Category Archives: Musings

A Question of Timing

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How do you ensure that you launch your new product at the right time?

We had neared the end of my lecture to a class of first year MBA students: an hour of what to expect in b-school and an hour on the success and failure of a new product launch, covering the gamut of Ford Edsel to New Coke. It struck me that, quite naturally and somewhat disappointingly, I did not have a “right” answer to that question.

The timing of a new product launch is often determined by factors such as overall business plans, product readiness, competitive launches, and seasonal cycles. The 10-year growth strategy might have specific time points for particular new launches. The new product development team would have certain limitations and capabilities that determine when the product would be ready. The new product might be launched quickly in order to be the first to market, it might be launched later in order to take a competitive launch head on. Several product categories such as consumer goods are in higher demand during particular times of the year, and launching them then would make the most business sense.

But what do you just before the rains if the technology for your new umbrella is yet to be transferred from China? What if your R&D department has gone through multiple rounds of development but is nowhere near a good product, with only two more months to go before your scheduled deadline? What if your competitor got there faster?

The real world includes delays and uncertainties, risks and new developments. Timing the launch of a new product is not always within the control of the company. More on this in my next post ‘A Question of Timing – More Answers.’

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The Mantle of Confidence

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One fine day came a mail addressed to me by name, and it was from a classmate of mine from b-school. I was thrilled – oh, so A has shifted to a new role with the Tatas, I thought. It was an invitation to participate in a blogger contest by Tanishq for their newly launched brand Mia for workwear jewellery. (Find out more at the Mia website.) I realized very soon that this A was not my classmate, but that didn’t reduce the enthusiasm any bit, because by then I had watched the Mia TVC as well. There was something in the bold, smart and confident protagonist which struck me – I could see a little bit of me in her. And so, here goes…

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Just like bad hair days, there used to be bad attire days. Those were days when I would stand in front of my wardrobe, choose clothes for the day, put them back, pick others, put those back, and after a couple of rounds of this, settle for something safe. Something that wouldn’t draw too many comments in the day’s meeting, or distract from the serious business at hand.

But I always felt there was something untrue about dressing down, because it stopped me from looking as beautiful and confident as I felt about my work. And so, one day, I decided to take a little risk: I wore a puff-sleeved pink shirt to a meeting where anyone who knew me would have expected a staid grey striped shirt. Because I felt beautiful in it, and it was the real me.

That day, I was harking back to something I had wondered over two years ago as I started a career in business strategy consulting: why shouldn’t a woman look her best when she is doing her best at work? This question came back to me as I watched the Tanishq Mia TVC. If you are a woman professional or have women professionals at your workplace, you might want to spare 60 seconds to watch it.

Megha, the protagonist, is told not to wear attention-grabbing gold earrings in a client meeting. But in a flash of confidence which lets her be true to herself, she decides to go into the meeting with the earrings. Her boss is not too happy, but Megha’s presentation of her work goes so well that she (the boss) changes her mind. As Mia wearers, both of them are confident of their work and the value they bring to the table; their relationship is one of mutual trust, of confidence that recognizes confidence and tolerates differences. Even when they both wear Mia, their choices are very different, and yet equally elegant. Even when there is difference of opinion, the two of them understand each other.

Megha embodies what I call wearing the mantle of confidence. The mantle could be an item of clothing or an accessory, it could be a pen or a notebook, it is anything that acts as a repository of confidence. It helps the woman do her work well, be it preparing a document for a meeting, having an important conversation with her team, or presenting before a client. And this is what it means to be beautiful at work. After all, confidence and beauty are inseparable, and a balanced mix of beauty and confidence is what all of us value as poise. The poised woman is smart and confident; she knows it and she will show it.

Like Megha, I too prefer short hair that doesn’t have to be touched. While she wears her Mia earrings, I have a gold chain and locket. There was a time when gold was off limits for women professionals in Western attire, but those days are passé. Today’s workplaces are no longer about pale shirts and dark suits. When women are around and they feel confident, they will wear what they like, with effortless ease. They set norms and lend legitimacy to what they do simply by being themselves. They know that diversity is about being unique and confident, and they give others – both men and women – the confidence to be themselves. They tolerate differences and bring out the best in others.

