The Branded and Gilded Life

We've travelled on trains so often, we hardly think of the conceptual leap it took to make it a transportation option worldwide.

Car and cycle wheels are round and we don't think much of the turning radius required to make turns.

But wheels on a train run on parallel tracks.

So, how do they handle turns?

Cars and bikes can sweep across the road but trains are restricted

Won't one of the wheels move off-track? That would be disastrous.

Pay attention to the inner extension of the wheels on both sides.

Train and track engineers have made the wheels more like cones spinning on tracks.

As the train takes a turn, the inner wheel travels less and the outer wheel moves through a larger arc.

Held by the axle in the middle which allows flexibility when the train goes around a curve.

It can't be a right angle curve - but you've seen how tracks curve through a distance of a few hundred meters to accommodate the turns.

The other marvel would have been working out how the wheels switch tracks. It would have to rise above and then slip into the junction as every set of wheels right along the train shifts effortlessly but there is a grinding noise.

And we hear it every time we travel. It's so much a part of the 'normal' train sounds, we barely register it.

The romance of train travel is legendary.

But it was created by some innovative engineers who solved the problem so well, we've never had to rethink it.

What does 100% digital transformation look like?

No paper for any process?

All work done online? These percentages are highly confusing.

And some of the reports push this even further - where CEOs say that they've transformed about 30-40% and others claim that it is 70-80%.

How do these companies look? How do they function and how are the people who manage these companies so sure about the percentages?

Is there a way to break this down into a set of processes at a company and then see how far along the line they've travelled?

Even then, the parameters would be hard to nail down. At what stage is a manufacturing company digitally transformed? When it's billing is completely online?

Or when its manufacturing process is driven by robotics? Or when the sales and marketing are only done through digital media?

You see where this is going? There is a digital component to what we do but how much of it is a transformation is hard to measure. Or even hazard a guess.

In a sense, it's like the other favorite these days - smart cities! Talk to 100 people and you'll get 120 definitions.

We've all been digitally transforming since the mainframes arrived in the 60s. Back then, it touched far fewer people and organizations.

Now, it's as if we're permanently in some kind of digital environment for a large part of our waking hours.

Is individual transformation different from the sum total of transformation at a company?

We invent these glib phrases and then fail to define it is simple and clear terms.

Why is memorabilia valuable?

The smashed cars from Mad Max Fury Road are being auctioned off shortly.

They may not look anything like the pictures shown.

But people who found the film resonated with them may want a part of the action if they can afford it.

They're great conversation pieces, for sure.

All the vehicles in the film were the products of fevered imagination - none of them very safe or even road-worthy.

But you can re-live the film sequences and show off a piece of movie history.

There's something about success that seems to spawn this feeling.

People want to be a part of grand projects that have made an impact. The costume from a blockbuster. The light saber from Star Wars.

That is when the merchandising masters realised the infinite potential for films to make money far beyond the screen. And that began a wave of everything from lines of toys, video games to all kinds of knick-knacks that generated f or decades after box office receipts.

We have this love for anything touched by greatness.

And this sense about long-lost glory as well. The ruins of the Colosseum in Rome. Or walking next to the Sphinx and the pyramids in Egypt.

Or our own Taj Mahal. A mausoleum as a labor of love. Two ironies in the same breath. 

It doesn't matter if the memories are our own or something we can identify with. 

Otherwise, what explains the interest in the ruins of vehicles which we can see every time we drive past automobile scrapyards?

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Plot points in the popular serials are quite instructive.

You realise everyone has to balance books, including criminals.

The difference is that taxmen go after legitimate businesses to collect their dues while police dig into criminal enterprises.

In the series Animal Kingdom on Netflix, the lady running the show has an elaborate set of businesses through which money is 'washed.'

And from the detailing, it's highly complex.

Taking over businesses where cash is king - like laundromats, car washes and bowling alleys. Then slipping the illegal proceeds into the chain and making sure the accounting is perfectly legal and above board - because they shouldn't come on the radar of the regular tax authorities in addition to the police.

Buying up properties with cash, keeping low-cost renters and getting higher receipts from them.

While crime films are the craze, the accounts are the carpet under which the cash is swept. There's no drama in drawing 20 money transfer receipts a day, collecting rent and then entering a higher receipt in the books and so on.

This was explored in the series Breaking Bad as well, when the flow of money gets too large to be hidden away in vaults and there's no way it can be legally spent without attracting attention.

