Skip to main content

Make versus buy

Chickpet is one of those serendipitious destinations in Bangalore. Every visit there, like in many other city markets is a revelation. Today, when we went there, the Raja market was one such revelation - this place sells stuff that people use to make dresses, jewellery and suchlike. The place was crowded to the brim - which means that there is a sizeable set of people who make their own creations - designers if you will. One of the things I have often believed that India is a place where people dont do their own work - as in, the DIY industry is non-existent. Todays visit made me rethink that assumption at one place atleast.

Anyway, we had to buy a timepiece for the house - since the one in the kitchen had outlasted its working use. And while conversing with the shopkeeper (conversing with shopkeepers in Chickpet is a great eye opener) - I realized that he sells clock movements (Thank you Ajanta, clocks - for figuring out that there is a market here) as well. The clock movement costs some 60 rupees and a full timepiece costs some 140 rupees. So, while we bought the timepiece, we also bought a movement set, and, with the kids, plugged it into a CD and created a clock with a Lego housing.The clock now occupies a place of pride in our front room (and I presume it will keep moving around as the kids wish).

The thrill that this simple activity worth some 65 rupees and some one hour of our time gave us is unimaginable. The more I think about it, making stuff with kids is one of the most constructive learning experiences for them (and for us).

And then, why cannot it be so for adults?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The man who saved Pumpelsdrop

This was a story we had in college if I am not mistaken. Perhaps it was in school, but a delightful story it was. The story goes somewhat like this ( reproduced from here ), but the college version we had was slightly different from this.  I t was a dull, gloomy and a depressing morning in a town named Pumpelsdrop in northern England. The Great Depression had brought all the businesses to a standstill. The bored automobile dealer was spending time alone, as usual. But, this seems to be an unusual morning as an odd entity (customer) appeared on the horizon. A man in a bright suit walks up to the dealer and says, "I need to buy a Rolls Royce Phantom II. We have a business conference coming up and I need to impress my customers". Then proceeds to pay 10% of the deal with a single check for 2000 pounds. The rest he says will pay when he takes the delivery.   The auto dealer was stunned. He was delighted to hear that someone is holding a business conference of some kind and

The Mintzberg triangle

At a recent training, someone spoke about the Mintzberg triangle. I located it here . Image from that page reproduced here. The page linked above has a better explanation of diagram above, but what intrigued me was that the triangle exists for practically anything. The facilitator referred to this in the context of facilitation. Of how facilitation has science, craft and art to it. That is so true,  I thought. Worth a thought! Need to read of Mintzberg though...

Waigaya and Sangen Shugi - Honda

Two big takeaways from Driving Honda were Waigaya and Sangen Shugi. A few days ago, we were working on a strategy module for a company. As we leafed through old and new theories and books around the same - one comment which caught my eye was Henry Mintzbergs comment where he says "Strategy is like weeds, it has to grow all around your company" A lot of times organisations dip into their pool of employees (and sometimes customers) and solicit ideas from them. This happens either at an offsite or a meeting or some quarterly review and the ideas pile up. Most companies today have an innovation program that encourages bottom up ideation. Many of these ideas are future strategy - provided someone is listening. Sometimes these ideas are not immediately implementable - but if one keeps looking, there might be valuable stuff in there. And if (post such programs) ideas die very often, the motivation of someone to keep doing it will also diminish. Waigaya is what Honda call