Finally the Outliers!

Finally I bought my own copy of the Gladwell book - Outliers! I just waited endlessly for the paperback and a discount(both together). Blink had made me cautious! Just managed to read some 3 chapters in a moving car!

As with the Tipping Point,interesting observations replete with loads of stories, often repetitive to perhaps make the book fat enough for 200 pages:-)

I loved the point(in hindsight quite obvious) that he makes about the highly successful guy in any category investing in about 10,000 hours of practice compared to the not-so-successful(but equally talented) guy putting in half the number of hours...

Picked up a few quotes from the net which Gladwell Saheb has made:

1. The closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play!

2. When I wrote Tipping Point, my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it ... I had no notion I was creating a kind of public document. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put the podium to waste.

3. At the end of the day, I'm just a journalist. I spend my time talking to people who tell me things, and then I write them down. I'm necessarily parasitic in a way. I have done well as a parasite. But I'm still a parasite.

4. People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience."

And a lot of the experts are theory rich and experience poor:-)

5. No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.

Well am 1 month into it(rising around dawn). Feeling rich a little...am I?

6. Hitchcock began making his best movies in his late 50s. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and many others did their best work very late in life. Sometimes success isn’t recognized until late in life. That’s not uncommon.

Javed Akhtar, Gulzar Saheb too!!

7. Google is the answer to the problem we didn’t have. It doesn’t tell you what’s interesting or what’s important. There’s still more in the library than there is on Google!!

So true...okay will leave it at that!

Tweet What You Eat and Other Thots

Was having an end of day quick chat an with ex-planner-colleague on twitter. She is a great user of the service, I an on-and-off user/critic/admirer:-)

And then in the morning discovered this small factoid about 'How Twitter may help you shed some extra kilos!'
Slim people worldwide are now posting their healthy food diet on 'Tweet what you eat'! Suddenly some ideas pop up in the mind on how we could use twitter(maybe they already are being used)

A ramble at the end of the day!

1. The Great India Discount Tweet. Tell where the biggest discounts are. With where it's convenient to park:-)

2. The 10pm what-movie-am-I-watching-tweet. One always keeps looking for people to do some post-movie-chat!

3. The weekend 'where-am-I-lunching-today' tweet or what's-great-on-the-menu tweet

4. The know-your-gadget-better tweet for the tech-challenged. Learning about the new gizmo one tweet at a time!

The trick I guess is to be more useful in a less and less obtrusive way

Faults of Argument and Parallel Thinking!

One of my colleagues had a great argumentative mind. He would impeccably find 'fault' with every concept and idea. And yet, having found the 'fault' in reason/concept, he would fail miserably in building something new.

As I look back at many of the professional relationships I have had in Indian advertising, am amazed at how good many of us are at finding faults in other people's arguments and how little time(in relative terms) we devote to co-creating some idea/ concept!!

In case you are interested in this line of thinking, you could browse through Edward De Bono's book - Think! Before it's too late.

De Bono says...

1. With the traditional argument or adversarial thinking each side takes a different position and then seeks to attack the other side. Each side seeks to prove that the other side is wrong. This is the type of thinking that was established by the Greek Gang of Three (Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) two thousand four hundred years ago.

2. Adversarial thinking completely lacks a constructive, creative or design element. It was intended only to discover the 'truth' not to build anything.

Value is never really created by only the adversarial mode of thinking! You get an ego boost. That's all about it...

3. But there is another, more constructive form of thinking called 'Parallel Thinking'. With 'parallel thinking' both sides (or all parties0 are thinking in parallel in the same direction. There is co-operative and co-ordinated thinking. The direction itself can be changed in order to give a full scan of the situation. But at every moment each thinker is thinking in parallel with all the other thinkers. There does not have to be agreement. Statements or thoughts which are indeed contradictory are not argued out but laid down in parallel.In the final stage the way forward is 'designed' from the parallel thought that have been laid out.

4. A simple and practical way of carrying out 'parallel thinking' is the Six Thinking Hats method which is now being used widely around the world both because it speeds up thinking and also because it is so much more constructive than traditional argument thinking.

5. As you may already know, the "Six Thinking Hats" is a powerful technique that helps you look at important decisions from a number of different perspectives.

While we all know these things, rarely do we put them into practice! The different hats and what they stand for are here...Am meeting a friend for some idea-generation for his new venture, so let me wear the yellow(positivity) and green(creative) hats and meet him...cheers

50 Things That Are Being Killed By The Internet

We the technology-awed populace always view all technology as being better, faster and taking us to a better place. The internet seems like no exception. Yet, every new technology also takes away something...

Stumbled upon this interesting article 50 Things That Are Being Killed By the Internet at PSFK. Have a read...

Gleanings enmeshed with my thots on some of them...

