Suresh Dinakaran's Blog

It is said that ‘ you win some, you lose sum ‘. Fair enough. This philosophical expression originated in the early 1900s among gamblers who bet on sports. But, when it comes to whining, going down south into the bottomless rabbit hole is the only assured outcome. If a downward spiral is what you are seeking, please go ahead, though none of the people around you would be in any hurry to offer you some cheese with you whine !

Whining is self reinforcing and it doesn’t let go of you easily. Embracing tightly the comfort zone called status quo has something to do with it. That said, we as humans are hardwired to whine as a way to ask for connection and empathy. And as we do that, knowingly or unknowingly, we dilute or give up on our initiative, our action, our agency, our possibilities, ignore potential joy and sink into the never ever can you win card game called ‘ Let’s Play Victim ‘. There is a better way to bridge the gap, be a blackjack rather than stay poker faced.

The culture gets a lot of say in what is encouraged. Most armed forces around the world, the mariners, the SEALS etc, discourage whining with a passion. While fan bases of popular sports teams in baseball, football, cricket, basketball and the likes around the world, use that as crutch, in fact bask in it.

Like every problem presents and opportunity, marketers and the customer service community should see this a chance to redeem and delight. Firstly, not offering scorn, but by acknowledging the ‘problem‘. And by taking responsibility, not only does the problem stand a far higher chance of being resolved but the resultant connection goes deep and becomes more meaningful. ” You whine some..you win some “.

In a world with so many challenges and so much unevenly distributed distress, whining about the brand of toiletries or the artisanal chocolates that the airline offered you as a first class passenger on your last flight would be impossible to justify. Whining is addictive and it is easy to get hooked on the solace that comes from whining (either from others, or from our selves).

“Never whine. Whining lets a brute know that a victim is in the neighborhood.” Maya Angelou

Where there is customer pain, there is an opportunity for brands. Moving the needle from top down to bottom up is ideally the way forward for brands and marketers. Some would be in plain sight, others would have to be unearthed with a fine tooth comb.

Don’t find customers for your products; find products for your customers.

More @ https://www.brandknewmag.com/dont-find-customers-for-your-products-find-products-for-your-customers/

Have no doubt about it!

The most ignored demographic in most marcom or advertising is the one involving elders | baby boomers.

Ironically, they are the ones with the most purchasing power.

Contrary to the popular perception that the only thing they need is an ” anti-slip bathmat ” 😁 .

With malice towards none, this rant is undertaken with a lot of apprehension, clean intent and hope.

So, before I unravel what I want to, here’s a caveat: ” Citizenship is a full contact sport. NOT a spectator sport. Cities are fundamentally about relationships. Cities only work when we serve our shared goals, share our thinking(and) share ourselves. It’s not what I do to or even for you, but what we do together. I reckon I have stated the obvious in this short preamble.

Like many others, I am an accidental nomad. And now spending a lot of time in Bangalore(Bengaluru)– this new domicile that I am keen to call|make home. Over the past few months, I have been extremely fortunate to have met with some  wonderful people, who have so graciously become mentors, guides, coaches, friends and much more with no expectations or obligations. Extremely grateful for this abundance and welcome. It has only reinforced my belief that this can truly become home and my motivation still remains high. This release is to ensure my wishes are horses.

Some days, I admit, the last thing you want to do is go to work—but since it doesn’t look like those bills will start paying themselves anytime soon, you put on your best adulting face and head out for your daily hustle. What follows is a set of on road | off road | from road observations. And certainly not painting everyone with the same brush.

Bangalore can be termed the spondylitis capital of the world. Other cities might run it close, but for now, it is a clear victor. My metric for measurement on this is the fact that bikers, motorists, cyclists, truckers etc never ever look left or right when they access oncoming or ongoing traffic. Stiff necks could be the cause. That other motorists would be neck deep in trouble because of their RoboCop act is of no concern to them. Probably a reason why the term is “break neck speed “. It had to come from somewhere.

