Indian hockey - chak diya!

No, I am neither going to write a review for chak de! nor I would be writing a news item for Indian hockey team's victory over Korea in Asia Cup(7-1 victory is commendable).

I watched the final of Asia cup final on Sunday evening and yes it was a shocking victory (yes not a shocking defeat, but a shocking victory). Indian beat Korea 7-1 in an already flooded tournament - flooded with goals by Indian hockey team, who scored a mammoth 57 goals in the tournament. Then I coincidentally watched chak de, 2 hours later. I think this would probably be the reverse of what others would have recently done - I am assuming some of the so many people who liked chak de! might have watched the match.

This could well be a great opportunity for the celebrity hungry brand managers and media agents. For example even the news channels in my opinion have a good chance to spread their wings over some other sports and may be have dedicated shows for hockey.

Companies picking some of the good hockey players as of now could be spotting a good opportunity for much lesser a price than they might have to shell out in case they win another tournament and then all the companies jumping to cash them resulting in much higher prices for the new ambassadors.

It may look as if I am blowing Indian team's victory in the Asia Cup way out of proportion. But, as far as I can see hockey is one of the few games which can easily gain mass appeal in a country like India. I say so because,
(i) It does not require costly equipment to start with.
(ii) It does not need special courts or tracks for common man to play.
(iii) It is not a very complex game when it comes to scoring.
(iv) It's a good entertainer.

And then once upon a time... India was the best in this very sport and even though I doubt kids below 10 would know this, but it is India's national game.

I don’t think chak de was the motivation for Indian hockey players but it could be with these results coming in more frequently. Great hopes for hockey to gain its lost glory.

Does the menu matter ?

Have a look at some of the pictures I took while having dinner at Pizzahut on Sunday evening.





The pictures make everything worth eating and drinking. Drinks for example - under normal circumstance if everything is only written without any pictures then very few would really want to wander out of the normal Coke and Pepsi. But, when you open the menu and find a 15*10 cm picture of a refreshingly green "apple coolers.." it becomes tempting enough to try at least once.

Now lets look at what this could to the business. We as a group could have ordered a pitcher of Pepsi, which would have cost us Rs 90. But highly tempted by the pictures 2 of us ordered apple coolers and 3 ordered "masala lime" each costing 45 resulting into a total splash of Rs 225 only on drinks. That is 2.5 times what otherwise would have been.
Assuming that 1 of every 2 tables order drinks and 1 out of 5 such drink ordering tables is impressed by the pictures and makes an experiment, that would mean an increase of revenue from Rs 900 to 1035(vague approximation of all tables ordering same). This is 15% more!!!

The same goes for pizzas that we ordered.

15% more revenues for designing and redoing the menu once in every 6 months and including new and fresh pictures. I think the menu does matter!!

The bottom line for a restaurant is, pictures in the menu can definitely add value. But, remember it raises expectations at the same time and so living up to expectations is more important and difficult than creating those very expectations.

This is a practice seldom followed in Indian eateries, which I think is worth
spending some time and money in order to reap benefits from the visual impact.

Member Details

This morning I got a mail(in my bulk/spam folder) with subject line 'member details'.
I think this trick can definitely add traffic to the website at least initially.

The trick is, some website guys will send you thanks for registering on their xyz site with your username and password.

If you encounter a salesman approaching you with some product or file in his hand more often than not you look at him and say no, before even listening to what is he saying(in fact you don't even know if he is selling or buying). If you were a bit polite at the most you would listen to him and then say thanks, make some excuse for why you do not want to listen to him further. But now if he says "do you remember you bought that thing from us" or "do you remember we met" or may be something like "thanks for buying so and so" which you might have never bought, would you not be provoked to listen to him/her for a few more seconds and ask him/her back what is it that he/she is talking about.

Well the spam mails I am getting in my mailbox stating "thanks for registering at our website, your login details are following and please visit our website" is following the same trick(in my opinion). I think it does makes some new or gullible internet users to visit the website. In case you get an e-mail mentioning the website features, the possibility is that even the new internet users might not visit the site. This could be because they did not like the features or just that they are not involved with it. In case-I, it provokes them to think how could they be registered with this site so they visit the site to check it out.

I think the trick makes sense to introduce products to customers who are not willing to have even a single look at it.

2 years

2 years back from today, I joined this workplace. It was a fresh and new beginning to my career. I do believe I got a very good opportunity much better and higher than my expectations.

Over the two years I met lot of good and interesting people. Learnt lot of new things and saw places which neither I had ever though of or heard of.

Some of the things that come to my mind which i have realized/learnt:
1. It is not just the work profile that matters, it is the people among whom you work that matters equally.
2. Networking helps.
3. Its important to move on.

After having learnt my small share of the new things, now its time I start to unlearn as well so that I can learn new and more.

Learning is the key.

Being brutal

At my age I have read many a books on business which talk about performance and non-performance. All those authors often write about getting rid of non-performance and encouraging performance. I always thought it would be easy to encourage performance. At the same time when I read about the bell curve Jack Welch created I was shocked to hear that a team lead would be required to fire the bottom 5% performers of his team every year.

Jack himself said that he found team leads signing-off at the end of 3 years because there was no way they could fire someone they had been working with for 3 years and now he performed fine but was still at the bottom of his team.

I thought it was crazy but still always used to quote this example in any discussion that involved a point about performance. I did agree that it was an outrageous thing to do something like this but at the same time believed that if a standard of this sort could be established then others could try to establish standards equivalent to 80% of that by may be softening some of the rules.

