Brave For Free

When passing through a full body scan, a pat-down search and a baggage x-ray on your way to buying a coffee in your local mall, you know you live in the era of Security. It seems to me, however, that enterprise security operates under the sole premise that mal-intention can be prevented. Password policies, network restrictions, biometric sensors, intrusion detection, firewalls, access tokens, truckloads of technology all geared to one single goal - keep the bad guys out. Driven by fear of doomsday scenarios fed into you at numerous conferences, we treat every potential breach as a nuclear explosion and try to prevent it. I doubt anyone other than Jet Li can bring a jet down with a pocket knife (and by definition he's a rare talent), yet we – at great cost and inconvenience - make sure every pocket on a plane is empty of a knife. Even China does not have that many Jet Li's so for that kind of success ratio this is kinda expensive. Ignored here is the strategy of deterrence - mak

Multi-channel – store, phone, online, mail-order - is finally maturing . For the longest time, retailers promised and customers expected this muti-headed hydra of a retailer present seamlessly across every channel, moving between channels with similar lack of seam, permitting mix & match of all kinds. For the longest time, reality was disappointingly different. Retailers spent the last decade launching anaemic web stores; proudly announcing that they were multi-channel and hence so much better than pure-play e-retailers. Unfortunately those feeble attempts remained the stuff of boardroom backslapping and upbeat press conferences - neither actual shoppers nor pure play e-tailers took much notice. Staples , John Lewis and a few others remained rare exceptions. What took so much time? Retailers aren't exactly clueless idiots, why didn't this get figured out a long time ago? Futurebazaar was exactly such an attempt; indeed many customers assumed automatically that we were mult

In my last post , I talked about how giving up some of the trappings of physical retail is not without its costs. This post is about the flip side of that coin – in a way. What caught my eye was Wal-Mart's new facility allowing customers to pay cash for online purchases. The announcement (made a little over two months ago) comes with a twist unfamiliar to those Indians happy with cash on delivery – this one requires you to visit a Wal-Mart store to pay cash for what you bought on the Internet. After same-day pickups, this seems Wal-Marts latest attempt at that famous silver bullet that was supposed to defeat Amazon – multi-channel. Online shopping is still a small percentage of worldwide retail, but it is expanding far faster than the boring brick kinds. Profits may not be stellar, but growth certainly is - Amazon is climbing the ladder faster than an MBA on steroids. And physical retailers are feeling – if not the heat, then at least the smell of smoke from the flames. After ye

Walls between work and life have broken down. Companies have not noticed. Work and leisure used to be quite distinct once upon a time (and that wasn't so long ago either). Work was carried out at designated hours in the workplace, with tools that the employer provided; home was spouses, kids and paid vacations. Even where you carried work home, it usually meant a temporary exile to the kitchen table. Once, only artists and rockstars lived without such boundaries. This, of course, is long gone. Laptops and telecommuting started the blurring process a couple of decades ago, but things really went south with the advent of  the smartphone. Uniforms gave way to business formals, yielded to business casuals before finally jumping off the roof entirely when the flip-flopped dotcommers took over. Work texts were shoved between bites of dinner, treadmills served as venues for conference calls, angry birds flirted with corporate emails and social networking finally nailed all those coffins f

Mass market retailing is an expensive business. Rents, staff, inventory – the average brick and mortar retailer struggles along with barely visible net margins (spontaneous dancing is known to happen at 5%). With thousands of stores, hundreds of warehouses and over two million employees, Wal-Mart has in the last five years managed a profit margin of just 3.5%. The story is no different for any other major brick & mortar retailer, American or desi. Cool-kid-on-block Internet retail, on the other hand, thumbs a nose at the old-fashioned ways and gives the distinct impression that it can do much better. There's just one small problem. The bellweather Amazon, for all its buzz, seems unfortunately to have done much the same (indeed, a little less at 2.48% over the same period); nor has any other sizeable virtual retailer done much different. What gives? The law of unintended consequences, that's what. Lets take two of the most discussed items – rent and inventory. Mind you, thi

