Politics of trinkets

Once upon a time, there was a company that sold books and stuff online called Amanzo. It sold billions of dollars worth of stuff. Then inevitably one day, elections were held in the land of its headquarters. It was a hotly contested election. The company decided that it should join the thousands of polling companies trying to figure out the outcome of the elections. One executive at the company realizes that they have millions of customers. Couldn't they poll them? Another adds a brilliant twist: why don't we sell Republican elephants and Democrat donkeys? Based on their sales we will know which party is going to win. The executives congratulated themselves on this brilliant plan!

The trinket selling began in earnest. The sales leaned this way and that.

But some customers realized that this is quite stupid. What this measures is how likely are repulican and democrat supporters to buy silly trinkets to display their affiliation at places of work and home. And before an executive could say 'golden parachute', a more interesting thing had happened. The customers of the company were engaged in a debate about the implications of such a "poll".

I am not a lady

An open letter

Dear colleague,

I want to make it clear for the second time that I am a woman. I am a female member of the human species. I am NOT a “lady”.

Today was the umpteenth time I saw you use the word “ladies” to refer to your female colleagues. I felt like hitting you on the head but since that might disqualify me from actually being a lady in the 1920s sense of the word, I stopped myself.

Instead, I decided to be helpful. For your reference, here is a guide on the correct usage of the word lady. You may use the word when referring to:

1. Members of English aristocracy
2. Women over 70
3. Women who are doing something crazy, as in “Lady, are you nuts?”
4. As a reprimand, usually preceded by the word “young”: “Young lady, how many times have I told you not to hit your male colleagues?”

I assume you thought it would be more “respectful” in some old-fashioned way to refer to women as “ladies”. But by using this word in a clearly artificial manner, you actually made it quite clear that you don’t quite know how to deal with women colleagues as equals. Why else would you say things like:

• Each team should have 11 players with a minimum of 2 ladies and max of 9 gents
• Opening batting pair should have at least 1 lady
• First over must be bowled by a lady and faced by a lady
• And so on
  

Or perhaps I have misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe this is a costume party cum cricket match. I wonder whether any Bangalore theatre groups carry Victorian-era gowns.

Here’s a thought: If you think calling a woman a woman is too matter-of-fact, maybe you can call us the “XX chromosomed” humans. At least it will be accurate. Then your invitation for cricket would read something like this:

• Each team should have players with a total of 13 X and 9 Y chromosomes
• Opening batting pair must be exclusively X chromosomed
• No Y chromosomes allowed in first over bowling and batting
• Etc.

Yours sincerely,
A woman

Privacy matters

Today I need a “proof of employment” letter from my employer. Upon putting in the request, the first question I got asked was “what for?”. To put this in perspective, “proof of employment” letters in India are demanded for everything – whether it is filing for a visa, applying for a credit card, a phone-line, renting an apartment, anything. In essence, they act as proof of who you say you are, and they are demanded by everyone. The only person who hasn’t asked me for one yet is an auto-driver.

Now, my employer has a policy of asking why it is needed. Why is it my employer’s business? If I am doing something illegal, clearly I can fabricate a letter of employment without going to my employer. If I am doing something legal, why invade my privacy?

I don’t know if this is true of other companies but my company asks all kinds of intrusive questions and publishes this information to random people. For example, every time a direct report of mine wants to order an official taxi, s/he has to submit a form online (all our internal systems are automated). In that form, the person has to put in what kind of taxi, from where to where, etc. But the form also automatically (using employment records) adds several more pieces of information – e.g. the age. This information come to me every time. Why on earth do I need to be informed and continuously reminded of the age of my team members? Worse, this information + the person’s full title + employment band is sent to the Taxi company! So, if a taxi company wants to target someone for mischief, they can easily figure out which person probably has a higher net worth based on band and title. Wonderful! The taxi company knows your seniority, where you live, your home line, your mobile, etc.

What about safety, security, or even a bit of simple privacy?

Reading Time

I was at the Crossword bookstore yesterday, at Strands a couple days ago, at Blossom's a couple of weeks ago... None of the bookstores in Bangalore, it seems, cater to avid readers. Crossword was selling "A Thousand Shining Suns" and Alan Greenspans books as "new arrivals". Strands still had The World is Flat on display. Blossoms had nothing new worth reading. They seem to think that accounts of people graduating through IIMs make for literature. And why there is a sudden explosion of books on this topic is beyond me.
Cleary, I am not their target customer.
I go through at least one book a week, sometimes more. So I am stuck with re-reading old books I have. Also, these bookstores completely fail in exposing someone like me to new authors. You can't really go and browse in these stores in the hopes of finding something interesting to read.
Buying from Amazon costs a bundle -- not just the shipping to India, but also the price of the books themselves. The books that I buy cost 300-600 rupees, or $8-15. On Amazon, the same books are $17-$28. Plus if I want to save the shipping cost, I have to wait for continent-hopping friends to bring the books here.
The bookstores here don't stock the books I want to read, and nor do they offer any alternates that I find interesting. Some days I really miss Barnes and Noble. And Amazon.