Drawing up legal agreements to cover illegal ownership. Which involves the setting up of shell companies that cannot be traced.

The way tax havens get around scrutiny is that all the paperwork remains as paperwork. There's no online repository and the conversion is eternally 'in progress.'

Laundered money should tell no tales - because the handcuffs are just a wrong move away.

The tapeworm queues at airports

Like Nokia's famous 'snake' game that grew progressively longer on the small black and white screens, the queues at the security check-ins have grown.

Web check-in now makes it easy to get a boarding card but now, every little additional convenience has transformed into a revenue generation point.

And airline bookings are getting to be like telecom bills - complex and hard to decipher.

At the Bangalore airport, getting past the security is a marathon. Stripping down every little metal bit, from belts to purses.

The security guy insists that you put in only one article per tray for automatic scanning, so even if you only have one laptop bag and a small suitcase, you have to put them into three or four trays.

Add another one for shoes and belts.

The X-rays seem to be automated, and any suspicious objects are flagged and sent down another line.

And the humans there have become the bottleneck.

In the space of ten minutes of waiting for the suitcase, passengers had to surrender batteries, some unknown metal parts that looked vaguely threatening, shampoos and open up jewelry boxes - anything metallic was immediately suspicious.

Maybe the systems have improved but what we're seeing is the degradation of the travel experience.

Booking tickets has become easier. Travel times to airports has mushroomed. You can check-in faster at the automated counters. And then slow down at security.

Then, when flights get delayed, the chairs in the post check-in area are packed.

Touch. No touch. Scans and beeps. Hostesses wearing PPE.

And with passengers masked and sanitised, it's a long time before air travel will feel anything like normal again.

Site visitor analytics is more fragmented than you'd expect.

Google Analytics is right up there going by the data.

But a couple of guys trying to build an alternative are finding holes in coverage.

Tech savvy audiences aren't granting Google the access it requires. And on some sites, its over 50%

The tension between providing access and being compensated for it is a flash point.

While Google builds up huge troves of data on usage, most of it is hidden behind the company's walls.

This one-way traffic is not an advantage for those who rely on the data to make important decisions, or even use it to determine their own ranking.

There are some surprising statistics on the blocks - 68% of laptop and desktop users, 88% of Firefox users and 82% of Linux users.

Now, the universe of Firefox and Linux users in comparison to Chrome may be small but this is a significant chunk. And it could be skewing the drift of the data.

So, a competitor to Google Analytics is long overdue but it isn't going to be easy to execute or stay in the race.

Google has a lead built over decades of watching entire categories and sectors grow. It knows what people are searching for.

But a pure play analytics company won't have access to search data. 

Fragmentation is good and bad. Good because it dilutes the power of the major player and bad because a lot more work is involved in determining what the visitor count is.

What's your take?

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Never? Or when you've decided the effort is not worth it?

Can both be true?

The sunk cost fallacy is about persisting with something simply because you're invested in it. Either in terms of time or money.

The sunk cost fallacy becomes perseverance when it succeeds. Two concepts that are the polar opposite of each other transition perfectly from one to the other.

Evidence can be produced to support both concepts. And those arguing for and against will be right as well. It depends entirely on what you believe and how your motivational levels operate. 

mRNA vaccines were a sunk cost fallacy until the pandemic hit. Then, it became a story of perseverance.

Neeraj Chopra as a kid in Punjab throwing a javelin for years with some success along the way could have been a sunk cost fallacy story. Until Gold at the Tokyo Olympics made that the perseverance story.

Nassim Taleb's Black Swan concept for years was the perfect example of sunk cost fallacy. He kept losing money in the stock market in the strong belief that a crash was certain.

And in a single day, when the markets crashed, he made an insane amount of money. That changed everything.

He became a celebrated author, analyst and his words took on an Oracle-like status.

In a sense, it's like proverbs contradicting themselves. An Idle mind is the Devil's workshop is completely at odds with 'Invest a few moments in thinking. It will pay good interest'.

Which side are you leaning towards?

Oil companies want to change their stripes

If the world moves to renewable energy, what happens to the oil giants?

You don't need to worry about them.

They're already making investments in renewables quietly, away from the spotlight.

There's a revealing fact in the article.

OPEC projected that electrical vehicles would be 1% of the world's sales by 2040. But that projection came to pass in 2016.

