Battling Unproductivity

So what was I doing all these weeks ? 

I was hibernating. I was trying to come up with some original fresh ideas for my blog. Bullshit. I just didnt feel like blogging. Now i feel like, i am back again. 

Of course some people did miss my blog, they even told me to start posting again. The ’some’ counts to five as of now. 

If you hadnt noticed the change by now, let me tell it to you, I started using proper Caps. I weighed out ‘originality and something different’ against ‘popular market demand’ and the latter won. You see people like seeing proper Caps, im giving it to them. Ive learnt from life that when people want something and you can give it to them for free, you really should. 

I am not getting any proper ideas for this post. I lost the touch, itll take some time to get back. I dont want to corrupt my blog. Besides, I am too sleepy.

Readable Stuff

i normally dont post stuff written by others on my blog, but i guess i am bending that rule now. the content really appeals to me and i thought it would be good to share it with others. these are excerpts from the websites and blogs i normally read. thats it , enjoy the wow moment

1. Mark Cuban, blogmaverick.com 

These investors, including myself, know what you don’t, and they are not telling you. The minute you ask for money, you are playing in their game, they aren’t playing in yours. You are at a huge disadvantage, and it’s only going to get worse if you take their money. The minute you take money, the leverage completely flips to the investor. They control the destiny of your dreams, not you.

Investors don’t care about your dreams and goals. They love that you have them. They love that they motivate you. Investors care about how they are going to get their money back and then some. Family cares about your dreams. Investors care about money. There is a reason why venture capitalists are often referred to as Vulture Capitalists. The minute you slide off course from the promises you made to get the money, your dreams fall in jeopardy. You will find yourself making promises to keep investors at bay. You will find yourself avoiding your investors. Then you will find yourself on the outside looking in. The reality of taking money from non family members is that they are doing it for only one reason, to make more money. If you can’t deliver on that promise, you are out. You will be removed from the company you started. You will find someone else running your dream company. If this sounds like a scene out of the Sopranos or an episode you would watch on TV about a loan shark, you are right. The only difference is that it’s all legal.

There are only two reasonable sources of capital for startup entrepreneurs, your own pocket and your customers pockets. I personally would never even take money from a family member. Could you imagine the eternal grief and guilt from your mom, dad, uncle or aunt because you blew your nephews college money or the money for grandmas last vacation… I cant.

You shouldn’t have to take money from anyone. Businesses don’t have to start big. The best ones start small enough to suit the circumstances of their founders. I started MicroSolutions by getting an advance from my first customer of $500. The business didn’t grow quickly in the first couple years. We didn’t grow past 4 people in the first couple years, and we all worked dirt cheap.

So what’s wrong with that? It’s OK to start slow. It’s ok to grow slow. As much as you want to think that all things would change if you only had more cash available, they probably won’t.

The reality is that for most businesses, they don’t need more cash, they need more brains.

2. Also from blogmaverick.com 

At no other time have their been 3 financial news networks and thousands of websites providing so much financial information and opinion. The sum of which  has definitely lead us into a situation of  “Paralysis by Bullshitalysis”.  Everyone is afraid to buy. Everyone is afraid to sell or short.  Sales forced by de-leveraging is the catalyst for the market.  However, there are so few buyers, the de-leveraging sales are taking forever.

Who knows what the new normal is. No one has any idea what is going to happen in this market. NO ONE.  Personally, I am completely hedged. I bought puts, sold them. Sold Puts, bought them back, then decided to hedge every long dollar and then some with big puts on the market. This allowed me to be protected on the down side, and tip toe on the long side. As stocks go down, my hedge allows me to buy more of the stocks I like. If the market takes off on the up side, hopefully my longs will more than cover the cost of my puts. If the market does nothing. I’m stuck right where I am, with my puts losing time value every day.

Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t.  What I do know is this, everyone is a genius in a bullmarket. The last 5 years, that wasn’t a stock market. THIS is a stockmarket. This time it is different. This may just be the new normal.

The impact of tax rates on productivity and development is something economists masterbate about,  enterpreneurs don’t waste their time thinking about it. We have business to do. 

3. Paul Graham, paulgraham.com 

For example, initially I thought maybe this principle only applied to Internet startups. Obviously it worked for Google, but what about Microsoft? Surely Microsoft isn’t benevolent? But when I think back to the beginning, they were. Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood. When IBM introduced the PC, they thought they were going to make money selling hardware at high prices. But by gaining control of the PC standard, Microsoft opened up the market to any manufacturer. Hardware prices plummeted, and lots of people got to have computers who couldn’t otherwise have afforded them. It’s the sort of thing you’d expect Google to do.

Microsoft isn’t so benevolent now. Now when one thinks of what Microsoft does to users, all the verbs that come to mind begin with F. [3] And yet it doesn’t seem to pay. Their stock price has been flat for years. Back when they were Robin Hood, their stock price rose like Google’s. Could there be a connection?

