the wow moment!

predictability, my friend is a bigger virtue than patience. 

no one is, was and ever will be  in the same space-time coordinates as you are now, so the same rules, tips and tricks which work for you now may not work for others or even for you at another time(or even vice versa).  

every disease has its cure, and you cant swap ones medicine for the other. 

the same logic applies to both life and business, what might ‘totally rock’ today might be dull and drab tomorrow. 

the 1980s saw the sony walkman coming into the music market, it was the right time and the right attempt, it ‘totally rocked’. 

the ipod came somewhere around 2001, once again they hit the right shot at the right time, business bloomed.

then came the zune player(did you hear about it ), bad timing, bad hitting. 

the thing about the market is you have to give them what they want, no matter how meaningless or foolish it is. and often the market only asks for a ’sequel’ to what already existed. the desktop market asked for laptops, the laptop market asked for better laptops and so on so forth. the task of the company is to give them that. plain and simple(so, it may seem! )

people will always want more and better stuff(human nature, my friend , human nature) , its the job of the company to give them that and when you cant meet up their expectations, you are simply wiped out unless there is nothing in the market which is as good as yours. perhaps one big reason why zune didn’t work is because people had already seen the ipod. perhaps one big reason why windows works is people haven’t yet seen a mac.

this can best be explained by the automobile market, all cars have four wheels and a steering, until you see a better car, you are going to be very happy with your old one, the moment you see a better one, you are going to want it.

 say you didn’t know about ice creams, then you wouldn’t have bothered about them, but now that you know what an ice cream tastes like, you are going to want it.

‘wants’ might be said are subject to viewability. (business is more to be ‘want based’ than ‘need based’).

your product should shout at the customer: ” dude, this is what you have been looking for all your life”.

 the challenge here is to rightly anticipate what people want and i tell you this is not at all easy, there will always be error, the trick is to minimize the error. six sigma helps here, but you know, being humans, you can never predict anything to an entirety, how much ever you try, there will still be loads more that could have been done. 

beauty, my friend  is when you look a little less uglier. 

point 1 : you are not alone, there are tens of hundreds of people like you sitting out there with more or less the same ideas.

point 2 : read the first point again, and then got to the third point.

point 3: you think your idea is great and unique BECAUSE you think its so, what is the guarantee that the people around you also like it?

point 4: you think your idea is unique in the sense that because no ones ever tried it, and you are the first one, it must be great, you don’t think why someone else DIDN’T do it.

point 5 : even with the greatest idea ever conceived and the perfect timing, you are still going to have to compromise on a huge market.

point 6 : you analyze yourself, are you sure others will also think just like you? where you see value, the market might see worthless. what you might consider futile, the market might resonate to it.

point 7 : never judge people to the extent that you discard them , humans have the tendency to find more wrong in each other than the value, people whom you think are worthless might prove out to be dealmakers.

point 8 : you cant do everything, in your entire LIFE if you can do ONE THING PROPERLY, its GREAT. and you have to do many things in life, you always need people.

point 9: just because you don’t see the value in something, it doesn’t mean that its like that, may be you are a fool, theres every chance.

point 10 : people are busy, really busy, and they have no sympathy towards you, why should they spend their precious time with your product or idea, you might see the value in your idea, do they?

are you interested in my life ? i dont think so , i am not Albus Dumbledore.

did that make sense ? if it didnt, then obviously you are senseless.

the question remains ..now that you are senseless, lets figure out how senseless you are ?

still reading ? u sure are senseless to the core.

seven fifth of the world population does not know fractions.

there are more mosquitoes in India than there are in Sri Lanka, obviously, Sri Lanka is a smaller country. Also, India has Himesh Reshamiya.

two out of every five people are different from the remaining three. and those three are different from the first two.

despite all the jargon, money is still a very important thing.

workload increases with decreasing time, efficiency however decreases.

for most part of their lives, people will more or less remain the same, there are hardly any ‘enlightenments’ or ‘gyan’ sessions.

at the start, you say quality, then you come down to adaptability, then you say compromise, then you come down to availability and finally to desperation. ( the context here is both girls and gizmos )

in business, the bottom line is that you are there only for one reason: to make money.

in life, the bottom line is that you are here only for one reason: to get better.

as far as i am concerned, business and life are very closely intertwined, businessmen need to understand life much better than any one else. and the more you try and understand business and life, the more deeper they get, as long as you get too desperate or messy, things will go pretty smooth. i am a believer of the ’cause and effect’ doctrine from which it follows that if something is going wrong now(the effect), then there have must been a cause, things simply don’t ‘happen’ on their own.

lets us now analyze the jaundiced causes which end up in goofed up consequences, life is very short, one way is to go ahead blindly and ‘learn from your mistakes’, the other is to look at others and learn from ‘others mistakes’, like they say it makes no sense reinventing the wheel, you simply cant keep making the same mistakes which others made, also, you cant keep yourself from making mistakes, so its perfectly ok if you if you make ‘new mistakes’, in fact its great!

there are some mistakes which keep repeating so often and are so obvious that it becomes hard to notice them, people screw up their prospectus in all possible ways and they do it very stupidly. here are a few of them

i love what i am doing/my work is cool: like what Covey said in his book, its important that the ladder is leaning against the right wall, people are busy climbing the latter, mindlessly, senselessly without bothering where its heading, the kind of work that has to be done is the kind of work which is in demand. ever wondered why the so very cool gadgets produced every now and then don’t survive the market. well the answer is obvious. your product should be adaptable to the market, and if possible cool, not the other way round.

target market: yet another goof up when the managers don’t do their homework properly, you can’t sell a helicopter to someone afraid of heights, however cool it might be. this explains why diet coke never worked in India.

Now now , look at the meaningless topic , it only shows how jobless and innovationless i am.(Whats the opposite of innovation? ) It also indicates something else, so are you.

Still reading ? well you see i am out of topics to fill up my blog, but i guess its been so long something has be posted.

any suggestions? now !!!! we have a topic ? why do people write blogs and what do they get out of it ?

one reason is simply because blogging is a hobby, some find it ‘cool’ , some others want the world to know what kind of person he is ‘actually’ , then there are some like me who are simply jobless.

the bottomline is blogs are written for people to ‘read’, thats it. if you have the best blog in the world and people find it useless, hardly anyone will read it, this brings me to a new topic, i am on another cloud now: usability and value, unless and until people find value in what you are offering, no one is gonna give a damn about it. people are too busy (trying to get into newer better relationships, discussing statistics of some sportsperson or simply gossiping, more about this a little later.) to give a damn about what you have to tell or do.

The Right Thing:

In business as in life, people look for the ‘right’ thing and ‘right’ decision always. To be very honest, it does not exist. The world is big, very big and theres room for everyone. Whatever decision you have made will gave their own consequences, you simply cant categorize anything as entirely right or wrong. For eg: Microsoft decides to focus on increasing profits and they do everything in accordance to it, Apple decides to stick to quality and they do everything in accordance to it. Both of them have their own markets and following. Now tell me who is RIGHT?

I am busy.

We’ve heard the sentence written above a zillion times. I am too busy to rewrite it. Lets put it to test now. Lets have a look at the world around us, dozens of TV shows around are running successfully, tickets for sports matches sell like crazy, especially if its Indian Cricket or European Football, people have time to get into new relations every now and then, there are people bragging about their jobs, lifestyles, parents etc etc(social networking will help you soothe your emotions if you are one among them), people have time to flaunt their expensive clothes and goodies(thats why brands sell), movies and music are a huge market, entertainment was supposed to be an accessory, not an addiction like it is now,…. and the sickest of all: page 3 news: how is it going to matter to you if some socialite or actor is busy with whatever makes them busy, every magazine and newspaper has a gossip column which discusses personal shit about senseless actors, thats sick enough, whats sicker? people actually read such stuff, it sells, they have ‘time’ for it.  people like me have time to write meaning less blogs like this, thats bad enough, and you: reading such stuff : thats worse.

I am asking again, are we busy? am i ? are you ?

Love you, hope the next post makes some sense, this was just a reminders to my ‘readers’ that i still exist.

Right now, I am pretty busy!