Now GM and Ford have said they will have an all-electric vehicle lineup by 2035.

That gives the oil companies slightly over a decade to get their act right and prepare for a dip in the overall oil market.

Not much is going to change right away. Coal companies still run a lot of the power plants in the world.

Change is not easy - especially at this scale. So, the changes will be apparent in a few decades from now.

Petrol and diesel vehicles will not go away. In fact, the ones that survive will be far more efficient and the network of fuel stations may reduce over time.

But people are slow to change. If you did a poll of people looking at electric vehicles as their next purchase, the figure would be bigger than it was a decade ago.

So, oil companies may simply swap some of their fuel stations and change them into electric charging stations.

How soon that happens remains to be seen.

Will online video game restrictions work?

China has mandated that children below the age of 18 can only play online games for a total of 3 hours on weekends - one hour a day.

The platforms have to identify logins, ensure that the directives are followed and maintain records.

Will it work?

What prevents children from persuading their parents to login and get over the restriction?

Or use it as a bargaining chip for spending more time studying?

Question is whether this will result in better behavior or reduce the time spent playing games.

Both seem remote.

Children who already spend large amounts of time will not change tracks. Instead, they may switch to offline options.

Services to prevent tracking will find a fresh market. It won't be obvious but like India's alcohol advertising, no one is fooled with brands selling glasses and CD covers.

The problem is real. There are too many children caught in the web and the addictive pursuit of online gaming.

The games themselves have been designed to keep the gamers hooked.

So, a forced separation will result in unpredictable effects.

When children have too much time on their hands and little to do, the hope is that they will take to outdoor sports and make new friends.

That won't happen overnight.

And parents having to deal with a rebellious child at home because the gaming tap has been turned off may find parenting gets tricky.

Was it better to have them hooked to games rather than stalk around the house in a surly mood?

That may be the inspiration for a whole new game!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

There's a slice of life permanently devoted to paying back.

For the car, the house, the TV, the fridge and more.

And rents are the ones that drill big holes in monthly budgets.

Sweden has one of the biggest government rent control programs running since World War 2.

The objective was that the middle class and people earning less should not be priced out of the best neighborhoods. And with all the sincerity in implementation, there's a 9 year waiting list to get into a government contract that lasts for life.

Rent or buy is the eternal question and there are no easy answers.

Desirable housing close to city centers and schools, offices and entertainment gets lapped up by people who can afford to invest in multiple properties and choose exactly which part of the world they want to be in at a particular time.

For the rest, which probably is 90% of the world's population, it's a toss-up between getting a decent house in a livable neighborhood.

The EMI life allowed a larger set of people to advance their dreams - but it came at a price. It took away flexibility and freedom of choice.

Especially with big-ticket purchases like homes, a 15-to-20-year lock-in is guaranteed.

Even a couple of decades ago, education was nowhere near as expensive as it is today. And students are well into middle age by the time they pay back loans. And then embark on the housing loan EMI!

The Equated Monthly Instalment has become Eternally Maddening Indebtedness! 

Is the burger falling out of favour?

According to the Wall Street Journal, millennials may have had their fill.

There seems to be a drop in the number of burgers they consume.

McDonald's is still growing overall but they shut down nearly 150 outlets in the US last year.

This can be sliced and examined in several ways but some fast food brands are running in the slow lane.

Millennials have grown up with the healthy food movement ringing in their ears and it was bound to have an effect.

McDonalds is experimenting with getting more people in for breakfasts and the $36 billion they make every year still allows ample elbow room for experiment.

It's a good time to consider how longstanding brands stay in 'cruise mode'

At some point all of us tire of a food item we have too much of.

It's a simple matter to make less of something at home but when entire supply chains are configured down to the smallest spice ingredient, it may lead to earthquakes.

We change brands at times simply because we want a 'change'. Not because we're unhappy with the existing experience but we want a new one.

Even if it means smelling a little different.

And with the hundreds of D2C brands now available, customers are moving out of their loyalty lock-ins.

This may be a small shift in the scheme of things, but it can splinter quickly if a generation decides that burgers are no longer 'comfort food.'

No escaping the Antakshri in India

It's a family activity that makes young people roll their eyes.

And the older ones bring out their singing voices from the deep freeze.

Songs sung off key, off lyrics, off the beat but with gusto.

