Posted on January 24, 2020 by admin with No comments
A tribute to Clayton Christensen, the Harvard professor who introduced "disruption" in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, which, in turn, led The Economist to term him "the most influential management thinker of his time."
Even more influential for some would be his 2012 co-authored book How Will You Measure Your Life?. [try here].
Christensen passed away in Boston on Jan 23, 2020.
Posted on October 22, 2014 by admin with No comments
JEFF BEZOS SPENT AN EVENTFUL TIME with his larger Amazon.com engineering team in India recently. The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here]). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course).
In between these two was a private dinner organised with a dozen or so CEO's in Bangalore. This paraphrased post is thanks to one of them [try here] "minuting" the following five points that Jeff talked about among other things.
#1: What was the hardest moment of your life?
Jeff: My experience of raising the first million dollars to start Amazon.
Nothing over the following two decades of founding Amazon compared to that. I reached out to 80 odd investors and how they thought my idea of selling books over the internet was crazy.
#2: How do you hire people?
Jeff: I look at two things: one, does the person consider himself to be fortunate? And two, how good are they at making decisions without data... I'm biased and I prefer people who consider themselves as very fortunate [...] they will make or do things better because they are thankful to the way their lives are shaping up. The others will waste their lives looking over their shoulder and complain about how life is not satisfactory. “Those kind of people I don’t want on my team”. [...] While data is an extremely important element of decision making, you have to first listen to your gut, what feels right. Usually, the gut is right and you have to substantiate it with data. But you should not start the other way round, where you look at data first and then suppress your instinct and do what the data says. That will not necessarily make you do great things.
#3: Would you hire a philosopher and/or an entrepreneur?
[Jeff pauses for a bit], I would hire a philosopher and not an entrepreneur. [...] a philosopher will take my mind where nobody else has taken it. And then, he will find the entrepreneur to make that into a reality.
#4: What are the fundamental tenets of your business?
Jeff: There are three things -
1. Customers rule: That is an obsession at Amazon. At any meeting that we have, we have a chair for the customer. I say, ‘there’s a customer sitting here, and are we doing things right for the customer?’.
2. An incessant appetite for innovation: This has to be there in every walk of life, and it’s not an annual activity, but an everyday thing: we have to do things better.
3. Operational excellence: When you are running a successful corporation, the fundamental building block is phenomenal operational excellence. Everything will happen the way it is planned to happen and that we actually execute and deliver on the promise.
#5: What next?
Jeff: I’ve only just begun.
(For a perspective, today Amazon ranks #35 in Fortune500 list - compared to Google's #46, and Microsoft's #34).
Posted on August 29, 2010 by admin with No comments
"ORGANIZATIONS WILL NEED TO PLAN for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends (listed below)", observers Gartner fellow and VP, Tom Austin.
In a report published earlier this year titled "Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020", Gartner says that organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them the most, and consider whether radically different technology models will be required to address them.
The other key message that emerges out of the report's overall analysis says:
Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyper-connectedness, 'swarming' and by 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization's work will be "non-routine," up from 25 percent in 2010.
Later next month, Tom Austin is scheduled to speak in London on these trends:
De-routinization of Work: Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. The report argues that the core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning.
Work Swarms: A kind of work pattern involving a flurry of collective activity by anyone who is available and who could add value, is defined as Work Swarms. The report indicates two phenomena within the collective and apparently unstructured activity: One is that Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. And secondly, Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad-hoc action requirements, as ad-hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
Weak Links: Members of a Work Swarm may not 'know' each other in the classical sense, or even have a strong or moderate reference. There relationship remains largely temporary, and the report labels it as Weak links. They are indirect indicators which partially rely on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Social Networking comes into play at personal as well as professional level that would contribute to Work Swarms.
Working with the Collective: "the Collective" are external forces, mainly disparate groups of people tied together by common interests, that are not controlled by the organization but who could impact the success-rate of the organization. Their potential for influence is very high. The report suggests that smart and powerful business executives who live within the business ecosystem which they can not control, will do the market research and come up with ways to work with "the collective" to wield influence in their organizations for their benefit.