If you are in media or publishing, you would be knowing the term ” having a church and state relationship“. Effectively means that the editorial and advertising teams don’t see eye to eye. Here, it is the same with urban planning and infrastructure. They don’t bother each other at all and hate playing tweedle dee and tweedle dum. And aesthetics, well that is the prerogative of the ‘unreasonable’, so I am not trespassing there.

There is another claim that it can make. Being the colour blind capital of the world. Right from an impressionable age and even earlier, we were given to understand that Red light at a traffic signal means stop, Green means go and Amber means pause and review. It’s a win-win out there. Red means go. Green means go. And Amber- what|who is that? Is it my daughter’s friend who is now settled in Canada? What impressed me about the democratic nature of this blatant acts of violation is that it is done with great panache by both the white collar and the blue collar tribes. No discrimination or gender bias there. Yes, you guessed it- including the techie types with backpacks branded by mega MNC IT brands! Pray dell me?

This is also a place where Lane Dhane is always on – I mean you can move from any lane to any lane, any time, any way, any manner. Who gives you that incredible flexibility? Empowerment re-imagined. Lucky!!

As you sit in kilometres of parking lots( I mean roads) anticipating your next major move of 3 to 4 mms, you look around and more often than not see billboards inspiring you to invest multiple crores in the next big residential complex. Lake View Penthouses if you may. Leaves you wondering when will the owners ever reach those places, if at all- probably well after the lakes have dried up or encroached upon, both of which are distinct possibilities. And all this while you are coming to terms with Google Maps’ audacity of its robotic, cut and dried reassurance- ” you are on the fastest route despite heavier than usual traffic “. And I am not even going to ” there is an object on the road ” riff- it is no object but the subject of all strife for God’s sake- it is the trailer truck whose driver has parked right in the middle of the road as he saundered into the wilderness without any GPS to attend nature’s call.

All over the city you see tell tale signs that ” once upon a time ” metro work had started. Apparently part of folklore when it started ( which in any case was 20-25 years too late). The tired looking pillars(of weakness) and rusting iron rods tell a pathetic story. The brief given was ‘TYT‘- we are in no hurry, as long as it is work in retrogress, and it is massively inconveniencing everyone, we are fine with it. We are all on board for Plundership and Non Cooperate, Non Governance- Life in a Metro anyone or should it be Strife in a Metro?

If cradle snatching has a hero destination, this would be it. All over the city you can see underage boys(obviously without license but a license to kill) riding and motorbikes. But for them too, it is a tough ask- for you to qualify doing the unthinkable you must pass these strenuous tests: you must have at least 3 kids on the bike, you must drive on main roads with heavy traffic and God help you if you are caught wearing a helmet. Its extremely tough but it gets pulled off.

It is also (dis)heartening to note the progress made by the city on the beautification front. Other places resort to water features, hardscape, softscape, irrigation etc to keep their cities looking beautiful. Here, the citizenry is empowered to use garbage as the ammunition and it can be thrown anywhere you please as long as it is across a vast stretch( I am told a minimum stretch of 100 metres is mandatory) and it becomes a sight for four eyes and cleans up your blocked nose. Beware, these are exacting standards to live up to!!

It took a while to dawn on me why ISRO is headquartered here: I could not see the obvious but given the amount of crater filled roads or craters masquerading as roads, the close resemblance to Mars or the Moon’s surfaces gives them instant and constant access to real simulations without taking any moonshots. And given it’s penchant for agile thinking, I understand that Disney is taking inspiration from the roads here for some of the roller coaster rides that it is planning  at its upcoming theme parks.

I am told that top notch mobility, urban transportation and logistics companies from around the world over are making a beeline to come here and understand how to transport iron rods, concrete blocks, rotting garbage, meri junk etc in broad daylight, during all hours in the most unsafe and crude manner possible, all through the city. I think the original version of Fear Factor was conceptualised here.

Earlier this year, the city witnessed a dry, hot spell for several months. The grass was not greener on any side. Nay sayers predicted doomsday. Little did they know that given the amount of open urination and relentless spitting that happens here would be more than enough to solve the liquidity crunch. Don’t they see it coming? How remiss! We see it all the time(whether we want it or not!). MRP(ee)!! Thank the Men of Dishonour!

