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DoCoMo

Posted by Mandar Gadre on February 14, 2010

A couple of years back, a friend directed me to an excellent case study about one of the most successful Japanese companies – DoCoMo, authored by John Beck and Mitchell Wade. A spin-off from Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT), it gets its name from “Do Communications over Mobile network”. The book is full of interesting trivia and anecdotes throughout the six chapters titled Love, Inequality, Impatience, Luck, Fun and Strength. One can learn some interesting things from it, keeping in mind that case studies do not provide a formula for success, because there is none. Depending on the situation, someone could fail following all of the things DoCoMo did and someone could succeed without doing so.

The book starts with a chapter on Love, and talks about how DoCoMo won early, avid customers for its groundbreaking wireless technology by reaching out beyond the apparent and mainstream markets – appealing to hip trendsetters and gadget junkies, as well as active, ambitious professionals – and tapping into personal passions.

The one on Inequality states that economics is all about inequality – it makes trade possible, increases demand, drives competition, enables innovation! One can make money by creating value out of this disparity. Sometimes, the differential is pure luck (e.g. Californian Gold Rush); sometimes it is the inequality of information.

The chapter on Impatience illustrates how the restless energy and all-encompassing focus of its chairman Kouji Ohboshi saw DoCoMo through a series of early crises, each time emerging more determined and stronger. He is known for his ‘cockroach’ style – he scurries around, gets into everything around him, doesn’t wait for a network of others to find out what’s going on, doesn’t pause for consensus to build. He does a lot of prior consultation on the grass-root level before executing a new idea (a beautiful gardening term for this is ‘nemawashi’ which means preparing a tree for transplant.)

A very crucial chapter on Luck shows us the big lucky breaks DoCoMo got, and more importantly – what it did with those. It was spot-on on timing, and quickly executed innovative ideas. Then follows the chapter on Fun. It is a powerful antidote to risk, driving innovation ahead. Fun takes creativity to the next level and boosts learning. The authors say that innovation comes from someplace beyond our flow charts and process manuals. Fun is the best way of getting there.

The last chapter is about the inner feeling of Strength that DoCoMo has enjoyed. Not a tyrannous force, but a gentle one, which radiates non-threatening confidence allowing great partnerships. DoCoMo did not try and dominate and exploit content providers by charging too much. They just distributed, sat back and made money, while content providers guessed people’s tastes, came up with new content, created a buzz, maintained the servers. Staying inside your limits takes strength, especially in a booming market

DoCoMo’s story is about all these emotions; a great read indeed.

Posted in Economics, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

The Damned Rain (and All of Us?)

Posted by Mandar Gadre on February 10, 2010

“The clouds have gone missing, my eyes are like the rain-thirsty birds..
O my Mother Earth, please let the rains pour down.. now!”
- A distressed farmer, in Gabhricha Paus.

The weekend brought a screening of the Marathi movie “Gabhricha Paus” (The Damned Rain) to our campus. Written and directed by Satish Manwar, it is a unique movie on the horrible problem of farmer suicides in India. Without getting melodramatic, it is a shaking-to-the-core, in-your-face depiction of the current situation. No blame game played, no plausible solutions proposed, no questions answered.

Kisna is a farmer who owns a few acres of land in a village near Nagpur. Even when there are suicides happening all around him, Kisna puts up a brave fight against irregular rainfall, debt, lack of infrastructure and financing and more. Kisna’s family is confused and worried about his mood, and tries to keep him cheerful lest he considers a suicide. To the viewer, Kisna’s positive attitude is apparent when he proclaims: “As long as my heart beats, I will not give up farming“, as the other farmer has given up and replies with a sigh – “That’s what I’m saying – now only death can save us from this misery.”

Kisna faces an uphill battle and it is heart-wrenching to see the way it ends. One is left with so many outcries, so many questions and a feeling of helplessness about the situation. One farmer in the movie says: “Farmers’ suicides were always happening. Now their number has increased, that’s it.” It is very, very painful to see the very people who literally provide us with our food stuck so bad that the only way they see out is to end their lives. As Eisenhower had put it, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.”

There have been numerous reports and discussions about farmer suicides in India for over a decade now. The issue is not a new one and the situation has been worsening to the point that the reversal seems an unsurmountable task. As P Sainath analyzes in this article, the total number of suicides have been increasing, and it is rampant in the Big 5 States: Maharashtra, MP, Karnataka, AP, Chhattisgarh.

The “Damned Rain” – the irregular and insufficient downpour is just one part. The problem is multi-faced: concerning lack of infrastructure, lack of sustainable practices, problems of land distribution between the owners and actual farmers, farmers under perpetual debts from money-lenders (which are not covered by the loan-waivers from the government). Other issues are planting only cash crops with no variation causing the rich soil to be drained of nutrients. There is wastage in storage and transport. Then there are the middlemen, the baseless fluctuations in market prices and the list goes on. So many devils of our own creation.. looking at this, the movie could as well have been titled ‘The Damned Rain (and All of Us)’.