Work Sketch-ups: Most non-routine processes that could not be automated will also be highly informal and non-standard. The process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups" which are created on the fly. The practice will evolve over time to be able to identify meaningful patterns of these processes and structure them.
Spontaneous Work: Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity. The report says that as in Work Swarms, spontaneous and proactive activities would also emerge, forming its own patterns such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
Simulation and Experimentation: Interface with virtual environment will increase many fold, where technologies such as 3D interfacing with data (akin to the Spielberg film Minority Report) will replace spreadsheets and traditional number crunching. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content.
Pattern Sensitivity: This is Gartner's forward looking management strategy approach called "pattern-based strategy". The report argues that the business world is becoming more volatile, with far less visibility into the future than ever before. Organizations will have to create focus groups to identify divergent emerging patterns, to evaluate those patterns, and to develop various scenarios showing how the disruption might play out.
Hyper-connected: Organization have complex inter-relationship of networks, with multiple overlaps for a single function. For instance, an IT support function might work well in delivering a service while working in dedicated and isolation mode, but in shared and complex environment with multiple overlaps, networks, and stakeholder, the same dedicated resources may largely under-perform and underachieve, resulting into additional work. The report calls this Hyper-connectedness, and argues that it will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
My Place: There will be job roles which are always on-duty. For them, the traditional segregation of personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. They will work in virtual Work Swarm environment, all the time, across time zones and organizations, and with participants who barely know each other. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work, called "My Place".
See also:
Go here for the report on Gartner website (User login required)
Go here for details on the upcoming summit in Spetember '10 in London where Tom Austin will be presenting these trends.
AFTER THE WORLD'S LARGEST PRODUCT LAUNCH EVENT YET, on July 16 Steve Jobs did the press conference following the recent keynote for the world's largest IT organization that Jobs staged for the eleventh year running after his return in '99 to the (then struggling) company he originally co-founded in '76 as Apple Computers Inc.
Over the last two and an half years since the launch of the first iPhone, the competition has grown (and perished) in the smartphone product space. The information hungry, instantaneously reacting, viral population of Social Media 'journalism' was increasingly demanding of this Silicon Valley veteran from 1, Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA, USA.
Apparently, Apple's latest offering of iPhone 4 smartphone with services from AT&T ran into media highlighted issues of a certain "loop antenna" problem where the device was dropping calls if the user happened to hold the device in a certain manner. (Rather interestingly, the same device did not seem to have any such issues in geographies other than the US. where media and service provider coverage were different.)
Jobs presentation at this press release to address the 'issues' was very effective, and some of the key attributes of his presentation skills have been captured below:
Have a laser-sharp focus on audience expectation: "relevancy" runs the highest among people noting, tweeting and blogging in real time during the key presentation events.
Give the audience a pleasant surprise by always having something new: content of the presentation has to be novel or newsworthy. There is no use regurgitating previous press releases or old news.
Forget bullet points - perfect your slide design: design slides with images instead of text, with crisp lines which is not only short and quotable, but even if it's taken out of the context of his presentation, it still makes sense.
Repetitions and consistency: take time to summarize the points, even if they are many. Build intended-redundancy to the presentations that helps drive home the central message.
Evangelize! draw the audience to join the ‘cause’, the main theme of the presentation. If required pitch in the competition with Us-vs-Them scenarios.
Posted on March 29, 2010 by admin with No comments
Fitt’s law (Simplified):
"Put commonly accessed UI elements on the edges of the screen. Because the cursor automatically stops at the edges, they will be easier to click on. [And then] Make clickable areas as large as you can. Larger targets are easier to click on."
The law is rather simple (or, one might argue, too simple to follow all the time). This is basic common sense. Human Interfaces of computer system typically are a subject matter of Fitts’s law.
A FEW YEARS AGO I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY to attend a workshop with Mr. Aaron Marcus. The veteran man is an industry expert on usability and the designer of the original Nokia cell phone’s user navigation system. Cell phones were a niche product in early 2000's and not much data was available to ascertain how users would react to such an operating system of such a hand-held device.
