Kumar's Blog

Renowned Harvard Business School professor, Clay Christensesn shared a story (hat tip to Prakhar) while addressing the 2010 graduating class of HBS. Here's an excerpt:

We got to the British equivalent of the NCAA tourna- ment—and made it to the final four. It turned out the championship game was scheduled to be played on a Sunday. I had made a personal commitment to God at age 16 that I would never play ball on Sunday. So I went to the coach and explained my problem. He was incredulous. My teammates were, too, because I was the starting center. Every one of the guys on the team came to me and said, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule just this one time?” I’m a deeply religious man, so I went away and prayed about what I should do. I got a very clear feeling that I shouldn’t break my commitment—so I didn’t play in the championship game. 

Ludicrous as this story may seem, I can somewhat relate to what he is saying. I have a similar commitment, to myself. That I will watch every single competitive game the Chelsea Football Club plays. And I have kept this up for a good eight or nine years now.

About 6 months ago, I made another commitment to myself. That I will write a blog post every single day of the year. I kept it up for about 6 weeks. Then I missed one day, thinking 'just this once' and I can continue from the next day. But I only managed about 30 posts in the next 4 months. Nowhere near what my commitment demanded. I just didn't build that into my culture by allowing 'just this once' lapses now and then.

You can make any kind of commitment. In fact, millions of people across the world do it at the start of every new year in terms of resolutions. But, few are disciplined enough to see it through. And as Clay Christensen says, you will only imbibe it into your culture if you're disciplined enough to avoid the 'just this once' lapses. 

Looks like there is now research indicating the benefits of living multiple lives. Putting yourself in the shoes of a character you admire for as little as the duration of a movie or the reading of a novel can change the way you think and act.

Whether you use a Micromax Canvas Turbo to juggle your many lives or not is immaterial (sorry Micromax). But the act of juggling many lives is a good thing to do.

In football, having the most talented players in your squad is not enough. When the competition lasts a good nine months, having eleven good players is nowhere near enough. Players will face injuries, fatigue, drop in performance. Sometimes, different tactics need to be employed for taking on different opponents, which might call for players with different qualities.

While it is important to keep the eleven first choice players fit and sharp and high on morale, it is equally important to do the same for the reserves. Of course, the reserves will get to play much less than the first choice players, but they need to be able to play their part when called upon. The best teams that win competitions at the highest level do a good job of keeping their entire squad of players fit and sharp and high on morale.

The same can be said about individuals as well. While we use a certain set of skills most of the time in doing our jobs, and working on improving them, it is just as important to manage and improve our reserve set of skills that can be put to use when needed.

What are you doing to manage your reserves?

Use it.

You blame the government for poor infrastructure in the country. You blame the officials for indulging in corruption. You blame taxi drivers for charging more than what is fair. You blame real estate agents for inflating house and land prices. You blame your organization for not following best practices. You blame marketers for lying to you about what products can do.

You blame them because you feel they have the power. The power to run things the way you'd like them to. But you're blaming all the wrong people. You are the one with the power.

Sports channels prioritise matches involving Manchester United over others because that is what majority of the people want to watch. It is shown because a lot of people want to watch it. Not the other way around. It is the same with radio stations, newspapers, and everything else you consume. You are shown what a lot of people want to see. Not the other way around.

If you want to a match involving Arsenal to be prioritised over the others, you should only watch when an Arsenal match is on. And there should be enough of you doing that. You shouldn't watch the Manchester United game just because it is on and the Arsenal game isn't. Because when you do, you are one of the many people making up the majority who define what is shown.

The logic is the same with all the issues mentioned above. You can complain all you want, blame people all you want, but unless you stop doing the things you don't want to, you will be one of the many people contributing to the majority that define how things should be done.

Towards the end of The Dark Knight, the Joker says to Batman 'You just couldn't let me die, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness and I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.'

You have the power. Use it. Like Batman did in not killing the Joker. 

When that is the case, having just one key will not get you through the door. You need the other one as well. But before you start thinking about the keys, you need to know where the door is.