At marriages and family gatherings, impromptu teams are assembled in seconds.

The ones with an encyclopedic knowledge of old Hindi film songs are in great demand.

They are the ones who come to the rescue when tricky ending of songs with the hard 'Th' and hard "Dh' are the starting point for the next song.

Wikipedia states the the Anatakshri has been around since the days of Ramayana. It comes from Anth (last) and Akshar (Alphabet) and at the time, it was uses to create a chain of narration of slokhas.

This activity has transcended time.

Today, it's only about film songs and several group trips have survived bad singing and raucous voices.

The songs are quite easy to come up with in the early stages of the game. As the teams exhaust all the popular ones, it gets progressively tougher.

There is a timer for the rival team to respond, but this is often like street cricket rules. The elders in the family could be impervious to time and consult each other - they don't like losing to the younger ones.

At one point, this was one of the most-watched programs on TV as well. But while it survives at family functions, it may be losing its charm

But that's debatable, especially for an activity that has survived thousands of years.

Do you have a cringy Antakshri story from your family?

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

And to top it off, the company he stole from offered him a job.

As head of security, no less.

It was a heist like no other. Crypto valued at over $600 million was siphoned from one of the exchanges.

This is where things get interesting.

Unlike robberies in the real world, where there are 'fences' to help launder the ill-gotten riches, crypto is harder to launder.

When the money is transferred out, the exchange can see where it's gone. Much harder to make the money vanish.

The next day after the money went missing, the exchange put out a request for the person involved to return the money.

Strangely enough, he did. Turns out that he was angry that the exchange had not patched the security holes he had pointed out.

It was one of those obscure things that hackers seem to specialise in - find ways to enter virtual entry points few people have a clue about.

The transfer created an avalanche of media attention because of the sum involved and that made the hacker nervous.

He got in touch with the crypto exchange and in series of tranches, returned most of the money.

Then, they offered him a reward of $500,000 for being a nice guy. That's of course a far cry from $600 million. But this was legit money.

And to top it all off they've made a job offer, since they think that he's probably the best one to guard the crown jewels.

How's that for unusual job applications? These crypto stories get weirder all the time.

Locking customers in

How often do you empty your Promotions tab on Gmail?

Once a week? Or a month? Whenever you remember?

Companies are looking to lock in customers through passive means.

I used to glance at the Promotions tab to see if the emails were piling up and every week or so, select all emails and delete.

Then, I found that even when I selected all the emails about 50 would not be deleted unless I did it again.

Another glitch was that the promotions tab notification would show only 50 emails but when you opened the tab, there were more than 300 unread emails.

Yahoo Mail doesn't like you downloading emails to a desktop client.

I found that the sync was blocked and I had to login to the site.

And that meant showing ads as long as I stayed logged in.

Though Yahoo now gives you 1 TB and you probably will take decades, if not years to fill it all up.

And Gmail suggests you archive emails, instead of deleting them altogether.

Playing on your fear of deleting some important email that's gone forever.

Somehow, that works. 

Occasionally, driven by a burst of spring-cleaning enthusiasm, I would go and look for old emails with large attachments and then delete them one by one.

But its tedious and Gmail knows it.

Laziness is the best way to get compliant customers to cough up money year after year.

So far, however, I've kept it down to less than 50% below the limit. One of life's satisfying cheap thrills.

What's yours?

Looted Samsung TVs don't work.

It happened in South Africa

During the recent riots, there were break-ins at major showrooms and TVs were looted.

Samsung has built an anti-theft module into the TVs, so they are disabled remotely.

The technology now comes pre-loaded on all Samsung products.

It's one way the company supports its retail network because if the TVs don't work, the motivation to steal them drops dramatically.

Another line has been drawn by compulsion between buying a product and having control over it.

In this case, it works in the customer's favor. But there could be a situation where programs and channels can be blocked off based on the commercial arrangements between the TV manufacturer and broadcasters.

Remember the infamous Blu-Ray DVDs that were region specific and would not play on normal DVD players?

All of this starts with good intentions and requirements. But then, the connections create new opportunities as well.

Samsung's Smart TVs are probably the biggest TV ad network service providers in the world. But that fact is not given too much prominence because it could have negative effects.

This is promoted only through business channels and generates good revenues for Samsung.

Smart TVs were only supposed to make viewing smarter for consumers and not become an information collection point or used for customer targeting.

