Leadership by its very definition seems to assume the presence of a follower who needs to be lead. However, this follower may not always be another person. One form of leadership that I believe in is Personal Leadership - the ability to lead yourself from your current circumstances or situation to a better future. In other words Personal Leadership means taking charge of your own life or situation before taking charge of other people.
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Leaderless groups - a case against hierarchy
My latest article in The Hindu Business Line - Leaderless groups - a case against hierarchy. Full text follows:
In his treatise Dastambu, Mirza Ghalib documents the events in Delhi at the time the revolt of 1857 broke out. He writes: "Band upon band of soldiers and peasants had become as one, and far and near, one and all, without even speaking or conferring together, girded their loins to their single aim... City after city lies open, without protectors, filled with men who have none to watch over them, like gardens bereft of their gardeners studded with trees stripped bare of leaves and fruit." (Ghalib - Life, Letters and Ghazals; Ralph Russell; Oxford University Press 2003)
While Ghalib's political leanings are not the subject of this article, what is interesting is his view that the men behind the mutiny were leaderless and hence not worthy of being taken seriously.
Are there any examples to prove that a leaderless group can actually lead to efficient outcomes? Can independently-deciding individuals help a group achieve its goal?
History suggests that in certain situations leaderless groups can indeed achieve a stated objective. Leaderless resistance movements such as guerrilla warfare are a good example of this. Terrorists too tend to operate in independent cells (and not hierarchies). This probably explains why they manage to escape from beneath the eyes of hierarchical intelligence agencies.
Key advantages of a leaderless group include the fact that there is no centralised command and control system, which is vulnerable to attack. Each small group or individual behaves independently based on some shared values. This means that the group is not burdened by traditional hierarchical chains of command, bureaucracy and red-tape in its decision-making. Additionally, affinity of group members towards the cause is likely to be much higher since there is no central authority who forces membership and neither are there any negative consequences of giving up membership. In other words, only truly passionate individuals would aggregate in such a group.
Clearly, leaderless groups are structurally efficient. Are they functionally effective too? In the best-selling book The Wisdom of Crowds, James Suroweicki argues that large, independent groups of people are smarter than an elite few (leaders/ experts). For instance, on Who wants to be a millionaire, audience polls got the correct answer 91 per cent of the time, while the `phone a friend' experts got it right only 65 per cent of the time. He identifies four prerequisites for a `wise' crowd — diversity of opinion, independence, decentralisation and aggregation. There must be a diversity of opinion within the group, which is independent of the views of other members. The group must not have any central chain of command and there must be some way of aggregating various individuals' viewpoints.
The Wikipedia model
Wikipedia (a freely editable online encyclopaedia) is a good example of tapping into the wisdom of crowds. Individuals across the world collectively edit articles to produce content that is by and large of very high quality. There is, of course, the stray incident involving a writer editing an article to depict a deliberately biased point of view. However, Wikipedia does have a core team of editors who scan content for such anomalies. Thus, in effect, the people who contribute to the Wikipedia project are like a leaderless group, which is loosely monitored by a core team of editors.
An interesting thought experiment to conduct would be to evaluate whether such a model can be extended to other kinds of organisations. How could one structure an organisation to tap into the wisdom of crowds? Needless to say, leaderless groups are not suitable for certain kinds of organisations — for instance, a manufacturing organisation would clearly need a highly supervised environment. However, for organisations whose main output is knowledge (software, media) a leaderless approach does seem to be an interesting alternative. Open source software movements clearly show that people don't have any hassles creating intellectual property free of cost — with little or no supervision — if they believe in the larger cause.
Purely from a human psychology perspective, a group with a `leader' necessarily means that one individual becomes bigger than both the cause as well as the other individuals in the group. While this is good in a political cause (like apartheid) where it is important to truly inspire people, it may not be particularly useful in a more everyday cause, like a company that makes a product or service. In the latter, having overarching leaders can lead to harmful political behaviour and other efficiency-dissipating activities that can lead to drop in motivation levels. On the other hand, people are happiest when they work for causes (not people) much larger than their individual selves. In fact, offering work as a service to the Lord, without worrying about one's ego or the end result, finds support in the Bhagvad Gita too. Maybe, it's time organisations experimented more with leaderless set-ups (perhaps within individual divisions if not entirely). History certainly shows that it can work well in a number of contexts.
