Money. I have always had enough to meet all my needs and most of my ‘basic’ wants. But never have I had enough of it to take care of all the numerous fancies that regularly cross my mind and heart.
Until sometime ago I used to believe that the very rich do indeed fulfill all desires and therefore at least in that context must be very happy. After all don’t they say that you can never be too thin or too rich?
And then I met, after a gap of a few years, a couple I had known well. The couple had seen their annual incomes climb from being tens of millions of rupees a year to the stratospheric heights of thousand of millions. Chiefly as a result of the commodities boom that so characterized the period preceding 2008.
As Jyoti and I drove down, for a dinner appointment, to the seven-star hotel they were staying in, I looked forward to seeing the glowing transformation in looks and well-being that I thought immense wealth must bring.
As we drove back home that night I was in a mild state of shock.
We had a met a couple of individuals in despair. They had flown in that morning in their private jet and had shopped all day for diamonds without having the time for lunch. As they gobbled down dinner the worry lines on their rather haggard faces only underscored their talk:
“Of needy relatives who expected them to help out (can you imagine the greed!). Of cars costing thirty million rupees having been driven all of 300 kms in a year (where after all were the roads in this benighted country where one can drive such a car?) Of the armies of servants who ran their various homes across the world and who could not seem to fully conceal their feeling of unwanted intrusion when the masters came in, after a gap of months, for a short stay. And what of the Naxalite threat? Well the police and the security were taking care of that, though can you imagine even the police had to be paid what amounted to a regular salary? Of course, when they travelled, the private jet allowed then to fly over all that danger crawling on the ground though sometimes, one must admit, the weather they flew in seemed just as dangerous.”
What happened? Does really big money always do this? What is money?
At its core money is supposed to represent human effort.
Money represents a day’s physical labor or an hour’s use of skills honed over decades or the complex organizational skills and risk-taking abilities that is required to coordinate the efforts of large numbers of people.
However somewhere along the line (a few seconds after it was invented I suspect) money shed its representative context making it an entity by itself.
Individuals could accumulate it without any reference to the human effort they had exerted and to close the increasingly vicious cycle, they could then use it to distort the value of the efforts of other humans so that they could accumulate more money.
However human effort is an integral part of nature. Centuries of a system that distorts the value of an integral part of the web of life produces negative results. The increased level of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere and the resultant greenhouse effect are measurable and now much discussed and debated.
The increasing concentration of the value of the efforts of many in the hands of view is just as dangerous.
And just as those of us who have the largest carbon footprint become fat and sick, so also those of us who increasingly hoard and distort the value of the efforts of an increasing number of our fellow human beings become, at the core, miserable.
Not everybody who makes big money is a distorter. There is many a rich individual who treats big money as a reservoir of value to be dammed and converted to power that gives increased value back to others. In doing this, these worthies earn true respect and the happiness of quiet self-esteem.
It is only when money is seen as a possession for personal use that big money distorts not just the human community at large but very visibly the “possessor”.
Money represents a force of nature which when distorted produces disaster.
Pink Floyd, as is their wont, rocked to the true value of money even as they mouthed cynically the twisted role it currently plays in most human activity:
Money, get away
Get a good job with more pay and your O.K.
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 my stack.
Money it's a hit
Don't give me that do goody good bullshit
I'm in the hi-fidelity first class traveling set
And I think I need a Lear jet
Money it's a crime
Share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie
Money so they say
Is the root of all evil today
But if you ask for a rise it's no surprise that they're giving none away
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Monday, September 7, 2009
Break On Through To the Other Side: Chapter Two: Same Difference
I scrapped Chapter Two as I had written it two posts ago. Hated it on second reading. Nearly as much as Arthur did who, in his (her?) disgusted comment, advised me to stick to quadrants etecetra. Here is a fresh one. Arthur tell me how much you hate this one. I'll tell you the next time I read it. Sunder keep me going bro.