The moment there's 2-way traffic and a network, the game changes. IoT will not be a boon just for customers. As usual, other market dynamics will come into play.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Before Windows 95 was launched, the earlier versions - Windows 2 & 3 already had a base of over 50 million users.

Back in the early 90s, that was huge.

And the worry was that a complete change would help some users but make it worse for millions.

Finding what people would wrestle with was the problem.

Today, we look at files and folders and they seem so basic, it's hard to believe that people needed to be told how to navigate to one or the other.

The two pane view confused people because they could not understand how folders could exist within other folders.

That's where the difference between files and cabinets in the real world breaks down.

Hierarchy was unknown. So, the concept of drilling down to the level of the file took several iterations for people to understand.

The 'drag and drop' which we use almost without thinking today was hard to teach.

People had to click, hold and drag one icon into another one.

Today, it looks laughably simple.

But the first ever interaction of holding the mouse and controlling the cursor took a couple of sessions.

Hand-eye co-ordination and discovering the speed at which the cursor would move was comical to begin with.

Today, we think nothing of swiping between screens, zipping up files and attaching them to emails.

But back then, it was like UX 101

The Start Button, the Find icon and the Help Icon had callouts when the mouse moved over them.

It was that basic!

Cracks in the brand image

The ads ooze luxury.

The showrooms look futuristic.

But the salespeople fall short. It's the nightmare of brand managers.

Several aspects of the brand experience cannot be controlled beyond a point.

The more expensive a product, the higher the expectations are.

In a sense, the online experience is confined to what customers see on the website. How smoothly the transaction proceeds from payment to delivery defines the brand experience for most customers.

None of know what 'Amazon' looks like. It's confined to the website and the package that arrives on the doorstep.

But Bose is different. They retail high end audio speakers and have built an image of exclusivity.

This is an actual experience from a customer, someone I know who has a taste for good music and is particular about what he plays it on.

A few years ago, he said, the salespeople were approachable, knowledgeable and knew the product line down to the subtle differences. Which recreates the aura around the brand and keeps it on a pedestal.

Recently, he walked in to buy another product from Bose he had checked out online. The salespeople had only a cursory interest and practically no knowledge about the differences between one speaker lineup and the other one.

Worse, one of them tried to foist what he thought would be the best one.

This is how brand images are destroyed - at the last point in the chain where conversion should happen.

Instead, a lack of product training and uninterested salespeople dealing with customers completely devalues brand perceptions.

Mealtime special effects

It's roasted over a flame directly and ready to eat in a few seconds.

Or swells when deep-fried in oil.

But the varieties and the recipes of this simple, dried in the sun lunch and dinner accompaniment are culinary art.

It is still a small-scale industry because it has not yielded to mechanization. The 'dried in the sun' papad retains some moisture, and that is essential.

The sun does its magic when each papad is put out to dry in hot sunlight and returned each day a little drier than the previous day.

Since the market for papads in India is huge, it provides employment to millions of women who are engaged in making the dough, flattening it, drying it and packaging it.

The large papad brands are essentially aggregators who have built a deep distribution chain.

But the varieties of Indian papad and their consumption varies by states which are a few hundred kilometers apart.

The Kerala pappadum swells when deep fried and is light and flaky. The Tamil Nadu appalam from the neighboring state stays flat and usually comes in much larger sizes.

The dough that goes into making papads is also according to the spices and the food influences of the region.

Lijjat, made by a co-operative organisation of women is one of the biggest brands in the country - and they make 14 varieties for the different regions they cater to.

The collective crunch of papads cracking is the sound effect you will hear at mealtimes in homes across the country every day.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Be careful about what you listen to first thing in the morning

We all experience this from time to time

You hear a tune playing and then, it loops in your head all day.

It may even be something you don't particularly like.

But you're stuck with it.

Certain riffs that have an ability to burrow deep. And that's the focus of a new commercial from Spotify.

Two guys walk down a college classroom corridor.

One asks the other guy's opinion about a song from the playlist. He plays the song.

They walk past a classroom where the professor is teaching complex physics or maths - the blackboard is full of formulas.

And the professor, in a completely natural burst of enthusiasm, sings the next two lines of the song out loud. Then stops, realising he's facing a group of stony-faced youngsters.

Perfect timing and casting.

We do this all the time. When a song we know plays and we listen to a few bars, we have to complete the next few lines in our head. Or, if we lose ourselves in the moment, sing it out loud.