(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, works with a multinational financial services company.)
Previously published articles of mine:
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Google's Adsense Income - Is there a conspiracy?
Google Adsense follows a policy of making payouts only when a user's earnings reach $100. Now, assume that Adsense (like everything else) follows a 80-20 rule i.e 20% of users make 80% of the revenue.
In other words, 80% of Adsense users would be making close to nothing. Assume that the average earnings of these users is about $50. Assume that Adsense has 10 million users.
Adsense users = 10 Million
80% of that = 8 Million
Average earnings of these 8 Million = $50
Total unpaid earnings = $400 Million (!!!)
Lets do some conservative math now
Adsense has 5 million users : $200 Million in unpaid revenues
Adsense has 1 million users: $40 Million unpaid
Adsense has only 500000 users: $20 Million unpaid
These are still large enough numbers to make us want to question what is going on.
Thus, Google could potentially be holding about $400 Million in cash that they probably never will payout because 80% of its users (like me) will never get enough hits to make $100 any time in the near future. Is this a deliberate strategy? Wonder if Google's earnings statements reflect these numbers, but I'm too lazy to check that out!
In other words, 80% of Adsense users would be making close to nothing. Assume that the average earnings of these users is about $50. Assume that Adsense has 10 million users.
Adsense users = 10 Million
80% of that = 8 Million
Average earnings of these 8 Million = $50
Total unpaid earnings = $400 Million (!!!)
Lets do some conservative math now
Adsense has 5 million users : $200 Million in unpaid revenues
Adsense has 1 million users: $40 Million unpaid
Adsense has only 500000 users: $20 Million unpaid
These are still large enough numbers to make us want to question what is going on.
Thus, Google could potentially be holding about $400 Million in cash that they probably never will payout because 80% of its users (like me) will never get enough hits to make $100 any time in the near future. Is this a deliberate strategy? Wonder if Google's earnings statements reflect these numbers, but I'm too lazy to check that out!
The least Google should do is to at least payout interest income to these users in addition to what they have already earned.
Technorati Tags: Google, Adsense
Spiderman could be 2007's biggest hit
Rediff reports.
Interesting piece of news this, particularly because the regional language dubs of Spidey 3 (Tamil, Bhojpuri etc) are doing really well.Dubbed movies seem to be a good substitute for poor quality local movies.
While I'm no fan of dubbed movies, Spiderman is certainly the type of movie that wouldn't suffer artistically no matter which language it is dubbed into!
If Bollywood movies were dubbed into English, would they be able to attract a global audience? Of course the plots would still be hackneyed, but for all you know the western audience may lap it up with India being the flavour of the season. I doubt if these dubs would be any worse than those oriental Kung fu action flicks.
Interesting piece of news this, particularly because the regional language dubs of Spidey 3 (Tamil, Bhojpuri etc) are doing really well.Dubbed movies seem to be a good substitute for poor quality local movies.
While I'm no fan of dubbed movies, Spiderman is certainly the type of movie that wouldn't suffer artistically no matter which language it is dubbed into!
If Bollywood movies were dubbed into English, would they be able to attract a global audience? Of course the plots would still be hackneyed, but for all you know the western audience may lap it up with India being the flavour of the season. I doubt if these dubs would be any worse than those oriental Kung fu action flicks.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Interesting
The Internet is playing a much more important role than anyone ever imagined. Brands are going to be made and destroyed on the Internet, and there’s a whole set of new marketing rules for it. One cardinal rule is trust and respect.
That's a quote from Keith Pardy, Nokia's senior vice-president of strategic marketing, which appeared in Mint recently.
Reminded me of what I had written for The Hindu Business Line many months back.
