Males of the species beware!

The whole patriarchical structure of society is a plan of survival by the males of the species called Homo Sapiens. Look around you will find nature does not really need males of the any species and role of male is limited to providing stimulus to the egg to develop into a zygote! and nothing beyond. In any case sexual reproduction is a method to tide over difficult time and in a situation of abundance all the species would like to multiply asexually which is so much more faster! In case of human beings we have lost the ability of asexual reproduction, however where the nature stopped, technology has taken over. How much time from now, when the males would just be seen as sperm donors?

Woman of the species have reddefined their roles in last one century, but males have tried to hold on to the age old roles. Its high time they also redefined their roles and created a new relevance in the society which is not defined by the traditional roles.

God’s own enterprise

Every time I visit the great Gods of Chinna Mastika, Deoghar, Baba Vishwanath, Siddhi Vinayak or Sirdi Sai Baba, I am in awe. These gods have been kind to me and blessed me in many ways. But the sense of awe is for a very differen reason, I am amazed by the industrialization of the the whole thing. Its an industry in its own right.

The priest brigade, the prasad sellers, the hawkers. Not to talk of the hospitality and travel industry that comes up to support the whole pilgrimage business.

At times I do wonder if its God's way of blessing the local populace with a livelihood opportunity, I think this is the case.

Capitalism to Socialism

We all would remember the old joke about the socialism and communism. Seems all the isms are cyclically linked or what would explain the phenomenon post the global melt down. No doubt that the private enterprise created wealth, but it did so for a few who were part of the game. However when the losses started coming in, it was the government who had to come forward and do the bail out.
Now in a democratic set up, its us the people who make the government and its our (tax payers) money that is getting used to bail out the large corporations. Have no doubts its clearly capitalism of profit and socialism of losses.

I feel like clapping at the irony, the trickle down effect of wealth creation takes ages, but socialism of losses ensures that everyone is impacted.

Best out of worst

There are enough research and writings to the effect that people leave their managers and not the companies/organization. It makes me wonder what makes people do wonder under some managers and the same people turn out to be underperformer horror stories under some other managers. Very young in my professional life, I wanted to sack someone and approached my then manager as to why the person should leave.


I was given a simple challenge then. Anyone can get work done out of good and talented people, how do you demonstrate you are a good manager? The idea is very simple if everyone is good in their job and did justice to their responsibilities, there will not be need for managers in such pefect world. However the world is not perfect and we have to get the best out of worst people. At that point of time I seethed with anger, feeling my manager was behaving like a Bengali socialist protecting incompetence. However it gave me a great learning, it was not him who was a problem, it was more of me who did not look at his skills, his strengths and his usefulness in the organization and tried to look at him through a paticular lense and was not happy with the image.

Over a period of time I have tried to assimilate this learning in the way I work and have never been disappointed by a team member. After all its our job as a manager to get best out of worst

Brand Activation What's this all about

This is one of the most abused word in a Marketer's lexicon. This can mean anything from Events, Promotions, road shows and host of other activities which marketers can not club under any other name gets clubbed under activation. Every industry has evolved its own definition of activation. Media owners (Radio & Press) are masquerading their clubbed offerings and value deals as activation. So we have outfits offering brand activation without understanding what exactly is this. So we have notions like Activation is about Implementation, its Below the line, its tactical, it is what non-advertising people do….. The non traditional stuff like Brand Experience… 360 degrees…behaviour transformation… “invite, amplify, experience”…media neutral…BTL…”last mile”, and Activation at touch points…value addition etc etc.

So much so that after spending around 9 years in the brand activation domain I still get confused by the jargon of activation and the way different people use it.

If I have to put a definition to activation, it would be, "Consumer engagement with a defined and specific objective, wherein a particular emotion related to the brand world is fired/activated in sync with a specific consumer insight at relevant mind points". This engagement is not subservient to the media vehicle. The reach out media can be the traditional mass media as well.

Mind points are communication hooks which can help us connect the brand better with consumer with the specified objective. e.g. when Nokia was losing relevance with youth, it came up with mind connect point of "Defend Your Turf", this was based on a key insight about youth that they are tribal in their bonding and any challenge to their territory or turf unites them and they then connect with each other to the nemesis of the opponents.

This gelled well with Nokia's proposition of connecting people as, this brand initiative helped youth to connect with each other!

Amitav Ki Duniya

Amitav Ki Duniya

Sustainable Rural Development- Companies Adopting Villages

Came across this article by Omkar Goswami, suggesting corporates adopt 1 villages and turn that into utopian heavens - suggesting corporates create infrastructure in adopted villages. Now there are 66, 000 villages in India and pray how many corporates will take to adopt the entire India and turn them around! and what kind of time frame, will it be?

It is belived that, most govt programmes fail because of failure on part of govt machinary (read bureaucracy) in the design and implementation! It is belived that corporates being result oriented - will have a proper framework and plan with mechanism for checks and reviews to ensure it gets implemented what has been planned.

I know corporates have a social responsibilty, which manifests itself in the various peripheral area development programmes being implemented and which have seen various degrees of success. However to suggest that corporates take over the responsibility of govt. becuase they are efficient is taking things bit further.

The solution is not corporates taking over governance, but corporatization of govt and having same sense of accounatbilty and result oriented work culture in bureacracy. Its argued that it will hardly cost anything to the corporates. But why tax the corporates twice? If private enterprise has to take over the event basic govt duties, why do the citizens pay taxes?

Also will this kind of development which is based on doles, will it be sustainable? For developments to be sustainable they must be backed by employment opportunities and increase in people's income.

Let corporates do, what they are best i.e. wealth creation and profit making. If corporates make enough money, generate enough jobs and we all pay our taxes honestly, the development will definitely trickle down. To catlyse this process, best brains from industry may be drafted /deputed in various govt delivery mechanisms and let inefficient babus learn from them.