Are you being served

It does not matter what restaurant I like, but if the service quality of even my favorite one is bad - they loose repeat business from me.
This holds true for any product, not only dine-in places. Unfortunately, client servicing is the most "taken for granted" aspect of several businesses. Now that's more cultural than by design. Taking stock of what customers want, listening to them and acting on their inputs is the most crucial bit.

This is what separates the men from the boys, if you will :

1. Product
2. Sales
3. Service

Weakness on any of these dimensions makes a business vulnerable to loosing share of wallet or even market to competition.

More jobless = more entrepreneurs ?

Not in any other part of the world, but when it's the valley - that's quite a possibility..



Courtesy : businessinsider.com

Bing ! goes Yahoo! Search

I guess the news of the newly forged live-in relationship between Yahoo and Microsoft would be discussed and beaten to death by the end of this week.I don't blame the people who (including me) would do that - simply because it's the end of an era. It's also because a legendary company like Yahoo is throwing in the towel to call it quits from the race to be the better (best ?) search engine.

It's sad. I first used Yahoo in the late 90's and have loved it since then as a company. But enter Google and Yahoo started to lose it's religion.. they used Google for their own search for a brief period, bought Inktomi , tried for several years to get it right and in the process lost focus on how they wanted to be positioned as.
From a search engine to a multimedia site and to now being a bookmarks commissure - Yahoo seemed to have completely lost the compass.

The company refused to be bought out by MS earlier despite moving like a wrecked ship - made me think that the spirit is still alive but Alas ! Yahoo has finally given up - on search at least. Let's see how MS fares as it's newly found role as a Guardian Angel !

Innovation

( Top-down , bottom-up or all around ? )

Innovation : a new way of doing something. It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. A distinction is typically made between invention, an idea made manifest, and innovation, ideas applied successfully. (source : http://www.wikipedia.org/)
Well, that definition sort of does sum-up what innovation is, however when it comes to practicing or further still - mastering the art of innovation, most organizations hit plateaus much sooner than later.
Now why is that ?
Based on my experiences and consumption of information around / interaction with people around, I have made some observations :

The 3 most crucial components that make any innovation successful are (and I am considering being the first-mover to be an implicit imperative) :

^ radicalness
^ benefit
^ execution

If you are the first mover, you leave a huge gap behind for competition to catch up.
If you are catching up, you better be fast to not only catchup but outdo the leader at break-neck speed.
To outdo means that the benefits your innovation offers, are better than anybody else around.

Self-explicit. Or is it ? If the mantra is so simple, then why are we mostly talking about the same set of companies always ? Why don't we see a dozen new companies across every year that race to the top 20 on this index ?




Source : BusinessWeek


Is it just because these companies have phenomenal leadership at the helm ? Or is it because that these companies nurture a culture of innovation ?

I mean everybody knows that Steve Jobs has an unbelievable and un-quenchable desire to make products that the competition can only just marvel at ! forget outdoing, they can not even ape Apple products properly.
But is it just Jobs alone in Apple that is responsible for innovating ? Is he the one that comes out with ideas ? Or is he simply a terrific leader who inspires innovation !
Take BMW as another example - those guys build tanks that move like the wind ! And they always make it unbelievably better than the last one ! For a company that goes as far back as 1916 - they don't have a Steve Jobs there, or in P&G. And enough has been talked about Google and it's innovation speed.
What these companies have in common is a culture of innovation , better still, they have processes that help nurture/ facilitate this culture.

Operationally what that means is that people are empowered to ideate and implement those ideas and their organizations are willing to take the risk of spending R&D dollars for driving those ideas to success !