Chapter Two: Same Difference
After my father died, for a few years I felt very lonely. Not that he talked to me that much. Besides the occasional friendly cuff and grunt. He was a man of few words. Instead my time was populated by the dyad that my parents were. I celebrated as they laughed together and in their happy muttering in the quiet nights of our lean-to on the beach. I experienced tragedy in their occasional fights and catharsis when the happy mutterings resumed. When my father died the dyad was broken and it seemed to me my mother died too.
That changed.
A gull rested, in splendid isolation, on a rocky outcrop in the limpid light of a November morning. Its apparent loneliness drew me to it. I got close, closer when it suddenly turned and looked me straight in the eye. It was not just a kin it was my twin. The next moment I was soaring in the skies with the sea and the beach a single entity, nay the entire world a single entity spread right before me. Suddenly I was a whole flock of gulls flying in formation and it was not just the world that was one, the world was me.
Me, us, them, someone, no one, everyone, same difference.
When I came to that November morning spreadeagled on that rocky outcrop on that private beach that belonged to the Mafia Queen and which my mother, like my father before her, cleaned every dawn and dusk, my life changed forever. I ran back to our lean-to and for the first time in my life hugged my mother burying my head in her slightly damp midriff.
My collection of people started that day with my mother. Collect people? You must be wondering what that means. Names and likenesses in a scrap books with perhaps a strand of hair pinned at the proper place? Facebook friends? Networking cogs? No I just collect epiphanies.
People. Epiphanies. Same Difference.
Path to nirvana or recipe for being dysfunctional. Same difference.
And as I walked that moonlit beach I put my bitchy ninth ex-wife out of mind as I shooed her out from that sunlit Nariman Point conference room.
My mother had walked back to the house leaving me alone with the one hundred fifty thousand odd people jostling for space in my head.
And then I smelt her hair. The one I didn't marry. The one I never could divorce. Damp, breezy, mornings lit by a lazy, drowsy sun. Objective correlative: that's what John Fowles called it. The memory of a memory.
Two years ago, I let one of my nine dimensions slip into her bedroom as she slept with her husband of twenty years. The genteel snores of middle-aged peace. She of the lazy drowsy sun was not there. Never will be. Except here, here on this moonlit beach, an epiphany rising from the sea.
What tosh! You fool! Promise never to use the word epiphany again!
The bordello done up as a fancy bar in Dubai was just beginning to come to life. The Russians eyed the Chinese varily across the border while the hungry eyed both species like cats enable to decide between cats and canaries.
Bored I dimensioned into Lords, leaving my childhood friend contemplating exercising that flabby piece of meat he left untoned at the gym. Another session, another trainer. Same difference.
Just an aside. Dimensioned is not like teleportation. It is instead like a light moving from one spot on the stage to another spot, in my case, one from a total of nine.
Why do the English smell so bad? Is it the balti food that they now regularly ingest. Or is it just indifferent personal hygeine. Same difference old chap.
I turned to the English Rose bosoming next to me. What's the score? Who's keeping score? The guy on the other side had his hand digging deep into his checked trousers.
The son I never had adored Tendulkar.
I was a red cherry careening down at 147 kph into the good length spot. I was already smirking having swung a neat outswing parabola, landing on my seam and swerving in ever so slightly.
The smirked got wiped off my face, as I bounced of the tin on the edge of the square leg boundary. 106 for 2. Boy that felt good. Almost as good as being manacled in the pink bedroom of a whipper snapper Bollywood matahari.
Same difference? Perhaps. Pleasure does come in seemingly endless variety. Did I tell you about the year or so I worked in advertising?. It was like playing the piano in a whorehouse.
But then that's a story for another day.
Chapter Two: Same Difference
After my father died, for a few years I felt very lonely. Not that he talked to me that much. Besides the occasional friendly cuff and grunt. He was a man of few words. Instead my time was populated by the dyad that my parents were. I celebrated as they laughed together and in their happy muttering in the quiet nights of our lean-to on the beach. I experienced tragedy in their occasional fights and catharsis when the happy mutterings resumed. When my father died the dyad was broken and it seemed to me my mother died too.