As part of the city’s talent attraction programme, senior sound engineers from some of the top most audio brands in the world are coming to understand the technology behind the horns used here. Especially the psychedelic meets electric shock meets dysentry in a flash kind of horns. And they can’t stop honking- at traffic lights when there is not an inch to move, at 2 am in the night when there is no need for it. These guys are perennially horny I guess. What to do, ‘horny ko kaun taal saktha hain?”

And thank god, this is also a city of faithfuls. Like some auto rickshaws which has this clear message written at the back saying ” Jesus is Coming “. Seeking divine intervention is natural given the state we are in. So, let’s all keep the faith. Believe.

Some of the Uber and Ola drivers though are different. Yes I am referring to the few who look at you with homicidal intent when you ask them to switch on the Air Conditioner. It is as if you have asked them to hand over their family fortune at gun point. How dare?

I am not going to throw more light on non existing street lights on non existing roads- why waste electricity? Though we have the power to change things. That said, motorists here are always driving with full beam at night(what is a dipper??) and with the dust and craters on the road, this is the perfect setting for filming Nightmare on Elm(every Street)!

All the above notwithstanding, as I said earlier, “Citizenship is a full contact sport. NOT a spectator sport “. And charity begins at home.

So, much as we would all want to wield the megaphone and wave the Silicon Valley flag, and with pride at that, none of us want to hear its phonetic equivalent ” Silly Con Valley “- that would really hurt! Wouldn’t it?

So, lets wake up and smell the Coorg Coffee! It will be still worth it, I promise.

Circa 1979. One of the most famous coups de theatre in recent business history occurred when a very senior Sony executive paid a visit to his engineering department to challenge the ingenuity of the people there. Like a fairy-tale king visiting his alchemists, he produced a small rectangular piece of wood and dared the engineers to design a tape player of the same size.

” No bigger than this “, he declared. The techies went to work, but soon came up against a seemingly insurmountable obstacle: they could not devise a speaker that would fit into a tiny package.

Then, one of then one of them had an intuition, inspiration, illumination, revelation, epiphany- whatever. He asked himself: ” Why does it need a speaker at all ? Let’s do the job with small earphones!”

Whereupon one of the all-time great inventions, the iconic Sony Walkman was born!

In fairy tale scenarios of course, the hero of such a story would be the person- a bullied youngest son or step daughter- who solved the puzzle and saved the day. Here, however, defying fairy-tale morality, one could argue that the real hero is the king- the manager. It was he who ” thought the unthinkable “. A tape player that you could carry in the palm of your hand, or in your shirt pocket or strapped to your arm, or clipped onto your belt. It was he, who had the panache to ” present the unthinkable ” in the theatrical way he did, using the block of wood as a vivid prop.

Managers across organisations are being increasingly called upon to exercise self-reliance, flexibility and imagination– that is, creativity. They’re being asked to stretch and grow-to jam- to help their companies improve in today’s rapidly evolving global economy. Its all about challenges: setting them and meeting them.

The era of predictable competition, steadfast investors, docile customers and slow-footed change are well behind us. The need(or knead?) of the hour is for brands and organiations to live in a permanent state of mobilised awareness– of themselves, their competitors and of course their customers.

Corporate landscape is littered with the psychic corpses of the unfortunates- those who did not either see the chasm or bridge the chasm to embrace change and compete with that groovy genius wearing six ear rings on her left ear and working on the next game changing…err game design while subsisting on Pepsi and Chips!

Contrary to perception, almost all managers can carry off leadership by challenge. And in the current business climate, they must. As we all know, fear is a reaction, creativity is a response!

The poet J.D. McCatchy captured this essential fact beautifully in his observation that “love is the quality of attention we pay to things.”.

As some wise man said, don’t just move, move forward.  The things that are craving for our attention is like a bottomless pit. Social media, emails, OTT, meetings, monitoring stock markets, entertaining and all of that. All of this means the direction, energy and time of our attention is all outward, external.

And because life is not a spectator sport to remain on the sidelines and react to what others are doing, accomplishing- it is for you to make your own moves.

