Remembering My Very Own 9/11

 I was in New York that fateful morning. A callow 45-year-old flush with the success of a mid-size five-year-old advertising agency, investing in our very own dot-com at what turned out to be the fag-end of the dot-com boom. It was an e-learning start-up, twenty years ahead of the Byju's of the world. We were in New York as the first leg of a coast-to-coast tour to potential customers of the e-learning engine we had developed. I was also looking forward to exploring tie-ups with a couple of Madison Avenue ad agencies whose bosses I knew. The founder of the e-learning set-up and I were staying in an upper Westside apartment of an excitable Bengali-American investor banker. The e-learning company contracted the banker and two other US-based Indians - a lawyer and a Silicon Valley techie - as business development partners for the US market.

The previous day, we met with a couple of dot-coms as potential white-label customers. Then, on the 12th, we met in Boston with the professor in charge of e-learning initiatives at Harvard. 

I had scheduled a breakfast meeting with one of the two advertising agency bosses on the morning of the 11th. 

The office was a few miles uptown from the World Trade Center. A half-hour or so into the meeting, Charlie's secretary interrupted the meeting, saying Charlie's daughter was on the line saying it was an emergency - a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers. Charlie didn't seem very perturbed. He told the secretary he would return his daughter's call later. Charlie explained to me that a mini plane had crashed into the tower piloted by a novice who probably had got his license due to connections a few years ago. He lamented America's rich-can-get-away-wth-anything culture and feared, being a staunch Democrat, that things would only get worse under Bush Jr.

We wrapped the meeting in 10 more minutes. As I took the elevator down from the 45th floor, I had no idea anything was amiss. However, as I hit the street, I saw a large crowd in front of a storefront transfixed by images on a large TV set in its display window.

I joined them and felt the first rumblings in my world, a seismic change that would reverberate over the next few years and shake up my world beyond recognition.

The next few days were a fuzzy mix of TV talking heads, the excitable Bengali's rantings suggesting that the US should immediately nuke Afghanistan and the lawyer's Trumpesque (in retrospect) conspiracy theories. I knew that not only was this business trip doomed, but we probably had made the wrong choice of business development partners.

I should have also realized that 9/11 would accelerate the fading out of the dot-com boom but, sadly, I didn't. So we returned home but continued investing in the e-learning venture, whose viability was entirely dependent on the US market as, those days, the Indian market for Internet-based ventures was extremely shallow.

A few more years and a few crores later, the e-learning venture went bust, with a critical reason being that we needed to recognize the end of the dot-com era in the US. The loss of capital combined with a scandal-driven bust of one of its key clients led to the nine-year-old until-then-successful ad agency going bust,

I resurrected a new life out of the ashes but never again joined the ranks of hot-shot successes. After a few years of painful readjustment, I found my angle of repose—the satisfaction of rewarding work without the accoutrements of fame or wild success, an interior quiet that gives me a broader perspective of the world. 

9/11 shook my world, too. But after the first traumatic decade, the second one has been, personally for me, a decade of finding balance and peace.

Can we say the same for the world? The financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent decade of recovery and growth is a perspective that implies that. 

If the world can contain the scourge of social media and inequality-driven tribalism, perhaps a third even greater decade fuelled by a revolution in biosciences and AI is to follow. Personally, as I look forward to going from being 65 years old to 75 years oldish, I look forward to my mind being AI-assisted and my body holding up well thanks to the coming miracles of cutting-edge bioscience.

Class Project - Introduction

Among communicators, it is the belief that stories are the most useful way to convey ideas and deliver impact. Today’s post “Class Project — “Introduction” is the first of a series of posts. A series that uses the narrative technique in the hope to inspire at least a few baby boomers like me. Provoke us to get out of our post-retirement armchairs and pontifications and go out and try to make change happen,

As I sat across Prakriti, the Deputy Collector of Akola, I felt a quiet sense of accomplishment. I was sure the rest of my Class of 81 mates — Sunil, Ram, and Iqbal — sitting with me thought the same.

My mind went back to that day 18 months ago. That day the chat on the Class of 81 WhatsApp group had got entirely heated between the overt and covert anti-Modi and pro-Modi supporters. Underlying it all that anger and disagreement was the notion that somebody else was responsible for the perceived mess in the country.

