Re-invention is all about intention!

Just few days back I was in a training where we were discussing about reinventing yourself. The speaker was the CEO of a Russian Bank and he was discussing how thrice over the company had seen political and financial crisis in their country and how every time they had re-invented themselves according to the situation and emerged stronger.

One of the questions he was asked was "What if it is not possible to re-invent yourself?" He smiled and said, "It is always possible if you want to. It's not a question about possibility but about intention. If you have the intention, you will find a way." And then he gave a perfect example of re-invention where very few people would think possible - Cirque du Soliel. The example of Cirque du Soliel really caught me and it has since been spinning in my head.

After all, how much can a circus hope to re-invent itself? What's the scope? And yet they did it... Not a single animal is there any more in any of their shows. But, it's still a beautiful display of skills... And it's grand and bigger then ever before; almost equivalent to a Broadway show. With the ticket prices touching the sky, they barely do a show that's not sold out. Now that is re-invention. It really is a question of intent.

Image source: Google search

Shouldn't technology use be logical as well?

(Photo courtesy: HT)

Two days a go, I read an article about a 72-year old lady and a 79-year old man becoming parents to a baby boy through the in-vitro fertilisation (IVF-test tube) technique, wherein the eggs and sperm are fertilised outside the womb, in a test tube. There have been other such cases too. In another case in 2006 - a good ten years back - a 70-year old lady had successfully delivered a baby girl through IVF. And in 2008, a 66-year old lady had given birth to triplets - two boys and a girl.

This couple was desperate for a child and this is nothing short of a miracle in the medical world. The doctors must be like God to this couple and one can only imagine their joy at the eventual parenthood. But, despite all, I feel sorry - I feel sorry for the child. It makes no sense at all to have a child and then not be able to give him a normal childhood. 

I am a mother of a 9-year old, and I can give a solid testimony to how much effort and hard work it requires nowadays to raise a normal, active and enterprising child. And no matter how healthy you are, a 70 or 80-year old cannot match the energies of a parent in his or her 30s. You have to run errands like car pools to various activities. You have to use technologies like Google and Wikipedia to help them with studies and school projects. You have keep on your toes for very basic things as teaching your child to cycle or play badminton or even climb a bouncy. I wonder how these poor parents, who would be 80 and 90 year olds by the time the child turns 10 even, keep up.

I feel pity for the child not just because he might lag behind in all these activities that all other children will take up and all children deserve to take up but also because he just might suffer with low self esteem not being able to match up to his peers. I also feel sorry for the child because even before he grows up, he just might end up as the carer for two people in their very advanced age. And nothing could be more devastating that the burden of this responsibility before he evens understands the same.

May God bless this couple with a long life, and let's not even go into the scenario where he might end up as an orphan even before he is mature enough to handle himself. That would be really sad. I hope the child otherwise has good-hearted and helpful relatives very close to him to help him have a normal childhood. God bless little Arman Singh and may all his 'Arman' come true!

When did Technology become such a vital part of our lives?

I have been living without a phone since almost a month. Okay, correction: I have been living without a smart phone for almost a month. I do have a functioning phone in an old non-smart handset, but it doesn't have an internet connection and I am off WhatsApp and almost off all social media.

I had recently bought a Nokia Lumia 1520. Needless to say it is a high-end phone and I was more than satisfied with it. Loved it, to be precise. Then, one day I accidentally dropped it and it's screen broke, much as my heart. I thought, "Oh luckily, this time I have bought an insurance for physical damage so I am saved." Little did I know that it was the start of an ordeal. I called the Insurance company, in fact I couldn't even get through on their number for the first two days. Eventually I did, on 10th October, 2014. The lady told me they will pick the phone from my house within 24 to 48 hours. But no, they took full 7 days to do so and that too after scores of phone calls and after involving the retailer from whom I had bought the phone. Okay, not a good start but let's hope all goes well now, at least the person at the insurance company promised that it will. How wrong could I be? Two weeks, daily follow-ups and they hadn't even got my phone repaired. Their excuse? Well, sometimes they don't have staff due to Diwali and then later Nokia service centre doesn't have the part. I called up Nokia Service Centre and they tell me, "Ma'am you bring the phone, it will take about an hour to repair the phone." My Insurance Company had been fooling me.

I try to escalate by talking to the supervisor of the person concerned. He plays the same dirty tricks. Well, on 1st November, 2014 they eventually confirm that the phone has been repaired. But it's today, 5th November, 2014 and I still don't have it in my hand. And today I broke all records of phone calls. Record 53 calls made to the Insurance executives to at least force them to eventually pick up the phone and come up with yet another excuse. Furthermore, their excuses are getting dirtier and inhumane. "The executive who was on his way to deliver the phone has met with a serious accident." What the hell? If I tell them off saying that it's just one of their excuses, I am an insensitive person. Yes, that's exactly what they guy said to me. Can you believe it? Yet another promise of a 110% guarantee of the phone being delivered the next day is handed out.

So much for my physical experience. But, what about my emotional experience. I have been feeling depressed, cut-off from my friends and lonely. In fact, I have been feeling angry, harassed and stressed too. I have been seething with fury since this morning for being taken for a ride and have been unable to calm myself down despite all my attempts. I feel absolutely helpless and feel like crying. And to be honest, I haven't felt like this - so angry, so helpless and so depressed - since a very long time. I tell about this to someone and I sometimes get a reply, "Okay, it's just a phone. We didn't even have them till a few years back." And I feel like snapping back, "Have you lately tried living without your phone for a month?"

We belong to a generation who has done away with stereos, cameras, watches etc. ever since we shifted to smart phones. The first thing most of us look at when we get up in the morning is our phones and some even check it out a number of times at night. True, we didn't have them till a few years back. But, then nobody did and it wasn't just me alone without it. And therefore, people used other ways of keeping in touch. It wasn't like now when you keep in touch through WhatsApp and Facebook. Even office is easier to manage when you don't have to switch on your laptop before going to sleep or after getting up in the morning to check on your mails because you could simply do so through your. phone.

I don't know, I thought I might be able to calm myself down after putting all this in words here. But, for once, even this is not working. Dear God, I NEED my phone. PLEASE HELP! Before I go crazy!! I NEED MY PHONE!!!

Who is tomorrow's competitor?

I received a mail today. Although it was long enough to justify the need to put it away for reading later when free, when I did read it, it made sense. So I decided to post it here for others to read.

Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?

Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones.

Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sonys and Canons are taking note.

Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours).

Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth.

Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smartphone bus. They admit that Apple's Iphone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?

The "Mahabharat" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question - "who is my competitor?"

Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital."

In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both.

It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.

In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!

India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market.

Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen.

One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding!

On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast .or.. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly.