Return of the Scientist Rockstar

It was a pleasure to read in the Guardian today about the new Oscars for Science - The Breakthrough prize for life sciences. It seems to be the biggest prize money being given out to the scientists who have contributed in a significant way. The prize money of 3 million each is more than the Nobel prize itself. Ofcourse it doesnt come with the same prestige but I'm sure there are many more people who deserve the attention of the world than just the Nobel prize winners in the various fields. Yes, it might even be true that the 4 Tech gurus of this world (Yuri Milner, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerburg and Jack Ma) might be doing this for some self publicity but hey, I don't mind the reasons as long as there is some good coming out of it.

I had read somewhere that scientists were the rockstars of the 19th century. Well it seems we might have come a full circle in the 21st century (or atleast showing signs of it ). Although there is no respite in the coverage of everyday motions of the rockstars, moviestars and all others belonging to the entertainment field, it is definitely endearing to see more and more coverage of the people who are doing to change the world we live in.

It somehow important that we continue with attention. Not for the sake of the scientists themselves , although of course they deserve every bit of praise that comes their way - but also for the generation of today looking for their first role models besides their parents.

Source : http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/07/breakthrough-prize-oscars-of-science

Ad to instant Action

Every company that make advertisements want it to culminate in an action of purchase.The time lapse between the two should be as short as possible to garner the maximum bang for your ad buck. This is one innovative idea to convert ad to action instantly. Way to go HUL at the Kumbh Mela. Me likey :-)

The path to happiness

Maybe its entering my 30's, maybe its because of my search for some time now for this elusive elixir called happiness, maybe its new year resolutions time, maybe its long drinking sessions with close friends on philosophies of life, maybe it talking to my lovely wife or maybe its reading Herman Hesse's Siddhartha just before writing this post or all of the above - I'm feeling a sense of calm and contentedness flow over me, like the river in the book which ebbs and flows and is at peace with its existence, which I haven't felt in a long long time.

I realize now that the search itself was what was hindering me in finding it. I had been feeling uninspired lately to write. You can clearly see that from the decreasing quantum of material on the blog. I was feeling lost with my own inability to find the right words to put my thoughts down. Sometimes an emotion tugged at me and I wrote but mostly I was silent on the outside and burning inside, waiting to explode. I was even feeling ashamed of the poor formulation of my thoughts. But I feel a sense of freedom now. No, I don't think I have found this thing called happiness, but maybe, just maybe, I have found the path. And sorry this is not something I can share for like its written in the book - everyone follows their own path. "Knowledge can be shared, Wisdom, not so much" to re quote Herman Hesse less eloquently.

This much I can say - don't try hard in life to look for happiness - do the things that make you happy and life will find you. I don't even know if that's a quote that exists or not.If yes, then all credit to that someone, but I'm sure a lot of people before me have found this to be true and would have expressed this feeling in similar fashion and hence the idea itself is not new.

But understanding the idea took its own sweet time with me. Now that I have , I hope that I can gain something for this rare introspection. Its ironic in a way cause anyone who knows me - the word introspection is something they would consider I'm far far removed from. But surprise surprise, its here and I wish to attempt to take that leap of faith into this new found wisdom and try to take it where it leads me on wards from now on. And maybe you are on your own journey yourself (by googling the title of this blog ) and have stumbled upon this blog in the eternal world of the Internet. May you find your own way of interpreting this idea.

Don't get too worried - my family and friends who know me in real life. This doesn't mean I'm changed. I'm just more free to be me and enjoy that in its pure unadulterated version. So watch out - Will the real Vivek please stand up question has been answered - The real Viveks have stood up and be prepared to see all and hopefully I find that elixir when all this is said and done.

PS : In case you didn't get the hint -read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse :-) Cheers and Thank you for all the Fish. Wait that's Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy. Ahh well - now you know my fusion style ;-)

The Legend retires

I awoke at 11 am in Denmark to the news of Tendulkar retiring from ODIs. All those clamoring for his retirement got what they were screaming for but somehow the initial silence on social media is the deafening proof that all those people of my generation are sitting with this same loss of childhood feeling that I'm sitting with. We were the ODI generation and our ODI idol has giving us his all...Thank you Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar for helping all of us forget all our worries and frustrations growing up and making us go out and play one more time to try and see if we can be own local neighborhood's Sachin and be the best we can be...If there is one role model India has seen in the past 20 years who everyone would follow -it has been YOU, no matter the regions, the religions the castes, the seeped corruption, you have made us proud. Cricket will not be the same after this for us. 

