Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Tech blogger, Ben Thompson, wrote about this company called Bird that allows users to rent electric scooters. Recently Bird decided to provide such scooters to independent operators who could then run their own fleets, even re-brand them. So what’s in it for Bird? One, they get 20% of the ride fees; and two, all those scooters will show up on Bird’s rent-a-scooter app. Did that sound a bit like Uber? Of course, it did. No surprise then that there are rumours that Uber may buy Bird. Harvard professor, Theodore Levitt, famously said: “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.” See the connection to Uber and Bird? People want to go from A to B, the cab (or scooter) is just a means to that end. Ergo, it makes perfect sense for Uber to focus on the end (transport) instead of getting hung up on the means (cab v/s scooter). By the same logic, Thompson wonders if rent-a-room/home site, AirBnB, should start listing hotels on their app. After a

We believe (most of us anyway) that the ends don’t justify the means. So we (rightly) place emphasis on the means we choose. But there is a flip side of going overboard with that approach too: you may never reach your goal! And no, it’s not because we followed the rules while everyone else was breaking them. I realized this aspect when I read this quote from over 30 years ago by the CEO of a textile company called Indian Head Mills: “The objective of our company is to increase the intrinsic value of our common stock. We are not in business to grow bigger for the sake of size, nor to become more diversified, nor to make the most or best of anything, nor to provide jobs, have the most modern plants, the happiest customers, lead in new product development, or to achieve any other status which has no relation to the economic use of capital. Any or all of these may be, from time to time, a means to our objective, but means and ends must never be confused . We are in business solely

Means v/s Ends. When people say the means are more important than the ends, they are (usually) talking about ethics and morality. But when it comes to problem solving in the real world, shouldn’t the emphasis be on finding a solution? On finding ‘x’? Shouldn’t how one figures out the solution be irrelevant? Taken to an extreme, rules and processes often blind us to what is the intended purpose of the whole exercise. Just look at a bureaucracy to see what I mean. Unfortunately, our education system focuses on the “how”, not the “what”. That is almost always a bad thing, except maybe in one case. Computers blindly execute instructions without having a clue as to what was intended. Maybe our wavelengths match with computers when it comes to following instructions without a care about the ultimate intention, and perhaps that’s why we Indians are so good at IT?!