OK…so here we go…of late i have had a chance to be a part of several teams, it doesn’t take an Aristotle to tell you that in the real world nothing is ever perfect, there are always nasty curves and bumps, but, people don’t quite seem to realize that, everyone wants everything else around them to be perfect. Humans have that inherent tendency to want perfection everywhere, they spend days and months trying to put things in order, waiting for the perfect people to come into their lives et cetera et cetera, i personally don’t endorse this theory. Life is short and it makes more sense to work with whats in hand than wait for perfect timings and perfect people around you. Sorry i went a little astray from the topic but that doesn’t quite matter. Coming back, all the team members have both the good and the bad things about them. It takes a leader to spot the good in them and use it to the best possible extent, leaders in most cases want all team members to grow and learn. i say all that is crap. lets be very simple and logical, no high funda theories, any team is like a system, and when it comes to considering what a system is all about, look at yourself, the legs do the walking, the hands do the work, the mouth does the eating etc. Now, if you want the hands to learn the walking, do you expect it to be of any use(unless you are a circus clown), the hands should be taught to work better, the legs to walk better so on so forth. That is exactly how its supposed to be for a team. One more thing i noticed in team work: heroism, the moment this comes in, the entire team is screwed. If you are someone with the basic common sense levels, you’d surely realize that in all teams, each and every individual needs others from the team, is needed by others by others from the team, else they wouldn’t have formed the team in the first place! So heroism in teams sucks to the core. It doesn’t benefit anyone. As in everything else humans do, teamwork also involves a lot of ego and emotion running across, there will always be weird people around you with strange ideologies and mentalities. The smarter you are, the swifter you glide through them.

Dear people,

when i started this blog, it was meant to be more of a diary blog than what it is now, and today, i intend to satisfy that purpose. I ve been busy(not as much as i pretend i am), so much has been happening that looking back you feel ” ok, now come on, i ve been busy, so much has been happening, wait a min, what exactly happened?” you see i am blank there and i hate that feeling.

the last month and half was very productive, was it ?, well !! i am looking for a proper word, i ve been learning so many things which i must NOT do.is there a word for that ?why bother anyways ???i have been traveling from team to team and now i am ‘enlightened’ (yes, even normal people can get enlightened; you need not necessarily be a Chinese monk ).

Let me tell you this thing about people, you see a billion people, the billion and oneth will be different. So, honestly, there is no point thinking about them. For mathematicians and nerds, Net count of types of people= Net count of people. Its really funny and exciting to work with a bunch of crazy people(in a perfect real world, all people are someway or the other crazy).

To start off (you see i am very nagging bozo, this is the 4th para and i am still starting); let me discuss some thing called YBAH,Young Business Associaion Of Hyderabad. now this was some sort of a business organization started by an alumni of our college, and because me and my bunch of friends somewhat knew how to talk to people, throw around some charisma, we were made the ‘core members’. So what did we do? Well, something. So you are a bunch of dynamic people, know how to pretend that you are very cool and all, does that mean you can do business ??Life is supposed to be simple, everything that pertains to life is also meant to be simple. At YBAH, we had a mission statement that was more or less general, a twelve year old could have come up with the same thing. I didn’t realize it then, but now i feel strongly, that was where it was beginning to screw up. You see you started an organization with a foundation that has nothing new to offer, you lack something called a USP, you cant expect to survive. Only close contacts and friends will become your members and thats exactly what happened here. And talk of professionalism, believe me - its not about the formals!!! wonder when people will understand that !! YBAH offered in its statement that members will get management classes and internships and all, but, what type of management classes, no one knew! who was going to lecture, we had no answer. When we asked this, our whims were satisfied by some long convincing nonsense about what we can do and all. The power of Speech ! i tell you, this is very dangerous, you not only screw but kill the prospects of your long term relations. We are here to do business, not to preach or throw attitude. When people asked us whats going around, we played the same dirty trick, we came up with a list of nonsensical blah blah so that people come running to us. You see such tricks work only once. You will be wiped off, you need people to do business.

Alarmed with all this and filled with a sense of pride and dedication, the YBAH team kicks off to get sponsors for an event called EDGE(Entrepreneurship Development Growth and Excellence). You see the name was posh. period. The so very ‘experienced’ seniors came up with lists and divided the core members to go for marketing. Do you think it worked, NO. Ill tell you why ? Firstly, we didn’t have anything to sell i.e we were not offering anything new. To be very honest we were not sure if we had anything at all to sell, we didnt know where to go, we were ‘passion driven’ here, passions don’t quite end up sweet, you see you end up feeling like the insect who gets hit by the bulb. Passionate things only feel good for a little while, you need to focus on naked ground realities. We senselessly went to Google, Dell, Deloitte and a truckload of other high funda companies and guess what we told them, we were like ‘ you see there was this amazing event two years ago and we want to do it again, will you give us sponsorship ?’ why we wanted to do ? we didnt know. how we were going to do ? we didnt know. Being enthu is good, but its always better if you are smart first and brave next.

