Blog me...curiosity redefined

    Creative ads make money...especially when you know how to make it a lasting impression on your brand. One such example is AFLAC (American Family Life Assurance Company) an insurance company in USA and Japan that made news with their duck ads . A simple ad with a duck which speaks made their sales double in 3 years during the early 2000s.     A pug dog named 'Cheeka' created the same buzz in 2003 in India with Vodafone (Hutch those days) 'You and I' campaign. Isn't it a wonder how animals can impact our brand names and increase sales? Do you know how to capitalize on its popularity? Photo Courtesy - Internet     After the popularity spread in the US and Japan with the Aflac duck ad, the people were asking for more thru duck dolls, cancer campaign etc. No wonder the pug dog ad was popular but it could have been a real worth if they made it ever lasting to their fan base. This is where Airtel won even thou there was no animal in it. What went wron...

      In Business, profit making is given so much of importance that the impacts to the environment is hardly being considered. You might argue that isn't value creation and capture another critical factor for sustaining in longer terms. Yes I wouldn't deny the fact that value creation is given its due but profit making is still the primary objective.        Now shifting the focus towards companies like Walmart who are known for its low cost leadership strategy, they are even notoriously known for killing the kirana stores (or popularly known as mom-and-pop store) in their neighborhood. They are predators in their own way who kill the competition just by sheer dominance. My concern here is definitely what will happen to the ecosystem as a whole if such monopoly continues.      Let us correlate to this to Charles Darwin's "Theory of Natural Selection" (5 points -  competition, adaption, variation, overproduction, speciation) led ...

          Again am stressing the point Man is known for creative destructive nature. We are creating the digitalised world with social media, mobile, cloud, analytics (SMAC) technology that is predicted to be equal to the physical economy by 2025, referring to Brian Arthur's article ' The Second economy '. No wonder this second economy will create a progressive path for few with lesser jobs for the majority, the bigger impact is the divide. Arthur in his article talks about producing wealth with uneven wealth distribution. If this is bound to be true, the world is staged for the next war - Rich vs Poor.             If I imagine the digital economy to prosper in the next decade to its full potential, the economic impacts would be a greater divide between the rich and poor. The most unfortunate thing about this being the economic progress without jobs. I am sure, many countries including India have already started see this kind of ...

  Curiosity drove me to see what BAU acronym stands for. I knew one of those popular meaning 'Business As Usual' in IT context or project management context. To my surprise, I got 20 different definitions for it. Courtesy - https://www.abbreviations.com/BAU Term Definition BAU Bacou U S A, Inc. Business  »  NYSE Symbols BAU Bauru, Sao Paulo, Brazil Regional  »  Airport Codes BAU Bags Are Us Business  »  Companies & Firms BAU Behavioral Analysis Unit Governmental  »  FBI Files BAU Bangladesh Agricultural University Miscellaneous  »  Farming & Agriculture BAU Bad Apple Unicorn Miscellaneous  »  Unclassified BAU Balqa Applied University Academic & Science  »  Universities BAU beacon artist union Commun...

   Just yesterday I wanted to change the title of my blog posts. That is when I started googling for some interesting titles. Here are few I created myself before finalizing on 'Blog me...curiosity redefined'. Chasing Leaf Reflection of Grace Inspirational Mountains Four circles Wishful tornado Provoking thoughts Curiosity redefined Living water and sand Creative attitudes Canvas of thinking Picture thyself Broken beautifully Let me know if you liked any of these...

Photo Courtesy - Internet     

      Imagine you are the Steve Jobs in your company. What would your next innovative idea be? How would you implement it? Write to me on this.        Let me imagine myself the same too and below snippet comes with that preset mind. Relax your body and mind with deep breaths for atleast 5 mins. Close your eyes and imagine a large TV Screen. Put these steps on the TV screen with you as the main actor. Try to put in as much details as possible. See every detail on the screen with you and your network in it. Step 1 - I am good at process implementation and I am looking for the opportunities to eliminate/reduce waste using Lean principles sitting at my office desk. Step 2 - I am capturing the operational efficiency this process improvement brought it before and after. Step 3 - I am highlighting the same with top management and required stakeholder with the proof of concept I just achieved.  Step 4 - I am taking their buy-in to implement ...

       "War is coming", no, am not referring to the Game of Thrones ad here. But the real war is going to come. Lest we should be prepared. This one is for sure not between countries nor between regions but it will come. I suspect this war would be to show how unbalanced our the economic situation is. I Hope it ends and will not lead to our extinct.        The world today as we see is growing to become more in-equal w.r.t income we earn. As of today, the richest 3 Americans are equivalent to 50% of the bottom in terms of money. Is it fair? The richest 1% of the global population received 82% of  wealth  created in 2017, while nothing went to the  poorest half  (3.7 billion) of humanity, according to a  new study  by the global charity Oxfam.          Don't you see the stage being set for the hunger vs wealthy? The pace at which the rich are accumulating the wealth is the real worry. Not ...

     Adam Smith was a  popular economist whom most of you would have heard of. His famous book 'The wealth of nations' (1776) is a renowned on how nations can build wealth (mercantilism), what government can help nations build wealth thru free market economy. I believe his ideas are even today implemented by corporate to create wealth and by Governments to implement policies to make a economy free-market based. But little did all of us knew that this method of creating wealth only had an adverse impact on our natural resources. Photo courtesy - Internet      Few of us knew his book 'Theory of Moral Sentiments' (1759) was more apt to sustain the natural resources...in short doing business morally rather than keeping wealth as the primary motive. If only this theory had popularized over the principles dictated in Wealth of nations. I personally believe in the next decade, we will see this change happening across the organisations, Governments and S...

Ready or not Make it a knot All it takes is fake a plot Don’t miss the spot Just sit and find the blot Feel the slot Fill it with a shot Make it a pot That sells, if not rot

     The world in the recent past has undergone arbitrage in terms of the labor. We saw the jobs move from developed countries to developing countries like India, China and other south east Asian nations. The competitive advantage these developing nations had in terms of their capability, skills were utilized to the maximum. This led to the developed nations to think why can't such a labor arbitrage happen within their own country? Aren't there few states where the laborers are comparatively cheaper than others within the country? Well it did work for short period as the economics of efficient resource utilization across the world would dominate in the longer run.      Now the situation is gradually shifting within the labor arbitrage but not in terms of geography but in terms of automated machinery (or robots) doing the same job at faster pace with better efficiency. Where does this lead to? My view is, we are evolving right now thinking that robots can ...

     Our world just consists of the things we see. Could there possibly be a world of illusions or dead people? What if we have not experienced it yet? I heard that hypnotizer usually rely on this world to change the pattern. If so, don't you think our reality sucks. Fantasies apart, wouldn't it be just great to travel outside our box and venture in to unknown?      If the above fascinated you enough then you should watch this movie ' Beyond Reality '.          Video courtesy - Youtube. A good movie which keeps you on the edge. Enjoy it.          

This blog is inspired and taken from the UPLIFT video on ' The Economics of Happiness '.       The Governments today are short sighted as they look for 5 years planning when they should be planning for at least 2-3 generations from us. In our pursuit of greed and getting wealthy we have lost our true purpose of being born. Human beings were born to preserve and appreciate the nature along with other animals in this ecosystem. We seemed to have forgotten it.        Economics in simple terms mean allocation of resources efficiently for all of us to sustain and survive in a better environment. Remembering that earth's resources are limited would help us realize our mistakes faster. We are to unlearn something in order learn something new. The focus of the industrialization has always been to make profit using people, which seems the unfortunate thing.        Mankind is supposed to become the caretaker of this universe. Are we? Ou...

        At the end of the day, what matters is if we are giving back an ecosystem that our children are proud of? In simple terms, can the air they breathe, water they drink, food they eat be of good quality as we do now?  In our pursuit to compete and outsmart one another, we are destroying the natural resources that are available to us. At this trend, what will our next generation have? Hope you don't want them to rehabilitate to Mars or find another galaxy like milky way in another universe. Photo courtesy - Internet         What can we do to avoid this? At the corporate level, can we imbibe the values to conserve and protect our depleting natural resources? Should we follow the Bhutan way of carbon-free country? If so, our understanding of economical progress will be wrong. GDP or GNP will not an appropriate index to measure economic progress instead we need to look for Gross National Happiness Index(GNH). As simple as our quality o...

        Grammatically it is just a preposition that is the difference - 'For' or 'In'. Would it make a difference? Lets understand it from economic stand point of view. Way back in 2014 when Raghuram Rajan was Indian RBI governor, he suggested that ' Make For India ' would be a better strategy for India rather than the PM Narendra Modi's 'Make In India'.  Primarily this was because India has a high domestic consumption and demand driven due to its demographic advantage (average age of Indian population being around 28 years).         It is obvious that India does not want to become another China whose economy is driven by huge exports and investments. The proportion at which Chinese companies production to consumption is way too much and this leads to export driven economy. On a contrast, Indian economy is driven by its domestic consumption. 'Make In India' approach might lead India to follow the foot steps of China by exporting the surplus...