Its one thing getting stuck with a repetitive track early in the morning. They are harmless to begin with but the 'repeat' mode is jarring.

It's a bit like beating hiccups. Have your alternative addictive playlist handy. And hope your mind smoothly switches tracks.

How far TV has come in 50 years

In the 70s in India, it was barely available, except to Indians in Delhi.

Even that was for a few hours a day in the evening. One channel and the so-called 'popular' programs formed an even tinier slice of the schedule.

Once a week, for half an hour, there were film songs played. It had the kind of viewership channels today can't replicate. The scarcity economy at work.

Newsreaders were stiff and formal, especially the ones reading the English news. They barely cracked a smile and every headline was pronounced in grave tones, as if the fate of the country hung in the balance.

They would be horrified at what TV news has become - debates and shouting matches on every channel. 

The media story that changed TV in India was the staging of the Asian Games in 1982 and the state broadcaster Doordarshan transmitting for 8 hours a day in colour.

People rushed out to buy TVs because there was something to watch. Since then, the satellite revolution in the 90s and the internet have permanently changed the medium. 

Today, homes have hundreds of channels and multiple remotes strewn casually on the sofas. As people switch between the satellite channels and OTT streams.

But the feeling lingers. That the packaging of TV programs has got much better than the programs themselves.

The optics of politics, stardom and projections have eclipsed the main show.

And that's where change needs to happen.

But no one really cares as long as the TRPs keep delivering hits to skyrocket media company valuations.

Ola is betting the world will want one

It's being touted as a 2-wheeler revolution starting in India.

It comes from an outsider who first locked horns with another global ride sharing giant.

Who came off better there is debatable, but Ola has managed to pull off something big in another avatar.

The launch film starts off like an eco-commercial.

Then, like all films do these days through a wide drone shot, it zooms to the roof of the factory set up in a pristine, scenic location.

On the roof is the founder, Bhavish Aggarwal.

And he goes on to list the multiple features that the bike has built, from the ground up.

Apart from the mechanical ones, the 7-inch display facing the rider is definitely a first. 

And it provides everything from maps to music. With speakers built in.

The bike can sound exactly as you want it to, so personalization is much like your mobile phone themes.

And no keys. It senses the owner as he or she walks up to the vehicle and calls you by name. When you get off the scooter and walk away, the vehicle locks itself.

One of the biggest problems with electric scooters was the perception that they cannot be compared to their mechanical cousins. Not in terms of power or styling.

Maybe that's still some years away but the OLA S1 is certainly a contender in the future two-wheeler sweepstakes.

Bhavish has his eyes on the world market - and gigantic plans.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

MacKenzie Scott was married to Jeff Bezos.

And her divorce gave her a windfall of billions of dollars.

She's handing it out liberally to charities and organisations doing stellar public work.

Most of the time, they struggle to raise funds. So, this is clearly a gift of gigantic proportions.

An article in Bloomberg analysed the sectors to which she has provided money.

Years from now, we'll see the long-term effects.

It's like an experiment to determine if money will make a difference to lesser privileged sections and sectors that struggled to survive.

There has never been a charity spike quite like this one.

This charitable handout is breathtaking because nothing on this scale has ever been attempted. By providing money to organisations that work towards racial equality, and those that create the infrastructure for philanthropy, change is foretold.

The speed with which the money has been doled out and that they were given to organisations who had not pleaded for it is remarkable.

There are reports of the emails from her organisation lying unopened or not acted upon because the recipients thought it was spam.

In about a decade from now, this should make for an interesting case study. The effect the money had will percolate through society and hopefully, some differences should show up.

No one would have believed that a divorce would become the fulcrum around which charity would be redefined.

The social media Olympics

The Tokyo Olympics almost didn't happen.

And athletes would have found it strange to walk into massive empty stadiums after slogging for years to get to the pinnacle.

The feedback from social media was their lifeline.

Social media accounts of the Olympians registered steep increases because they documented life within the village - not normally accessible to outsiders.

And athletes got just as good at it as some of the 'influencers' have.

Most mainline media reports are about records broken and the medals tally.

But it's always the human interest stories that hold interest and get shared.

Like that of Hansle Parchment from Jamaica, who almost didn't get to compete in the 110 meters hurdles final because he boarded the wrong bus to the stadium.