Thats how it all ended, business is not about making visiting cards, printing lists and showing off how good you look in formals. Common sense is a blessing.

when i was twelve, i thought i knew everything about life, i thought i was very smart and talented and all crap, but then i realized i was wrong. i thought may be when i reach fifteen or so, ill have nothing more to learn from then on, but then i was wrong once again. and then i thought when i will be eighteen may be ill know it all, i mean the governments and all fixed this as some sort of ‘maturity age’, so i expected something miraculous will happen when i am eighteen and i will be perfect. it didn’t . i am nineteen and i am still a fool. every time i feel this must be all, i know so much, i get slapped across my face(not literally), i finally gave up, gave up big time, now i know that as long as i am going to breath, there will be a goal, there will something or the other ill want to achieve and i am happy. i now mock at people who think they are ‘know it all’ walking talking encyclopedias and have nothing to learn but just to offer their great talent to the world. damn them . i repeat. damn them. like they say, ‘the further you travel towards achieving your goal, the more those blurry objects at the horizon come into sharper focus(to be replaced by newer objects)’. it simply doesn’t make sense to even assume that you will achieve a state of perfection and elegance, let me tell you, thats impossible.why? say, somehow you get there, you are whatever you wanna be.perfect.whats next ? there is always a journey, always a next stop and thats what makes life exciting.

hakuna matata

lets first define this thing called ‘professionalism’. i don’t know why is it so but these people give so much importance to clothes. a man dressed up in formals is considered more ‘professional’ than some one like me. why? dogmatized bozos! i mean lets just think, if you put hitler in charlie chaplins clothes, do u think he’ll start dancing on your TV screen? clothes DON’T make the man. one more damned feature : hero worship. when you talk to the boss of some big company, you must behave properly, your every word should be cautious et cetera et cetera. when was the last time you talked to your parents like that ? dogma turns smart people into biological machines. i suggest the next time you talk to a ‘big guy’ just imagine him itching, scratching and what not. doing so will re emphasize in your mind that he is still human. may be you will feel more comfy.

from what i can make out, most corporate cultures render people dumb and innovationless even though they claim the opposite. the strict hierarchy which they maintain is pretty much similar to the caste system of the ‘bad days’. only difference is it its now come out in a different way. the only two big companies who stay cool and are not dogma driven according to me are google and apple. people here are cool, they treat people around them as people. and the best part- they know something called ‘having fun’. the others need to be given a dose of ’simplicity’.

it was two months ago that i deleted my orkut and facebook accounts, the reason being very simple, ‘there are better things in life’. to be very honest, social networking is a ‘talent killer’. the same people who would have been out there writing blogs, playing football, working out at the gym, programming or even something as obvious as ‘thinking’ are now spending hours looking at weird profiles of fictitious girls. let go off the girls, people take a keen interest in reading scraps and the profile owner takes it upon himself as an ‘obligation’ to ‘increase the number of his scraps’.let me say that once again..there ARE actually better things in life.

to add to the fun, there are despo lover boys, stupid show offers(like me) and dumb senti girls who think they’ve all of a sudden got a chance to show themselves to the world. facebook! now this place is so very girly, girly would be a sweet word, its actually ‘auntiesh’, i wonder why people are actually ready to pay billions for it. for those of you who dont know, facebook rejected a billion dollar offer from yahoo and there was a rumor that google offered 2.3 billion. thats heights man!

to be very honest, i completely agree, it gives you a platform to find your long lost friends and build a network, but just think, if that friend actually deserved to be your friend, he would have never been ‘long lost’, you dont actually talk to your hundred odd friends, they are just ‘there’. you are actually wasting some of the best times of your life on stuff which doesnt deserve to be wasted so much time for. in two words, excessive social networking is for the ‘emotionally challenged’ and cool souls like you(?) and me should go for the BETTER things in life.