I saw a headline other day about Nani in trouble with Fergie in Manchester United. He has been demanding more money, saying his career is being curtailed and got benched. Next day I was watching a ManU match and saw the veterans Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes playing – I think they had long career with ManU, well past their 30s and still favorites. I think Paul Scholes had an injury where he had some vision trouble – still Fergie stuck with him and he is still considered one of the best, still scoring crucial goals and making perfect passes. On this particular match, saw Nani wasting too many chances and Scholes opening the score. Then there was news of Fletcher getting a standing ovation – making appearance after a serious illness. At the same time the kind of stars that exited (or forced out) are staggering – Beckham, Nistelrooy, Ronaldo, Tevez. Rooney came close to getting kicked out when he acted too smart in between. Then there is the example of Real Madrid (who in fact picked up most of the ManU stars) – galactico and the super achiever Mourinho is other extreme of it.


Where I am going with this is the much discussed aspect of Fergie dealing with super stars who is hurting the team, thinking they are better off somewhere else, they deserve more than they are getting, their show getting better than themselves. Many of these stars went out while they were the top scorers in the team and in EPL (sure, he made good money for the club). But having the belief in the current team that they will pick it up and still have a shot at being champions even after removing the super stars is commendable – it shows the trust in the existing team which in turn builds loyalty.

I see some folks these days who are stars (or perceived to be critical for the project/account), but in effect hurting the team and generally being bullies. Sometimes the super stars should be let go for the remaining team to stay together and achieve more. It is hard decision most of the time, but postponing that kind of decision will continue to hurt.

PS: but still confused whether taking in Van Persie was right decision..

continuous learning

a good quote, from Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker.

individuals will have to learn new things well after they have become adults – and maybe more than once. what individuals have learned by age twenty one will begin to become obsolete five to ten years later and will have to be replaced – or at least refurbished – by new learning, new skills and new knowledge.

individuals will increasingly have to take responsibility for their own continuous leaning and relearning, for their own self-development and for their own careers. they can no longer assume that what they have learned as children and youngsters will be the "foundation" for rest of their lives. it will be the "launching pad" – the place to take off from rather than the place to build on and to rest on. they can no longer assume that they "enter upon a career" which then proceeds along a pre-determined, well-mapped and well-lighted "career path" to a known destination. the assumption from now on has to be that individuals on their own will have to find, determine, and develop a number of "careers" during their working lives. 

Wal-Mart story continued…

Few more from Wal-Mart story. As before, I compare continuously with Infosys from the perspective of organizations which continue to perform even when they are big.

It’s almost embarrassing to admit this, but it’s true: there hasn’t been a day in my adult life when I haven’t spent some time thinking about merchandising. I suspect I have emphasized item merchandising and the importance of promoting items to a greater degree than most any other retail management person in this country. It has been an absolute passion of mine. It is what I enjoy doing as much as anything in the business. I really love to pick an item – may be the most basic merchandise – and then call attention to it.

Many of our best opportunities were created out of necessity. The things that we were forced to learn and do, because we started out underfinanced and undercapitalied in these remote, small communities, contributed mightily to the way we’ve grown as a company. Had we been capitalized, or had we been the offshoot of a large corporation the way I wanted to be, we might not ever have tried many of those things.

For us, thinking small is a way of life, almost an obsession. And I suspect thinking small is an approach that almost any business could profit from. The bigger you are, the more urgently you probably need it. At our size today, there’s all sorts of pressure to regiment and standardize and operate as a centrally driven chain, where everything is decided on high and passed down to the stores. In a system like that, there’s absolutely no room for creativity, no place for the maverick merchant that i was in the early days at Ben Franklin, no call for the entrepreneur or the promoter. Man, I’d hate to work at a place like that, and i worry every single day about Wal-Mart becoming that way.

Just interesting to see the passion in the first place. Other thing is the advantages of being small to start, being forced to adapt and innovate. Lastly on the need to continue to innovate rather than being tied down with operational efficiency alone.

Your stores are full of items that can explode into big volume and big profits if you are just smart enough to identify them and take the trouble to promote them. I can name you a lot of retailers who were originally merchandise driven, but somehow lost it over the years. In retail, you are either operations driven-where your main thrust is toward reducing expenses and improving efficiency-or you are merchandise driven. The ones that are truly merchandise driven can always work on improving operations. But the ones that are operations driven tend to level off and begin to deteriorate. So Sam’s item promotion mania is a great game and we all have a lot of fun with it, but it is also at the heart of what creates our extraordinary high sales per square foot, which enables us to dominate our competition.

So when we sit down at our Saturday morning meetings to talk about our business, we like to spend time focusing on a single store, and how that store is doing against a single competitor in that particular market. We talk about what that store is doing right, and we look at what it’s doing wrong. Focusing on a single store can accomplish a number of things. First, of course, it enables us to actually improve that store. But if in the process we also happen to learn a particular way in which that store is outsmarting the competition, then we can get that information out to all our similar stores around the country.

This was interesting. What if the senior management sits down with one client account a week to see how it is performing and what more could be done?

Walmart Story

Just completed Sam Walton’s auto biography. The contrast of Walmart and Kmart (then and now) and story of the growth of Walton from one franchisee store to an empire made it very interesting. In case you are not familiar with Kmart, this statement from the book puts in perspective.

Compare Kmart and Wal-mart after they had both been on the street for ten years. Our fifty-plus wal-marts and elevent variety stores were doing about $80 million a year in sales compared to kmart’s five hundred stores doing more than $3 billion a year. but kmart had interested me ever since the first store went up in 1962. I was in their stores constantly because they were the laboratory, and they were better than we were. I spent a heck of lot of my time wandering through their stores talking to their people and trying to figure out how they did things.