Why cant we Live and Let Live?

With the attacks in Norway it really seems like the last bastion of peaceful living on this planet has also been now shattered. It comes out that some right wing extremist who sat in his house dreamed up an European takeover by Muslims and he murdered 93 innocent souls to prove his lunatic point.

I was relieved for minute there that it was a right wing lunatic who caused so much damage in Norway and not another Islamist extremist group. But that lasted but for a minute - the thought that followed afterwards was that the other extremist groups of the world are a kind of "taking offence" of the spread of Islamist extremism and are resorting to the same tactics to showcase their totally and utterly whacked messages around the world.

Its only one of the latest of the horrific terrorist attacks all over the world that seems to show an ever decreasing tolerance levels around the world. Bombay was attacked again only a week back. Death tolls and killings around the world have reached such epic proportions that any number less than 100 doesn't even register in our brains anymore. We are getting desensitized to murder. That doesn't say  anything good about our society today. I today's globalized world when we all will be talking working and living with people from all over the world - Being Tolerant is not a just a "nice thing" but the very basis of sustainable peaceful living on the planet. Live and Let Live or see the planet burn in hate.

Transparency Revolution

We live in interesting times to say the least. The Internet's power is slowly being  released and its true strength is coming to the fore. With the entire world wired in to what's happening in the most hidden alleyways of the world there is little that the governments of today can keep away from their people and the rest of world.

Of course everyone has seen the impact of Wikileaks and the Middle East revolutions and how the toppling of the various regimes have happened in short span of time. All this has been observed and written about by far greater thought leaders than poor old me with his laptop. What i wanted to point out was something I have not seen written around and that's a name for this phenomenal revolution happening right under our noses.

Hence I take it upon myself to christen this grand revolution as the Transparency revolution. Why? Well since the time that different forms of governments have been running the countries - be they democratic, autocratic, socialistic, republic or even anarchic - the citizens of the such governments have almost never been pervy to how the BIG decisions impacting their day to day lives have been taken by those who lead/rule/govern them.Now slowly with the help of the Internet there is more and more transparency demanded and obtained by the people and governments all over the world have had no choice but to slowly but surely let escape the secrets they have for so long kept hidden within the select circle.I understand it must be quite scary for many of these governments (yes, even the democracies are scared) but for now they have no option. Unless of course they find the way to tame the Internet entirely as a communication medium.

China is trying to do that currently - I must say I'm quite surprised that its worked till now. Just the sheer number of Chinese people who live outside China and are able to access all the information and bringing it back with them must be raising quite a scare among the Chinese Politburo members.

The worry must be quite similar with the Indian political leaders too. Though they have been "elected" by the people there is still far too much that is hidden under the dark cupboards of government that needs to be cleaned. Like I said we live in interesting times. Lets wait and watch what expose comes next !!!

Customize Me

Happy 2011 everyone. I wont even bother excusing my writers block and would just like to thank the heavens above that I'm still writing :-) . A new decade's starting and it makes you look back at the decades gone by (90's rocked obviously for my generation -Go Bhumkesh Bakshi and X Files) and wonder what's in store for the coming decades.

One of the things that we notice is the almost global shift towards individualism and the personalization of everything. From your mobile phone background screens to your Christmas gifts to your cars - Everything is now customized. Mass market is so un-cool!!! I think customization of our lives is going to be one of the biggest thing for this and coming decades.

Lets imagine a completely customized world of 2030 for inspiration. A new child is born - Customized from the DNA analysis of the Mother and Father to make sure only the best qualities in both are exemplified in the child. The kid gets a name which is customized and totally unique for him/her - XtraOrdinary007 or something (Ofcourse alterable when the kid turns 18 to be customizable for the kid's choice). The DNA analysis (or whatever else can be used by medical science) gives the kids vaccination lists, his food patterns, allergies, kind of education he/she is best suited for and automatic enrollment to such a type of school and later on college. Everything you touch, feel, smell, hear are attuned to what's your customized preferences. He touches Coke and the bottle says sorry your preference is for Pepsi, find it on the top left shelf. She chooses Sufi music and the Infinity playlist Apple Imeandonlyme Pad says your suitability is for hard rock.

As the kid grows up , The Social Network of the time will provide the best friends customized for your needs and the best partners you might find around your location who are the perfect match for you. The jobs customized for your abilities are listed and your in the queue for those jobs automatically as and when they become available. The list goes on with your favorite hangouts, eat-outs and shopping destinations and brands of clothes. You begin to get the picture.