Lost in the music playing on his headphones, he didn't register the instructions.

When he reached the wrong stadium, he had little hope of making it on time. Not knowing the local language or the geography.

Luckily for him, a resourceful Olympics games volunteer arranged a taxi and gave him money to get to the right one and he made it on time.

He went on to win the Gold, but the story did not end there.

He located the volunteer, paid her back and shot a selfie with her that went up on his Instagram account.

And that got picked up by mainline media - sort of a reverse flip from old times.

When journalists find stories and break them.

The 'Lilliputization' of National Geographic

The famed yellow frame has been imprinted into our minds.

We grew up flipping through its hallowed pages.

Most of the issues we picked up were on street shops and they were months or years old.

It didn't matter.

We were instantly transported to exotic lands, strange people and wildlife we could almost touch.

It was the magazine devoured in libraries and placed out of reach unless you knew librarians well.

The glossy paper and the lustre of the photos was missing in the other magazines that existed then.

It was as if Natgeo was printed and published on another planet.

A photographer who got a commission from Natgeo could talk about it for decades.

It was the ultimate professional pinnacle.

On Instagram, the main Natgeo account has over 178 million followers.

It's one of the accounts that Instagram recommends as soon as you sign up and the photos appear in your feed almost immediately.

But this is where its power gets diluted and flattened.

Shorn of the exclusive environment of the magazine that kept it on a pedestal for years, it competes with talented amateurs and product ads that cut into the feed.

Unfortunately, the days of the double spread and glossy posters mounted in living rooms are over.

It must bug the editors that a century old magazine with a treasure trove of historical material has to compete with trigger happy influencers for attention.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

It's not a trick question.

Or maybe it should be phrased another way.

Smiles can be an integral part of power play.

But they're rarely, if ever, spoken about in that context

It's hard to wear a tough expression in response to a smile.

And  they're often the preamble to conversations. Setting up the stage, as it were for a dialogue.

In social situations, from networking to parties, the ones willing to talk convey 'approachability' quite easily, signaled by a smile. Breaking the barrier of resistance.

The ones whose faces seem to have the sign 'Forbidden Zone' imprinted on their expressions have a tough time getting through. 

It may work as a tactic, when power hierarchies have to be established. But others in the room can play the same game as well, leading to deadlock.

People who smile easily aren't pushovers. That's a misconception and they have understood that smiles dissolve walls. That helps them exercise power without showing it at all.

Observe power dynamics at play. The ones who extract concessions may hold on to their positions, but they manage to be relatable and accommodative as well. And that includes toning down tensions, getting people to talk to each other and  diffusing the atmosphere with a well-timed joke or observation.

We tend to think of smiles as pleasantries, used for polite conversations. But negotiating with smiles is a power tactic where far more is extracted than people are willing to give.

Does that sound like a contradiction? 

Growing in the pandemic

A couple bought two acres of farmland to grow food without any pesticides or chemicals.

In a few years, they grew more than they could consume and looked to market the produce.

And the pandemic helped them get a toe into households who wanted vegetables home delivered.

My Harvest has been a step-by-step process, like several other companies responding to the disruption caused by the pandemic

The trial by fire is managing supplies and logistics against companies having deeper pockets and better distribution.

So, they worked on the personalised service route.

Ordering is through Google forms and the vegetables and fruits change from week to week.

They added grain and millets with more farmers cultivating their lands the same way.

There's 'Mappilai' rice, a rich dark grain that's perfect for 'congee' along with a tangy chutney or pickle. Remarkably nutritious and light on the stomach.

And the young founder posts everything from news about farmers on the network to a celebration in the village to the experiments they are conducting with the crops to improve yields and quality.

Now, they've started a recycling project and removed plastic almost completely from the chain. Vegetables are packed in a cloth bag and exchanged every week with a fresh order.

The bags have a personalised pin that identifies customers, and the shopping bags act as both branding and symbolise how they're being sustainable.

They have a core of less than 1000 customers a week now. But wait for a few years and they could be a significant force for good.

Make yourself useful

It starts early in childhood.

At some point or the other, everyone has heard it.

Maybe when sitting idly at home.

Or in class looking out of the window.

Even during a coffee break at work.

The problem is that usefulness is a single dimension - and refers to just one thing. Are you doing something to score more marks or make money for the company?

Anything outside of that is seen as useless.