Some people like nearly every movie they watch and every book they read. While some others find ways to criticize every movie they watch and every book they read. And neither kind is wrong. They just see what they are looking for.

Unless you are looking for the right things, you are not going to find them even if they are starring you in the face. That is why you are advised to meditate before performing a session of Yoga. That is why you are asked to remove your footwear and wash your feet before you enter a temple. That is why food tends to taste good in restaurants with good ambience. You need to get yourself in the right frame of mind. You need to be looking for the right thing in order to find the right thing.

If you're looking at the right thing without an idea as to what you need it for, you will find it, and when you do, you will not have a clue as to what to do with it. Having found the right thing will still keep you in good spirits for a while. Then it wears off.

If you know what to do with the thing you are looking for, you will get to work as soon as you find it.

You need to know where the door is. You need to know your goal. You should succeed in finding both keys. You should succeed in understanding what you're looking for and also in finding it. When you have found the former, the latter is staring you in the face everywhere you look. Then all that is left is to open the door. To make art. To ship it.

You can spend another couple of hours in the office touching up the slides to be used in the presentation tomorrow, perfecting the words in your blog post, revising for an exam believing that what you have done so far is not good enough.

Good enough for what?

Before planning to do anything, it is essential to know what is expected, what is good enough and what will exceed expectations. And it is time to ship when you have made your art good enough to exceed expectations. If you continue honing it and making it better, you will succeed in doing so, but you will have missed the boat to ship it.

If you aim for perfection, you will achieve it. But you will have missed several opportunities along the way. To ship. To take up another exciting challenge. To broaden your skill set. To grow.

The only skill you need to know is to understand what is good enough to exceed expectations. Everything else you need to get there are things you can learn.

When this skill is lacking, there will be fear. Fear of not having done enough, fear of consequences, fear of rejection, fear of failure.

Do you want to overcome that fear by striving for perfection or do you want to not let fear get into the picture by understanding what is good enough to exceed expectations?

Done is better than perfect.

The biggest fear that anybody has is the fear of failure. A lot of opportunities are not taken, by individuals to change their lives, by businesses to change their products, by governments to change laws, simply because they are afraid of the consequences of failure.

Everybody seeks perfect candidates. Consumers respect brands that do not have a history of any blemishes. People vote in governments that they feel will best suit their interests. Companies look for people with a stellar record in academics and previous roles. This leaves no room for failure.

The best way to not fail is to not try.

Even though the popular saying goes 'To not try is to fail', that is not the perspective that people have today. The best route to success is seen as one where there is no disagreement with anybody else, one where the only important thing that needs to be done is fit-in.

This is sounding a death knell to innovation.

There is either nobody questioning the status quo or everybody questioning it. It is as though the individual view point has given way to a collective mind in the race to fit-in.

If you want to learn, you have to fail. If you have to fail, you must be willing to try. If you want to try, you should forget about fitting in.

Be different. Fail fast. Fail Often. Make a difference.

We are often told to be original and be ourselves in our interviews, in our work. This is not a very sound piece of advice to receive when the person giving it doesn't know much about the original us. The original us simply may not be good enough. In this case, we have to look outside for inspiration and to understand what we ought to do to improve our chances of succeeding in whatever it is that we are pursuing.

The alternate path that many choose is to try and reach out to people who have successfully trudged down the path to the finish line before us and to learn the steps they took in their journey and aim to replicate those steps in our own journey.

Here's a line from The Truth about Marissa Mayer: An unauthorised Biography, that appeared in Business Insider a few days ago, that inspired this post.

“You know, you have it all wrong,” the counselor said to Mayer and the campers. “It’s not what Zune knows, it’s how Zune thinks.”

The counselor said that what made Nguyen so amazing wasn’t the facts that he knew, but rather how he approached the world and how he thought about problems. The counselor said the most remarkable thing about Nguyen was that you could put him in an entirely new environment or present him with an entirely new problem, and within a matter of minutes he would be asking the right questions and making the right observations.

We focus on the path taken by those before us, without understanding that it is not the path that matters. It is the reasoning behind choosing that path. After all, each person will have to take her own path that will resonate with her life so far. This is what is actually meant when we get advice asking us to be ourselves.

We learn a lot from failures. Only if we go down our own path with full understanding of why we're choosing it. If we go down a path defined by someone who reached success through it, without understanding if that is the best path for us, we will not even learn from the failure as we will attribute it to either not doing it right or to the person who defined the path. 

Malcolm Gladwell is famous for his '10,000 hours' theory in his book, Outliers.

In order to be successful at your workplace, at sports, at writing, or at anything else, you're often told that you need to put in 10,000 hours, paying your dues. Its not an exact number, of course, but unless you put in a significant amount of effort at getting good, you will not get good. There are no shortcuts. There is no get-rich get-famous overnight formula.

Of late, I see too many people taking this advice at face value. The effort needed to get in and get through a good college is seen as the 10,000 hours that need to be put in to get a high-paying job. As an intern, the effort needed to complete all the tasks assigned, along with coming first to office and leaving last, is seen as the 10,000 hours that need to be put in to convert the internship into a job offer.

When you take the advice at face value, you are not following the advice at all. We all put in our 10,000 hours in something or another. But are we all masters at those things?

10,000 hours is not a checklist item that needs to be ticked off. If you treat it that way, you had better gear up for disappointment as the end product you had in mind while ticking it off will fail to materialize. By treating it as a checklist item, you will keep facing newer 10,000 hours that need to be checked off to reach the next step of the ladder.

10,000 hours is not a checklist item that needs to be ticked off. It is a way of life that you need to embrace. I'm very fond of Morpheus's line in Matrix, 'If you ask, you're not ready to know.' I see this being applicable everywhere in life. The adaptation for this would be 'If you're counting the 10,000 hours you're putting in, you're not counting beyond zero.'

10,000 hours is not a chore. Unless you enjoy those hours that you're putting in, you're not making any progress.

Do you want to lead a life where you're perpetually ticking things off a checklist?

"My major allegiance has been to story-telling, not to history."
                                                                                               - Russell Banks

We often pledge our allegiance to a religion, a country, a lifestyle, a person, a political party, a scientific principle, an author, a company, an idea. Then we rely on this allegiance for guidance. Most of our actions are shaped by the allegiances we forge. After a while, we stop reasoning whether we ought to go ahead with a certain action. Instead, we start reasoning as to whether that action falls within the ambit of what is allowed by our allegiances. We often tend to focus on the history than on the story-telling.

Since we act this way, we expect everyone around us to act the same way. We do not take change very kindly. This is why brands are ever so cautious about changing their stance about certain topics. Which is why it was a pleasant surprise to hear one of the biggest and oldest brands in the world, the Pope, come out and say "If someone is gay and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?" This, after a million moms raised their voices against JC Penney for roping in Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson.

Far too often, we get lost in the ambit of our allegiances and fail to act, fail to create and fail to be remarkable. Brands most often reflect the popular opinion, which means this prevents brands from being remarkable as well.

If we let the history go and focus on the story-telling alone, we will witness brands, governments and everyone else doing the same. When we look at the way a brand communicates, or the way a government is run, or the way our organizations are run, we are looking at mirrors.

What do you want to see in them?

"A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way."
                      - Paul Graham

When I read this, the first person that came to my mind was Lionel Messi.

We all want a Messi. In our team, in our organization, in the political party we vote for. We want a Messi wherever it matters.

It is easy to find people with accomplishments. It is easy to find people with a fancy resume. But they are rarely formidable. For comparison, Fernando Torres is a World Cup winner, a Euro winner (with a Golden Boot), a Champions League winner, Europa League winner, FA Cup winner. But I will have to shield myself from brickbats if I even compare him to Lionel Messi.

It is not a dream if you can do it. This makes a formidable person with a dream the biggest asset to any organization. If an organization turns away a formidable person saying nobody is bigger than the organization and its rules, it is obvious who the loser is. Majority of the employees in an organization are moulded by the existing rules. Their dream rarely aligns with that of the organization. When a formidable person whose dream does align with that of the organization turns up, it has to go to every length to keep her. 