So nowadays, on bad attire days, when I feel like putting the clothes back and picking others, I ask myself the reason. If it has anything to do with appearing more staid and less beautiful than I feel inside, I don’t change my choice. Instead, I wear what I choose and let my confidence carry me through the day.

Seeing What You Want to See

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It was one of those lunch-time conversations that brought up the name of Saramago, and the memory lay hidden till the book called out to me as I browsed the shelves of the library that’s my haunt once every month. The back cover had a remarkable description – “José Saramago has deftly created the politician’s ultimate nightmare: disillusionment” – and the author’s history piqued me: a Nobel Prize winner who became a full-time writer in 1979 although he was born in 1922!

And so the pick found place in my reading list. And exited the queue quite fast too, because towards the middle, the slow-paced writing gets quite gripping.

It was only after finishing the book and reading up about it online that I realized that Seeing was the sequel to Blindness. But that doesn’t take away from the reading experience. And what’s the experience itself all about? The story of Seeing is set in an unnamed country, perhaps Portugal, where elections are being held at the time the narration begins. The results for the capital city reveal something extraordinary – a large majority of votes do not have the name of any party, they are blank. A repeat election makes things worse, as the share of blank votes is higher this time. The ruling government – a legitimately elected one – considers the blank votes an assault on democracy.

Indeed, the government sees what it wants – rebellion and disrespect for democracy – and uses various means to subvert the perceived subversion. In that sense, Seeing reminded me of some of George Orwell’s works where the Big Brother state controls people’s lives.

Very soon, the government puts the capital city under a state of siege, and withdraws all administration and police from within the city perimeters. The people are not too displeased and the situation remains completely peaceful. The government then resorts to finding a scapegoat for the problem, for they consider the situation to be a problem. They choose as the culprit a woman who did not go blind when four years ago the entire population of the city was afflicted by inexplicable blindness and stumbled around helplessly. What then follows is an attempt to lay the blame on her, and the story proceeds from the perspective of the police superintendent who is assigned the job.

Through the book, Saramago’s intricate sensitivity to human nature comes across clearly. Consider this paragraph, for instance:

The superintendent slowly reached out his hand and touched the dog’s head. He felt like crying and letting the tears course down his face… The doctor’s wife put her book away in her bag and said, “Let’s go… You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you?”

“Are you sure?… You’re not afraid I might be tricking you?”

“Not with those tears in your eyes, no.”

Saramago is also adept at conveying the barter that happens in each dialogue between people. He also makes keen observations such as the idea that memories are selectively created, in the sense that there is a first filter of “hearing” by the senses and then a second filter of “hearing” by the mind or memory.

The narrative is free-flowing, with only a paragraph or two per page, and Saramago has a way of expressing dialogue using only commas as the punctuation. (In the passage cited above, I took the liberty of adding quotation marks and paragraph breaks.) This might put off casual readers, but for those who are ready to go with the flow, so to speak, it is fascinating to see, and not without real reason, if I may say so, how the author leads the reader on and on into the diabolical, not to say sensitive and witty, world of government insecurity, political intrigue, and just as important, institutional hierarchy, all juxtaposed, in a style not very common, into the lives of ordinary people, who are, like their counterparts across the world, simply trying to lead their lives.

If you liked the last sentence, Seeing is probably for you. And while you are at it, it might be better to go for Blindness first.

The World in 2045

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Imagine this:

2025 — people decide to democratically elect their representatives and form the World Government

2030 — language translation is the fastest-growing industry

2035 — security and fraud prevention industry is obsolete, since every person is uniquely identifiable and is connected to the global social network

2040 — phased global demilitarization is complete, and the freed up resources are spent on child nutrition and education

2045 — air travel is so frequent that da Vinci’s dream comes true: someone successfully commercializes solar powered “wings” for personal flights

Difficult to imagine? Well, when the connected generation – the one that does not know of a time without the internet – grows up, international borders will seem not only needless but irrelevant. And the stage is set for the true global village to emerge.

Thriving in Ambiguity

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Data is indispensable to most decision-making. The large market share that a company commands could mean 15% or 75%, and it is important to know that when deciding which markets to focus on. The short-term interest rate might be 2.25% higher than that on long term debt. However, there comes a point when either additional data is not available or additional analysis is not helpful. At that point, knowing there is ambiguity and still progressing becomes critical.