Generating new ideas - the Cisco way

Excerpt:

While innovation prizes can be a low-cost way to generate great ideas, they're also fraught with potential legal and HR headaches. Hsieh and Jouret wanted to ensure participants retained ownership of their ideas if they weren't chosen as the winner. They had other matters to consider, including making sure an idea truly belongs to the contestant and that a winner isn't found to be a convicted felon. So Cisco hammered out ways to prevent fraud and notified candidates that they'd have to go through background checks if they made it past the semifinals.

Not everything went according to Cisco's plan. Initially, the I-Prize site let contestants vote on each other's ideas, à la news-rating site Digg. But then executives discovered that some contestants were trying to game the system. So Cisco decided not to use the community voting mechanism to influence the selection of semifinalists and finalists.

The big challenge in some innovation competitions is making the prize difficult enough that real innovation can be achieved, but not so difficult that the prize can't be won. The larger the challenge, the more likely people will try and fail.

>> Read more:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2008/tc20080529_968185.htm

 

 

Microsoft's Woes

The problem with Microsoft is that it has a single strategy – ride on the back of Windows OS.  Ever since Bill Gates’ DOS ended up in the right place at the right time and got adopted by IBM for its PCs, the company has struggled to find its footing outside of operating systems and “hygiene” software.  Its Office Professional application suite took off only after it offered deep discounts to computer manufacturers (OEMs) and, in those days, assembler/resellers (VARs) for pre-installing the software on all systems sold. 

 

If you leave out forays into hardware (mouse, X-box), all other Microsoft software is sold on the basis of its linkage to Windows OS.  And, if anti-trust regulation limits the company’s ability to bundle in more software at deep discounts to its retail price, Microsoft is obviously left in a bind.

 

It hasn’t really figured out how to make a dent in other spaces.  The software remains woefully archaic, and the attempts to update it every 3 years only end up frustrating users who have finally managed to figure out how to get the software to do what they want it to do.  By the time your efficiency reaches an acceptable level, your IT department has been cajoled by deep discounts for early-adopters and mirages of future super-efficiency, to upgrade all users to Windows 2020.

 

In Excel, if you have to convert a number that has been designated as text (for what-ever reason) back into a number, you have to first type 1 in a new cell, then multiply the cell in question by this ‘1’.  If you are lucky the original cell will now recognize that its content is a number not text.  If you are unlucky, status quo will remain and you in frustration will re-type the content as a number. So, after 20 odd years of development investment into Excel, this is the best the thousands of researchers and programmers at Microsoft have come up with.

 

In today’s “collaborative” world, it is surprising that Microsoft hasn’t provided simple features to make people’s life easier.  Such as turning an email into a item on the calendar – in ONE step.  Or, easy-to-use annotation abilities in Excel (not cell by cell comments) for easy sharing of ideas among teams spread across continents.  The majority of corporate communicate today happens in PPT slides, but the annotation capabilities are pathetic.  The microscopic yellow tab can’t be seen without a strong lens… and you can’t circle something and put a comment around it.  Buying add-ons are not the answer since most corporate IS teams are on a crusade to surreptitiously remove all unauthorized software from corporate hard-drives.

 

And as for entering the Web 2.0 age, buying Yahoo is not the answer. Providing a Facebook-Youtube-whatever, suite of applications that corporate IS departments are not petrified of, is.

 

 

Destroying brand new cars

It seems that Mazda (owned by Ford) decided to destroy roughly $100M worth of cars after a rather odd event during transport. They weren’t sure exactly what damage had been caused to the cars and decided to destroy them rather than risk having to pay consumer claims for unknown problems later on.

What is interesting is how economic considerations have driven a rather ethical sounding outcome. Of course, the environmentalists among us will question whether they should have pushed for greater re-use instead of destruction. For example, they blew up the sturdy air-bags instead of dismantling them for reuse. Or perhaps it was not possible to pull them out intact. Or charity-minded folks might feel that they should have donated these potentially-defective cars to some charity.

What interested me in the story was the fact that the company took a bold, and probably internally unpopular, decision.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120942873506551291.html?mod=blog

Corporate gifts, served Panchtantra style

In response to my previous post, one reader asked: “Okay, so fake leather isn’t right for women, nor the polo shirts for guys – but what would be the right present?”