It is quite common to hear people saying that you should follow your passion when you're looking for a job. Many people even end up starting their own ventures doing what they are passionate about. This can be extremely rewarding if you do it. When more than fifty percent of the world's workforce are unhappy with their jobs, it is great if you can make a living out of what you love to do.

I used to be a staunch advocate of this idea. But today, I came across something that made me have second thoughts. There is this person who has taken from idea to execution, a way to improve healthcare in rural areas. He has been involved in all aspects of development of the product. The product does what he envisioned. But, the time has come to change its status from 'pet project' to 'commercial venture'. This is where the problems begin. Making it a successful commercial venture involves doing a lot of things outside of his comfort zone.

A lot of start-ups fail to make it to the market. Not because the idea isn't good enough. Not because the founder isn't passionate enough about the idea. But because the founder loses motivation when she realizes that the activity that she loves doing is only a small part of making her idea a commercial venture.

It has been proven in several studies that external rewards reduce intrinsic motivation. This is why most successful start-ups have founders who showed true grit to get through the rough patches because their motivation was not purely intrinsic.

In order to progress and develop, you ought to spur that side of your brain that craves for the external rewards available at the end of an activity, like promotions, higher pay, etc. At the same time, you ought to spur that side of the brain driven by intrinsic motivation. Striking the right balance between the two is key. This is why companies like Google and 3M are ranked among the top places to work. They allow employees to spend 15-20% of their work-time on pet projects while the rest of their time is dedicated to the company's commercial ventures.

When you're deciding what sort of a job you want to do, the only thing you need to ensure is this balance. The job ought to offer you enough opportunities to grow in terms of your position in the hierarchy, in terms of your pay, etc, while still allowing you enough time to focus on your pet projects that have no consequences on the bottom line of companies or even your own bottom line for that matter.

No love story is written about a couple who are perfectly compatible, have the same interests, and understand each other perfectly. No story is written about a bright kid who has always topped her class, and who goes on to do well in her chosen career. No story is written about a superhero who can effortlessly overcome all opposition.

Nobody wants to read (or watch) a story where everything is perfect from start to end. There is nothing to take out of such a story. The story has to involve troubles and difficulties that are overcome. It must involve adherence to principles. None of us are perfect. But we all aspire to be. Nothing spurs those aspirations than an inspiring story.

We all need inspiration. I have always found it easier to look for inspiration in fiction than in real-life characters. As Bruce Wayne says in Batman Begins, "As Bruce Wayne, I am a man of flesh and blood. I can be destroyed. I can be ignored. But as a symbol (Batman), I can be incorruptible. I can be ever-lasting". Right from Robert Langdon in the four novels based on him, Harry Potter in the seven-book series, Batman in Christopher Nolan's trilogy, Ajay Devagan in Singham, Leonardo Di Caprio in The Great Gatsby, to Goku in Dragonball Z, you can find a variety of characters in different scenarios, hailing from different backgrounds, facing different obstacles. But all have their purity at heart, their adherence to principles and their dedication to chase their goal, in common. They are all inspiring characters.

There is inspiration all around. There are heroes all around. You just need to choose who you want your hero to be. Who you admire. Who you want to emulate.

So should you.

When your performance, your bonus, your promotions are all decided by how much money you earn for the firm, it is natural to focus all your energy on increasing return on investment. Every action taken by every company is evaluated in terms of the future revenues that will come in as a result of the action taken. The future revenue earning potential of a company single handedly determines the stock price of a company, and thus defines the potential wealth of shareholders.

There is a high level of similarity between the way a person leads her life and the way Wall Street functions. Just like firms on Wall Street evaluate investment options based on future revenue earning potential of those investments, a person does the same with her life. When someone spends a lot of money to attend a school of repute and obtain a degree of repute, it is with an expectation of securing a job which enables earning more than what is being spent right now. Return on investment. This is similar to a company establishing an office in a different city or country.

