Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The more things change, the more they remain the same. I was very amused to read this analysis by Rudolf Winestock of how that happened even in the field of computers. But wait a minute…hasn’t computing power moved from mainframes, those “refrigerator-sized modules housing the vacuum tubes” to our homes and then to our beloved hand held devices? If that’s not a Change, what is? Yes, we went from mainframes to minicomputers to PC’s to laptops to smartphones. We were getting it smaller and making the computer more personal. Along with computing power, data moved from a central location to our home and to our devices. All true. Except that the trend reversed. Now smartphones are getting bigger and bigger: doesn’t Samsung call its best-selling Note a phablet (too big to be a phone, but too small to be a tablet)? And starting with the Internet, and then accelerated by the smartphone and the tablet, much of our data now sits on data servers, aka “on the cloud”, not on our ...

“A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you cannot expect an apostle to peer out.” -          Georg Christoph Lichtenberg Steve Jobs. Great innovator? Definitely. Ran a huge company as if it was a small, nimble one? Absolutely. Role model? That’s a tough one. By all accounts, he was a terrible person to work for. And yet he drove/led those very same employees to insane levels of perfection and greatness. That makes Jobs a very complicated figure to learn from: should other bosses and companies learn from him? Did Jobs succeed because of those horrible attributes? Or despite them? To realize how badly managers want to learn from Jobs, consider the following instance that Bob Sutton ran into: “(this) caring, calm, and wickedly smart CEO -- asked Huggy Rao and me if we thought he had to be an asshole like Jobs in order for his company to achieve the next level of success.... he seemed genuinely worried that his inability to ...

So many people complain about the difficulty in making decisions while shopping. Do you buy Brand X that gives 20% extra free? Or Brand Y that has 10% off? Or Brand Z that gives something else free with it? Do you buy that flat screen TV today or wait for the sale at Diwali? Now since the customer is king, shouldn’t companies be simplifying pricing choices? Like maybe offering consistently low prices all the time? Not so fast, as the US store, JC Penney discovered to its cost. Turns out that while people do complain about pricing choices, they are irrational. Also, they enjoy the thrill of the chase. Huh? The word “sale” acts like a siren call for many people: it lures them in to make that purchase. Consistently low prices don’t do the same. Besides, if a competitor lowers their prices just one time of the year, and Poof! Suddenly that low price claim becomes suspect in shoppers’ eyes. Then there are those sites that offer coupons: have lunch at Restaurant A on Wedne...

“Ideas worth spreading”: the catchphrase for TED. That choice of words is also the reason for this Umair Haque article criticizing the “Ideas Industry” , the poster child for which is, of course, TED. (Sometimes it’s fun to read an article like this: how could someone possibly dislike TED, right?). Note that Haque coins the term “TED thinking” to collectively refer to 800-word blog posts, business best-sellers and of course, the famous 18-minute talk itself. So what is Haque’s problem with “TED thinking”? Well, it’s that TED thinking makes you believe it’s a Great Idea only if it can be “simplified, reduced, made into convenient, disposable nuggets of infotainment”. It places “climactic epiphany before experience, education, and elevation.” Haque then uses analogies that blew me away: “In that sense, TED thinking is like a one-night stand with ideas. One night stands can be fun, and may sometimes even lead to something more — but they're not the great, worthy love...

Consensus: a word with positive connotation because it suggests inclusiveness, rather than driving a decision by brute force. And yet, at the workplace, most people are not fans of consensus. Like take that scenario where most bosses genuinely allow the team to decide where and how to celebrate a product milestone: now tell me honestly that you came out of the room still a fan of consensus. That example brings out the first issue with consensus: as Bruce Eckel wrote, it “is the slowest possible decision process, excepting probably war.” To continue with that analogy, trying to arrive at a consensus is like the trench warfare of the first World War, a war of attrition that takes years. Makes you yearn for tanks and fighter jets, right? Ah, that slippery slope to a non-consensus way of deciding things… Moving back to the topic, if we arrived at a consensus over something, the price in time that we paid inevitably creates the next downside: a consensus driven approach crea...

When we think of countries with large reserves of natural resources that are also very valuable, we assume that it makes the country rich. We feel envious: they don’t have to work hard to get rich, they just happened to own the right patch of land. Or is it? And no, I am not talking of the case where a handful of people own, say, the oil field, and mint money while the rest of the population stays poor. Turns out the situation is more complicated. First, if the country doesn’t have the expertise to extract or process that resource, they inevitably rely on foreigners to do the same. Which means a good chunk of the money goes out of the country. Second, extracting resources from oil fields or mines is hardly a well paying job, so most of the jobs created are hardly making people rich. Third, if the resource was found in a poor country, they often strike poor deals with foreigners because they’re looking at prices from their current (poverty-striken) levels. Fourth,...

“Any explanation is better than none.” -          Nietzsche We love to cite reasons for everything that happens. If the reason is correct, all the better; but that’s not a must. Obviously, nobody says that to themselves, but if you check out many of the “reasons” floating around, you’d see what I mean. It turns out that we don’t just stop at attributing causes to real life events. People even try and find root causes for battles from movies , like the Battle of Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back ! So what were the reasons Darth Vader and Co couldn’t crush and kill the rebels in that battle? “Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.” Well ok, those reasons would apply even today in the real world; so maybe this analysis wasn’t a total waste of time after all! A comment on Slashdot to the above analysis said: “…peo...