Mr. Marcus had a variety of ideas and principles to talk about at the workshop on the subject of Software systems and their usability aspects. He began his presentation with some of the photographs that he had captured in the fruits and vegetable markets of Africa. He argued that the rural ladies selling these goods were very less likely to have got primary education. However, looking at the grouping and arrangements of goods that they were selling – lemons, figs, chewing sticks and others – one could observe that all of it adhered to some of the basic though indigenous design patterns. The largest objects were kept at arm’s length; groups of smaller objects were kept at the centre; there was a hierarchy around freshness of the goods; and finally, the whole arrangement was then utilized in bargaining and negotiations. There may not be primary education, but there was some common sense.
Mr. Marcus argued that the same basic senses also drive ergonomic of products and systems.
More recently, a few days ago when Scott Adam smacked Google design team for their unintuitive and flawed design of their web-based emailing system Gmail, there was a lot of hue and cry from die-hard Google fans. Dilbert blog was swarmed with protesting comments, unthoughtful that they were in most cases.
Last week, Jeff Atwood picked up the similar thread and did an interesting study with illustrations by citing two examples from Gmail, and one from Facebook. The point is well made. The eject button is surprisingly lost in the woods of the so called Google Operating System. As one of the friends put it, to log onto Gmail after pubs on weekends is asking for trouble – the arrangements and margins between buttons leave no margin for error and your mailbox could be messed up pretty badly when you notice next morning.
A recent illustration by National Geographic Magazine argues that the success of Google Orkut social networking website in India and Brazil was primarily based on is simple design. While the larger user-base in these geographies use low bandwidth connectivity, it is also to be considered that these are non-native English speaking users where simpler layout of the website design shall work better. A lesson the rest of product team at Google may be overlooking.
Mr. Marcus had concluded that in the years to come, the primary selling point of products would be ‘emotional’ triggers and attachment towards that object. “I love this watch”, shall supersede form and function, utility and usability, value and cost of the watch. And that indeed is coming out to be true, for here we are, with Social Media, declaring our likes and dislikes and associating our choice of products around it.
See also:
Go here for the clomplete post: The Opposite of Fitt's law
Go here some of the best Usability tools that employ eye-tracking for current rich media contents of Web 2.0
Go here for a very interesting series by Smashing mag on Story-telling as User experience. Note that while there is no direct relation to Usability per say, it has the final inkling from the user's side.
Posted on January 23, 2010 by admin with 2 comments
BusinessWeek RAN A STORY LAST MONTH that focused on "Jugadh" and termed it as the new mantra for innovation. Colleagues and clients not too familiar with the Indian culture tried seeking second opinions on the word. Observers commented on the topic from the world over. Some compared the term with Quality techniques such as Lean and Keizen - doing more, with less. Others saw it as the new Agile. Jugadh or Jugaad was considered by the Economist as the latest cost-cutting technique in Asia. WSJ wrote that Jughad is the primary reason why Indian economy remained insulated in the recent Global economic down-turn. Someone else commented that ISB at Hyderabad conducts special workshops to tool executives with Jugadh, also citing the inclusion of the term in the management consulting arsenal. The original title of the article looked at "Jugadh" as the next big export from India.
After due considerations and with due respect to all the views, "Jugadh" is a fad of a business model on the face of hard-core and global requirements for sustainability. To put is into the right perspective, it is rather unfair to model Jugadh either as a new form of innovation or as a path breaking and business changing technique.
The Hindi word Jugadh or Jugaad (de: जुगाड़) literally means a noun referring to an improvised or jury-rigged solution. Wiki traces the root of the term to the farmers of northern India employing indigenous ways to make use of the domestic small diesel engines for multi-purpose transport and similar make-shift usage. There are indigenous ideas like these which can be categorised as Jugadh, but they are by far a minority. In the broader sense of the practical life, however, Jugadh can be described as what Bear Grylls does on his reality TV show "Man vs. Wild" on the discovery channel: some cleaver survival tactics, a desperate measure but with some spin of intelligence, the basic human instinct of improvisation over the most rudimentary of the tools. That is Jugadh; a poor desperate man's innovation, where: Dependence on luck or accidental favours is too great; Against the rewards the risk is usually too high; And measurability, predictability, controllability and repeatability are too low. And it does not matter who opens a "Jugaad" office in Electronics City, in Bangalore.