All this is good. Necessary. But the sad part is that all evaluation is only in terms of future revenue earning potential. The stock price of a company doesn't go up when it announces that it will spend more money in manufacturing in order to improve the working conditions of the labourers in the manufacturing plants. Even though it will result in benefits for thousands of people, it will not improve the future revenue earning potential. This keeps a lot of companies from taking those steps to improve working conditions of people. Instead, they end up doing the bare minimum necessary for running business as usual and improving revenues and as a consequence, improving their stock price.

You can do the same. Majority of the people today lead their lives in this mindset. Wanting to constantly improve future revenue earning potential while doing the bare minimum necessary on every other front.

Unless most of us understand that Wall Street-like behaviour is only one aspect of our lives, and start doing things to improve future potential of things other than just revenue (income), we will always be looking over our shoulders to see who is catching up. 

Stop holding back.

This article makes the case for how your willpower and cognitive resources are drawn from the same pool of resources. Whether you're trying to prevent yourself from doing something, or holding back from saying something, or whether you're fully engaged in your work making good progress, you're using up resources from the same limited pool. So, if you want to be productive at what you're doing, you ought to spend lesser time holding yourself back from doing or saying certain things. This might explain why most accomplished people are known for certain quirky behaviours.

When I looked at my routine with this lens, it made a lot of sense. The article talks about how we're being expected to make more and more choices and how this is taking a toll on our resources, the very same resources that contribute to willpower and cognitive abilities. I no longer make choices about what TV shows I watch when, or what I cook, or what clothes I wear, and so on. Most of these decisions are derived from an algorithm that I just had to decide once. I felt that the article made sense as this allows me to burn these resources on other things.

This kind of a research opens up marketing opportunities that lie in ethical grey areas. For example, showing a billboard inviting a person driving by for a dinner at your restaurant is a lot more likely to persuade her if she is on her way back after a long day at work, as compared to her driving back after watching her kids perform in a play at school. Or, you are more likely to have a user click on your ad if you show it to her after she has just completed a challenging game rather than after making the first move in a game like chess.

But the flipside is that when you pursue such techniques, you still ought to deliver on exceeding the expectations of the customer you have just acquired. If you don't, they end up regretting their moment of weakness in falling prey to the advertisement and you will have lost your credibility.

Majority of the time, this phrase is used with a negative connotation. Gaming the system has nothing negative about it. In fact, it is a way of life when you are part of a society. And in this ultra-connectedness era, nobody can claim to be living a life of their own, totally unaffected by what is going on around her. We are all integral to the system(s) that exists.

We are always looking to understand what needs to be done in order to achieve something, be it studying for an exam, preparing a resume, buying a new car, getting a promotion, securing admission for children in good schools, or anything else. We identify what needs to be done and then we go about getting that done. This is plain and simply, gaming the system.

Marketing is where this is most apparent. There are standard practices for gaming the system here. It is part of the job description to understand what it takes to sell something to a potential customer, be it offering a discount or changing the product features altogether, and then get that done to make the sale.

Gaming the system is inevitable. Everybody ends up doing it. But it is up to you to decide how often you wish to do it. With short-term goals, you will end up gaming the system for every new goal that you set yourself. This will be so frequent that you will not build a coherent profile of yourself (or your brand). This will progressively make it harder for you to game the system because every time you identify what needs to be done, you will find a growing list of things to be undone (things that you did to achieve your previous short term goals).

Gaming the system is inevitable. But do it with a set of longer term goals in mind. Or you will live a life where you're constantly putting out fires.

"We see people and things not as they are, but as we are."
                                                                                         - Anthony De Mello

Every Marketing textbook, and every business book, must have a few pages dedicated to laying emphasis on this statement. Understanding this is a must to making a successful mass product. You can make successful products without understanding this. But that will only cater to an audience who are fairly similar to you, the creator. If you want a wider audience to accept and remark about your product, you have to understand that they see your product as they are, and not as you intend it to be.