Ram, one of the more perceptive and quieter ones among us, caught the underlying drift.

He wondered how a group of 60 plus years old, all educated at the country’s best institutions at a high cost to the exchequer, all having tasted great success in one field or the other essentially making money for themselves and others, did not feel any pang of guilt at their hand in making the mess.

And how we all felt important enough to offer analysis and solutions from the comfort of our near-retirement material success.

Shouldn’t we, at least now with all-out material needs met, get off our backsides and do something concrete to improve the lot of the so-called underprivileged we spoke and wrote so much about and seemed to have for whom such great sympathy?

So Ram called Sunil, Iqbal and me and spoke about his feelings. Over the next three weeks, we bandied ideas around and came up with a plan to test if people like us could make a difference to the life of others.

Sunil’s cousin Prakriti was the DC in Akola, and we decided that we will offer our services to Prakriti. We planned to shift to Akola for a year and work with her to try and improve the Government schools and primary care system in her district. She accepted, and the four of us have been in Akola for the past 15 months.

The story of what happened is exciting, and I will tell it in short, bite-sized instalments.

Suffice it to say the experience changed much in us, and Prakriti tells us that it has done significant good to the schools and primary care system in her district

Surprising learning is that the change went beyond external outcomes. But happened within the four of us and the scores of teachers and primary care workers, we interacted closely with over these months. It is almost as if we catalyzed for each other a change within which then radiated out to positively affect our work, our relationships, and our thinking like no external event, control, or process could have.

One fundamental change within me now is how I perceive the power of words. Words are the vehicle that allows intent to catalyze change. To be the change, you want to see.

The Calculus of Change

In most post-modern business, economic and social circles ‘growth’ is a holy cow. However consider what environmentalist Edward Abbey once said “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”. Could it be that an unconsidered chase after growth has been the cause of dysfunctionality in many of our social, economic and business systems and organizations? Technology has enabled accelerated growth in almost all fields of human endeavor but has this growth been all in the right direction? Take the growing ability to cover long distances with the minimal of physical effort. The direction this growth has taken has produced among other things a sharp spike in lifestyle diseases, road rage, pollution and the corrosive and distorting politics of oil. Let’s go a tad deeper into the realm of personal growth. Isn't the chase after more power, more fame, more money to the detriment of all other dimensions of growth a cancerous affliction of the human spirit? What we perhaps need to revisit is the calculus of growth. Our growth paradigm today is differentiation. The rate of change towards a mad hurtle towards the ‘more’. Shift to integration in the calculus of change and we get back to the gestalt: the complete view. And then we perceive that there is constant beyond change that sums up to health and happiness. Easier said than done. Nevertheless, good to remember and revisit, now and then.

The Morris Theorem, Hard Ceilings and the Dead Cat Bounce

Ian Morris, a Stanford University professor of classics and history, in his path breaking book “Why the West Rules- For Now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future”, postulates what he, rather immodestly calls the Morris Theorem: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable and safer way of doing things. And they rarely know what they are doing”
Morris also postulates that every civilization climbs the ladder of progress until it hits a “hard ceiling” of social development. The units of time that underpin Morris’s analysis of the relative rise and fall of the East and the West are in hundreds and thousands of years. Morris’s analysis is in the same league as that put forward by Arnold Toynbee in his “A Study of History” and Paul Kennedy in his more recent book “The Rise and Fall of Great Powers”.
When I think about what Morris is saying I find myself mulling over a couple of points.
The first point is in the context of what regular readers of this blog would have noticed: my disgust at the current state of the Indian establishment and my avid, if armchair bound, search for means to change it.
Does the Morris Theorem provide insights in this regard? Does the establishment continue to flourish because us the “greedy and lazy” people find it easier, more profitable and safer to not just overlook the faults of the establishment but, in most cases, strive to be accepted as a part of it? Are violent revolutions successful when they create conditions when it is no longer safe to be part of the establishment? Is there any other way?
The second point is where in the cycle of ascent and descent is the Indian civilization. Did we hit the hard ceiling around the times the Vedas were created? Is the past century showing signs of an upturn?
Or are we just experiencing a “Dead Cat Bounce”? The “Dead Cat Bounce” is a stock market term. When a share falls precipitously it experiences a tiny resurgence at the bottom of its fall, a resurgence that is known as a “Dead Cat Bounce”. Many a clever stock market operator has profited from a Dead Cat Bounce by recognizing it for what it is. However disaster awaits those who, out of Irrational Exuberance, mistake a Dead Cat Bounce for something else. Irrational Exuberance? That is another story.