I am standing at a position where my stance about someone's performance might result into a decision like that. Unfortunately the person in question is a good friend of mine. And more unfortunately an honest statement from my side might not result into happy state of affairs.

I do have sometime to decide on my position on the whole matter and I hope whatever I do is a rational and justified decision.

Comfort Zone

Life in a hotel sounds very dull, moronic and unusual. But, When I tell people I lived in hotel for 8 months(in China) then it sounds beyond all that = weird. Even I used to think it is silly to be living in a hotel instead of not moving into an apartment.

But, now I am missing all the comforts that I had in the hotel. From the cleaning of the room to change of bedsheets. From removal of towels in the bathroom to ordering of newspaper at 1 in the night.

Keeping apart all the problems of food and living alone and working 16 hours a day in a world totally away and different from yours now its time to live in a world that is not the same. Its time to re-create the comfort zone.

The old man and his God. Book review - IV

Author - Sudha Murthy.

I have not read Sudha Murthy before though I have read that she written quite a lot. This time I got my hands on it as my brother bought it.

The book is written in a very simple and plain style. Describing some very common stories that the author came across in her life. The statement she makes in the preface stands correct for such stories and it is that "we all come across such strange and touching incidents in our life it is just that we forget them".

Well some people makes note of them and get a chance to share with others. This is what Sudha has done in this book.

The book is written in a very simple language and does contains interesting stories with happy and sad endings showing different facets of life.

A good short read.

Back to blogging

Been here done this. I have been away from blogging even before and this time it was a higher degree as I stopped reading them too. But, the reason was not merely my laziness but also the block on accessing blogspot.

Now that I am in Bangalore, err.. Bengaluru, I there is no such block and I would be more regular to writing. If not writing at least reading them.

Let's see when I say more regular what can I come up with.

Blue Ocean Strategy. Book review - III

Authors - W. Chan Kim. Renee Mauborgne.
Publisher - Harvard Business School press

A typical management book it talks about creating a market for your business where you no longer compete with your existing competition. Though it is a bestseller. I did not like it too much for a few reasons like (i) It really does not gives any practical solutions instead it is giving too much of theoretical solutions (ii)It really does not tells anything new.

The book is written by management professors at INSEAD and hence is more like a consultant suggesting something instead of an executioner with task at hand.

The examples cited as reference to the strategy of creating a new market all make sense in hindsight because they succeeded but there would have been so many unique attempts that would have failed as well. Though the book does touches upon how to execute such strategies, convince people to allow changes and move things forward but again it is too much theory. Well I would say my understanding might not have been good enough but if you think you like business then do read the book to realize it is not fun to do business in fact to do business is a serious business and it is very important to do monotonous and not so interesting tasks in business.

The only blue ocean strategy I could learn from the book was how the authors made this book look technical with a complex name and still write not so very complex content (though the authors might have worked very hard to generate this) and make the book a bestseller. One good thing is the book is not very thick like other management books and hence can become a short read on some journey.

Languages and their meaning.

I remember a few years back for the first time when I read in some newspaper article that Chinese is a tonal language with every word having 4 tones with every tone having a different meaning. I thought, 'how stupid' and how do people speak such a language. Well I still think its 'weird' but now after having been in China for more than 6 months I have been seeing and hearing only that language.

Now after having worked out my way to speak a little bit to the waiters in the restaurant and to taxi drivers I find it interesting to learn this unique language more everyday. While learning this alien language (I mean Chinese and alien because it is as distant as an alien’s language would be, no disrespect to the Chinese language and people) what I realized is that all languages are as meaningless and meaningful as every other language (including Hindi).

Where as the 4 tones for every word result into 4 meanings, to count up to 100 all u need to know is 0-10 and then you can keep adding and multiplying the numbers to reach 100. e.g 2 is er and 10 is shi, so 12 is shi er and 20 is er shi, isnt that cool.

Just quoting a few examples here for short comparisons.
Most of the people know only one thing about china and it is "nihao" meaning “hello”. But, dissecting it, 'ni hao' means 'you good'. ni = you and hao = good. Co-incidentally I can relate this to Kannada (the language of Bangalore). 'ni' in kannada also means 'you' and in Hyderabdi (the commonly used language in Hyderabad which a sister IT city of Bangalore) 'hao' means 'yes'.
After giving much deeper thought to ni hao, for the first time I thought what do 'hello' and 'namaste' (Hello in Hindi) stand for and realized there was nothing much that could be dissected and understood more about these words. Now if you think its an easy language lets see how different tones result into different meanings and all the sense is lost.

"shou" in four different tones means(the number with each word represents the tone):

shou1 - collect.
shou2 - ripe/mature.
shou3 - hand
shou4 – slim/thing
Though reading about tones cannot help understand what they mean and sound like, most probably one cannot understand them even on listening to them. This is not a one-off example! Every word has four tones and every tone has a different meaning. Words with same tone can have different meanings too.

Now to avoid taking you more through the details, here is one last example;)

English - condom.
Hindi - Nirodhak
Chinese - biyuntao

Well I never learnt languages from scratch before and so I don’t know the origin of the word 'condom' or 'nirodhak' but here it goes for condom in Chinese.

Biyuntao: bi - to avoid, yun - pregnancy, tao - case/cover. ;) Well it does makes some sense. Say thanks to me for not mentioning the tones of each of the three parts.

P.S. The last example was the lesson a Chinese learning website published today (05-July-2007, www.chinesepod.com), which I refer to for learning some Chinese words occasionally.