Storm the Norm

Almost 60 years back, the Canadian communication theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “The medium is the message” to focus attention on the character, not just the content, of a medium. And he spoke of this when television was barely born and the internet was just about a germ of a thought, at best. In short, the media were not quite as complicated as we know them to be today.

But today the shadow of digital looms the largest over the media landscape. And other media – television, radio, out-of-home, print –are not extinct either. And that makes it messier. Or does it? 

Listen in as we storm this norm with none other than Sam Balsara, the doyen of the media industry. And as always powerful #StN Hacks to help you optimize your strategies in the right direction.

As we reflect upon MNC after MNC and how they’ve gone about their journeys in India, the three things that strike you immediately are: they play it safe, they prioritize testing the waters profitably from Day 1 over making a long-term commitment with lesser profitability in the early years, and they come with a “this is what we have, take it or leave it” mindset until India teaches them otherwise. And that’s the reason for today’s norm: Innovation at global companies only serves the niche.

And our guest today who’s stormed this norm with his disarmingly simple but insightful take is the Gulbahar Torani, CEO of global company Philips Domestic Appliances. And of course the 5 powerful hacks from Anisha & Narayan that will help you in your innovation journey!

Regardless of how progressive or woke an organization is, employees always start from a position of disadvantage, negotiating their way to a better place—either individually or collectively, formally or informally.

That’s the norm we storm in this episode of our podcast.

Listen in as Narayan & Anisha get chatting with a talented duo Aditiya & Gautam from the very aptly titled new age firm “TALENTED” and their attempt at creating a workplace model that’s trying its best to exceed employees’ expectations one HR policy at a time

 We also have for this episode Ritika Mathur, Partner – Human Capital Consulting, Grant Thornton Bharat for the GT Insights section to throw some light on how can companies deploy ESOPs in the best way to foster not just stock ownership but company ownership in the true sense of the phrase.

“The start-up economy today is only about moving money, not value creation.” This is the provocative norm we posed to veteran Fund Managing Partner,VT Bharadwaj, partner, A 91 Ventures & we began the discussion with something like this..venture capital firms basically mop up money from various sources – individuals and institutions, pension funds across the world, etc.—and then pool it up to then fund start-ups and new ventures. Basically, they move others’ money around and make more money by doing so. We pushed the argument further by saying that VCs are not “making” anything, in the traditional sense of manufacturing or creating. If anything, they’re manufacturers of belief, getting those with investible wealth to believe enough in ventures that don’t currently exist to back them with their surplus money.

In this entire reductionist approach, where is the conversation around sustainable value creation? Listen in to what he has to say…

#startups #Funding

In a world that’s all about the Web3 bubble, there’s no place for chewing gum bubbles.

Now, that’s a big and provocative norm to challenge about a category—and about large FMCG companies—that have built not just big customer bases for themselves but I daresay, also responsible for creating the kind of unparalleled mom-and-pop retail footprint in India that very few other categories can.

And I don’t say it lightly. The world of brands today seems to be about one or more of the following three things: purpose, planned purchase journeys, and pivots enabled by disruptive tech. Where’s the place for a frivolous, impulse-driven, unchanging product category in this world?

So how can an impulse category pivot to succeed in a D2C world, where the rules of commerce, culture and communications may be very different?And today’s norm is not just an existential question but a practical one that our guest Mr Rajesh Ramakrishnan, has been tackling at the helm of Perfetti even before the pandemic, but also through it.de!

Can we separate cryptocurrencies from blockchains?

Are coins a necessary part of securing a public blockchain?

There is a widespread public perception that exists that blockchain technology is worthwhile, but cryptocurrencies are not. You hear this decree all the time and with the regulatory overhang, it's only increasing by the day.

With some blistering critiques of cryptocurrencies, technocrats are trying to mitigate this stigma by focusing on the possible applications and changes that blockchains can bring about.

But the question remains .can we justify the separation of cryptocurrencies from blockchain technology?

Our guest Jonathan Caras explains..

First time ever in India, a podcast from one of world’s best blockchain & token economic specialist from Israel, Mr. Jonathan Caras telling us how can an algorithm—a structured set of instructions encoded to enable repeatable tasks with the same consistent result every time—create or replace a phenomenon like trust?

Trust which is a function of 3 human dimensions.

Subjectivity is just one dimension of trust as we know it. One’s currently held beliefs play a large part in how one approaches an object of trust. A second dimension is the fragility of trust—it can be broken by something that may not necessarily be a disastrously bad mistake or error of judgment. A third dimension is that it takes time to build trust—it’s not something that can be generated instantly, not even overnight.

So how can technology replace all the above?

Listen in as Narayan & Anisha take this up with our global expert as he systematically storms this norm that has a far-bearing effect on businesses of the future.

#blockchain #Crypto #Defi #Web3

The Covid-19 crisis exposed stark differences in the fortunes of different small and medium-sized businesses. Larger businesses did have an edge & were less hard-hit as a group. These were the ones who were able to take some knocks, bounce back, restart, adapt better than others.”.

But we also know that the world at large & we don’t just mean the world of business and economics is mostly made of the long tail—from the results of a Google search to stocks listed on any exchange beyond the big index-driving stocks to mom-and-pop retail that drive and support the consumer economy, we see that it’s the small entities that sustain the world. And if these weren’t resilient, then we would have sunk as a socio-industrial-economic complex a long time back—whether we consider the global or the local economy.

So where do we net out on this norm? Does size of operation insulate a business against shocks?

Listen in to our guest expert Siddharth Nigam & a complete Storm the Norm RESILIENCE TOOLKIT as a handy ready-reckoner.