The real question remains -
What can we do? What should we do?

Posted in Development | Tagged: , | 6 Comments »

We Accept You, {$name, $descriptor}

Posted by Mandar Gadre on February 6, 2010

We have heard the famous legend about the Parsis coming to India centuries ago. Upon arrival the Parsi leader was taken to the court of the King of Gujarat. Having pondered over the situation for a bit, the King presented the Parsi with a glass of milk full to the brim. The Parsi replied by mixing a spoonful of sugar in it, conveying their intention to be assimilated, adding value to the local life without unsettling it.

There have been much discussion and discourse on this accepting nature of Indians. There are and will be multiple views about it – the factual-only ones, the proud ones, the critical ones saying it is one of India’s virtues gone past the limit. It is interesting to see how our knowledge about humans in a state of positive affect and the neurotransmitters in the brain help us understanding the tendency to accept.

‘Affect’ denotes the experience of feeling or emotion, one of the three domains – cognitive, conative and affective – described in modern psychology. It is broadly classified into positive (excited, alert, determined) and negative (upset, guilty, jittery). There are multiple studies on the influence of positive affect on various behavioral and cognitive aspects. To quote Prof M A Isen at Cornell: people in whom positive affect has been induced, compared with those in control conditions, have been found to be more sociable, cooperative and helpful to others. In addition, the research has suggested that positive affect can influence the way cognitive material is organized and thus may influence creativity and problem solving.

For humans in a state of positive affect, the neurotransmitters seem to broaden the brain processing, helping the person at alternative thinking and creativity. The brain is less focused and far more likely to be receptive to interruptions and to any novel ideas or unexpected events. This is unlike a tense situation where the brain focuses on the details right there in the front and tries to deal with the situation at that very moment, temporarily leaving the big picture aside.

A relaxed brain under positive affect is more flexible and ‘accepting’ in general. Could this have played a role in case of Indians being open to so many external influences – always accepting new people, new cultures? The Indian landscape – decorated by numerous rivers, temperate tropical climate with beautiful monsoons.. the soil so fertile that one could just toss the seeds on the ground and get a good crop. Small kingdoms spread all over the place, with mostly no one emperor too big to be defied. Ample availability of sunlight, food and water, with moderate political stability facilitating a generally happy life could have led to a more sustained state of positive affect.

No wonder they welcomed the Parsis with milk, not swords.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged: , , | 3 Comments »

Bending the Rules

Posted by Mandar Gadre on January 31, 2010

“[Some rules] can be bent, others can be broken.”
“Let it all go, Neo – fear, doubt, disbelief.”
It is a gem Morpheus is passing on to Neo through those fabulous dialogs from The Matrix.

Dialogs from that movie can hit one at the strangest of times. One of those came to me sometime last year, when I got a chance to meet and learn from Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan. While we were going through some beautiful alaaps in Raga Bilawal, Ustadji let open his bag of tricks. His eyes sparkled as he took us down a winding road through the musical landscape – talking about the intricacies of that enchanting composition at hand, about Pt. Ravi Shankar’s book My Music My Life and what music meant to its doyens of that stature. As he elaborated on the aaroha and avaroha of a raga, he explained how playing with the avaroha can completely change the feel and thus the raga. It is very important to assimilate the descending pattern of swaras, he said, for the raga gets its distinguishing characteristics from there. Quite intrigued by this comment, I asked him if it was true for all ragas.

He smiled and said, “There are no hard-and-fast rules like those. Musicians may bend and break various ‘rules’ depending on how far they have gone. If you are a beginner learning the rope-balancing act for a circus, I will tell you to look straight ahead, balance yourself using the pole in your hands, and take steady steps. But once you are through the basic training, you are going to break all those rules and literally dance on the rope! So for now, just follow what your teacher is trying to tell you. You’ll know when you’re ready.”

Amazing.

Better one is at something, more so the rules turn into guidelines, guidelines reduce to mere convention. I remembered listening to Pt Kumar Gandharva’s Chaiti Bhoop where he inducts the excluded swara shuddha madhyam; and reading about Feynman pondering over the problems in theoretical physics in strip clubs. Bold, audacious, non-conformists – such giants exude endearing idiosyncrasies.

Having understood this, a person is able to really unlock the unique potential he/she has. Not worrying too much about crippling rules, one grows comfortable with subjective notions of ‘’true’, ‘right’ and ‘apt’; with customized solutions which need not be applicable everywhere but are appropriate in a particular context. People question and learn with an open mind, having been freed of having to hold any single notion as the ultimate truth. Freedom from the shackles of one’s own creation!

Paraphrasing from The Matrix, it’s not the Rule that’s bent, it’s We.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged: , , , | 5 Comments »

Whatever happens, happens for good??