All kinds of organisations need to embrace the power of the Internet as the new global market place where brands will be created and destroyed ... Brands would need to be `humble' and not mighty; brands will have to understand, rather than be understood; brands will have to listen and not talk.
Notice the similarity!
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Structured Procrastination
This is a very interesting article on procrastination that I found in my inbox. It's apparently written by a Harvard Professor. Presenting it in full below.
Structured Procrastination
by John Perry
Version of April 25, 1995
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of
not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.
Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.
The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
Update: This is the source
Structured Procrastination
by John Perry
Version of April 25, 1995
I have been intending to write this essay for months. Why am I finally doing it? Because I finally found some uncommitted time? Wrong. I have papers to grade, textbook orders to fill out, an NSF proposal to referee, dissertation drafts to read. I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time. All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of
not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.
Structured procrastination means shaping the structure of the tasks one has to do in a way that exploits this fact. The list of tasks one has in mind will be ordered by importance. Tasks that seem most urgent and important are on top. But there are also worthwhile tasks to perform lower down on the list. Doing these tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher up on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, the procrastinator becomes a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
The most perfect situation for structured procrastination that I ever had was when my wife and I served as Resident Fellows in Soto House, a Stanford dormitory. In the evening, faced with papers to grade, lectures to prepare, committee work to be done, I would leave our cottage next to the dorm and go over to the lounge and play ping-pong with the residents, or talk over things with them in their rooms, or just sit there and read the paper. I got a reputation for being a terrific Resident Fellow, and one of the rare profs on campus who spent time with undergraduates and got to know them. What a set up: play ping pong as a way of not doing more important things, and get a reputation as Mr. Chips.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this goes contrary to the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be by definition the most important, and the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is a way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being.
At this point you may be asking, "How about the important tasks at the top of the list, that one never does?" Admittedly, there is a potential problem here.
The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.
Another example is book order forms. I write this in June. In October, I will teach a class on Epistemology. The book order forms are already overdue at the book store. It is easy to take this as an important task with a pressing deadline (for you non-procrastinators, I will observe that deadlines really start to press a week or two after they pass.) I get almost daily reminders from the department secretary, students sometimes ask me what we will be reading, and the unfilled order form sits right in the middle of my desk, right under the wrapping from the sandwich I ate last Wednesday. This task is near the top of my list; it bothers me, and motivates me to do other useful but superficially less important things. But in fact, the book store is plenty busy with forms already filed by non-procrastinators. I can get mine in mid-Summer and things will be fine. I just need to order popular well-known books from efficient publishers. I will accept some other, apparently more important, task sometime between now and, say, August 1st. Then my psyche will feel comfortable about filling out the order forms as a way of not doing this new task.
The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?
Update: This is the source
New look
To make up for the fact that my posting has been erratic, I have changed the template of this blog. Same old content. New look!
On a serious note, I've got to get back to regular posting.
Also, if you wish to bring management related posts to my attention, do mail me and I will feature your post on this blog.
On a serious note, I've got to get back to regular posting.
Also, if you wish to bring management related posts to my attention, do mail me and I will feature your post on this blog.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
The PS3 Song - a Web 2.0 rant
Interesting Web 2.0 approach to telling a brand that it sucks. Check it out!
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
The Bakshali Inheritance - IIMC convocation
Convocation Speech by Ajit Balakrishnan: IIM Calcutta
An excellent read
An excellent read
Thursday, April 5, 2007
Emergence
I read about this interesting concept today.
Emergence is one of the founding principles of agility, and is the closest one to pure magic. Emergent properties aren't designed or built in, they simply happen as a dynamic result of the rest of the system. "Emergence" comes from middle 17th century Latin in the sense of an "unforeseen occurrence." You can't plan for it or schedule it, but you can cultivate an environment where you can let it happen and benefit from it.
A classic example of emergence lies in the flocking behavior of birds. A computer simulation can use as few as three simple rules (along the lines of "don't run into each other") and suddenly you get very complex behavior as the flock wends and wafts its way gracefully through the sky, reforming around obstacles, and so on. None of this advanced behavior (such as reforming the same shape around an obstacle) is specified by the rules; it emerges from the dynamics of the system.