Now the situation has reversed. I had a Kmart near where I lived – parking lot used to be empty, whereas nearest Walmart used to be full – enough said on their current positions.

Few other quotes and my thoughts below –

Say I bought an item for 80 cents. I found that by pricing it at $1.00 I could sell three times more of it than by pricing it at $1.20. I might make only half the profit per item, but because I was selling three times as many, the overall profit was much greater. Simple enough. But this is the essence of discounting: by cutting your price, you can boost your sales to a point where you earn far more at the cheaper retail price than you would have by selling the item at the higher price. In retailer language, you can lower your markup but earn more because of incremental volume.

What happened was that they really didn’t commit to discounting. They held on to their old variety store concepts too long. They were so accustomed to getting their 45 percent markup, they never let go. It was hard for them to take a blouse they’d been selling for $8.00 and sell it for $5.00, and only make 30 percent. With our low costs, our low expense structures and our low prices, we were ending an era in the heartland. We shut the door on variety store thinking.

But sometimes I’am asked why today, when Walmart has been so successful, when we’re a $50 billion plus company, should we stay so cheap? That’s simple: because we believe in the value of the dollar. We exist to provide value to our customers, which means that in addition to quality and service, we have to save them money. Every time Wal-Mart spends one dollar foolishly, it comes right out of our customer’s pockets. Every time we same them a dollar, that puts us one more step ahead of the competition – which is where we always plan to be.

on competion who didn’t make it –
They were bright stars for a moment, and then they faded. I started thinking about what really brought them down, and why we kept going. It all boils down to not taking care of their customers, not minding their stores, not having folks in their stores with good attitudes, and that was because they never really even tried to take care of their own people. If you want the people in the stores to take care of the customers, you have to make sure you are taking care of the people in stores. That’s the most important single ingredient of wal-mart’s success.

What’s really worried me over the years is not our stock price, but that we might someday fail to take care of our customers, or that our managers might fail to motivate and take care of our associates.

In IT, nobody is looking for luxury. Nobody goes to Cloud or Mobile because it is the new in-thing. They want to save money. 

job and happiness

Couple of quotes from one of very few blogs I follow since number of years:-

The traits of work that makes someone happy:
1. stretches a person without defeating him
2. provides clear goals
3. provides unambiguous feedback
4. provides a sense of control

Your level of optimism and quality of relationships impact your level of happiness more than your job does.

Obvious I guess. But of late I am finding that stating the obvious is an eye opener sometimes.

good day

The day was a complete disaster, until that point. I called home to let them know I started from office. She picked up the phone and said “I recognized the phone number. I was waiting for you. I will start getting ready, we can dance”. When I reached home, she was wearing four different colored beads, one necklace, red, pink, purple, orange, gold bangles, all with a blue dress. She said something in rapid fire fashion; I understood something like she will dance three times, one to teach me, one to dance together and one solo. Her mother was going to put on the radio and we will dance to whatever music that comes on. So we danced the weird dance, she was twirling and doing all sort of stuff with her face and hands and I had to repeat after her. It was too much for her mother / my wife to pass, so she recorded it. Thus it went on for couple of hours – her best friend called in between, she was all excited, she gave me a dictation, sang some songs, we played two varieties of hide and seek and in between all that she was studying for her final exam in LKG. It was not a complete disaster after all.


Earlier in the day..

I started the day reading “Design of everyday things”, thought about usability and slipped into a day dream about how I would start a new business which will vastly improve on usability of something existing and make me peanuts to live by. I drove to office, reached one minute before a scheduled call, took the call on mobile and had breakfast in between. Now can’t believe this is the same day and it just had been few hours since then.

Got into another call, one of those projects which is an experiment on chaos theory. Jumped into another slow burning furnace next. Had a tea with some friends where people were complaining about long running proposals with 3 deliverables per day, lots of ideas and too little direction, 22 proposals with 2 losses and 20 pending decisions and general venting on all things process related. Come back, discuss a project in medium risk, the kind of one which you can think of only with a sinking feeling. Straight after get to discuss how to revamp knowledge management in what we are doing – someone talking about collaboration, discussion, contribution and I was thinking that even if we get few of the hundreds of outdated documents updated it will be an accomplishment.

In between someone pinged in messenger and asked “when am I going to get a project??????”. From there on, it was all further downhill – came across someone who has visa who doesn’t want to travel, someone with visa who wants to travel only to a specific location, someone who want to travel anywhere except stay here, project starting but no one experienced to start it with. Saw three new polices in the same day and had issues with all three and better not get into that. Someone came asking about best practice with something specific which I directed to another and it came straight back that whatever I knew was in fact the only best practice.

I made a status report just to make sure that will be some status atleast someday down the line to report on, debugged why revenue was more than the estimate somewhere, sympathized with someone who got a much hyped code sample that the customer wrote for the project and found that from that grain of sand he has to build a whole palace. And on and on..
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I was telling her not to stick her tongue out all the time and that she will get rashes. I was getting angry and told her if she does that one more time, she will get something from me. The biggest problem I have is I can’t keep a straight face while strictly asking her not to do something. So she thought for a minute and started saying “you remember that advertisement, one uncle comes and asks if you can touch your nose with your tongue, then washes a toilet and the aunty also tries to touch her nose with her tongue.. nobody can touch it right? Like this”. Then she taught me to make 10 different structures with toy tea cups, empty jewelry boxes and a tumbler, before calling it a day..