The Calculus of Change

In most post-modern business, economic and social circles ‘growth’ is a holy cow.

However consider what environmentalist Edward Abbey once said “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell”.

Could it be that an unconsidered chase after growth has been the cause of dysfunctionality in many of our social, economic and business systems and organizations? Technology has enabled accelerated growth in almost all fields of human endeavor but has this growth been all in the right direction? Take the growing ability to cover long distances with the minimal of physical effort. The direction this growth has taken has produced among other things a sharp spike in lifestyle diseases, road rage, pollution and the corrosive and distorting politics of oil.

Let’s go a tad deeper into the realm of  personal growth. Can the chase after more power, more fame, more money to the detriment of all other dimensions of growth could be viewed as a cancerous affliction of the human spirit?

What we perhaps need to revisit is the calculus of growth. Our growth paradigm today is differentiation. The rate of change towards a mad hurtle towards the ‘more’. Shift to integration in the calculus of change and we get back to the gestalt: the complete view. And then we perceive that there is constant beyond change that sums up to health and happiness.

Easier said than done. Nevertheless, good to remember and revisit, now and then. Like we revisit the child who once were.

Marketing 3.0: Marketing To Change

Meet any marketing person today and she will tell you how rapidly marketing is changing.

In the world's most competitive market-the USA, where arguably the discipline of marketing is most evolved, it is all about how the emergence of digital is destroying long-running shibboleths and paradigms of media and marketing .

Meet a marketing person in India and he will talk about the emergence of modern retail (there is now a pause in the march of modern retail but before we write it off please take your mind back to the time when mobile services seemed to be a dead-in-the-water category in value-conscious India) and the increasing fragmentation of the media.

However I believe that the paradigm shift that has come to marketing is not in about how people consume media, analog or digital or where people shop (traditional or modern), it is not even about changing demographics (aging societies in US and Japan or the youth-dominated societies of India and China) .

It is about a tectonic shift on how people across the world see themselves and their lives.

This shift is from lives and self-image anchored in stability to lives and self-image geared to change. My 75 year old mother, 3 months ago started ,for the first time in her life going regularly, to the gym in our apartment complex ! My 20 year old son with regularity cannot stand today what he deeply admired just yesterday. And I am quite sure that the marketing services agency business that I own and run, with two other partners, will change its business model every quarter or so, not because it will be badly run but because it will be well run.

Marketing 1.0 was about displaying the wares. With the emergence of mass manufacturing and mass media emerged Marketing 2.0. At the core of marketing 2.0 is the brand. The brand is based on the premise that if a marketer establishes a relationship with a consumer beyond the transactional, such a relationship will become the growth engine of the business. Implicit in the notion is that, in essence, the value system of the consumer seeks relationships. The track record of brands over the past six to seven decades suggests this was true.

However what if today's consumer does not seek relationships but instead seeks change, continuous all pervading change? Would not such a state call for a new kind of marketing?

Premised on the above argument I propose for consideration a new marketing framework. I choose to call this framework: Marketing To Change.

The framework I am now beginning to build is based on a framework for change that
John P Kotter proposed in his seminal book "Leading Change. Why Transformation Efforts Fail".

Kotter's model of change has been created with reference to businesses attempting to change to better meet business challenges.

The essence of the model are the eight steps to change.


Step One: Create Urgency

"If many people start talking about the change you propose, the urgency can build and feed on itself."

Step Two: Form a Powerful Coalition

"To lead change, you need to bring together a coalition, or team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources, including job title, status, expertise, and political importance."