That changed.
A gull rested, in splendid isolation, on a rocky outcrop in the limpid light of a November morning. Its apparent loneliness drew me to it. I got close, closer when it suddenly turned and looked me straight in the eye. It was not just a kin it was my twin. The next moment I was soaring in the skies with the sea and the beach a single entity, nay the entire world a single entity spread right before me. Suddenly I was a whole flock of gulls flying in formation and it was not just the world that was one, the world was me.
Me, us, them, someone, no one, everyone, same difference.
When I came to that November morning spreadeagled on that rocky outcrop on that private beach that belonged to the Mafia Queen and which my mother, like my father before her, cleaned every dawn and dusk, my life changed forever. I ran back to our lean-to and for the first time in my life hugged my mother burying my head in her slightly damp midriff.
My collection of people started that day with my mother. Collect people? You must be wondering what that means. Names and likenesses in a scrap books with perhaps a strand of hair pinned at the proper place? Facebook friends? Networking cogs? No I just collect epiphanies.
People. Epiphanies. Same Difference.
Path to nirvana or recipe for being dysfunctional. Same difference.
And as I walked that moonlit beach I put my bitchy ninth ex-wife out of mind as I shooed her out from that sunlit Nariman Point conference room.
My mother had walked back to the house leaving me alone with the one hundred fifty thousand odd people jostling for space in my head.
And then I smelt her hair. The one I didn't marry. The one I never could divorce. Damp, breezy, mornings lit by a lazy, drowsy sun. Objective correlative: that's what John Fowles called it. The memory of a memory.
Two years ago, I let one of my nine dimensions slip into her bedroom as she slept with her husband of twenty years. The genteel snores of middle-aged peace. She of the lazy drowsy sun was not there. Never will be. Except here, here on this moonlit beach, an epiphany rising from the sea.
What tosh! You fool! Promise never to use the word epiphany again!
The bordello done up as a fancy bar in Dubai was just beginning to come to life. The Russians eyed the Chinese varily across the border while the hungry eyed both species like cats enable to decide between cats and canaries.
Bored I dimensioned into Lords, leaving my childhood friend contemplating exercising that flabby piece of meat he left untoned at the gym. Another session, another trainer. Same difference.
Just an aside. Dimensioned is not like teleportation. It is instead like a light moving from one spot on the stage to another spot, in my case, one from a total of nine.
Why do the English smell so bad? Is it the balti food that they now regularly ingest. Or is it just indifferent personal hygeine. Same difference old chap.
I turned to the English Rose bosoming next to me. What's the score? Who's keeping score? The guy on the other side had his hand digging deep into his checked trousers.
The son I never had adored Tendulkar.
I was a red cherry careening down at 147 kph into the good length spot. I was already smirking having swung a neat outswing parabola, landing on my seam and swerving in ever so slightly.
The smirked got wiped off my face, as I bounced of the tin on the edge of the square leg boundary. 106 for 2. Boy that felt good. Almost as good as being manacled in the pink bedroom of a whipper snapper Bollywood matahari.
Same difference? Perhaps. Pleasure does come in seemingly endless variety. Did I tell you about the year or so I worked in advertising?. It was like playing the piano in a whorehouse.
But then that's a story for another day.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Break On Through To the Other Side
Creative writing has always been my first love. I have over the past decades started writing many a novel and then let each one of them wait for me to come back to them.
This time I intend going public with the act. I am going to attempt writing stories live on this blog.
My fiction writing style is in the fabulist streams of consciousness style and those who cannot digest that do not fret. I will continue posting blogs on brands, marketing etcetera in my usual style.
For those who you enjoy reading streams of consciousness, here is an open invite to help me write this. Post your suggestions in the comments section or email them to me and be sure they will create their ripple in the stream as it bubbles along. Also I will thank you in the postscript.
The title of this work of fiction I am now beginning to write live on the web is ‘Break On To the Other Side’. Jim Morrison fans will get the reference. It also signifies my attempt to overcome the resistance within me that has kept me from giving full play to my creative self.
