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!

Lessons from GE

 It was just a few years ago that GE was extolled as one of the greatest firms that survived multiple decades/centuries to remain in the index while many withered away.

And today we see GE on a precipitous decline and booted out from the index. As always, failures offer greater lessons than successes. So what can we learn?

If I attempt to distil it down to one simple lesson — it is the failure of the 3 Horizon play. The 3 horizons that any firm is supposed to manage well are the Current, Adjacent and Disruptive.

Not too long ago, GE was given a discount by the stockmarket called ‘Conglomerate discount’. It was too varied and broad that the stock market thought it did not enough focus and excellence in specific areas and hence discounted the stock price. This is the Adjacent.

The problems of the current are too obvious. Poor capital decisions, window dressing of the business numbers with creative accounting from finance business, stagnant market segments, Ostrich mentality, rubber stamp board members….

On disruptive, while there were many initiatives such as GE Digital leveraging Internet of Things etc, they were too small to offset the declines in the first two horizons.

In Summary, failing to manage all the three horizons !

What is wrong with Digital?

Everyone from stock markets, venture capitalists, enterpreneurs,students are so enamored by Digital that it has almost become sacrilegious to say anything against it.

Taking inspiration from John Mayer’s song ‘Say’

“Knowing you’d be better off instead,
If you could only

Say what you need to say….

You’d better know that in the end
Its better to say too much
than never to say what you need to say !”

So here it goes.

1. Digital is not cheap : Inspite of media touting about crashing hardware costs, everything on cloud etc etc, Digital is not cheap. The skills are in short supply , grounded engineers who are multi dimensional and focused on solving business problems are fewer , marketing against the noise takes lot of money and the competition is from every nook and corner of the world.
2. Digital , for its own sake? : Its easy to get occupied with Digital and lose sight of the business impacts, ROI, cost vs return, opportunity costs, bandwidth, alternatives to digital etc. Are you doing Digital for the sake of digital / because of peers, fear of losing out OR do you really have a ‘well thought out strategy’ with fallback options/exit routes and Plan B/C/…. ?
3. Everyone is not FANG ( Facebook, Apple,Netflix,Google) : Temptation to imitate the unicorns of silicon valley is not small but everyone is not FANG. Blind imitation will only lead to disaster.
4. Funding Traps : Every round of funding comes with more dilution, more stringent terms, more loss of control and more unrealistic demands. If you feel like you are riding a tiger, you are probably right. As someone famously said “Venture Capitalists are like hitchhikers with credit cards. They get in your car, and as long as you take them where they want to go, they will help pay for the gas. But if you get lost or wander off the road you promised you were going down, they will hijack the car, throw you out and bring in a new driver.”
5. Timing : It is better to acknowledge that many technologies are in their infancy, not robust enough, do not have wider adoption and yet to make big impacts in the real world. Your play with them is likely to be longer term that needs dollops of patience and perseverance.

Go into Digital with your eyes wide open, being aware of both sides of the coin.