Step Three: Create a Vision for Change

"When you first start thinking about change, there will probably be many great ideas and solutions floating around. Link these concepts to an overall vision that people can grasp easily and remember"


Step Four: Communicate the Vision

"Don't just call special meetings to communicate your vision. Instead, talk about it every chance you get"

Step Five: Remove Obstacles

Recognize and reward people for making change happen.
Identify people who are resisting the change, and help them see what's needed.
Take action to quickly remove barriers (human or otherwise).

Step Six: Create Short-term Wins

"Nothing motivates more than success. Give your company a taste of victory early in the change process"

Step Seven: Build on the Change

"Kotter argues that many change projects fail because victory is declared too early. Real change runs deep. Quick wins are only the beginning of what needs to be done to achieve long-term change"

Step Eight: Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

"Create plans to replace key leaders of change as they move on. This will help ensure that their legacy is not lost or forgotten"

The application to marketing of the above model would be to view the consumer as an entity whose purpose in life is to make change happen every minute of her life and the brand's and through the brand the marketer's objective is to enable the consumer in this purpose.

Lets see if we can then work out eight guiding principles of Marketing 3.0 based on Kotter's eight steps.

The "Create Urgency" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to record and reinforce the change she desires?

The "Form A Powerful Coalition" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to find and communicate with other people who are in the same frame of mind and do this as the frame of mind changes?

The "Create A Vision for Change" principle: Can he brand enable the consumer to find a pattern in the changes she experiences and desires that inspires her?

The "Communicate The Vision" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to megaphone the inspiration in order to reinforce it?

The "Remove Obstacles" principles: Can the brand provide outlets to withdraw and vent her frustrations as a step towards overcoming obstacles?

The "Create Short Term Wins": Can the brand set up a self-directed 'pat-on-the-back" system for the consumer?

The "Build on the Change" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to run a virtuous cycle between change and achievement?

The "Anchor in Culture" principle: Can the brand enable the consumer to recognize her need for change in the need for change in the organization she works in and the society she lives in?

I agree that the above principles are abstract but that is where a new paradigm always begins. You will agree though that the above principles portend a completely fresh brand and marketing templates.

It is also clear that no one brand will embody all eight principles. In fact brands will be positioned by which principle or set of principles they embody. Going a step further maybe the product and service categories of the future will be driven by a matrix of the eight principles and everyday functional needs.

While the first stating of a new paradigm might be abstract but every valid paradigm must begin in reality. I have begun the search for looking for examples of Marketing To Change already happening in markets across the world. I invite you to join the search.

The Discipline of Change

Change is the new greed.

About a year ago, greed was good with everyone. Then comes disaster and the only one who seems to have done alright in the past twelve months is Mr. Obama.

And what is Mr. Obama all about? Change of course. And hey presto, change is the new greed.

When greed was good money was, so to speak, the currency.

Money, get away.
Get a good job with good pay and you're okay.
Money, it's a gas.
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star daydream,
Think I'll buy me a football team.

Money, get back.
I'm all right Jack keep your hands off of my stack.
Money, it's a hit.
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit.
I'm in the high-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet.
(excerpt from Money a number on the album Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd)

Now that change is the new mantra, the currency is earnestness. It is quite heartening how all our politicians this side of forty are suddenly in their mind harbingers of change.

So don’t be surprised as we have change all around us in a couple of months. Quite literally that is. On ubiquitous posters, wall paintings, TV, radio and press ads.

All of it funded, of course, by the abundant harvest of old greed even though the change is the new greed.

And change as the theme of the season will soon fall upon that other field, besides politics and advertising, that so depends on platitudes: management consultants and experts. What would you except after Satyam?

I am all for change. Really I am.

What makes me a cynical about the current brouhaha about change is that it is the page three types and the same old scoundrels in our country who are embracing it. This trivializes the theme and I am worried that this will delay the taking up this theme seriously by people who can make change happen.

Change is not an idea or even an objective. Change is a discipline.

When change is only used an empty slogan or a new peg to hang the same old platitudes on, it will swallow its users.

An embracing of real change over the past few decades has led to the China success story. In contrast the theme of change in Russia after the fall of communism has in a large measure been rhetorical and the negative results are clear.

Real change is a hard taskmaster. China has mounted the tiger of change (any allusion to Mr.Raju’s infamous tiger is unintentional) and if China gets off before the tiger is satiated it will be definitely be clawed badly if not eaten.