Here goes.
Break On Through To the Other Side
Chapter One
Growing Taller
My mother grew taller as she aged beyond fifty. By then I was stuck at five feet two. How do you think I felt? We lived near a private beach. My dad’s job was to keep the beach clean. Pity he never did like the sea or think much about its salubrious effect. No wonder than that he died at forty. That left my mother with radiant good health and me.
The private beach belonged to a hot-eyed mafia queen. As my father’s body burned on the pyre, he walked up to my mom and offered her the job my Dad had. She accepted. Not surprising considering she had one thousand two hundred rupees in soiled ten rupee notes and me as the legacy Dad had left for her.
My mother loved the sea. She spent hours more than she really needed to tending to the beach. And with each passing day her simple underclass look began to subtly change. I can swear her nose started to straighten and, despite of her being a natural adherent to the truth, grow longer like Pinocchio’s.
I had no one else to share the wonder of this metamorphosis with so I shared it with her, talking to her about her in the third person. And this habit stayed with me. I lived now with two mothers. The one I talked to. And the one I talked to her about.
Decades later when I had a private beach of my own, my mother was six inches taller than me as we walked the beach on summery moonlit nights. And once at nineteen, at five feet two, I had been an inch taller than her. And that was not all. She looked twenty years younger. How do you think I felt?
By then I was an adept. Adepts don’t feel. They just do. Nike would have loved to have me as their brand ambassador. Only that I never wore athletic gear in my life and at five feet two, weighed ninety four kilograms.
Adepts live in more dimensions than the three that dear reader you live in. Unless you are an adept yourself but then adepts never, ever read anything at all.
As I walked down the beach that summery moonlit night with my taller, younger, much better looking mother I was experiencing wraith like rain falling across swathes of bare naked trees pulsing with the white light of far way lightening.
You do not get to own a private beach by being in one place at a time, especially if you were born to people whose job it was to clean one.
That bare-naked wood in the pouring rain was getting my bile up. Exactly what I wanted as I stared across the conference table at that long-nosed, impossibly thin aristocratic bitch who was trying to screw me out of a couple of million dollars more.
Once upon a time she had been good in bed but now she practiced the art in board rooms. I touched the button on the side of chair and imperceptibly my chair gained height as hers sank at the same rate.
Adepts love technology and never use magic when good old technology will do.
She snorted. She saw through this one. Apparently this particular invention of mine, as so many before, had been plagiarized and made sort of common place among the cognoscenti.
I had many secret admires or so I liked to believe. I was now out of those rainy woods and kicking back my heels in the plush push back seats of the neighborhood multiplex. They were playing my story there.
My mood improved. I even managed to smile at the bitch and gave her not just the couple of million dollars more she was haggling for on the divorce settlement but a couple of million more. She looked ready to give me a farewell blow job then and there but then I was walking with my saintly mother on my private beach on a summery moonlit night. Wasn’t I?
- To be continued... soon
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The Death of Macho
Once in a while comes a take on the world that is breathtakingly simple as well as breathtakingly deep..
“The Death of Macho” by Reihan Salam published on the Foreign Policy website on 22tn June is one such event.
Reihan take is that “for years the world has been witnessing a shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one”
Foreign Policy (FP) magazine and now website has a track record for publishing seminal pieces of work. I would put Reihan’s work at par with Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” first published in FP many years before 9/11.
Reihan besides being deep is witty. For example, in support of his central contention he calls the current recession he-cession.
One of the trends Reihan spots in support of his thesis is the increasing emergence across the world of women as the leaders of their country. A corollary occurs to my mind: Did India, as in so many seminal shifts in history, take the lead in this one too? Did macho in India begin to die when Indira Gandhi became the ‘only man in the Cabinet’?
Humor aside, has Reihan unearthed something that heralds the coming of a world very, very different from the one we live in?