1. Punctuality. Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up for lunch on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudeness of the connected age.

This is going to be a huge conflict area between generations. My father runs his life by the hour, I am far more comfortable keeping things fluid all the time!

2. Memory. When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the "mere" storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

Today, if you have a story, the facts and the props are available for free on the net. However, as an agency planner and now a trends and futures consultant, I find this aspect liberating!

3. Dead time. When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet's draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.

All former dead-time is now pottering time - twitter, flickr, youtube, fb, sms, mobile chat, gtalk...And we are more busy than ever before, our reflection time has dropped to an all time low!

Just because the pipe of our conversations is broader and the flow 24X7 hasn't guaranteed that better stuff is flowing through those pipes. Although, the more plugged you are, the more you can scan the global brain for ideas and inspiration.

4. Mainstream media. While in India, print might be growing and TV getting higher TRPs, for some of us mainstream media has been quietly marginalised over the last few years.

- We don't miss the week-night news. In fact haven't watched the weekly bulletin which were so much a part of life a decade back.

- Right now we are consuming a mash-up of mainstream media and new media. This may be the intermediate step before some of us totally migrate to newer forms of digital media(personalised, customised, on-demand)Already, in the Western markets, free news and the migration of advertising to the web threaten the basic business models of almost all media organisations.

Mental post-it : What else is being killed by the internet, new media? Isn't it an interesting thought to stay with for a while...

Brand New From Bagchi

Just ordered the new book by Subroto Bagchi- The Professional on flipkart.com. Triggered by reading an ET interview of Subroto - How do you align knowledge with customer needs? Bagchi says - There are three layers of knowledge - technical, experiential and existential.

Most Indian firms and professionals are very good in technical skills. You are given a set of specifications and you deliver the best project, but that’s about it.

However, if you look at what Nissan did years ago while exploring to enter the European markets, they were focused upon the experiential aspect of knowledge. Nissan sent some 200 engineers to Europe with each driving almost 2,500 kilometers across different roads to understand what it takes to be a motorist in Europe. The engineers came back and then defined a design. This is like stepping into the shoes of your customer.

But this is not all. You also need to get into the mind of your customer, which is all about existential knowledge. Companies such as Sony and even Narayana Hridayalaya are great examples of such companies. Since each of these knowledge layers is separated by a glass ceiling, we need to break free.

Looking forward to reading the book...

Thums Down!

Thums Up 'Got It' from Campaign India on Vimeo.

This post had been languishing in the draft mode for a while now. Am talking about the now-not-so-new Thums Up TVC.

As a fan of the drink(surprisingly a very infrequent drinker) and it's commercials over time, I found this new departure from the usual action-packed thrill quite uncalled for.

Unconvincingly elucidated by the team behind it on afaqs and campaignindia, I failed to see what's so excitingly different.

Akshay doesn't quite know whether he has to play the action hero or the comic man. The battered BMW with billowing smoke is a total waste even on the 36in LCD! The orgasmic oohs and aahs after every sip of TU is quite irritating. The extras in the story all need lessons in acting...I can imagine Akshay laughing all the way to the bank without performing any stunts...

While the promise of showing - 'Action in the imagination' might look appealing on paper/ power-point, this rendition is a dud!

Hope the next ad brings the action back. Guys I want to see the action. People love carbonated sugared water brands only for the action and imagery(at least I do). Don't believe what a few morons say in an FGD sitting in a dark b-grade hotel room:-) And I feel so strongly because TU is amongst those rare Indian brands that we have managed to build and consistently sustain over the years .

It's so easy to mess with what you have and take it to 'the next level'. The really difficult task is to stay exactly where you are and yet have engaging stories to tell time and again!

Why we don't have iconic youth brands?

Pi-shaped Talent

As I wade through the workplace, transitioning from agency planning work to consultant work there are interesting shifts that are taking place in the sort of work that I do. And also in the way that work happens. More complex work - with a fine balance of 'analysis', 'logic', 'creativity' and 'ambiguity'. Geographically spread out work. Talent hot groups. Being a part of many such groups at the same time...Some you lead; in some you learn. In most you collaborate and build upon each others work. Multi-tasking, learning, forgetting...

And all this work requires a very different sort of talent than needed in the past! Eduardo Braniff in this Adage.com article describes beautifully these pi-shaped talent that's needed in this creative collaborative economy.

Pi, the Greek letter, describes talent that is broad in its interests and expert in two areas, if not more. As a decimal representation, pi never ends or repeats which, when used to describe talent, means no two "pi talents" are alike. And, as a circular constant, it is inherently about well-rounded talent. Though a constant mathematically, the only thing constant about "pi talent" is the rate at which their attention changes and ambitions evolve.

Excellent article. Do read it and share view-points...