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?

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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?