Link via 37signals. Source: Andrew Hunt - The pragmatic programmers.
Sometimes the best ways to create complex outcomes is to create simple mantras to be followed religiously by all stakeholders.
The concept can be extended to organizations as a whole. If an organization has 3-5 pithy mantras that it will abide by in all its decisions, it can lead to complex positive outcomes. On the other hand if one were to start from the complex outcome and work backwards, failure is guaranteed. I believe that great vision statements perform this function in aligning the actions of organizational stakeholders.
The concept can be extended to organizations as a whole. If an organization has 3-5 pithy mantras that it will abide by in all its decisions, it can lead to complex positive outcomes. On the other hand if one were to start from the complex outcome and work backwards, failure is guaranteed. I believe that great vision statements perform this function in aligning the actions of organizational stakeholders.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Sony Bravia ad
The award winning Sony Bravia ad manages to evoke an emotional response every time! And this link seems to suggest that those multi-coloured balls you see in the ad are real ones.
The music is by Jose Gonzalez, and the song is called 'Heartbeats'.
The music is by Jose Gonzalez, and the song is called 'Heartbeats'.
Monday, March 19, 2007
Web 2.0 marketing
Former India cricketer Krishnamachari Srikkanth seems to believe in the networked marketplace. He is promoting his cricket website Krish Cricket on an Orkut community. He has an Orkut profile too, and is glad to add friends! His website targets cricket fans through mobile games, and other interactive content. What better place to find young people than Orkut?
What's more Srikkanth is also promoting Google's cricket blogging contest, and has his own blog too.
What's more Srikkanth is also promoting Google's cricket blogging contest, and has his own blog too.
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Interactive Brands - featured in The Hindu Business Line
Today, The Hindu Business Line's Brand Line supplement carried this article written by me. Link to website: Interactive Brands
Full text follows:
Full text follows:
The young adult of today's world is hyper-networked, interlinked to many more people than before, and part of many more conversations than ever before. Marketers who are today selling their brands to a spectrum of target groups of which such hyper-networked individuals constitute a small but significant chunk will realise (as these individuals age) over the next 10 years that the entire marketplace has turned hyper-networked.
Are brick-and-mortar companies prepared for this change? I doubt it. The difficulty of `selling' to such hyper-networked individuals is that they are highly sceptical of advertising, branding gimmicks and PR spiel. This group tends to form and create opinions through n-way conversations that take place on the Internet through blogs, social networking sites and e-mail. Such communication is not just text-based - it could even take place through videos (YouTube), images (Flickr) and voice (podcasts).
The important feature of these conversations is that the information they contain is viewed with much more trust, primarily because such conversations do not have a hidden profit motive. The equivalent to this global conversation is the `word of mouth' benefits that brands earlier enjoyed in the brick-and-mortar era.
Join the conversation
The solution that one foresees in such a scenario is for brands to turn interactive, and actually join the conversation. Interactive brands would be those that effectively conduct two-way conversations with their defined marketplace. The earlier era was one of uni-directional communication, which involved running advertisements and other branding initiatives on one-way communication media such as the television, radio and billboards. Potential customers were expected to passively absorb messages from such media, and consume the advertised product or service. Occasionally positive word-of-mouth contributed to brand choice in addition to the creative message. However, with the emergence of the Internet, word of mouth assumes a much more significant and globe-spanning role in brand choice.
Corporate blogs
How then do brands engage in two-way interactions with their defined marketplace? One effective way to do this is a corporate blog, which incidentally finds itself in Bain Company's list of top 25 management tools of 2007. A key benefit of a corporate blog is that it enables an organisation to communicate in an honest, human voice to the world at large.
This honest voice would involve such former taboos as publicly acknowledging mistakes as and when they occur, honest promises on customer service levels, transparent communication on future product launches and internal thought processes. In addition to this, customers can use this forum to openly talk to the company, and about their experiences with the company's offering. A static corporate Web site can never create the kind of interactivity and richness that a corporate blog can offer.