I have a hunch that Samsung, at some point, took a call – despite the absence of perfect data – to invest in technology and in building the brand; and that has been paying off handsomely now. Neither data nor analysis could have provided the confidence necessary to take that decision.

Often, an estimate is all one gets to work with.

 

Prepare for the Best

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We are often told to “hope for the best, prepare for the worst,” and the advice seems well-founded. After all, who wouldn’t want to survive through the worst of circumstances?

But preparing for the worst makes your company capable of exactly that – responding perfectly when the worst possible situation comes. The arsenal is all ready for when your most important competitor starts a price war, so is it when your customers don’t adopt your new product. But what if the same competitor shifts focus to a different market segment, or your new product is adopted surprisingly well by the market? Having the options in place to quickly increase production will then allow you to capture the market. At the very least, having a way of noticing such an opportunity will let you take advantage of the next one when it arises.

Sun Tzu says in The Art of War: “Be conscious of possible disadvantages that can arise when you are in a favorable position. Also be prepared for possible advantages that can arise even when you are in the midst of misfortune.”

What are Systems for?

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Systems, processes, methods are all orderly ways of doing things, important when organizations grow. And yet, systems are meaningful only if they support the greater cause of the organization’s existence. If rules are cited by rote and adhered to in order to be seen as adherent, our systems have failed us.

At one of the offices of a large company, a friend had to stand at the entrance waiting for the requisite documents that would give her permission to enter, even as the person she had an appointment with waited inside. “Madam, hamein toh apne aap ko bachake rakhna hai,” the security guard told her in full frankness: “Madam, we have to keep ourselves safe.” Of course, guards have to secure not just the premises but their own jobs too.

Companies do this so often with customers – at call centres, at (oxymoronic) customer care centres, at retail outlets, and at other touchpoints. Mostly because processes have been drilled into the very people who deal directly with customers.

When employees are empowered to allow exceptions, the results are exhilarating, such as when the call centre supervisor at an airline company allows an immediate waiver of the cancellation penalty, without requiring lengthy emails and multiple phone calls.

 

Where Credibility Stems From

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Credibility – the confidence that is critical when trying to sell your product or service – comes from several sources. For startups, the source might simply be (baseless) confidence in one’s ability to deliver. Later on, having proven results to the company’s name makes it easier to approach other potential leads. And over a period of time, even results become irrelevant if enough customers have bought the same product or service. Once the market reaches a tipping point, herd behavior among customers kicks in if other factors are conducive.

I can easily imagine some of Infosys’s earliest clients buying their IT projects after listening to the bunch of youngsters who sounded like they barely knew what they were doing. Over a period, having done multiple projects and delivered results that were measurable, they would have found it easier to present credentials. Of course, the company is busy setting its own house in order now, but that’s another story.

Showcasing credibility is easier with experience, but the process has to start somewhere. Perhaps square one is not a bad place to begin.

Constructive Discontent

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There are the discontented who complain of the state of things – they don’t act. There are the contented who are happy with the state of things – they don’t act either. And then there are the creative, imaginative ones who see the world for what it can be, not for what it is – and they act. Because their vision is as real as anything solid. And their discontent does not let them rest till they act.

Very recently, I listened to someone in the development sector who had, about a decade ago, guided a rude, uncared for young boy from the slums of Mumbai and nurtured him into a confident lad who now leads an NGO. Her eyes shone as she described the tremendous faith that she had in the boy when every other teacher in the school considered him hopeless.

Ask her, and she will tell you that she didn’t do anything heroic. All she did was listen to the inner discontent that didn’t let her let go of hope.

 

The Sprint and the Marathon

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Building something is about staying invested, about weathering the ups and downs, and mostly, about staying long enough till dame luck smiles. This is a difficult fact to acknowledge, especially today when results have to come fast, and making one’s own luck is the done thing.

I know someone who has decided that he wants to build an independent consulting firm, and regardless of what he does, he has already taken a decision that will drive the odds in his favor – he has decided to stay with consulting for three years, come what may. Staying power is hard to come by today, when every decision has to show results in the next quarter’s earnings, and every piece of work has to add to one’s resume.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.