In Hindu mythology and even in Jungian consciousness, the female principle is of nurture. If nurture become the operative word in the world (it is certainly has not been for all of mankind’s history) will it produce a golden age or will global civilization wither and die in the absence of man’s aggressive quest for dominance?
To some the answer to the above question may be obvious. Others might dismiss it because it is based on what one of my erstwhile colleague used to call a “critical assumption”. Either way you would do well to spend some time reading Reihan’s magnificent article.
“The Death of Macho” by Reihan Salam published on the Foreign Policy website on 22tn June is one such event.
Reihan take is that “for years the world has been witnessing a shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one”
Foreign Policy (FP) magazine and now website has a track record for publishing seminal pieces of work. I would put Reihan’s work at par with Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations” first published in FP many years before 9/11.
Reihan besides being deep is witty. For example, in support of his central contention he calls the current recession he-cession.
One of the trends Reihan spots in support of his thesis is the increasing emergence across the world of women as the leaders of their country. A corollary occurs to my mind: Did India, as in so many seminal shifts in history, take the lead in this one too? Did macho in India begin to die when Indira Gandhi became the ‘only man in the Cabinet’?
Humor aside, has Reihan unearthed something that heralds the coming of a world very, very different from the one we live in?
In Hindu mythology and even in Jungian consciousness, the female principle is of nurture. If nurture become the operative word in the world (it is certainly has not been for all of mankind’s history) will it produce a golden age or will global civilization wither and die in the absence of man’s aggressive quest for dominance?
To some the answer to the above question may be obvious. Others might dismiss it because it is based on what one of my erstwhile colleague used to call a “critical assumption”. Either way you would do well to spend some time reading Reihan’s magnificent article.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
The Matrix: The Coming Era of Database Marketing
Happy to inform my regular readers that Aqumena is progressing well.
As we at Aqumena dig into a wide variety of client situations, I encounter epiphanies that I then catalogue for further delving into.
A blog posting is to me is the most useful initiation of further investigation as it potentially co-opts many into the act.
In our marketing analytics practice, we were discussing the promise of integrating databases including operational sales data, post-but media data, data from syndicated studies like the retail and consumer panels etc when this epiphany about the Matrix gripped me.
The thought is that as soon as we accept a database, a research study or a data stream as representative of reality we are in fact integrating the available data on to the entire universe.
For example if we accept the NRS (or the IRS) as representative reality consisting of say, 500 million people, what in reality it means is that we are fusing, assuming the sample size of the study is 100,000, to 5000 individuals in the universe of 500 million people.
Subsequently if you accept a consumer panel of 10,000 household as representative of reality you are accepting that every record in the panel represents 20,000 households in your universe consisting of 200 million households (on the formulation of an average household size of 2.5 members from your 500 million individuals of age 15+ represented by the readership survey).
Marrying the picture of reality that the readership study presents with the picture of reality the consumer panel presents is an unquestionably valid activity because both are true representations of the same reality.
Based on the same principles, a U&A study of 5000 sample size or a price sensitivity study of sample size 2000, as long as they are accepted as valid representations of reality, can be married to the readership and panel data, individual by 500 million individuals.
The marrying of data (variously known as data fusion, data threading and data integration) is done through complex algorithms that dance to accommodate and integrate such that each view of reality that a data stream offers is valid within the overall picture of reality that is being produced.
The technology of data fusion is a developing technology but there can be no quarrel with the basic validity of the concept of welding together various views of reality, as represented by valid data streams, into a comprehensive view of reality that gets richer and more detailed as the data streams increase.
The culmination of this simulation of reality is the Matrix, the creation on a vast computer database a simulation of reality in all its complexity.
In previous times computer power was a severe limitation to simulation exercises.
I remember trying to simulate a cricket match when I was a student at IIT, Bombay back in 1976. The computer was an IBM 360. It took me months to do what can be done today on a low-end notebook in about 10 minutes.
Today weather modeling systems, with increasing effectiveness, model trillions of individual parameters using supercomputers and an array of sampling protocols across the world.