     This blog is inspired by the article in economic times below on the need for Indian IT firms to reshape its technology and business model.                    Yes we in IT are undergoing the change again. We see the change coming across every 10 years...the change could be the technology, process or even the business model. Lets look at the three decades since 1991 when Indian economy opened up.        Mainframes were the most happening thing then...we then gradually moved to windows based systems like DOS and then GUI based windows NT. A major step taken towards the IT world we see today. The industry just boomed with no stoppage with Y2K adding the spice needed to keep up the growing curve. Just when we thought we are unstoppable the 2001 recession made us think are we in the right direction? Obvious downsides have helped the IT industry shape up better.         W...

Resume or CV is just an indicator of your performance. Don't you agree? Are you judging the person behind the content or just the content? Do you want to judge based on the content or talk to the person who is in front of you? Today my accidental experiment worked fine by not carrying my resume to the interviews for one of the most reputed organisation. I was honest to acknowledge that I did not carry a hard copy of my resume to the interview. I wanted to be judged based on what I truly am. It was an accident for sure but it did work.  I did have an alternative of carrying soft copy of my resume on my laptop to show the interviewers. With all due respect to them, they understood me well and interviewed me based on my response. Credit goes to the company and the interview panel as well. Maybe it is the beginning of something new in recruitment, at least in India. Is it a beginning of a new era of recruitment? Do you actually need a resume highlighting what you did to p...

        Do you think stock market today drive the news or is it the news driving the stock market? Tricky question right...it happened to be one of the best articles I read in economic times. The answer was as simple as stock markets (or rather equity markets) drive the  news and not the other way round.        However tricky it may sound, imagine if we were driven by news? Just the sheer news on the possible fluctuation of the market due to a major crisis could have brought down the stocks for that day. Wouldn't that call for being grateful that human minds are not that volatile. Thank God. Courtesy - Internet        At least the dilemma of which drives the other between stock markets and the news is resolved. But aren't we as humans faltering again in the field of AI (Artificial Intelligence)? Today we have started building robots as an experiment and to aid our routine tasks. Gradually it would mean we will be mo...

     What matters most? Are you happy being a learner or getting educated? If the answer is learning, then I believe you would agree that we are on the right path. Getting educated is good but today's top innovators have proved that today's education system is destroying the self learning process.  Elon Musk, Bill Gates are few examples in US, Srinivasa Ramanujan a mathematical genius has proved that getting formal education is irrelevant.      The future of education lies in continuously unlearning and learning what is necessary. I would like to deviate a bit. Can you keep on learning something you are passionate about as long as you believe that is going to make a difference to the human kind? Wouldn't that be the more satisfactory than just learning what is necessary?      Life long learning is the need of the hour. Can I have an open program with universities and start learning every course that I am interested in at any stage of ...

    Of late, I have been hearing a lot about the passion that drives us to becoming an entrepreneur. If you are in IT sector with around 13+ years of experience or more, you are bound to have friends who are budding entrepreneur or want to be one. So its obvious about hearing a lot of motivation talks, finding the angel investors, niche market or product to get into, crypto currencies etc. But this blog to dedicated to all those ordinary folks who find happiness in the simple pleasures of life. :)     To me, what defines my life is happiness and the purpose in it. It definitely need not be to reach the stars. Not that I have peer pressure to do more. I enjoy learning new things and what best to do than enjoy what you do. Isn't being happy the ultimate goal? At least for me, it is.     Enough of preaching and let us turn our attention to the moment. I am enjoying writing this blog. If you are enjoying it too reading it, leave me a comment. That would make...

Luke Aikins jumped from 25,000 feet from airplane without a parachute recently. National geographic channel paid $1 million for this video.  It is a world record and no wonder history was written by him. Take a peek at this video  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaANi96Z-Wg               (Video courtesy - Youtube) Lessons from his free falling session on a lighter side...with all due respects to him: a) Never free fall unless you know the target and are sure to hit it. It takes some guts to fall off with a parachute. b) Cheer leaders when you land can come in handy...you might need few to lift your body if target is missed. c) Pay some respect to your sponsorer (National Geographic Channel in this case)...$1 million is no joke after all. Poke the deal as many...you might not achieve this feat again and again in life. d) Needless to say get insured for life...at least your family can take a breather (or maybe not). Should I say r...