I am not sure if Tata Nano is the right example of a Jugadh - it just happens to be one very cheap car from India. Neither it is fully agreeable that people in India are risk-averse - historically, India has one of the most risk taking trading and entrepreneur communities in the world. Likewise, considering Jugadh cleaver without appreciating the risks associated with it is but a mistake. A "Jugaadoo" arrangement - by its very application and circumstance, is only a temporary measure. A hope, if you may, largely thanks to Darwin, of doing better by using inherent human intelligence while the resources are scarce. And then, there are ethical issues when short-cuts and cutting of corners become integral parts of "Jugaad-ovative" solutions.
Posted on November 07, 2009 by admin with No comments
THE FIRST EVER TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, DESIGN (TED) EVENT IN INDIA drew to a close this afternoon at the lavish and state-of-the-art technology campus of Infosys at the Indian city of Mysore - about 120km south of Bangalore. It was an adrenalin pumping experience, and it left so many feeling spent at the end of four days. Absorbing a torrent of ideas condensed in a time-capsule is a demanding event for the creativity centre - glucose consuming frontal cortex of the human brain.
After all, TED may be the new religion. For generation Y + X.
Posted on October 09, 2008 by admin with 1 comment
JOHN DE MOL TOOK THE OLD PRISON CONCEPT of confinement, absorbed its mentality, attached psychological strings, created a manipulative environment, introduced conflicting personalities into it, televised it via mass media, commercialised it by asking people to pay by "voting", and produced through Endemol one of the most popular reality TV shows "Big Brother". While the producers claim that the show is not scripted, it surely remains a prompted show. The show now runs to various international formats in nearly 35 host countries, and is broadcast to more than 100. The central concept of the show is that one is always being watched all the time so far as one is within the premise of the designated Big Brother house.
You can run, but you can't hide.
Expand this premise to cover the whole world, and we get close to the Google GeoEye project. On September 6, 2008, the world's most-accurate commercial imaging satellite, the GeoEye-1 was blasted off into the space. The 4,300-pound satellite moves from the north pole to the south pole in a 423-mile-high orbit at 17,000 miles per hour (or 4.5 miles per second). The spacecraft can take photos at a resolution of up to 41 centimeters - close enough to zoom in on the home plate of a baseball diamond.
Interestingly for GeoEye, Google as a partner is the second biggest customer who would use the data (real-time images of the entire world) for purely commercial purpose. The largest customer of GeoEye data consumption remains the U.S. Government agency - NGA, that has been putting satellites into the space since 1970's to 'spy' on targets within the US and abroad (such as the Kremlin Square of Russia). While the NGA capabilities can even read from space the headline of the newspaper that one is holding on the ground, for Google however, the max permissible zoom limit of up to 50 cms would apply. This means that while you can easily see the red Mustang on Hawthorne Boulevard junction in LA, you perhaps won't be able to recognise the face of the blond seating on the passenger seat. In other words, the satellite can see, but can not show to you all those details because of the current legislative limitations.
With the next launch of a more powerful 'prying eye' - GeoEye-2 scheduled around 2012, which is capable of going to the resolution of up to 25 cms, Google surely hopes that the zooming restrictions would be relaxed. In other words, you might be able to spot people anywhere on Earth. And you might be able to do it all the time. And your target may not even be aware of your act or intent. If you start 'selling' your 'show' on, say, YouTube, you might have your own commercial version of "Big Brother" show. If the idea sounds familiar you may already have watched the 1998 superhit movie The Truman Show written by Andrew Niccol (see trailer below).
"We're commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments," Mark Brender, GeoEye's VP of communications said. "Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom - all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology."
[Images on the Right: 1) The Google logo rides on the main booster stage of the Delta-II GSLV rocket that delivered GeoEye in the orbit. source: wired.com. 2) The GeoEye setallite being launched on Sep 6, 2008 on board United Launch Alliance Delta-II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., USA. source: geoeye.com. 3) View from the space of Kutztown University campus in Pennsylvania. On Oct 7 GeoEye-1 satellite, going into action, took this first ever hi-res image from the space. source: wired.com.]