I wrote a post a couple of months ago about the importance of choosing the right context to communicate with your audience. While the context is an important aspect to consider, the frame of mind, the behavioural traits and the personality of your target audience matters a lot as well. Understanding this is extremely hard. That is what makes Marketing hard. And that is what makes building successful global products hard.

Geographic traits, local cultural traits, demographic traits all aid in the process of understanding behavioural traits of your target audience. But this is only helpful as long as you cast a wide net (target thousands of people with the same advertisement). This will give you a reasonable success rate as a good number of the target audience will receive your communication the way you want them to.

But as precision targeting of advertisements increase (especially online), this strategy is no longer good enough. You need to understand your target audience a lot better than you do right now. And this is the challenge for digital marketing at the moment. Big Data is showing some promise in meeting this challenge, but there are still a lot of hurdles to cross.

It is true that digital marketing is not showing success rates as promised. It is true that very few brands have been built through digital marketing efforts alone while thousands have been built through traditional marketing efforts alone. But that is no reason to give up on the hope of realizing the promise. We just have to find ways to make it work. The first step is to gain credibility when making claims about overcoming privacy concerns of people.

New businesses and new products come up to fill some void on the supply side. There could be a need on the demand side that is not yet satisfied by the existing supply of products and services, and the one who identifies this has the opportunity to fill that void by creating his own solution for the problem. 

Not material possessions. Not things you can buy in exchange for money or for any other service that you can offer. These things rarely affect people around you.

Do you own something that can gravitate people around you? Do you own something that can channelize the efforts of those around you (and your own) towards achieving a greater goal? Do you own something that will stir up passion in those around you? Do you own something that can make a dent in the Universe (hat tip to Steve Jobs)?

Do you own a vision? Do you own an idea?

Only if you do will you be able to put in your best efforts and convince those around you to do the same. Without ownership, you're just meeting deadlines or just meeting expectations set by others. Without ownership, there is never a high amount of internal motivation. Without ownership, you will not take not achieving targets as a personal failure. You will only see it as a situation to be handled with those who have set the expectations in the first place. You will settle for second best or third best. You will settle for whatever it is that you can get away with.

When you build your product this way, without ownership, you will always benchmark your performance with the competition. You will end up doing (or trying to do) just a little better than your competitors. You will treat your customers as sources of profit rather than the group whose problem you're addressing. You will only have short term goals in sight. And your product will never be anything more than average (at best) that will fizzle out of the market before you can do anything about it.

Even if you're an employee of a large organization, unless you own some project (however small), you will have no commitment to meeting deadlines. You will start wilting under the pressure applied on you by your boss, and you will start hating your boss, or your job, or both.

When you own an idea, you always have the grand vision in sight. You will look forward to getting there. And you will do everything you can to move things in that direction.

What do you own?

It is common knowledge that you need to exercise your body regularly to keep it in shape. It is impossible to wake up one day and run a marathon. You need to train for it. The training is not just in terms of running a mile every morning, or hitting the gym for an hour every day. It involves everything from following a healthy diet, working out, running regularly, staying in the right frame of mind, and many many more things.

Keeping your body fit is not a deliberate act. In fact, it is a lifestyle choice. You make the right choices for your daily routines and you'll keep your body fit.

It is no different when it comes to keeping your mind fit and creative. It is impossible to just turn up one day with the next big marketing idea unless you do creative things on a regular basis. Creativity is not something you're born with. It is a lifestyle choice. Just like you keep your body in shape by working out regularly, following a healthy diet and so on, you do the same for your mind. If you aspire to be a writer, you ought to be a voracious reader, you ought to write stuff everyday. You have to pick a right mix of things to read just like you would pick a healthy diet. You ought to write stuff every single day just like you would go for a run or hit the gym every day. If you want to be a marketer, you need to make it your business to understand customers of whatever products you come across. If you aspire to be an entrepreneur, you need to look to create value in whatever you do.

If you want to be in the creative business, you need to exercise your Idea Muscle on a regular basis. Otherwise, you will be trying to run a marathon after a month of sitting at home and watching TV, ordering Domino's every night.