I think USB sticks make great gifts these days as everybody keeps losing them. They should have just picked a more unisex style instead of one that was permanently embedded in Terminator style leather. Business card holders are useful – everyone needs them anyway; but again a unisex design is important. And if you are thoughtful enough to get something with elegant ‘green’ packaging you get extra bonus points.

These discussions about appropriateness of gifts have reminded me of a Panchtantra story I had read as a kid. It is a common story that most Indians have learned in school (at least, people my age).

There are two friends – a crow and a crane. One day the crane invites the crow for dinner at his home. He serves a delicious porridge in a ‘surahi’, a narrow necked earthen pot. While the crane thoroughly enjoys the meal, the crow’s short beak can’t reach the porridge in the pot. He is forced to eat the crumbs spilled by the crane.

The crow doesn’t say anything but in turn invites the crane for dinner. And he serves the meal in a flat ‘thali’. Of course, this time the crane doesn't get much to eat and he soon realizes his mistake.

So taking a cue from the Panchtantra tale: Next time I’m in-charge of corporate gifts, maybe I’ll distribute silk blouses with embroidered company logo to all. :)

Corporate Gifts

I’ve been thinking: How come so much of what I observe and write about is related to my experience as a woman, rather than as a human being. Surprisingly, this wasn’t a topic that was even remotely top of mind for me while I was in the US. It seems to me that living in India, you get rubbed the wrong way at least once (if you are lucky) or more, every-single-day. And after 3.5 years of this, I’ve just had enough. With that preamble, let’s pick a non-India example for a change :).

On Friday, I gave a talk to a bunch of 20 students and 2 profs from an MBA school in the US. Any B-school class studying emerging markets end up studying India, and ends up visiting us as one of the interesting companies to profile. So, inevitably, we end up hosting quite a few such student groups. So, back to the presentation on Friday...

I spent over an hour talking to the students about the company, India, its economy, etc. At the end of it, one of the students got up and, on behalf of the class, presented a gift. This practice of giving a gift is rare and not followed by all visiting groups because of restrictions on corporate gifts, especially the value of it, which they keep below $25-50. In any case, upon opening it I found a USB stick keychain and a money clip. Both of these are made in a bulky style, of heavy leather with bold stitching in a very male style to say the least. It’s something that Arnold Shwarzenegger would have carried as the Terminator (in the first of the movie trilogy), if he’d wanted to seem stylish. Believe me, I don’t mind leather, but no woman would carry anything of this style by choice.

So, why is a business school, in the year 2008, assuming that this is an appropriate gift for a woman? If in their defense they say, well, we didn’t know that we’d be giving this to a woman – well then, why are they assuming that there won’t encounter any women presenters? Sure, the number of senior women in business is low, but it is not zero!

Thoughtlessness is very off-putting.

The same goes for all kinds of corporate gifts and paraphernalia: it is all designed for men. Two years ago, I was responsible for organizing an annual meeting for roughly 100 senior leaders of the company. It had been customary for my department to give out polo-shirts for all participants. I had received one such shirt the previous year. As with all corporate-wear, this stuff is designed for men; I have never seen a woman wear a company-logo shirt in this company or previous ones. Since no other alternative was available, I decided against giving out any shirts. When an attendee inquired about the missing polo-shirts, I told him that when the company starts stocking shirts appropriate for women also, I’d be glad to give them out. :)

My strategic breakfast

It seems these days everything has become strategic. If a salesperson makes a sale, it is strategic. If a programmer write a code, it will be strategic code. So I figured why not a strategic breakfast, or a strategic drive to the office, or better yet, strategic breathing.

So many people use the word strategic incorrectly that it has almost lost its meaning.

The two most common mistakes are:

1. Confusing strategy with objective: Strategy is an approach, not the objective. "My strategy is to be the #1 company" is an objective, not a strategy.

2. Confusing strategy with an obvious thing a company/person must do. Claiming that "my strategy is to grow revenues and profits" is like saying "my strategy is to breathe." Strategy involves making a trade-off, choosing one option over many others. If your strategy is not debatable, it is probably not really a strategy.

A good corporate strategy is one that is actionable, that is proactive, that is dynamic in its response to changing market conditions.

A couple of weeks ago, after listening to a young IIM grad talk about adding value through end-to-end strategic leverage of synergy, I asked him to stop and use words and their meaning which would have appeared in the Oxford dictionary of twenty years ago.

Why do our business schools teach students to talk in such a meaningless way? Recently I interviewed quite a few candidates to fill positions in my group. Anyone using meaningless language got asked a couple of times to "be more specific" or "give examples". If the person insisted on using "strategic"/"value"/"leverage" on the average of one or more per sentence, s/he was sure to be dropped from my short-list.

So, No, Thanks! I won't be having a strategic breakfast anytime soon.