You can see how there would be. When you’re small, you can’t bully customers, so you have to charm them. Whereas when you’re big you can maltreat them at will, and you tend to, because it’s easier than satisfying them. You grow big by being nice, but you can stay big by being mean.

You get away with it till the underlying conditions change, and then all your victims escape. So “Don’t be evil” may be the most valuable thing Paul Buchheit made for Google, because it may turn out to be an elixir of corporate youth. I’m sure they find it constraining, but think how valuable it will be if it saves them from lapsing into the fatal laziness that afflicted Microsoft and IBM.

The curious thing is, this elixir is freely available to any other company. Anyone can adopt “Don’t be evil.” The catch is that people will hold you to it. So I don’t think you’re going to see record labels or tobacco companies using this discovery.

4. Steve Jobs, stanford.edu

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

…..

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

…..

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

billboards, iphone and business sense.

billboards have always been able to catch my attention, this time i have a lot to say about the ‘Idea cellular’ billboard which proudly flaunts their new marketing tag line  “one school, all present” (or something like that). the underlying idea that is that Idea cellular is so cheap and has such a wide network that teachers will be able to teach number of students across the villages of india (through phones!!) thereby spreading literacy and developing the nation. sweet. very sweet indeed. BUT, what is this billboard doing in the middle of a city?, infact at every other corner in the city? Reliance communications made the same mistake (you cannot call it a mistake in the fullest sense) when they promoted their network as the common man’s network. they lost many of the customers in the cities to other networks. the mindset of the people metamorphosed in such a way that even those who were a bit affluent abhorred reliance.  idea is doing the same thing now. people from the cities do not want to associate themselves with those in the villages, not at least in india. even those who come from the villages do not want to associate themselves with the villages. funny, i know. (this is typically similar to the NRIs who come back to India and insist on mineral water forgetting totally the fact that a few decades ago they used to run around drinking water from borewells in short nickers, or even without.)

what i want to say is that the advertising should be consumer centric. the people in the villages would be able to connect to the idea cellular’s education campaign, not just in a small way, but in a big way. the ads strikes a perfect ten there. however, the city crowd has a different way of thinking.

if you take the KFC himayatnagar road, you are likely to find another billboard which shows the picture of an iphone labeled ’smart’ and then the picture of a maruti suzuki car labeled ’smarter’. now this is definitely crazy, my first instinct was may be they give you a free iphone when you buy the car or something like that, but no ! i have absolutely no idea why maruti suzuki is gone nuts. please come and have a look at the billboard for yourselves.

speaking about the iphone, all i want to say is that – it wont work. now, i know i am a total apple ‘loyalist’ and would love to see apple products everywhere, but logically thinking, we end up elsewhere.

1. the iphone costs a whooping 31,000.

2. there are two types of people who have this kind of money for phones.

a) people belonging to the age group 40 to 60. one thing we need to remember here is that india has this generation of people who have worked ‘their way up’. very few of this age group population would have inherited their fortunes. (FYI, india is still a developing nation and we didnt have proper roads in cities until a few years ago.) these people are definitely unlikely to shell out 30k on a phone.

b) the heirs of this 40 to 60 age group, this market sector would be in their teens or twenties and they’d love to have the iphone if only it had ‘forwarding messages’ and ‘video recording’ in it. there goes your youth market.

the iphone was designed keeping the needs of an average european or american businessman in mind, who, as per our research should be atleast a second generation rich. that will take another 20 years in india, until then people will still use phones which are good enough to talk and talk alone.

good night and yes, dont forget to excercise tomorrow morning, you look weird these days.

business, travel and boredom.

business has always been by passion, how much ever i try to convince myself that i can digest technology, i am still unable to do it. the idea that you work day and night trying to invent new things in the RND department and some smart guy in designer suits will somehow cash all your efforts is abhorring to me. Putting it very bluntly, i want to be that smart guy. After two decades of wandering in the forests of hyderabadi colleges and schools, i am yet to find a guy who is good with both technical and the HR. The thumb rule is that people will stammer at at least one of these aspects. For reasons totally unknown to me, i do not want to commit myself to management so soon, i want to have a fling with technology for a few years, which is what brings me to GRE.  i know i am terrible with technology and most of my peers will gladly agree that the first half of this sentence is a fact.  i am still trying to try to get some tech gyan in me. lets see how much i can make it. 

designing is a very important aspect in life, you understand this very well when you travel on indian roads. every time you get stuck in a traffic jam, you want to curse the guy who designed all these roads. even though hyderabad cannot match any of the indian metros when it comes to ‘fashion sense’, it can very well claim to be a metro based on the ‘jamming power of the traffic here’. this congested roads gave wind to the flourishing billboard advertising industry. i can say for sure that the billboard ads always get better response in places where the traffic situation is pathetic. billboards are of no use at hill stations or at other spots. the idea is very simple: when people have nothing else to see, they’ll see your ad. 