Yet, the profound changes and the world we live in today has come about as a result of 'useless' work done decades or centuries ago.

By people who never looked for riches but were inquisitive and curious.

About mathematics, physics, chemistry or even experimenting with the unknown.

There are fewer places doing this today.

When there's no visible chance of 'returns' on the horizon, most people melt away.

Einstein knew exactly how he was able to work things out - by standing on the shoulders of giants.

But the giants are lost in the mists of history.

Marconi is credited with inventing radio. But he was simply applying the 'useless' knowledge Professor Clerk Maxwell carried out remote calculations in the fields of magnetism and electricity. 

That work lay unheralded for over a decade. Until Heinrich Hertz, working in a lab in Berlin, demonstrated how electromagnetic waves carried wireless signals. Marconi simply put 2 and 2 together and got both - fame and an everlasting credit in history.

Hard to believe?

Check out the article published in Harper's Bazaar - in 1939!

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.

Fuji film was a distant second to Kodak in the consumer market.

But then, the market flipped. Smartphones took over from cameras and removed the need for film altogether. And it went downhill for market leaders from there.

Kodak slipped away into bankruptcy and the theory was that the company lost market share when people stopped buying cameras and film which led to the decline.

However, the real story is far more nuanced.

Fuji has stayed out of trouble and done exceedingly well

How?

Here are the broad reasons. Kodak originally sold cameras on the Gillette razor model. They lost money on the cameras but made profits when people came back to develop films and photos.

They made an early entry into digital cameras but continued losing money on every sale. And for a while, it looked as if customers would shift to ordering albums and photos online.

The prediction was that people would still want to retain hard copies of their photos and remote ordering would become the norm. 

Kodak made all the investments there after selling off their healthcare film division for $2. 3 billion. When the market lost steam with a fundamental change in customer behavior, that proved to be a costly mistake.

Fuji did exactly the opposite and scaled the healthcare film products. Along with cosmetics.

It's a fascinating story of two competitors in the same business making different business decisions.

Kodak sank. Fuji soared.

How well stocked is your Kindle library?

Even if it has more books than bookshelves at home (and not those Zoom backgrounds), there's no way for people to gauge your interests.

Since it was launched in 2007, ebooks have become part of the reading landscape.

However, it will be interesting to see how things play out over the next few decades.

As home libraries fade and most people are content to show off their multi-monitor displays, or the game and movie rooms

Sad that the Kindle library is out of bounds. Unless you set up a family link and loan out books to other members of your family, or friends circle.

When the book is lent out, it disappears from your library. And the person you've lent it to has 2 weeks to finish reading it.

It's a pale version of happenstance in real life.

In bookstores, finding a person who liked the same obscure author was a great opportunity to strike up a conversation. And things would flow from there.

If you were reading a book on a train, or a flight, the book was a conversation starter.  But the Kindle holds its secrets close.

I'm not sure if reading habits have changed. Navigating the Kindle reader on a phone is a little easier for short dives into a book.

But the same problems with staying on track and piling up unread books on the shelf continue.

Somehow, you don't want to miss out.

It's like ordering more than necessary at restaurants.

However, when it comes to reading, nothing is wasted.

Even the trucks at Glenfiddich 'drink' the whiskey

Talk about factories that let nothing go waste.

The factory distilling Glenfiddich makes biogas from the alcohol waste. And that powers the trucks.

Sounds like a great idea.

For one thing, they cut down on the costs of fuel because they produce it from their own waste.

And any money saved goes to the bottom line.

Apparently, it's great for the environment as well, with a 95% cut in the CO2 generated.

What has started at Glenfiddich could easily be implemented at other factories producing alcohol - in India, the government plans to mix 20% ethanol with petrol to reduce emissions and costs by 2025.

The previous target was to make this happen by 2030, so they are stepping on the accelerator.

But the ripple effects will be felt in the sugar markets worldwide. India will cut down on the export of sugar to reach this goal and that is likely to increase the cost of sugar for many countries.

The diversion to making ethanol will take 6 million tons of sugar out of the market.

It demonstrates how closely the supply chains across countries are interlocked and any major changes have a completely unpredictable outcome.

All things considered, this is the time when the phrase 'One for the road' makes complete sense!

And in a good way.

Every week, I'll plant a few ideas in your mind on branding, behavior and markets. Triggers for your thoughts. Spread the word to your friends. All you have to do is click the link and enter an email address.