Change is the deepest theme of the evanescent world of Maya. Change is the dance of Shiva.

The makers of change start at the roots.

Mr. Obama started his campaign for change at the very roots of the political process. The roots of power in politics lay in your grass roots support.

There was a time when this support was built from where it should naturally be built. The French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the movement for India’s Independence are cases in point.

However most of current politics had got lazy, perhaps as most of current society.

This lead to politicians banked on inheriting the grass-root support of entrenched political parties and getting funds from entrenched special interest. The politics of the stagnant status quo naturally followed.

Mr. Obama started from the grass-roots. He and his team sweated in building a grass-roots army of volunteer neighbourhood to neighbourhood. Bringing into the political process individuals who otherwise would have remained clear of.

Mr. Obama and his team built most of his funding dollar by dollar through people donating in the tens of dollars.

There were of course many who donated in the thousands and even millions of dollars to Mr. Obama’s campaign.

But the strength of the ready army of small donors with no entrenched interest but that of change brought a better life for the many counterbalances and keeps in check the special interests of those who donated in the thousands and the millions.

This counterbalance is what gives Mr Obama and his administration the strength to stand up to the special interest of the status quo as he goes about delivering change.

But this is not the only reason why I back Mr. Obama to deliver on his promise of change. Not fully perhaps but substantially. It is because he and his team keep on, according to reports, hoeing the discipline of change after Nov. 4th 2008.

Consider this excerpt from an article by Joe Klein in Time titled “Barack Obama Promises New Destiny. Work Begins Today” about how Mr. Obama and his team set about the task of delivering change where the rubber meets the road:

Quietly, the Obama transition team reviewed every government agency "to find out which specific programs were working and which weren't." It was a terrifyingly brisk and comprehensive process, especially compared with the dust storm produced by the last Democratic President, Bill Clinton, during his chaotic transition period. "During Clinton's transition, you had all these people writing ad hoc papers about what to do at this agency or how to deal with that policy, but that was an extension of how Clinton's mind works," says one of the many Obama aides who is a veteran of the Clinton Administration. "Clinton had this great horizontal intelligence. He could pull an idea from a meeting he had in northern Italy and apply it to spreading broadband service through Iowa. It was amazing but not exactly efficient. Obama is more vertical. He pushes the process along, streamlines it. We had one 25-to-50-page policy paper for every agency."

The discipline of change is not just about the willingness to go the root and work long and tirelessly to make change happen root and branch.

It is also about nurturing the integrity that enables one to choose the steep and thorny route over the easy short-cut just because that way is right. Consider this excerpt from the same Joe Klein article:

In the midst of the transition, President Obama was faced with a telling policy choice: whether to declare a temporary sales-tax holiday. His economic advisers loved the idea. It would provide immediate consumer stimulus, a direct jolt that might unclog the commercial arteries. The money could be easily passed from the Federal Government to the states, which administer sales taxes. But Obama resisted and finally rejected the idea. "He thought it would provide a temporary benefit, that it had no substantial or lasting policy impact," a senior transition adviser told me. "I think he was remembering the campaign, when Hillary and McCain favored the gas-tax holiday, which he thought was frivolous, and he opposed it for that very reason — if we're going to spend money, let's spend it on investments that will make us stronger in the future."

Will Indian politics find its Obama?

I believe we will find ours within the next decade. I also believe it is not someone we heard of today in the national press.

He is perhaps in politics already. Perhaps a grass-roots worker of one of our main political party dreaming the dream that will bring change to India’s politics.

I also believe that an Obama is waiting to happen to the world of business.

As the old verities fall in the world of capitalism, the new paradigm is not going to come from the very experts who failed us in the first place.

It is going to come from a group of outsiders who will revisit global business from the roots up.

When that will happen it will be another manifestation of the discipline of change.

Breathe, breathe in the air.
Don't be afraid to care.
Leave but don't leave me.
Look around and choose your own ground.

Long you live and high you fly
And smiles you'll give and tears you'll cry
And all you touch and all you see
Is all your life will ever be.

(excerpt from the song Breathe from the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon)