Beat the Machine with the Abstract

If you are wondering what skills can the machines not learn, at least in near future, here is one.

As a wise person said, ‘ Jobs of the past were Muscle. Jobs of the current are Brain. Jobs of the future are Heart’.

While algorithms are distilling movie story lines and even creating a movie from an algorithm generated story line, creative pursuits are still some thing that would keep you in good stead for the future.

One such key skills is Abstract Thinking. How does it matter ? For innovation, radical differentiation, problem solving and for many other situations, abstract thinking is critical. It is simply not about thinking at a higher level. It is about elements and their interaction at a level that you are able to explain a complex thing. It is abstract thinking that helps you find gaps/identify new solutions/think different and effect different outcomes.

How common is it? Not so common. If you get mired in details, it is difficult to abstract out and find the picture that you are missing. Abstract also demands that you be comfortable with the fuzzy, uncertain and the vague.

Typically you would find someone who is good with rational ( engineers, mathematicians, accountants, scientists…) or those good with the creative ( designers, painters, visualisers, advertising folks…) but not both. Today’s problems or challenges need both these approaches to make a difference.

It is also one of the skills that a machine may take time to ‘learn’. Or may be not!

The De-coupling Opportunity

This topic needs a bit of context and background.

When businesses generate cash surpluses, suddenly there is a demand by the investors/market to do something with the cash. You give in to the merchant bankers and buy businesses, or build new businesses ( or buy back shares if you have no ideas left. )

Over time, the original razor sharp specialist becomes a conglomerate ( which looks more like a shopping basket). And then the ‘Conglomerate Discount’ happens. It is the discount to the stock valuation for a firm which is spread across multiple businesses ( and hence has thin focus and poor core competency!) . A classic example is how GE was discounted by the stock market since the management attention is spread across multiple unrelated businesses.

Way back in 2000, Jack Trout exclaimed ‘ Differentiate or Die’. Unless you are sharpening your differentiation, you will lose in the market place .

On the other hand, given the shorter business cycles today, the obsolescence rates for current businesses are much faster. So businesses have to find new sources of growth replacing the older ones.

Those are both sides of the coin for the dear reader. The case to specialise and the case to diversify.

Now let us look at the de-coupling opportunity. As someone tries to reimagine an existing industry/market place, one way is to re-imagine the full business model and process. The other ( and perhaps cheaper/less risky) way is to de-couple and re-imagine ONLY a part of the business process. It does not bring radical changes to the market but it would still give the innovator enough incentive and opportunity.

Here are a couple of examples to understand ‘Decoupling’ opportunities.

A market place platform replaces a showroom of limited choices , with multiple choices and convenience. Thus it is decoupling the showroom part of the chain and making it significantly better.

A stock trading app is decoupling the broker/advisor based stock selection to knowledge enhancement and self service based investment management.

Why is it cheaper/less riskier? Because you are changing a portion of the process which makes customer/market adoption easier and your chance of success higher. It is also a prudent way to influence the market when you are small.

Applying Serenity Prayer

This post is not a relegious sermon. Can we apply this prayer to real life?

The Serenity Prayer is the common name for a prayer written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

How do we apply this to real life? There are many things not in our control, even if we wish to change them. There are some things in our control that we can ( but we ignore or avoid ). For any business or personal problem, the wisdom to know the difference means figuring out what you can change and what you cannot.

There is no point fretting over what you cannot change. There is no time to be lost in changing the things you can to solve the problem. As you brainstorm solutions to the problem, keep this prayer in mind. It will save lot of time and money!

Spreadsheet vs Street Fight

You can analyze all you want, get second/third/fourth…’n’ th opinion/ cross verify etc etc. Ultimately you have to take the plunge. That’s the only way you will know if an idea will actually work. You have to move from Spread Sheet to Street Fight. And that takes a special quality!

You can simulate /scenario play / do sensitivity analysis all you want. It still wont replace the real world. Not everyone has the guts to take the plunge.

1.The 40–70 rule of Colin Powell : Colin Powell, former head of US military forces and former Secretary of State is a well-known and respected strategist and leader. On this particular subject of making tough decisions, Powell prescribes the amount of information that one needs to make the decision. He says that we need between 40 and 70 percent of the total information to make a decision.

He believes that with less than 40 percent of information, we are bound to make a wrong decision. At the same time, if we keep looking for information beyond 70 percent, then by the time we make the decision, it will be so late that others will have taken that decision and moved on. It will be too late!

2.Pivot : In the world that we live in today, the ‘re-imagine’ cycles are significantly shortened. Someone is always thinking of a radically better way to do things and experimenting. It is more critical for you to try something and then PIVOT to what works better, rather than wait forever to try something first time.

3.Fail Fast : Celebrating learnings from failures does not come easy to many. Especially the traditionalists. Like Jeff Bezos said famously “ if I know the result before the experiment , its not an experiment! “ . While no-one plans for failures, do not fear it. Embrace the learning.

4.Create or Critique : Another common conundrum is the fear of criticism. It might be pertinent to know that without creating first, there is nothing to criticize.

5.Agile Design : Design everything to be agile, flexible, variable and malleable. That way , making course corrections is easier and you will have less legacy baggage and can move on quickly.

It takes some special attributes to move from Spread Sheet to Street Fight. And the street matters more , any day!

Why bother with Innovation?

Its costly, distracting,uncertain,fuzzy…. There are more urgent things to do.

Top and bottom line targets, investor pressures, Competitive forces — obviously these need more attention. So why bother?

It might be pertinent to look at Mckinsey ‘s 3 horizons

Enduring Ideas: The three horizons of growth

In this interactive presentation--one in a series of multimedia frameworks--Steve Coley, a director emeritus in…

www.mckinsey.com

First featured in ‘The Alchemy of Growth’, it explains the three horizons in any business . The current, adjacent and disruptive. Optimise the current, grow with adjacent and be ready for the disruptive.

Too many firms have bitten the dust focusing on / being happy with the first. ( Nokia, Blackberry, GE, Yahoo….)

With cycles of obsolescence getting shorter thanks to technology, both individuals and firms need to work on ALL the THREE horizons simultaneously.

Its not a ‘Nice to Have’. Very quickly , it is separating the ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’!

Limiting Thought

A number of real world factors limit your thought, none of them worth limiting your thought. Why?

Budgets, feasibility, market readiness, customer adoption, funding, skill availability, technology …. the number of factors are quite a few. But none of them should limit your thought,even though they might limit your current execution. Lets try to understand with an example.

Apple products had keychain as a feature for number of years. Key chain is a mechanism to store passwords to accelerate authentication and logging into a Mac etc. Many years later, Apple implemented finger scanner authentication mechanism ( Touch ID). Subsequently face recognition ( Face ID). As you can see , this is a progression of the maturity of authentication mechanism to make user experience better and better. It might be pertinent to note that each of the later features use/leverage earlier features. Did Apple only think of Keychain when it developed it first? No. They certainly had a vision of improving user authentication though they wouldnt have thought out everything related to FaceID.

Not limiting your thought based on current limiting factors , helps you the following ways:

1. You can develop the first set of features/product as close as possible to the future vision to reduce re-work/non-compatibility etc.
2. Articulating the vision to the product teams/partners helps them align/enhance their skills in a timely manner.
3. The unlimited thought also helps you prioritise in terms of where the market /competition is headed and what gives you differentiation in longer term.
4. It also brings clarity to you on what is not worth pursuing, when you cannot see too far with it.
5. A consolidation of these unlimited thoughts is your product roadmap.

In more ways than one, it is a competitive differentiator.

Truth is a Lie

At the cusp of new year, I wanted to share the paradoxes of life that we eventually get to. Here we go.

1. Circle of Taste: Lets start with a simpler one. As kids everyone like the sweet taste ( toffees, sweets, ice creams etc) and as they age, they start liking the bitter ( alcohol , Smoking etc) ?
2. Circle of Maturity: Kids tend to do things that are considered ‘stupid’ by the adults. As adults age, they start doing the same ‘stupid’ things?
3. Circle of Assets : If you follow the billionaires, most of them , after accumulating assets, go on to give the most away. All the time and effort spent on earning and saving, suddenly seems to be the wrong thing to do ?
4. Circle of Rationality : All the education and science are based on logic and rationale over time fail to answer questions and then people tend to turn towards the fuzzy,obscure,abstract things such as faith, philosophy ?
5. Circle of Plurality: We keep looking at multiple things, multiple people, multiple issues and multiple lives. What if the truth is the opposite of the multiples?

Here’s wishing you as you travel towards the lies to the truth!