just about a week or so ago, i experienced another of my  ’wow moments’. to refresh your concept of the wow moment, it is a moment when you feel the wow!. self explanatory, perhaps. a mahindra renault billboard caught my attention. the ad was that of their new car ‘logan’, it simply showed a young male model posing beside the car and the caption read ” why can’t my first car be a big car?”. i have been seeing this ad for weeks but the wow moment brings in insights which nothing else can. now, this logan car was initially promoted as a big car, more like a status symbol. and then came the new airport. some company bought hundreds of logans and turned them into taxis. far from being a status symbol, the car now became a damned taxi in the eyes of hyderabadis. what does the publicity team do in such circumstances. get a bakra. they start charming the young market which fresh jobs who wouldn’t be so much bothered about their status or other complicated things like that as long as they get a car. mahindrarenault is suddenly in business. let me tell you, it is extremely satisfying to figure out such simple business gymnastics, if there is something in this world which really gives me a high, its this. 

and yes. i’ve been to pune. one look at pune at the rich poor gap we read about in our social studies books is reminded very strongly. there is more to write about the journey than the destination. on our way back, because of some strange problem which i still have no idea about, our train was late by 14 hrs. i assure you this is insane, especially because indian railways are in serious collaboration with the pigs, dogs and houseflies in place of a regular drainage system. in short: its all on the tracks. when a housefly comes and sits on your hand, you wish you’d never known something called probability. i hope you understand. if you don’t, read again. you will. kudos to indian railways. the previous sentence was meant to be sarcastic. the situation was much more pathetic a few years when most indian rails were almost always known to be 24 hrs late. of course they had their own reason- just like that. however, thanks to laloo prasad yadav, the world’s largest employer (yes, he is!), the trains now leave on time. infact  seven of my friends missed the train thanks to the traffic and rains during this pune trip. we missed the biryani they were going to get. by the way, laloo has always had his charisma do wonders for him, you can read about laloo here, here or here. he is interesting.i assure you.

when people are bored, they can do amazing stuff. paid jobs degrade the  mind, someone said that, i don’t remember who. when people are bored, they innovate, they do stuff they would normally never even think about. i have two hallmark examples. what better way to flaunt your endeavors than on the net.  here are two of my friends dressed up like joker from the movie batman and a goth . 

thats it for now. happy independence day.

poem

a modern zen poem endorsed by the hacker culture. 

 

 To follow the path:
    look to the master,
    follow the master,
    walk with the master,
    see through the master,
    become the master.

thats it. end of post. 

experience, looks and ethics

on experience: 

some people are of the opinion that experience plays a major role in any task you take up. i disagree. unless the context here is as trivial as say, brushing your teeth or something like that, its not going to make much of a difference. In both business and life, we all faces new problems and if everything could be solved in the same way, then there’d be no fun left any more. every new challenge is a different from the other(that is exactly why its called a ‘challenge’) and all the experience here will not fetch you anything because this is the first time you are facing such a problem. if however you face the same problem twice, then the question here is about your capabilities i.e the problem persists to be a problem only if you left it unsolved in the first place. 

so you see, experience really doesn’t matter, instinct does. 

looks: 

to say that looks play a very important role is not quite agreeable, similarly to say that looks don’t have any importance at all is also insane. the same goes for persons as well as the stuff around you. we all like good looking things. as a businessmen, we need to know that it is very important for us to give the customer just that. you might have the best service or product quality around, but if the packaging is bad, people are not going to like it, one example here is that of windows and linux, the old linuxes despite being amazing on the functionality took a beating on the looks , people fell for windows which was infinitely better looking than any other oss then, except of course the macintosh. even now, microsoft is pretty much trying to sell vista on just one ground: looks. the only good thing about vista is that it looks better, it has got some visually enhanced apps, thats about it, people still seem to like it. giving another example, just think about it, would you have bought 7 up and sprite if they were in transparent bottles instead of the usual green ones? 

ethics: 

google has an amazing bit of advice in their ‘ten things’ corporate policy and it goes somewhat like this: you should not give up long term futuristic gains for immediate or short term gains. i totally agree. this is where ethics come in. like buffet once said: it takes twenty years to build a reputation and an instant to ruin it. logically thinking, the odds are that, you will stay for the most part of your life in one or two to three fields at max, and the kind of person you ‘actually are’ will eventually show up, you cant hide for long from people. keep in mind that you are not the only ’smart’ guy who walk this planet, there are thousands like you. people can never be fooled, not all of them, never. you have to be honest, else you will be exposed and cleared. or else, just look at it this way: say you had to trust a big assignment to someone, would you not study that person and make sure if he really fits in, after all its your hard earned money and market respect, you wouldn’t want to toss it off just like that.  the same applies to you as well, when people deal with you, unless and until there is an  ’umbilical cord’ of trust, no amount of legal agreements and memorandums are going to work.

make them want you

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.

mistakes people make

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?

cause and effect

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.

teamwork

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.