There already are enough surveillance cameras on our roads, streets, stations, offices, malls and all public places. As the technology improvises and more GeoEye's start orbiting the Earth prying downwards, "Someone would always be watching you..."
[Above: Actor Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank in the 1998 Hollywood film The Trueman Show. Depicting a Big Brother like Reality TV show on extremes before the Big Brother format was even possibly conceptualised, the film chronicles the life of a man who does not know that he is living in a constructed reality soap opera, televised 24x7 to billions of viewers across the globe. Go here for this trailer on YouTube.]
You can run, but you can't hide.
See also:
Go here for more on John De Mol. And here for Endemol official website.
Go here for official GeoEye website. Looks like their business model expects you to pay for any image that you watch or use. Watch out!
Posted on September 19, 2008 by admin with No comments
THIS APPARENTLY IS A GREAT START OF THE WEEKEND: watching this very interesting and equally famous clips by Michael Wesch, Prof. of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University.
[Above: this 5 minute clip is about ‘Web 2.0’, but it in fact narrates how IT works today, and has got integrated into social human lives. Apparently, this is also food for thought for the next business transformation endeavour...]
The 33 year old highly tech savvy Anthropologist also has this another great short clip on the same subject, this time on Information R/evolution - here on YouTube.
[Go here for Michael Wesch's personal pages on Kansas State Uni website.] [Go here for the first clip about Web2.0 on YouTube.]
If any of the i's tantalise you, entertain yourself with this cute little 1.5 minute teaser video, which in fact is a runnup to the ImagineCup 2008 due this month.
"Great innovators don't imagine things in the future; They imagine them in the present, and change the future..."
Go here for a list of Software Project designs that made it to the semi-finals of the innovation competition this year.
[The video above is one among many created by the students of Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication. Go here for the video on YouTube, and here for other possibilities from Microsoft.]
Edit: The '08 finals will be held in Paris between July 3 and 8, 2008.
The "events", so to speak, involved no less than a typical decorated delivery truck on one hand (The event where, apparently, his amazon.in CEO called out Jeff as his 'Baap' [try here]). And, on the other hand, there was him meeting with the Indian Prime Minister in Delhi and talking about things (in e-retail in the most promising e-global economy with the world's 3rd largest open internet userbase, of course).
. Likewise, considering Jugadh cleaver without appreciating the risks associated with it is but a mistake. A "Jugaadoo" arrangement - by its very application and circumstance, is only a temporary measure. A hope, if you may, largely thanks to Darwin, of doing better by using inherent human intelligence while the resources are scarce. And then, there are ethical issues when short-cuts and cutting of corners become integral parts of "Jugaad-ovative" solutions.
at the Indian city of Mysore - about 120km south of Bangalore. It was an adrenalin pumping experience, and it left so many feeling spent at the end of four days. Absorbing a torrent of ideas condensed in a time-capsule is a demanding event for the creativity centre - glucose consuming frontal cortex of the human brain.
You can run, but you can't hide.
The largest customer of GeoEye data consumption remains the U.S. Government agency - NGA, that has been putting satellites into the space since 1970's to 'spy' on targets within the US and abroad (such as the Kremlin Square of Russia). While the NGA capabilities can even read from space the headline of the newspaper that one is holding on the ground, for Google however, the max permissible zoom limit of up to 50 cms would apply. This means that while you can easily see the red Mustang on Hawthorne Boulevard junction in LA, you perhaps won't be able to recognise the face of the blond seating on the passenger seat. In other words, the satellite can see, but can not show to you all those details because of the current legislative limitations.
[Images on the Right: 1) The Google logo rides on the main booster stage of the Delta-II GSLV rocket that delivered GeoEye in the orbit. source: wired.com. 2) The GeoEye setallite being launched on Sep 6, 2008 on board United Launch Alliance Delta-II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., USA. source: geoeye.com. 3) View from the space of Kutztown University campus in Pennsylvania. On Oct 7 GeoEye-1 satellite, going into action, took this first ever hi-res image from the space. source: wired.com.]