     I enjoy the animation movies....Kung Fu panda being my fav. Yes I do love the comics too. Unfortunately I am not reading anymore...more due to the supply problem rather than the demand here. Simply put it, I love Tin Tin, Amar Chithra Katha, Tinkle which used to be the best of my childhood reads are still worth reading.  Oh those Supandi stories, Tenali Raman, Kalia the crow, Shambu the shikari makes me wonder why did I ever grow up?      It is these childhood memories that have made my life richer than ever. After all we need to grow up. Is that the problem?  Or is it the part of thinking we are grown up that makes life more miserable? Irrelevant to me. But life is beautiful in all the simple pleasures we seek. Do I sound like a spiritual Guru when I say that?       We are being misguided by the everyday problems and the paths we have chosen. If only we knew how to relive this life with the inner child in us. Wouldn't it ha...

Lone travelling is bliss. I just feel in love with this photo on the internet which inspired me to write this blog. I do enjoy traveling if it is towards the nature. Traveling alone and being with the nature has its own perks. Isn't it a bliss when you hear the silence of the forest? The calmness in the picture with the God's rays can make tranquilize me easily. Photo courtesy - Internet Let me know if you have a photo that can speak a thousand words which you cherish. If travel makes you happy...let me know if you have any planned for the days to come. Together we can make the nature a better place by discovering the secrets hidden in it. What's say?

       DIKW (Data Information Knowledge Wisdom) is a common pyramid that you see explaining the relationship between data and how it evolves to wisdom. Isn't that what the IT industry is also doing? We started off with raw data processing in IT industry especially Indian IT and over a period of few years (I presume in couple of decades) we evolved towards knowledge based processing. What went in these 20 years is the value transformation that happened to evolve from just data processing to information to knowledge processing. In this process, we have captured the knowledge as well. If you observe at a minute level you might find the eureka moment of new discovery. Isn't that the wisdom we possess?        Data - raw form        Information - answers the question on What?        Knowledge - answers the question of How to?   Add understanding and interpretation to Knowledge along with keen observation...

       If you have not yet watched the bollywood movie Wazir  (2016), do watch it. Wazir in chess means queen, the most powerful pawn on the board. Do you think so? Isn't every pawn powerful as long as it is in the most appropriate position? A small ant can destroy an elephant, if it can get into its ears. Its all in the move, isn't it? Make yours for sure. Win or lose is secondary.       The game is meant to be played. Only a coward takes a cunning route to win. After all the Mahabharata would not have happened if not for Shakuni. Well the lord of the lords (Krishna) also wanted the play to go on, isn't it? Are you a Arjuna, Krishna, Duryodana or Shakuni? The character you choose is left to you. But do play for sure. After all isn't that what Krishna has preached too.       What do you think is the essence of any game? Is it the intention behind the game, the will to play it or the intensity with which you play?  As Buddha ...

       Oh God, please save us. Are we on the verge of evolution or destruction? On the technology front, we are assuming that making robots to take up mundane regular tasks is creative or progressive in nature. What if it turned out to be the worst ever invention of human history? Add AI to these bots and they can even think like Humans, at least that is the assumption as of now. Imagine a future where the bots with their intelligence ruling the humans who invented them. Isn't it scary?        Let us take a step back and see where did we go wrong. Today morning I had breakfast with couple of my classmates @ IIM Bangalore course. While having coffee I found that the disposable paper cups used for the coffee had a thin layer of wax and a plastic layer inside the cups making them carcinogenic. Introspecting it further, our own creation to make our lives easier has been the cause for our various diseases or rather destruction. So are we really ...

       Interesting enough, Pepsi did a survey and found out that Women don't enjoy chips/nachos when it makes sound as well as when the fingers get dirty with cheese. What does Dorito do? They come up with their own version of nachos for females. Do you consider this a well customized product? A niche market yet to be conquered? Or bringing in the differentiation to increase your customer base? To me the answer is 'yes' to all the above.       Photo Courtesy - Internet Photo Courtesy - Internet        It is probably the first of its kind that I see a gender based niche market created in the food products group. We have already seen the hair-oil, beauty creams, shaving razors being craved out and made a separate product for each gender but I have not yet seen one for a food product. Isn't it an interesting move from Doritos?  We need to see how well the consumers receive this new idea and encourage it.   ...