The point I'm trying to get to in this long winding way is that maybe customizing everything is probably also not something that might be best for us. Some things are better left non customized and finding out what works for us and what not is also as much about the journey as much as the destination. I hope we seek the balance in the coming years of what we what to know for sure and what might be something that we are willing to explore. Like finding the friends we need and the partner in life we seek. Like trying out the new music in store or a new hobby. Making this point is kind of ironic for me because I honestly believe this is a good business opportunity for the future and have even discussed with my brother on the topic. For that I would say, I could always do with a customized mug though :-) Customize Me but to the extent that i still have a choice of taking a small journey I would like to call Life.

Connect Not Confuse in the Information Overload Age

We live in the age of Google, Facebook, Twitter,Gizmodo et al. Its being touted as the information age. How understated is that !!!! Think for a while, we always lived in the information age. As human beings we always wanted to find out more and know more about stuff that caught our eye. Be it the apple falling from the the tree or the leaf floating on water. Something caught our eyes and we wanted to know more. Information we needed.

Today information flows to us without us even seeking it. We have so much information at our finger tips that we are too overloaded to give a decent go at things we are curious about. Our inboxes are spammed with all sorts of content, the social networking sites "push" all personal details and choices of our friends and families on our page, our mobiles are on 24/7 and fed with all sorts of ads and info....in fact we even have Google readers of the world to sort out the "Info spam" we receive into neat little folders - 99.9% of which we never read.

Clearly we live in Information Overload Age. How does this affect us as marketeers? We have all jumped/are jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and utilizing all available communication channels to reach to our customer. Tweets,social networks, blogs, podcasts and RSS etc all are being used indiscriminately. Don't get me wrong, i'm all for social network marketing but not just yet willing to give a blank cheque to internet marketeers to go about disturbing the customer at every opportunity they get.

We have to clearly understand what we sell, why the customer buys it and where and in what would he like to connect with us to know more. Yes, it is the customers choice where and when he wants to connect and not the other way around.But are we doing it effectively. All studies seem to point in other direction Isn't this a waste too? People will start blocking all this extra information soon if not happening already. Its already happened with email. We spammed so much "important information" to the customers inbox that he has started ignoring/deleting emails EVEN if they really were important.

Its should not be that difficult to build a strategy for Internet/Social networking marketing if we thinking about it for a while. Put yourself in the shoes of the customer (you already are for all other products you buy in life) - Answer these simple questions - When, where, how and how much?

- When am i need of the solution provided by XXX company ?(Yes we still are selling quarter inch holes )
- Where all do i look for it (Peer group, Sales person, Company website, Product forums etc)
- Which(how) are the best ways to reach me (Inbox, mobile, snail mail, TV, Radio, Print etc)
- How much info do i need to keep you Top of Mind for utility rather than Annoyance (Daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly updates)

Our job as marketeers is making it to inform him about the better solution we might bring and make his choice is easier,simpler and faster. Help and not annoy - Connect and not Confuse!!!

RIP CK Prahlad

Today one of the best known contemporary Management thinkers Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahlad passed away. He was 69, his early demise is a sad loss to all of us.


Read his obituary in Mint

Join me in the classrooms of tomorrow

Was reminiscing my classroom days when i was reading about Reverse Innovation and Black Swans today and wondered about a the future classrooms of tomorrow (the modern versions of the classrooms of yore) when you pick up a topic and find something to learn about it coz you just want to and stumbled upon this site. Join me here at WIZIQ if you feel classrooms were fun....

3 Idiots and my two pennies

I had thought of blogging this right after i saw the movie on xmas day but various things kept happening over the new year holiday. Anyways here we are - After the entire world and his cousin has written about 3 idiots and already got all angles covered.

The movie itself is entertainer in its own right albeit filled with all the standard jokes of our college ragging days. The message is quite loud and clear - Education for knowledge sake and not for social status sake. However the movie is at least a generation too late. Today's generation already know this and are definitely not thinking (I hope i'm right in this assumption!!!) that my son/daughter is growing up to be an engineer/doctor the day they are born. So that takes away the education for social status sake point out of the picture. Now comes the more pertinent Education for Knowledge sake point.

This is where the current Indian education system comes under fire. I was part of the education system which teaches children that only by securing in 99.99 percentile were you going to be anywhere near successful. I know everyone blames parents and teachers for putting this in the kids heads this from the day they join school but its not really their fault. They just wanted the best of their kids - and the best in that society meant you had to be in the 99.99 percentile to be an achiever. However I hope this movie points out finally for our generation that this is not the criteria of a successful student.

