Some of the iconic CEOs – Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos – are known for their obsession for exceeding customer expectations. How about Disney? Since I had never had been a Disney theme park, nor had any ” Moments of Truth” at Disney, I did not know that Disney is also famous for its extraordinary customer service. But thanks to Ron Baker, Founder of VeraSage Institute, I learned so much about excellence in customer service. Ron posted a series of 3 articles in LinkedIn, and I found each of them remarkable and insightful. I am sharing the articles below.
Category Archives: Business
Steve Jobs and “Focus”
Who was the most iconic CEO of the last decade? Very few people will disagree with the choice of Steve Jobs. No wonder there are so many books about Steve Jobs and the Apple story. While many of the books are interesting, the most read book is likely to be “Steve Jobs”by Walter Isaacson. The book is about 600 pages thick and naturally, it would be quite comprehensive and would cover most important aspects of his life(I haven’t read it yet).I am sure the book is also the favorite of many of his admirers, fans and probably even critics.
While there are so many things that can be learned from Jobs, one of the most legendary aspects of his life has been his razor like focus. In his popular daily blog, Fred Wilson(a Venture Capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures), writes about this aspect “Focus”. He says that “Focus is critical when you are three people, when you are twenty-five people, five hundred people, and ten thousand people. You can always get farther faster by saying no to too many projects and too many priorities. Pick your shots carefully and hit them. That’s what Jobs did to turn around Apple and that’s what you can do with your company too.” The full blog can be read here.
As an entrepreneur myself, I have been trying to apply this principle of “focus”. At our company, we have been focusing on only one vertical and that has served us quite well so far, especially we are so much resource constrained. And “focus”is required not only in new firms, but also in every aspect of life. Do you agree?
Big Data & Analytics – Some insights
I had the opportunity to attend a workshop today on “Big Data & Analytics” organized by TiE(The Indus Entrepreneurs), Chennai. There were 3 speakers, two from the industry and one from the academia.
The first speaker, Mr. Kumar Narayanan, Adomita, spoke on the topic “New business models around Big Data / Fast Data and Analytics“. He shared that Singapore is spending $500 million in developing the Big-data ecosystem in the country, with the goal of achieving revenues of $200 Billion in the next 10 years. He also gave the differentiation between “Big Data” and “Fast Data”. He also shared some of the business models around Big Data. What really caught my attention was some statistics that he shared – 80% of the unstructured data is video and voice, and the rest is text. So, any company which is into the analytics of video and voice has a big upside potential .
The entire speech by Mr. Narayanan can be found here.
The next topic was “Why your unstructured data is a blessing, not a curse” by Mr. Venkat Viswanathan, LatentView. He highlighted the fact that unstructured data is created at an unbelievable pace through social media, blogs, etc. The amount of user driven content like photos, videos,etc is mind-boggling. He spoke about the future of Big Data and how the unstructured data opened up tremendous opportunities.
Click here to access the speech by Mr. Viswanathan.
The speaker from Academia was Prof. Rangaraja P. Sundarraj, DOMS, IIT Madras, who spoke on the topic “Big Data and Predictive Analytics Opportunities.” He explained that Analytics depends on 3 pillars – Big Data, Cloud and Frequency of Requirements.He explained the applications and models for Big Data.
His speech can be found here.
The 3 speeches were followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A, which was quite insightful . Overall, the key takeaway for me was that there are lot of opportunities in this space and quite a few companies that are working and making great progress in the space. Now, the question is how to capitalise on the Big Data.
Any ideas?
Leadership lessons from Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos, who has taken the place of Steve Jobs as the leading tech CEO, is one of my favorite leaders, mainly because of his long term vision and strategic focus. His willingness to ignore the Wall Street and its dangerous obsession with quarterly earnings is legendary and helps him focus on his long term strategy for Amazon.
In this interview with Forbes, he details 10 Leadership ideas that he practices to keep Amazon.com on top. Two of ideas that I found very attractive are
a. “Obsess over customers” (everyone will agree that this is a cliche, but is very fundamental)
b. ” We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time”.
The full article can be found here.
The cover story on Amazon.com could be found here.
Which one is your favorite leadership idea?
Of “Cloud brainstorming” and the falling of language barriers
Twitter is rapidly changing the way we communicate, and different people use it in different ways. A few days back, as I was going through the some tweets, I was quite impressed by the way Anand Mahindra (Managing Director of Mahindra&Mahindra and an MBA from Harvard) was using it.
Anand was participating in a CEO conference and asked twitterers to send him some ideas regarding some plausible and implausible developments in business over the next decade. He got several ideas which prompted him to say “Prolific&excellent inputs fr which I’m grateful…It’s ‘cloud’ brainstorming lk cloud computing.Will retweet some….” (I like the expression “cloud brainstorming“)
One plausible idea that he retweeted was “barriers fall completely using real-time translators revolutionizing 1-to-1 commerce”. This caught my attention, as language translation is part of my daily life and fired up my imagination. Image what would happen if I could talk in my mother-tongue to anyone, anywhere in the world.
I lived in a multi-lingual atmosphere in India till a few years back, but technology was not available for real-time translation(RTT) at that time. Even though I had seen my East Asian classmates in US using the translators to aid their studies, my most interesting personal RTT experience came during my apartment hunting days in Shanghai.
During my apartment search,for some reason, my non-Chinese friend accompanied me to a property agent. My friend knew only basic Mandarin, and we were getting stuck at several points, unable to communicate our thoughts. We even tried sign language with limited success. Fortunately,the property agent was very internet-savy. She quickly typed something on her computer and then pointed to the screen. We realised that she was using Google translator to communicate with us. Even though many of the translations were hilarious, from the context of the situation we could understand what she wanted to tell us. Once I understood that, I typed in my response in English and used the tool to translate to Mandarin – Real-Time Translation at it’s best.
Currently I am in a German speaking environment and I use some of the online translators daily – Yahoo Babel Fish, Google translate. But the difficulty is that I have to type in each word in these translators. This cannot be avoided while reading a German book, but hated it when I had to copy and paste whole webpages to one of these translators. That was till I learned about the features in Google tool bar.
What Google tool bar does is to automatically translate the entire webpage to the desired language. This comes in very handy when I have to get some information from a German website that doesn’t have an English version. Take an example of the official Switzerland Weather website – http://www.meteosuisse.admin.ch/web/de/wetter/detailprognose.html . If you are on a German page and have a Google Tool bar, the toolbar will ask you which language you would like to translate it to. There are several languages available, including Hindi, Chinese and Greek. 
In fact, Google’s subsidiary YouTube is also using this tool for translating the titles and descriptions of videos. Even though the translation is not perfect, I believe that it is rapidly evolving.
This brings us back to the idea that came out of “Cloud brainstorming” – will language barriers fall? I believe that it has already started falling and if technology can be developed for Real-time voice translation, the “linguistic barriers” will one day be completely demolished. The same way internet demolished the “information barriers“. The implications of this will be enormous. What do you think?
PS: Will someone design a face mask that prevents “Swine Flu” and also do voice translation?