Brave For Free

I am sure all of you must have experienced this. A team of smart driven people get together in a room, all focused on a project and eager to progress. Two months of meetings later, the project is still drifting along, not quite getting to closure. Have you wondered why this happens? Why seemingly smart people with the best of intentions slip on the banana peel just as they are about to raise the curtain? My theory is that one (or god help us, more) of the following syndromes is in play. 1.  The HYTO or "Have you thought of..." syndrome. This is when, after a decision to act has been finalised, someone pipes up with "but have you thought about ". This of course leads to discussion about whether that has really been thought about, often causing action to be deferred till the thinking about is done. Of course, the next meeting to close has another "have you thought of..." moment and the cycle continues. With each round, the HYTO concerns get increasingly mo...

A group of friends pulled me into an interesting debate. Two events happened a couple of days ago; Starbucks announced a promotion for their hundredth store in India, and iPhone X pre-order sold out within minutes . Hotly debated was the sense in these events - why are people lining up for a coffee that's just a bit cheaper than usual, or a phone that is no longer much of the revolutionary product it once was. There was talk of cheaper CCD coffee and better Samsung phones, of price elasticity, Veblen goods, artificial shortages or just plain moronic behaviour. I felt that all these arguments were wrong. Economists should not be involved; this is really about storytelling. Starbucks has, over the years, gathered a loyal following of people willing to pay high prices for their coffee through a combination of ambience and aspiration. The hundredth-store sale is actually aimed at their regulars, not at new clientele choosing between CCD and Starbucks. It encourages the already comm...

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. In the last post I described my theory of levels of social media - Presence , Participation , Penetration and Platform . Presence was passive, Participation was active entry into the world of social media. Penetration and Platform are quite a bit more complex. This part two of the series gets into the next P – Penetration . I’ll need another post for Platform . To understand where I’m going with this, lets see what a social network really is. The web started off as a way to connect content together. Any piece of content could easily and simply refer to another piece of content, even if it was on a different server in a different country. A browser allowed people to move from content item to content item, thus making the universe of the world wide web a wonderful store of content. People soon realized that this could be extended to all kinds of transactions – one could pass not just content but messages and info...

Social is the new buzzword, and what a loud buzz that is nowadays. Everyone from sedate bank to hippy dippy start-up wants to be "social". Being unsocial nowadays is like admitting to a fondness for bellbottoms - hopelessly anachronistic and just a little worrying. Its not unlike the early days of the Internet where everybody wanted to "be on the web" and "have a domain". What does social mean, though – does it mean putting up a Facebook page? Does it mean obtaining a twitter handle? Does it mean encouraging a bunch of people to like you on foursquare? And what does good this do my business anyway? This rush to keep up with the social Joneses lead to some absurd decisions. Companies put up, sometimes at considerable expense, a "Facebook presence" and then proceed to be puzzled when no benefit accrues from all this. As with many technologies in their early days, people glimpse vast potential but simply cannot figure out how to convert this potenti...