Everyone knows in their hearts that you become successful only if you have the passion for the field you choose to be successful in. In my opinion 17 is unfortunately too young an age for us to decide what is our passion for most of us. As we are too busy being sponge for all sorts of information and have still not categorized it all in our heads. As some modern philosopher has said there will be a million things that catch our eyes but only a few things that catch our hearts...Pursue them

If we really want our kids to be able to decide what they want to do with the rest of thier lives and not churn our pseudo engineers and by the rote doctors then I think there should be atleast a year or two in between school and college where they get to try and experiment with what they have learnt and find out which is the area that captures their hearts. I would say two years of a real pre college where there are no marks crazy system but 100's of careers as options for kids to take a semester in atleast 4 options with real hands on exposure.

I know a lot of people out there would say this could be done in the final years of school but I feel til 17 its best if they remain the pure sponges for all sort of knowledge out there to have a better perspective to choose those 4 -5 options.

If after this they choose their respective professional courses in arts, pure sciences, engineering, medicine etc I believe we will then be really producing again students of old. Yeah I did mean students of OLD...as in atleast 500 years old time where the word "Career" needn't exist in the dictionary and we took up jobs based purely on our passion.

So will the education system and parents of today be willing to take this bold step and "waste" 2 years of their kids having an hands on experience of what they would like to do with their lives is the main question I would raise and in its answer lies the answer to Education for Knowledge sake's question.

....And btw Aamir would have been killed in a real college if he tried to electrocute his senior while ragging :-D

SMART I pants

SMART is one of the most common mnemonic one hears in relation with Targets and KPI's. I think for marketeer's sometimes we should make it SMARTI

Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time Constraint
& In your Control

With so many organizations having complex matrix organizations , multiple indirect reporting lines and virtual leadership control over your KPI's or targets becomes a key factor of success. Make sure that the buck stops with someone and not with a committee cos then you never end up achieving the desired results. Remember SMARTI pants

Always think from the customers perspective

I was trying to make a presentation for my company which is used to seeing and making only technical presentations on how good the features of the product are. I needed to make it interesting in a non technical sort of way. I was struggling with it for atleast a couple of weeks (I think i have spent too long a time among the pure technology/features thinkers) and realized i needed to simply go back to the basics...Why would my customer want it and for what reason....I know this seems like Rule no 1 in Marketing 101 but it helps to keep remembering it once in a while.

Customer buys you for his needs not for your features. Match the features satsifying those needs and you have him. Simple and yet lost so many times...

The Abyss between Desire and Action

My Humble atempt at Indexing...:-D

What are you?

REBEL----------------









-------REBEL CONFORMIST

















---------CONFORMIST REBEL















CONFORMIST-----------

Kids - Try this new and amazing Social Networking tool

Hey kids and grownups everywhere, try out this most amazing Social Networking tool. Its called "Outside"!!! Im not sure how social is this whole social networking craze is making all of us nowadays... Remember the days when we use to spend all evening playing cricket and football and came back all sweaty and tired for a nice shower and litres of mom's iced lemonade??? Splashing each other with puddles of mud in the rains and making comments on strangers walking by our local park "hang out"...What are the kids doing nowadays? Running home to tweet their arrival back from school...then spending 2 hours online commenting on others, giving the weirdest of quizes( which color underwear are you?) and throwing virtual sheep at others. This then throws up the question we are all asking around us today(Atleast the 25+ ages group- I think we were the Gen X)
How social are the social networking sites making us today? Its a double edged question. Some say more....some say no more.. .Voice your views

Thriller no more....

Well poor ol MJ had to die this apparent sudden death to get me out of my blog slumber. Woke up this morning to read the message left on the google chat by an ol batchmate of mine, simply saying "michael jackson is dead". I thought this was a virus message that must have come from his chat box as we haven't chatted for years. Ofcourse my curiosity was aroused enough to check and voila, it wasn;t some virus bot message. The King of Pop's eulogies were all over the web, the morning breakfast shows were showing all celebrities one by one pouring their tributes on the "greatest pop musician on the planet".

Its funny how celebrities tend to become important threads of the web of our lives. To each their own bunch of celebrities. I'm sure MJ was a high recall one for most people on the planet. 6/10 Trending topics on Twitter on him should give an idea of that I guess. Im sure Google analytics would also show up the same results for today.

Also im sure others like me would also have noticed how celebrity lives follow the typical PLC curves almost perfectly - the whole introduction, growth,maturity and decline phases all clearly marked out in most lives. And as with many good products/brands some also have a slight jump in the late maturity stage and re invent themselves to last longer in the public memories. Unfortunately for MJ his tweak in the late maturity stage had nothing to the good memories of moonwalks and music but the infamous child abuse charges and divorces and the worst cosmetic surgeries of the planet. Im guess he was just out to show Who's bad!! RIP MJ- You were loved more than hated. Thats something no one can take away from you.

I thought it...he blogged it

Here's something probably all of us think about once in a while in the rat race of life. I was having a similar argument/discussion along this line...Seth blogged it. Here you go

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/thinking-about-the-compromise.html

Has someone got the answers too?

The things that kids CAN do...

A very heart warming and heart wrenching episode happened in front of me a couple of weeks back and I just got down to blog about it after talking to a friend about it. A preamble first, I truly believe that in educating our kids lies the solution of half our country's problems.

I was in an auto and it had stopped at a busy signal. A couple of kids - a boy and a girl around the same age came near the auto. I first thought they were there to beg. The boy keeps his foot on the auto and the auto driver shoos him away. Then I see them move onto to the next auto and the girl starts to point at the auto's license plate and reads it out to the boy. The boy is repeating after her. That's when it struck home that she was teaching him the alphabets and numbers by reading out the license plate numbers....

This incident just confirmed my belief that the illiterate kids from the poorer class of the society
(Maybe I'm not being politically correct here) have the same drive to learn and grow as from any other class. And I think we should do all that we can do help these kids learn and give them a chance at living a decent life. WE have done enough talking and not enough action. I have decided take my first step towards doing something about this. I have decided to join MAD (Make a Difference) and see how I can make a difference, cause I know these kids surely CAN.

Sit before you Strech...

"Irrinittu kaalu neeta" is an old Mallu proverb (Badly translaed as the Headline) but it holds true to toadys marketing atleast in the B2B industry.If you were to look for B2B Marketing on the web you would be overloaded with great advise on how to use the latest Web 2.0 tools for marketing your wares. Started with Blogs which in turn lead to social networking though MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and others- moved to instantly gratifying social microblogging through Twitter and now everyone talks about Friendfeed ,where you bring in all your social networks and tweets into one place. Every marketing guru worth his salt (or not) is preaching about the "real time" connect with the customers and how to make your blogs,corporate social networks and Twitter accounts "human" and constantly and actively "engage" him/her.

As a marketeer you might be forgiven to believe that the entire world has moved on from offline to online in the B2B space and you must be the last person who hasn't done it yet. Well im here to tell you ( suggest rather,I ain't no guru to tell!) that although all these gurus are preaching from Tokyo to Hawaii that the customers will not see you in favorable light if you are not present in the online space, they might not be completely accurate.

I think many B2B companies are still struggling with their basics and this becomes more and more evident when the going gets tough like in today's market scenarios. Especially in immature markets like LAM and APAC regions. When business is booming, everything looks hunky dory when you look at your sales books at the end of the quarter. But when going gets tough, customers are deffering purchase decisions and delaying payments you are faced with realities. Did you get your basics right in the first place?

I haven't done any official market research but when i talk to my peers about how well they know their markets, I'm hearing a common voice - We really don't know the market out there. There are a million leads every sales guy or sales manager is sitting on but having no time or resources to work on it. And all of that potential gold mine is down the drain. I think most B2B companies still think daily sales (Which of course is necessary for any company to run) and forget there is need to understand how to channel their efforts to actually DO the Sale. Show me a Sales Manager who knows/is learning the insides of his market rather being the top Sales Guy of the team and Ill show you an exception to the rule.

Take a step back, think simple - know your strengths- identify your target markets and learn everything there is to know about them. Know all the players in these segments, identify the issues with each stakeholder (End User,Consultant,Contractor etc) and rationalise to them in clear terms how your prodcut/service is going to solve their problems. And for all these you need face time or atleast phone time- Mano-a Mano and not online lead generation. Everyone deals with a zillion tools daily in their line of work and no one wants to fill one more online survey. They want answers and the more personal it is the more confident they feel. So put your money first into the good old offline marketing department. This is not to say online is not the future but check out this year's marketing spends the consultants are recommending and you'll see what i mean. Get real, Get personal, Get business. Or find yourself on the floor rubbing your behind...