Posts

Making Sense Of Unicorns

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Contemporary attitudes towards disruption by new technologies revel in the notion that there is opportunity in uncertainty, in the space where the physical and the familiar can be replaced by the digital and the novel, and where value is created by shifting bits in an app and across the internet. It’s an appealing idea. Virtually anything is possible. With funding and passion. Experience something you didn’t enjoy? It was too slow? It was too cumbersome? The service was poor or lacked a sense of experience? Then do something about it. Let’s consider Uber. It was started by a couple of millionaire entrepreneurs who were apparently caught cab-less on a winter’s night in Paris in 2008. Uber is lauded for not owning any vehicles or employing drivers, its value is derived from the market platform it has developed, an API (protocols which allow seamless interactions between different software applications) technology stack, which efficiently matches riders with drivers. In this platform econ...
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Detecting Patterns

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This is how I imagine a future visit to a radiology department to be when AIs do the diagnostics. I’ll walk into the radiology section and will be instructed to go to the booth. A disembodied voice will tell me where to stand and to position myself. After the scan that same voice will read out my diagnosis. If it’s not programmed to understand my question I will battle to find a person to talk to. The only person who can really answer my question is the radiologist-turned-engineer halfway around the world. He would say something like: based on pattern match of the size, shape and position of the blob found in your body you are likely to be suffering from the diagnosed condition. This was cross-referenced with the database of other humans who share my correlated genetic markers. A treatment plan might be generated or a referral will be made. If it turns out that the diagnosis was incorrect based on my response to the treatment then additional data points based on my profile will be inge...
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Leadership Aikido

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Have started re-reading a book I picked up almost 20 years ago. It’s called Leadership Aikido by John O’Neil. Here are some of the keys points. Old-style industrial-era command and control leadership is not sustainable. He describes he Green Glass Age to reflect the coming together of the environmental concerns and biological advances – the green – with communication and computing power – the glass (glass being the colloquial term for silicon wafers and fibre optics). The way to the new style of leadership can be understood and learnt by the lessons of a particular form of defensive martial art known as Aikido (the way (Do) of life forces (Ki) in harmony Ai)). Leadership is about overcoming internal enemies: Failing to grow emotionally Failing to make creative connections Failing to emphatise Failing to manage the ego Failing to overcome alienation and boredom by mastering these practices: Cultivate self-knowledge Get creative – usually through the creative arts Find a passion Learn fr...
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Inconceivable Nature Of Nature

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Feynman on the light and electromagnetic radiation waves all around us. He describes it as fascinating as it is not as how we have come to think of all the waves simplistically. The perspective he gives illustrates how messy and fascinating it all is. These waves are all around us but we perceive only a fraction of them. We think that the visible light spectrum which we perceive makes up the bulk of sensory reality but it’s only a fraction.
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Culture Vs Strategy

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Change is challenging. The world is seemingly more complex and interdependent than it ever was. The pace of change calls into question old models of thinking about the world in general and the way we organize businesses. Smaller is better, agile is more productive and adaptability is non-negotiable. As a result we now focus more on how we design organisations and attract and retain talent rather than developing long term strategic plans. Take customer centricity for instance. Putting customers at the heart of organisational design has become the mantra for companies to remain relevant, survive and continue to thrive. What is often overlooked is how we implement this change. Stating a vision and aligning it to a strategy is necessary but not sufficient to become customer centric. We need to change our mentality, behaviour and habits. Much like achieving a New Year’s resolution we have to fundamentally change how we act. Retaining old organisational design habits is also severely lim...
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Big Data And AI

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Harnessing massive volumes of data and developing predictive models is the 21st century’s arms race. Google, Facebook and others are leading the race. Technology innovations are morally neutral. It’s how we choose to use them that determines whether they produce good or bad outcomes. Big data and related Artificial Intelligence algorithms are different because machines can be taught to make decisions on our behalf. Depending on how these algorithms are developed human bias can creep in and distort outcomes. Data can also be analysed to find cures for diseases, alleviate poverty, and combat climate change on the one hand or to get us to click on ads more often and buy more stuff on the other. Today, we voluntarily give up personal data about our physical activities to ‘earn’ Apple watches and cappuccinos or allow Insurance companies to monitor our driving habits in exchange for reduced premiums.  Tomorrow, we might allow our brains to be probed for the lure of big screen TVs and fre...
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Customer Satisfaction Surveys

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In their quest to be customer centric many companies conduct post interaction surveys to gauge customer satisfaction. These come in the form of telephonic, email, sms or web-based surveys. These have reached epidemic proportions and are now counter productive. If a customer has received outstandingly poor or great service they will be moved to communicate this. Companies should rather be geared to collect and analyse these spontaneous and authentic reactions. The current trend of gauging satisfaction after each and every interaction wastes time, becomes reflexive and generates more noise than signal. At the very least these dip stick surveys should be limited to annual questionnaires or risk low quality and indifferent responses which entirely defeats their purpose. Zaheer
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