Keeping busy

It is sheer boredom and the fact that I can postpone whatever little is occupying me at work currently, that I am here on the blog. What a waste, really that it has come to this! Started out as something that would record my life the way I see it, that would note my observations, feelings, thoughts, and ideas...Mode C was meant to be so much more but it was all of this only once upon a time. I have been busy since then and more than that, have been enjoying reading stuff online too much to bother about writing any.
 
There have been many things that have happened since I last wrote which is to be expected given the last time I wrote a post was some 7 months ago. My sister got married, I finally graduated from the small car to the mid-big sized car segment, the team I manage at work grew to five really smart people (Well...four smart ones, excluding me), I went on a regular exercise - good food course, went off it and saw myself bloat, and have now been back on the course again.
 
All these apart, the world is the same place as it was with its share of the strange and the mundane, joys and sorrows...the killings and plunderings co-existing with the winnings and achievements. With Manoj entering the family and Priya moving on to complete the family of her betrothed, I get a lot of time to sit alone and introspect...not too much of it though, considering that Priya continues to stay in the same building, even on the same floor as I do (which is a blessing, really).
 
Whatever little time I do get though, is spent on some good deal of mental reasoning, idea formulation, rationalizing and cross-questioning of thoughts, and at times, even their dissolution. Random thoughts...will India win the world cup for Sachin or vice versa...what is the purpose of my life, just to make a living, reproduce and die or to actually create something that carries my name and legacy forward...how and when will I be able to convince my parents to come and stay with me permanently...is the IPL only a random money making, extravagance showing game for the rich-beyond-means or does it bode well for the sport of cricket...and does it really matter as long as I am entertained not just by the cricket but also by the disgusting show of financial muscle...who and how would my life partner turn out to be and is it right to go the route of arranged marriage with no background or compatibility check possible and does it really matter...when would my venture finally see the light of day, if at all and what would it be like, the multimedia restaurant or the Home Office or the Fin Mart or something completely different...
 
There are no clear answers. Heck, there aren't any clear questions in the first place. All that's there is time, more than I can gainfully employ. I do keep randomly spending it quite nicely though. There have been some really good concerts that I have been to recently (the morning and evening concerts at Janfest on the 26th of Jan were specially nice and brilliant, of course, was also the time when both Manish and I lost our hearts to Gwyneth Wentink, the Harp player from Netherlands). I need to start getting back to theatre...participation may not be very active but at least as an audience...and when will I finally be able to play the guitar well (the three month lessons during my summers in Cal are all but forgotten)
 
I must catch a movie today. Keeping busy certainly helps.

Professional Entrepreneurism

One of the activities that I have been involved in recently as a part of my work involves a major shift in strategy for the business that my company deals in. Although it is interesting to see how new things are unfolding and how life is going to change for all stakeholders of this new business sooner or later, what is more interesting is to observe the sheer inertia that governs the lives of people in any business. The resistance to change, in whatever format the change may be is so strong that it is difficult to envisage, forget execute something drastically different from what is already present.

This becomes all the more difficult for an organization that is process driven like the one that I was working for prior to my MBA. In such an organization, the resistance part probably comes in much later and it is actually the fact that everyone is so used to blindly following existing processes that creates the hurdle. This is where you need the element of entrepreneurship to get out of this situation and give a good shake-up to the existing setup.

Having said that, if you look at organizations that are truly entrepreneurial in nature, it still does not solve the problem at hand. This is where resistance to change comes in not because the process of doing things in a certain way is very well defined but because defining any process, even if it is another process to substitute the current one or even the process of change, is the difficult thing in its own right. The lack of processes and professionalism makes the task of change or setting up a new process appear insurmountable.

So what, you ask, is the solution? Professional entrepreneurism is the answer that the Vice Chairman of my company provides. He is bang on target as far as spelling the need for this attribute is concerned, whether that attribute is already there in his (and my) organization may be something completely different altogether. Not getting into anything politically complicated, let me just concentrate on this phrase that caught on with me during last evening's webcast organized post the quarterly results of the company.

The phrase Professional entrepreneurism is amazingly self-explanatory and simple but achieving this is equally difficult. In fact, I believe that an individual at his/her own level can never be a professional entrepreneur, he/she can either be professional or an entrepreneur. It is not that individuals do not understand the need for being both but it is right there in our internal psyche to take that much amount of risk, to attribute that much importance to going ahead at any cost, to be that much driven by routine and to be that much guided by gut or by science.

The point that I am trying to make here is that though individually very few of us (oh yes, there are exceptions that prove the rule!) are able to act professionally and yet be entrepreneurial in our beliefs and thoughts, it is with a higher degree of probability that this can be achieved collectively. The thought processes and actions that an organization is capable of getting into are very much different from what an individual can ever hope of achieving. Application of cold objectivity and rationalization comes much more easily to an organization than to an individual. An organization may decide to be nimble on its feet through the very nature of its non-maneuverability...as a firm, you can be rigid about being flexible and no one can question you on that.