Community of users
Another way for brands to get involved in the conversation is to create communities of users. Two examples come to mind - The Royal Enfield owners club of the UK, and closer to home, Sunsilk's `Gang of Girls' Web site. Such communities allow customers to interact with other users of a product or service, and have conversations that have the incidental benefit of providing inputs to product development initiatives. Additionally, they would also help companies observe the evolution of their customers, and respond much faster than ever before.
It appears that brands will have no choice but to be part of the conversation between users, or risk being left out completely. This is not to say that traditional brand building approaches are no longer valid. They still have a role to play, but that role is more likely to help in reinforcing the brand's message, rather than creating it from scratch. Additionally, smart brands will no longer view people as `target groups' but start viewing them as people whom they can best understand through conversations.
Iconic brands tend to tap into a customer's self-actualisation needs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. People get emotionally involved with brands when they can relate to the brand in a manner that goes beyond mere price or quality. It is equally important for brands to get emotionally involved with their users by joining the conversation, or risk commoditisation. The choice is clear!
(The writer, an alumnus of XLRI, is with a multinational financial services firm.)
Some of my previously published articles.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Cricket ads
With the World Cup around the corner, it's time for some very interesting cricket centric ads. Marketers will try every trick in the book to associate their brands with India's inexplicable obsession with cricket, and hope for a reciprocal Pavlovian passion for the product to develop. This one is the new Nike ad. Excellent stuff. Notice how Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan have the most insignificant role in the whole story. I have a feeling the ad is trying to tell us that the Indian cricket fan is much bigger than the Indian cricket star. I love the way the ad has this "order in the midst of chaos" feel to it, that only Mumbai can create.
And here's an old Adidas ad featuring Sachin, that still gives me goosebumps. Notice how the phone rings throughout the ad, as the world comes to a standstill waiting for Sachin to face the delivery. This is probably the best Sachin ad of all time, because it just lets him do what he is good at (playing cricket) without having to mouth any inane lines like 'Visa power, go get it'.
And here's an old Adidas ad featuring Sachin, that still gives me goosebumps. Notice how the phone rings throughout the ad, as the world comes to a standstill waiting for Sachin to face the delivery. This is probably the best Sachin ad of all time, because it just lets him do what he is good at (playing cricket) without having to mouth any inane lines like 'Visa power, go get it'.
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Self promotion
Many of us are uncomfortable about self promotion, even if it is with regard to something that other people would really want to know about.David Maister talks about this phenomenon in this very interesting post and podcast.
Technorati Tags: David Maister, self promotion
Monday, February 26, 2007
Corporate blogging - my thoughts
Over at Abhilasha's blog I found some interesting questions raised by her on corporate blogging. In this post I attempt to answer a few of them:
1. Why should my organization blog?
For starters, if you are a consumer facing company (B2C), it helps to have an open conversation with your customer. Customers love to know what their favourite companies are upto. This is more so in the case of products that early adopters love (tech products, gadgets etc). A corporate blog can also become a very human touch point for customers, when compared to a boring website or even worse, a call center!
2. What realistic expectations can my organization have about the benefits of blogging, and what
obvious pitfalls or shortcomings should we be wary of?
A great, engaging blog does a lot more PR than a press release ever will. A great corporate blog can also help develop a loyal community of users around a product. Human beings love to be connnected to causes - sometimes, merely promoting a great product (like the I-pod) can be a cause. A blog can help create such a cause.
3. Who in the organization should blog?
I would say, the most important decision makers should. That way promises made on the blog will carry much more credibility.
4. What role does PR/ Corporate Communications have in this?
None! Blogs are the new age response to that tiring, sugar coated thing called the press relase.
5. What guidelines/policy should govern corporates bloggers?
Preferably none. However office bitching could be avoided!! A broad guideline coule be - say anything you want, as long as it is something that the customer is interested in knowing.