Modeling systems that consist at most of 7 billion parameters (assuming a world population of 7 billion) based on an array of operational and sampling based data streams is well within the affordability range of a major global consumer company.
Modeling a consumer universe of 200 million people is well within the affordability reach of a large size consumer company in India.
Marry the Matrix to the addressability that the emergence of the Internet,the mobile phone and the RFID chip represent and you can perceive the dawn of the age of micro-marketing.
As we at Aqumena dig into a wide variety of client situations, I encounter epiphanies that I then catalogue for further delving into.
A blog posting is to me is the most useful initiation of further investigation as it potentially co-opts many into the act.
In our marketing analytics practice, we were discussing the promise of integrating databases including operational sales data, post-but media data, data from syndicated studies like the retail and consumer panels etc when this epiphany about the Matrix gripped me.
The thought is that as soon as we accept a database, a research study or a data stream as representative of reality we are in fact integrating the available data on to the entire universe.
For example if we accept the NRS (or the IRS) as representative reality consisting of say, 500 million people, what in reality it means is that we are fusing, assuming the sample size of the study is 100,000, to 5000 individuals in the universe of 500 million people.
Subsequently if you accept a consumer panel of 10,000 household as representative of reality you are accepting that every record in the panel represents 20,000 households in your universe consisting of 200 million households (on the formulation of an average household size of 2.5 members from your 500 million individuals of age 15+ represented by the readership survey).
Marrying the picture of reality that the readership study presents with the picture of reality the consumer panel presents is an unquestionably valid activity because both are true representations of the same reality.
Based on the same principles, a U&A study of 5000 sample size or a price sensitivity study of sample size 2000, as long as they are accepted as valid representations of reality, can be married to the readership and panel data, individual by 500 million individuals.
The marrying of data (variously known as data fusion, data threading and data integration) is done through complex algorithms that dance to accommodate and integrate such that each view of reality that a data stream offers is valid within the overall picture of reality that is being produced.
The technology of data fusion is a developing technology but there can be no quarrel with the basic validity of the concept of welding together various views of reality, as represented by valid data streams, into a comprehensive view of reality that gets richer and more detailed as the data streams increase.
The culmination of this simulation of reality is the Matrix, the creation on a vast computer database a simulation of reality in all its complexity.
In previous times computer power was a severe limitation to simulation exercises.
I remember trying to simulate a cricket match when I was a student at IIT, Bombay back in 1976. The computer was an IBM 360. It took me months to do what can be done today on a low-end notebook in about 10 minutes.
Today weather modeling systems, with increasing effectiveness, model trillions of individual parameters using supercomputers and an array of sampling protocols across the world.
Modeling systems that consist at most of 7 billion parameters (assuming a world population of 7 billion) based on an array of operational and sampling based data streams is well within the affordability range of a major global consumer company.
Modeling a consumer universe of 200 million people is well within the affordability reach of a large size consumer company in India.
Marry the Matrix to the addressability that the emergence of the Internet,the mobile phone and the RFID chip represent and you can perceive the dawn of the age of micro-marketing.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Bonfire of the Vanities
I have smiled at shallow triumphs
And long mourned the loss of what I did not own
I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires
I have constructed an ego built of my senses
And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery
I have looked for God in vain meditations
And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon
I have sought love in the cravings of flesh
When love was within and all around manifest
I have played to weakness when strength beckoned
And belittled myself to myself
Enough say I, enough this night
This Holi night, as I go back millennia
People hunched around an ancient hearth
A primeval force, pure and cleansing
This bonfire of the vanities
And long mourned the loss of what I did not own
I have dwelt long in the shadow of my desires
I have constructed an ego built of my senses
And with foolish bravado fought the chimera of misery
I have looked for God in vain meditations
And reserved action for the pursuit of Mammon
I have sought love in the cravings of flesh
When love was within and all around manifest
I have played to weakness when strength beckoned
And belittled myself to myself
Enough say I, enough this night
This Holi night, as I go back millennia
People hunched around an ancient hearth
A primeval force, pure and cleansing
This bonfire of the vanities
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