This means that the answer does not lie in trying to change the employee into a professional entrepreneur but in making the organizational fabric very professional and very entrepreneurial. This can be done by making sure that there is a basic set of beliefs or guidelines that need to be followed whenever anything is to be done but these are just that, beliefs and guidelines, nothing very specific that can kill the thought process. There should be guidelines for everything, even to change guidelines but never any process that is deep frozen and does not provide any room to go out of the box. Personally, I don't know how much of it is easier said than done but what I am sure of is that the way to do it is only by attacking the collective core and that there is no way that you can change the basic human psyche and the way human mind is conditioned to think.

Exploiting Market Imperfections and a visit to the scientist

I have been wanting to write on so many things over the past week or so but now that I finally sit to write, I can't recollect anything at all. Hopefully, now that I have started to roll, things will come back to me as I keep on writing and deliberating and moving ahead thus. So, before the first of these topics hit me, let me place it on record here on this blog that I am not that disappointed with Mumbai. In terms of roads, green cover and infrastructure, in general, the city obviously does not show even a light to the grandeur of say, a Delhi. However, in all other respects, it is not too bad. The work culture is professional enough (not to say that it is in any way much better than Delhi), people smile here, too and at times, also have time to exchange pleasantries. Taxi drivers are a pleasant lot and generally tend not to cheat you off your last penny (though the same can not be said of the auto rickshaw drivers at all). Traffic is bad but coming from the congested NH-24 in Delhi, that does not seem too much of a bother either. Trains, of course, are bloody efficient even though they are perenially crowded, smelly and sweaty.

Speaking of smelly and sweaty, it reminds me of last Saturday, at the end of which, I was in a pretty bad shape myself, thanks to some fair bit of travel across the city during the hot and humid afternoon in open taxis and autos. Starting off the day was the memorable trip to meet a SCIENTIST which happens to be one of the things that I have been wanting to write about. The trip was based on an interview on national television done with a certain scientist who has been credited with treating some supposedly incurable diseases through his herbal medicines. My Mama had seen this interview and wanted me to see this person for my nerve problem (a fallout of the accident I had last year). So it was that Priya and I reached this scientist's place in Versova on this hot Saturday afternoon. In the last few minutes of his sitting time, the scientist heard me out, barely trying to stifle his yawn while telling me at the same time that I should start the medicine and that the medicine will cure me totally. To top it all, this was done without even glancing at a single report of a single test conducted for this problem of mine. So much for the science part! All this was still ok till the time I was told that there was only one medicine that he provides for all ailments, whether it is cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, paralysis, or a nerve disorder like mine. To assume that this one-stop-shop for treatment of ailments will turn out to be better than all the specialised treatments that I have considered and decided against because of their inefficacy, was a long call to take. But I did take this call alongwith Priya and my Mama, and for all my so called education, I can not but hope for a miracle from this exceedingly highly priced herbal medicine (15 doses for a freaking 15 grand).

The incident I described above does not conform to any of my thoughts about such things and yet, I acted in this non-conformist manner. To claim that I did this only to please my family members would be a lie to myself since at some corner of my brain, I wanted to believe in this treatment, however fantastic it seemed. Having all but lost hope from so many other 'scientific' quarters, and almost designated to lead a life with this disorder as a permanent part of my being, I reached out to this ray of hope, however bleak it may be. Doesn't it show somewhere that despite all the rational thinking that we are capable of, faith comes out the stronger in cases where logic and reason are not fast enough in their action?

On the work front, things are turning out to be quite a haze, what with me having to dip my hand in almost everything that presents itself for dipping hands into. I will try and write about all that I do in some other post but for now wish to share with my readers something of a management insight that I gleaned from one of the senior management meetings that I had the good fortune to be a part of. This meeting was called to discuss a new vertical that the company is going to launch and was aimed at kick starting the design of the operational and marketing framework for the new business. While discussing some operational aspect, a senior member remarked how and why we should not try to be perfect in all that we do. His logic was that there were imperfections in the market and the intelligent player is one who exploits these imperfections till he can and at the same time, is the first to find out when those imperfections are starting to get corrected. This is when the intelligent player makes the switch from playing to an imperfect market (and making his moolah while he does so) to initiating and setting up a perfect setup for a market that is fast on its way to removing its imperfections.

A perfect example was ICICI Bank, India's largest private sector bank, which chose to play along with other credit card companies in charging annual and joining fees for credit cards till the game was there and available in the market. However, as soon as the bank realized that this was a temporary phenomenon that was about to go and that the customers were very soon going to be very demanding, they decided to act as destroyers in the market and pioneered the concept of Free-for-life credit cards. They had the last laugh since not only did they lap up the revenues till they were there for the taking, but once they realized things were changing, they were proactive enough to build a large market share by removing the market imperfections faster than the market itself would have been able to manage.

Needless to say, I was quite impressed by this line of thinking and though this does not reflect too well on the Indian markets and the players involved, it still is a very practical strategy. It still leaves the question, however, that if everyone tries to exploit the imperfections, doesn't it tantamount to the market and the customer always remaining imperfect, with no body breaking the shackles? In reality, however, this does not happen and the efficient market hypothesis takes over at some stage or the other and the trick is to be able to predict this point of inversion.