6. How can my organization measure the impact effectiveness of corporate blogging?
There is no need to really measure effectiveness. Think of it this way - what is the impact of a CEO talking one to one with millions of customers everyday? Its difficult to put a number to that. That's because the revenue you earn from a corporate blog is goodwill.
Technorati Tags: corporate blogs, blogging, cluetrain1. Why should my organization blog?
For starters, if you are a consumer facing company (B2C), it helps to have an open conversation with your customer. Customers love to know what their favourite companies are upto. This is more so in the case of products that early adopters love (tech products, gadgets etc). A corporate blog can also become a very human touch point for customers, when compared to a boring website or even worse, a call center!
2. What realistic expectations can my organization have about the benefits of blogging, and what
obvious pitfalls or shortcomings should we be wary of?
A great, engaging blog does a lot more PR than a press release ever will. A great corporate blog can also help develop a loyal community of users around a product. Human beings love to be connnected to causes - sometimes, merely promoting a great product (like the I-pod) can be a cause. A blog can help create such a cause.
3. Who in the organization should blog?
I would say, the most important decision makers should. That way promises made on the blog will carry much more credibility.
4. What role does PR/ Corporate Communications have in this?
None! Blogs are the new age response to that tiring, sugar coated thing called the press relase.
5. What guidelines/policy should govern corporates bloggers?
Preferably none. However office bitching could be avoided!! A broad guideline coule be - say anything you want, as long as it is something that the customer is interested in knowing.
6. How can my organization measure the impact effectiveness of corporate blogging?
There is no need to really measure effectiveness. Think of it this way - what is the impact of a CEO talking one to one with millions of customers everyday? Its difficult to put a number to that. That's because the revenue you earn from a corporate blog is goodwill.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
XLRI Alumni in 2006-07
Prof. Madhukar Shukla compiles what XL alumni have been upto over the last year.
Technorati Tags: XLRI, Alumni
Technorati Tags: XLRI, Alumni
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
Kawasaki on market adoption
The top ten stupid ways to hinder market adoption
Guy includes one of my pet peeves - enforced immediate registration - as one of the barriers. Couldn't agree with him more. I don't understand what the additional value 'registration' brings in in an Internet scenario, where identities can easily be faked. I'd rather have a million anonymous users than 100 users about whom I know everything, and whom I can later target for promotional offers.
Guy includes one of my pet peeves - enforced immediate registration - as one of the barriers. Couldn't agree with him more. I don't understand what the additional value 'registration' brings in in an Internet scenario, where identities can easily be faked. I'd rather have a million anonymous users than 100 users about whom I know everything, and whom I can later target for promotional offers.
Wednesday, February 7, 2007
Corporate blogs
What kind of companies should start blogs to communicate with their customers? My thoughts:
1. Smallish startups that don't have marketing budgets
2. Companies that have very few product lines, or even better just one product. That way the conversation can be 1 to N. N to N conversations are just noise!
3. Companies whose brands directly touch individual customers. I wouldn't recommend a steel maker to start a blog for instance. I would certainly like to see, say, a winemaker with a blog (like this one). People would like to talk to or listen to brands that they directly relate to.
4. Large organizations that have people who are mini-celebrities in their own right - Steve Jobs, Robert Scoble etc.
At the end of the day, a blog is just a medium. The message is always more important than the medium. So, unless you have something compelling to say to your customer don't start a blog!
1. Smallish startups that don't have marketing budgets
2. Companies that have very few product lines, or even better just one product. That way the conversation can be 1 to N. N to N conversations are just noise!
3. Companies whose brands directly touch individual customers. I wouldn't recommend a steel maker to start a blog for instance. I would certainly like to see, say, a winemaker with a blog (like this one). People would like to talk to or listen to brands that they directly relate to.
4. Large organizations that have people who are mini-celebrities in their own right - Steve Jobs, Robert Scoble etc.
At the end of the day, a blog is just a medium. The message is always more important than the medium. So, unless you have something compelling to say to your customer don't start a blog!
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