Serendipity and Learning

Smaller companies innovate better? Happened to read this piece on Koenigsegg somehow while reading something and searched for more of their innovations and  here is what I found There is more on their website:  Automobile innovations . And heres their ex-design head talking about annoying design trends in automobile design.

Recently I was part of a team that conducted two events. In one of the events, the "owners" of the event took charge of the stage. They wrote everything that described every guest, every word was thought about and rehearsed and delivered and timed. The event started on time and ended exactly on time even though there were some (as usual) mid point glitches (nobody knew them - but the owners had planned enough Plan B's in the system). The result was a fabulous stage management with the event appearing professional. For the second event, we had invited someone else to compere. The compere, especially professional comperes are specialists. They are highly skilled, they know how to connect with audiences, how to engage and bring out the best in an audience. They have a great voice, good selection of phrases, but if you have noticed, some of them don't prepare enough because of the confidence of their skill. Which is why you notice that in company offsites, they often mis-...

 Every company claims to be customer first. Yet, they bombard you from day 1 on cross selling, upselling, notifications (check the types of notifications on any app), phone calls, spam emails.  A grocery app has decided to add ads before the customer starts adding to the cart. It also sends me useless information on nutritional value of cabbage (yes, it does). Plus sends me useless offers on a continuous basis. I finally silenced notifications.  The ecom app sends me more scratch cards than I can ever itch. And I have not managed to use a single one yet.  Ditto with the payment app that sends me off on useless collections - stamps, tiles, destinations and what not.  The bank, has spammed me so much I have auto blocked most numbers.  And oh, the grocery app which got taken over a conglomerate, has suddenly offered me a personal loan.  If you are customer first, can you please stop it? Point being: How do you know when to stop? Is it so difficult? Put yo...

 I chanced upon this fascinating write up on Google Maps via Twitter (@angsuman). I wont write more about the post, because you have to read the post, but in that, this caught my eye.  That is a post attributed to this post by Steve Yegg - Why I left Google to join Grab .  The main reason I left Google is that they can no longer innovate. They’ve pretty much lost that ability. I believe there are several contributing factors, of which I’ll list four here.  First, they’re conservative: They are so focused on protecting what they’ve got, that they fear risk-taking and real innovation. Gatekeeping and risk aversion at Google are the norm rather than the exception. As someone who loves and follows stories of innovation, this is both surprising and not surprising. Surprising because it is google. Not surprising, because companies, businesses, individuals - once they reach a point of success often begin to repeat the actions that led to success which ultimately leads to t...

 As a trainer, one of the ways I build the audience connect with metaphors and examples. For instance, in India if you used Sachin Tendulkar and Vinod Kambli as an analogy - everybody who was more than 5 years old in the 90s gets it.  Similary, there were cult movies and dialogues and statements and events people are familiar with. Sometimes when you want to drive home a point, these analogies come in handy.  According to me, this is one of the toughest leaps in training people who are from a different culture.  But now, over the last few years, with the fragmentation of content and the things people watch and relate to and recollect, this corpus is shrinking. There are audiences who swear by GoT while there are others that GoT even exists. Ditto for comics, bollywood, hollywood, classical music, sports, fitness and hobbies. There is almost no "mainstream culture".  Of course there is,  it is just tough to define it in a way that everybody in the room relat...

 Many of us have an aspersion to networking and networkers. As do I. Some years ago, in one of my conversations while taking over a new role, I was asked to network. Given my reluctance to network, I redefined it in my head. I redefined networking as "meeting for work" or "create work and a necessity to meet". Networking (or the lack of it) continued to haunt me when I was working a consultant. Until I came upon the Giver/Taker/Matcher framework of Adam Grant. The motto of networking is to network without networking. Or in other words, networking without expectation of anything. Or in other words, be a giver to your network and watch it grow.  Over the last few months, I have given my time for coaching, brainstorming discussions, reading articles or CVs, connecting job seekers to companies (and vice versa), made a course for an educational institution, engaged on panel discussions with students, worked on organizing an event. And within the company, worked on projec...

 Many years back I was (as usual) breathlessly presenting an idea to a colleague. I was relatively new in the firm and I thought I had found something interesting. The colleague listened to it calmly and said, "This is such a great idea, but hey, I have just submitted a proposal for exactly this to the boss." I was disheartened and stopped working on the idea.  Time passed and every time I spoke to the colleague about the idea - it was always round the corner. In fact it was round the corner till the time I quit. That was when I read the story of cookie-licking . This is a slightly old blog - it is all of 13 odd years old, but give it a read.  So, this colleague was indulging in cookie-licking by preventing my team from working on this idea. And as time passed, I discovered that the said colleague had many licked cookies and yet, no cookie was ever eaten.  Thoughts as I learnt that one of those initiatives was still "just around the corner"