Learning to design with TDD

This stems from a post Nitish wrote about TDD (Test Driven Development) and how developers end up making a sales pitch to their managers for using the methodology.
While discussing the same, we travelled on a tangent (not so far away) viz., what is the prime objective of TDD and are all/most
developers who practise (or try to) it, able to achieve it.
We converged that the true objective of TDD is to arrive at a good robust design that the code in question runs on. As a beneficial
side-effect, you get code that the QA team strugles to look down upon and you end up spending lesser time debugging it -
to arrive at a tangible comparison that must lead to this conclusion deserves a separate discussion (post).Well, truth be told, if we look at the context of the internet, where the LAMP stack has made it so convenient to build websites
that programmers (?) exploit the supreme forgiving nature of the PHP platform to the hilt. Good modelling, robust design and
architecture are milestones that are too far in the future.
So as a coder, I know about OOPs and abstraction to implementation as much as a few key books in college could engage me to read.
But that's just about it. In India at least the schools don't really teach you designing models and approaches.
That begs the question : can practising TDD help bridge this gap ?
Playing with some code and tests with the help of Eclipse pointed the needle to Yes ! But that's java - a language whose developers
are pampered with a number of high quality tools that make it so much fun and so smooth.
If you talk about PHP - the poor Rolex (Eclipse/Junit) replicas like SimpleTest and PHPUnit leave a lot to be desired.
But The possibility of these tools aiding developers ignorant to design pracices, learn by doing, is not bleak at all.
Soon, would be experimenting that and see if the hypothesis is correct.

Mumbai battle won

Thanks to the brave security personnel - the NSG commandos, army and the police. But this marks possibly the beginning if a new era where the citizens of India would want to take things in control and work to make this nation a better place to live in, rather than waiting for the politicians to do so.
Angry people talking on tv panels, peace marches being carried out in various places - this tragedy will not be forgotten like the others. And it should not be. Not because the terrorists struck the elite, who possess the power (by virtue of their networks) to bring about a change, possibly a revolution, but because, this was the last straw. It was outrageous on all accounts. The fact that a handful of people can land in our country with loads of arms and ammunition, enter the financial capital, spread around , strategize an attack and go about their business of spreading terror - unnoticed, unchecked !
There is no guarantee that this would not happen again. Especially because we have nincompoop people like the CM of Maharashtra and Home Secretary who say that "We did not have exact information" and "such incidents can happen in a big city". Preposterous !

Mumbai under Fire

It is devastating.A country of billion+ has been glued to their tv sets, watching a handful of mercenaries taking the city under siege. Enough has been talked about it over the last couple of days..
Anger, frustration, shock are common responses to the situation. But the agony and pain of affected families can only be understood by some one who has lost a dear one in an un-natural fashion. The only way to console oneself is to blame it on destiny - wrong place wrong time.
The security agencies, - army , police, NSG have done a great job at handling the situation, and lost the best people too. I salute them.
While most news channels are battling it out for being the first one to break a news or get an exclusive piece of information before or after taking gaps to run ads - so out of place. There were some who had eminent personalities speaking their minds about how they felt - Suhel Seth for one was quite angry, visibly.
Then there are opportunists, Mr Advani was quick to jump and comment that the Government is not doing it's job, Mr Vajpayee was swift enough to write/sign an ad published in the newspapers urging voters of Delhi to vote for the BJP (Sic !)
I don't know much about politics, but what I do know is that at times like these, all people ought to come together, brave the situation, and find ways to disallow such incidents pro-actively for the future. Governments have come and gone.. Assam, Punjab, Kashmir .. terrorists, naxals, mujaheddin.. whatever you call them, these people have been hitting this country time and again .. there have been people like Mr. Rebeiro and Mr. Gill who have found means to suppress /regulate and even eradicate such evil ideologies.
They must have done a lot of things right.This is a wake-up call for the country and there is no snooze button no more.
I am trying to think hard about how civilians like me can help in getting the house in order.. it's difficult for the law-enforcement agencies when people are not happy even with a security gaurd outside a mall frisking them (the rigor of frisking is questionable alright). When we are insisting to get our way by bribing - be it a traffic offense or anything else.
For starters, we should :

respect the law and be more sincere in abiding by it
stop giving bribes
be more watchful of activities around (not being snoopy in people's personal lives also)
report inapt security / measures in public places we visit
Am thinking of more concrete and radical steps that could start off some sort of a revolution driven by the people to take things that matter - in their control, if not in control then have a strong viewpoint in unison and make the governments and the bureaucrats and politicians, etc bow down to it and work towards them.
It's time to REBOOT INDIA.