Posted by Mandar Gadre on January 28, 2010

We have heard this phrase just too many times: ‘Whatever happens; happens for good’. It sounds like a wise saying, but it is plain simple baloney.

Giving it a ‘benefit of doubt’, one would imagine that it is probably an effort to look at things optimistically – to make someone see the eventual positive outcomes of an otherwise horrible and unfortunate series of events. It cannot be proved wrong and be discarded either. In other words, it is not an infallible statement and hence, not a scientific statement. This comes from its vagueness – it provides neither the definition of ‘good’, nor states for whom it is ‘good’, nor gives any timeline during which the ‘good’ is supposed to happen.

Firstly, there is no one definition of ‘good’. If one is bent on seeing the positive side of things, eventually he/she will succeed in doing so. Especially when there is no benchmark of what is ‘good’ and how much good it is; and in theory there is infinite time for this ‘good’ to happen. No set expectations, no lower bounds, and ever changing circumstances with a flexible definition of ‘good’. How convenient! And given enough time, nothing is impossible. Literally.

Secondly, there are so many things which are ‘good’ for a set of people and not so for others. But even if we take them out, there are still things which are bad for the vast majority – fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, economic downturns, various kinds of accidents. (‘vast majority’ because there could be people who benefit from certain calamities – remember the safety vault manufacturers flourishing during the economic downturn?)

There are countless bad, catastrophic, unfortunate things happening all around. There are the random occurrences, along with the phenomena we do not understand yet, and the phenomena which we understand looking backwards but are unpredictable nevertheless. Whatever happens does not necessarily happen for good – not for everyone’s benefit in any case. Terrible things happen, and it sucks being in this world for so many people all their lives and for the most at least some part of theirs. We do not need to create a feeling of false hope through any pseudo-wisdom. Discarding it is not pessimism, but plainly being realistic.

Science does not concern itself with such statements – they are not testable hypotheses. We owe it to Karl Popper who underlined the idea of infallibility and its relevance to scientific methodology. More than being a mere saying, the quote reflects the mentality and unscientific thought process of a large number of individuals which is disturbing. As Bertrand Russell had quipped while illustrating his idea of the Celestial Teapot, one can fake being wise and right by being vague. Such “wisdom” is misleading and dangerous. It would serve us well to avoid the trap.

Whatever happens, happens for good.

Posted in Philosophy | Tagged: , , , | 6 Comments »

dislocations, decentralization, diversity.

Posted by Mandar Gadre on January 24, 2010

While studying crystalline materials we were taught that smaller grain size helps in increasing the yield strength. Within a certain limit one could refine the grain and the material would become stronger! The phenomenon was explained in terms of imperfections in materials – dislocations – being impeded by the boundaries between the grains. Smaller the grains, more boundaries to stop the dislocations from sliding, and more is the stress required to get the material to yield. The strength of this material lies in the numerous, small grains spread around – an example of collective strength without any one central controlling entity.

One is reminded of Alvin Toffler’s Third Wave, and Gandhiji’s ideas of economic decentralization. Toffler’s proposition went along the transition from ‘standardization with one-size-fits-all’ to more customization, political dissent with the rise of regional interests and evolution of democracy from periodic polling towards more intimate interaction between the government and the people. He predicted the rise of the integrated ‘producer-consumer’ or the ‘prosumer’ society. Long before him, Gandhiji had championed self-sustained villages as the backbone of Indian economy. He promoted a simple, local, environmentally friendly, decentralized economy based on small-sized enterprises. A compelling case is made by E. F. Schumacher in his Small is Beautiful.

Among the rare interesting pieces in the Michael Moore film Capitalism: A Love Story is the profile of the Petaluma, California based Alvarado Street Bakery. In this 30-year old co-op the employees are more than just stock-option holders; they form the actual board of directors. They run the company, everyone has equal voting power and the CEO makes essentially the same amount of money as an average worker. It is quite an interesting model with characteristic self-responsibility, democratic control, openness and independence. A working model of decentralized economic control.

All these connect together pointing towards the benefits of intelligent and minimal central control. A dream froths – of a vibrant Indian economy with thousands of enterprises developing customized solutions to local and global problems. They may be small, varied in their forms, philosophies and working styles; and the landscape may be utterly chaotic. But this boosts uniqueness and truly preserves the diversity. It is not a one-pillar palace dependent on working of a single controlling entity, but a dynamic collaboration of numerous self-stared ventures.  There is no deference to a single central idea or body of regulators. Innovation, thinking outside the box, breaking the shackles of orthodox rules are not mere buzzwords.

It will be a step closer to the Open Society, as dreamed by Karl Popper and others – which does not hold one single idea as The Ultimate Unquestionable Truth and does not shun itself from new and alternate theories, ideas, outlooks and interpretations. Ah, a breath of fresh air!

Posted in Development, Economics, Philosophy | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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