The last rites of two promising startups made news a few days ago, and not just because they happened together. Flipkart shuttered Letsbuy on the same day that Snapdeal gave up on Esportsbuy, both had been acquired barely months ago, so it does seem that the acquisitions were just sugar coating on the euthanasia pills. This by itself is not particularly troubling. Natural processes of evolution dictate that many will launch and many of those will die. 2010 saw a spate of launches, one should not be surprised that many are running out of steam. Indeed, in any new business model it is quite likely that no more than a couple of firms will survive the initial spawning rush and become adults. Not all slaughter, however, presages the survival of the fittest - sometimes it is just an indicator of illness. Many people ask me why Flipkart is doing so well while others struggle. I think the trouble with e-commerce in India - and every pundit seems to know this - comes from two fundamental issues

I just sat through a presentation about the four big trends in IT that even the polite struggle to describe as dull, but it did get me thinking. Incumbent technology vendors (pretty much like incumbents everywhere) have too much invested in the present and will hence sell incremental as disruptive. IBM once believed sincerely in the future of mainframes, big studios still insist on the glorious road ahead for DVDs now that the laser is blue, predicting the future is always fraught with problems. Armchair sniping is all well and good, but shouldn't I be in a position to predict better? Time to get my somewhat ample behind off the couch then, and stick my neck into the future. Here, I go - my four predictions for IT trends, at least as far as careful, conservative corporates are concerned. Cloud will vaporise IT Today's businesses are all concerned about the technology underlying the cloud, and how to adopt it. However, cloud isn't really a technology - its a method of deli

Sitting within view of a three hundred year old pleasure palace, I was part of a lively discussion yesterday on what motivated us into coming back to India. I moved to the USA relatively late, having traveled back and forth for something like a decade before I decided to change residences in 2003, just after 9/11. When I finally did move to New York, I was already an experienced hand at American basic like driving a car and ordering at McDonalds. Most of my friends, on the other hand, had been dunked in cold straight out of college. Returning, for me, was thus somewhat different - I had not grown the same roots that people who had lived there a decade or more had. It was still a very large move nevertheless, not quite like moving back to Mumbai after a few years in Bangalore. America wasn't just another location change, it was the adoption of a different way of life that was very attractive in many ways. Coming back was therefore an event of some consequence, even if you had just l

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Who Question Once you've clarified why you're looking for an outsource partner and also which pieces to outsource, you're faced with the next big question – who? What should you look for in your potential outsourcing partner? The choice, I put to you, comes down to four linked characteristics. Ability The first characteristic, of course, is ability. A vendor cannot be under consideration at all if the basic ability to handle whatever you plan to outsource is not present. This is not always an easy thing to judge, especi

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The What Question The second in the series deals with the what – choosing which parts of IT can be and should be outsourced to a partner. Of course, one must first decide how one defines "parts of IT" in the first place – and different companies have slightly different approaches. Some will do it by business unit, others by geography, reporting structures or cost head. I have found it most convenient to consider any application , function or service a s a candidate for outsourcing. Applications are software-hardware combinations,

A little while ago, I was asked to give a presentation to CEOs on outsourcing. The audience wanted to know about adopting outsourcing for their companies; making use of its promise while avoiding its pitfalls. It seemed to me (unimaginatively, I must admit) that the whole thing boiled down to four fundamental questions - the why , the what , the who and the how . I decided to expand the presentation into a series of blog posts, one per question. The Why Question Why outsource? Given that a trillion-dollar industry has crowded a lot of people into Bangalore and made more than one driver rich, it seems a little late to ask this question. However, this isn't really about outsourcing being good or bad per se. Bloggers like us love to wallow in theoretical questions; companies usually want answers to more prosaic stuff. The question really is, why should a company be looking for an outsource partner ?   I've divided the universe into two simple flavours – Tactical and Str