Illusions of Reality

I recently read a very interesting post on how marketing folks can use a theory of exclusion to attract people. The post (by Seth Godin on his blog) is at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/exclusion.html

Incidentally, just a few days ago when I was thinking about different perspectives of business, I started to realize that a lot of nearly every direction or aspect of business can be directed to human psychology. Seth’s post is an example of applying this to marketing, but same goes in stock markets, economics, finance management, leading teams and so on. Infact, wherever you have human interaction, you have the psychology in play. Infact, on this realization, I have been keen to study some material on applied psychology - not the typical dry-bone psychology theories (I dont dis-respect those but just that they are not my cup of tea!) - but the pieces like above are very interesting and are of great importance in getting insights to how situations can be dealt with in business.

Often when we think of the Gurus of today’s markets, we think of them as the true innovators - ones who’s concepts changed market paradigms. But, as I am reading more and more stuff on founders of great companies, my (amateur, limited and self developed) knowledge of psychology says that treating things in this heroic way is just something that brings a feeling of charm and perhaps thats why everone is not ready to look into the details and see if it was that princely.

I have been reading the book Founders at Work that captures interviews of many legends in the technology business arena on the initial days they spent starting their companies. And the more I read this stuff, more I get convinced to something I have thought in past but never got convinced at.

Reading that GUI and mouse was not Apple’s idea sounded like an exception to me earlier. The fact that Six Sigma was not Jack Welch’s baby again was taken down as exception. But, now reading this book, I have noticed very interesting aspects.

Max Levchin, PayPal cofounder started with ideo of building crypto for mobile devices. Catarina Fake, Flickr cofounder, started her company with her husband with the concept of making an online game. Mike Ramsay started Tivo with Jum Barton creating network servers for home to build a complete computerized home entertainment network.

These insights have all been very interesting to bring out a fact that great visionaries havent been Godly creatures knowing what’s going to happen 10 years down the line and building exactly that stuff. But probably, Godly creatures are the ones who have identified concepts from laboratories or changed their minds when they have seen something that will click. That way, its more about identifying a concept and then applying it in the right way that has been as important as the actual concept, or probably more important. And these things have not happened all pre-planned; one has to move ahead keeping the radars open - perhaps an important lesson - to analyze things but not over analyze (or in words of one of my friends, not to get caught in the analysis paralysis).

I have been thinking over my previous post and now think of adding something to what I wrote yesterday.

Repeating the earlier thought - what current social networking websites provide is a base network to do a lot of stuff together online. Now, there are specifically themed social networking websites that enable people with common interests to join in - these websites certainly provide a common starting ground for discussion, linking and activity but these can be considered social networking sites targetted towards smaller group. A user would certainly not want to join 3 or 4 social networking sites to cater to different likings he has. So, future of these sites would be rather bleak since a larger number of user’s contacts (assuming that user is not fanatic for one thing) may not be on that website - giving him a good reason to not join in.

So, we would very much want a social networking website that can offer multiple themes and common starting points of discussion. What social networking sites have built upto now is large amount of very valuable information such as what are people’s likes and dislikes, professions, locations and so on. Focus needs to be turned towards use of this valuable information - not just for interactive customized advertising but also to provide or enable more interactive content, features and capabilities to make stick to the website.

Like many of the internet users, I have been avid and frequent user of one of the many social networking sites that are ruling the page hits, number of unique visitors and other such charts these days. However, a lot of times I end up just being in there trying to think out what more to do here? And I really feel that a lot of other people probably feel the same way.

Looking at this from a basic concept perspective, most of us like hanging out with friends or people whom we know where we kind of do activities for which we share common liking. We then use these friends or contacts to also help us with information and assistance for many needs that may come up - things like admission to universities, jobs, moving to new places and so on. Social networking sites enable us to take the "hanging out together" concept online, which is great since it removes physical distance issues. But once this task of putting people in touch with each other is achieved, a lot of stuff is left to be done by the users - things like building groups/ communities, contests, etc.

In my perspective, to take social networking to another level, probably a bit too much is left just to users and thus, this phase of being on a social networking site and then wondering what more to do. Now, this is a rare situation and opportunity where you have got visitor’s time - but not more to offer to the visitor. From my viewpoint, social networking sites need to take this to another level by giving a way to the users that are networked on its sites to have collaborative fun via doing something on common interests as well as find approaches to enable leveraging of the built network for person’s use.

Here’s an example for how social networking sites may help leveraging networks a person builds on their sites. Lets say a person is moving to California where he does not know anyone and wants to use his current web of network on a social networking site to find if he can reach a contact who lives in California to help him out. Typically, user would be able to do this by searching friend’s lists and checking locations and so on to determine this - now thats exactly an example of "a bit too much is left just to users". One approach to help here can be to enable the user to search up to "X" levels of network contacts whether there’s someone from California in these lists whom he can contact and say - Hey I am Y’s friend and so on. I must say here that implementation that I’ve put on is just an example and may differ - I say so since the way features work on social networking sites is a very sensitive area so implementation feature for anything needs to be deeply and well thought out.

An example of how social networking sites may want to enable friends to collaboratively have fun is via better content sharing and at times the sites themselves starting themes or putting up content to trigger talks and discussions. A place on the site where the site may put some content of the ongoing cricket world cup and asking people to upload pictures and videos and then triggering a forum/group/ community like discussion on that would certainly generate more traffic and keep people more and more addicted to the site. Usage levels of websites such as Youtube should give the social networking sites a hint in this direction - this can be more like merging of a content sharing website and social networking website. I understand a lot of social networking sites allow you to share your photos and videos, but that’s about it. This needs to be taken to a further level and again currently it’s a bit too much is left just to users.

The above basic concepts would certainly require detailed implementation thought process and organization of user data in a systematic way to enable greater search and browse capability and probably a lot many more steps that I have not yet thought of - but this certainly is the area where social networking sites can march ahead.

PS: If you are aware of any social networking sites doing one thing or the other in these directions - leave me a comment.

Ever since the web has been overloaded with heaps and heaps of information  and as a common man has started to imagine that he can look for more and more of the things on internet, reaching the right information quickly has become one of the most critical aspect. Google’s success with effective search, cry for everything metadata, emergence of Web 2.0 - all point to the same thing as well.

And I beleive this is exactly what the creators of like.com would have thought when they came up with an interesting and innovative idea of visual shopping. How often do we see an item and intend to have one that is similar to what we see. It is easy to judge that the probability of this happening is much more rather than we intending to put in description of the item we want to buy to search it out. Like.com pulls items from agencies such as Amazon.com and then provides a visual "likeness" search for items. So you can pick a t-shirt displayed in their catalog and then say show me other t-shirts similar to this one. What’s more - it allows you to specify what aspect of the t-shirt is more important for you - color, shape or pattern? This helps its search engine determine closely what likingness you want to search out. Additional search criteria include specifying color, prize range and other common search filter criteria that common catalog systems provide. And all this - without a touch of the keyboard!

The site is, however, in alpha release right now and its future growth and success depends on many factors:

- How accurate and fast is the visual search?
- What variety of aspects can the item search on and for what variety of items?
- How far can it go? (Can I just click Brad Pitt’s photo that I see on a news article  and get a look at the watches that are similar to the one he’s wearing in that photo..? )

In any case, certainly impressively innovative.

Before a couple of years from now, I started reading a lot of business leadership inspiration kind of stuff. The Jack Welch, Lee Iacocca, Lou Gerstner kind of stuff. As I read books after books, it started appearing how the effect of factors such as work-culture, knowledge of company values, deep impacts of management and company leaders were one of the most important and contributing factors to success of the great companies.

However, working here at one of my company’s client site (lets call it C) has kind of confused me to a certain extend. At C, most of the IT related work is outsourced (not just to India for cost savings but to other IT services provider companies in US as well). So, every project involves as many as half a dozen teams from different companies meeting together to work. Even the managers for C are contractors who would work here for a period and move on.

The benefit that C extracts out of this is slim company structure with minimal fat layers. So once a project is over or a technology is out of date, its not C’s head ache to take care of these people. And this is not an uncommon structure - infact most companies prefer this model.

But, at the same time it is very apparent that each of the participating vendors try to keep an edge over each other at all times and in process, end up giving top performance. C need not take up all the head ache of keeping close track of all the things - the vendor managers do that out of desire to bring in more and more business.

Now, all this brings into my mind a few questions:

1. If shrewd business desire can bring in so much of push to performance - isnt outsourcing in this way a better deal? And yes, where’s the limit to stop outsourcing things? Even the project and program managers are contractors these days.

2. How are things such as team spirit, common goals, common culture, etc handled or work in such a model?

3. Is the company probably giving up long term goals for short term objective of minimizing fat layer and keeping its structure cost effectively slim?

Opinions and thoughts are more than welcome!

So why exactly do I intend to start blogging? What do I have to contribute to this immense web of blogs that have sprung up serving a wide variety of purposes right from diary/journal kind of things to more liberal journalism?

Well, atleast at this point in time, I look forward to share my gyan on the following aspects:

- Technology from a business-markets-consumer perspective.

- My take on numerous books and other online resources that I read.

- Approaching MBA or rather setting up the mindset for an MBA.

Warning: This SoP may change at any point in future without any prior notice. So, invest your time in reading this page at your own risk!!