Busy is not a benchmark to get carried away by. Though our zeitgeist will not encourage anything else. Busy people are just ticking off the tasks’ boxes one by one. The idea is to move the needle and focus your attention on what you can do to add value, create impact. Treating time and attention like an investment  wherein the impact and value you create is the biggest return you can expect.

The toss up is between spending your time or investing your time!

Imagine the amount of energy that you can have back at your disposal when attention is inward, on what you are supposed to do rather than expend it un gainfully externally, bothered about reacting to what others are doing. Please don’t be so generous with your attention and do not give it away freely. It is said that attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity. So before you start your charitable work of distributing it outward, reconsider, introspect and use it for your next Guernica(Picasso). Or whatever lights up your day. Because diluted attention means you are actually dimming your inner fire, the spark.

The temptation in wanting a piece of ‘ what’s happening there ‘ is high. When you begin to internalise your attention, you get back the fuel that you have been scattering away aimlessly. Good work and great art comes from deep focus and deep work. Our ability to be prolific, create art that resonates, that strikes a chord , tug at the heartstrings and hit people in the face with a crowbar depends on our ability to focus.

This is not a rant about shutting the world out. Not in the least. But a rallying cry for being more you, more grounded, more curious about your own experience first. This is the shift that will disengage you from the ‘ autopilot ‘ mode and when you take charge, rather than being dictated by the external world. That is when you begin to lead the life that you have not been living, create the things that you so badly wanted to.

Consider for a moment the kind of mental world we can construct when we dedicate significant time and attention to our deep endeavors.

Your world is the outcome of what you pay attention to. Period. Attention is the currency of your achievement.

The world will still be there when you look up from doing what lights your fire. Till then, it can wait!

Part of the caption is with respectful attribution to Ryan Holiday‘s seminal book ” The Obstacle is the Way ”

We have two options in a crisis:

• Accept the reality and accept the crisis as a catalyst for the change that we have always wanted to make..or
• Resist the reality and accept our temporary circumstances become our permanent identity

The worst thing you can do when you are unemployed is to spend all your time looking for a job. Why? because what you are doing is spending all your focus, energy and attention on the greatest source giving the maximum anxiety in your life.

Let’s remember that an economy that once rewarded people for fitting in now rewards people for standing out. Probably a rude awakening for some of us sitting around waiting.

It’s been a while since the dreaded Corona pulverised us but that said ” have we fallen prey to Cornona Fatigue?  The new term that has been coined to describe our collective sense of exhaustion, helplessness and inertia.

That means we seem to have dropped the ball on our creative work and doing the bare minimum that needs to be done( plus Prime and Netflix of course!) . We got tired, frustrated and just waiting for better days.

Creativity is future proof. Some of the most remarkable works of art were created in dire circumstances and in response to adversity, social injustice and major uncertainty.  Here goes a few examples:

• The seminal work of Viktor Frankl(inside a Nazi concentration camp)
• The Hemingway & Steinbeck novels
• The Diary of Anne Frank
• Picasso’s Guernica

If you have read up until this part of the rant, you would discover a gap between your capabilities and what you are actually doing. Maybe you are thinking:-

I’m my own greatest obstacle

My self-doubt is an obstacle

My own motivation and focus or lack thereof is my biggest obstacle

We may feel that there could be something better and more fulfilling to do with our time and energy

Enough of (doom)scrolling, tweeting and obsessive email checking. What else can we do and what can we do and what prevents us from doing those other things?

The pandemic has made us hyper-focused on what sucks and short sighted about other things that we still have control over.

Everyone feels like a fraud. We are all making it up. There is only one difference between people who get out of their way and those who don’t. People who get out of their way, persists, even if they feel like a fraud.

You don’t have to have your shit together in order to create.

The fact that you don’t have your shit together doesn’t mean that you are stupid or don’t know anything- it just shows that you are human.

We use our creativity to express our humanity and we connect with each other thanks to our common humanity.

So, let’s get out of our way to shovel a mountain of shit for our ounce of gold.

” Every act of creation is first an act of destruction “- Pablo Picasso

Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) coined the seemingly paradoxical term “creative destruction,” and generations of economists have adopted it as a shorthand description of the free market’s messy way of delivering progress.

The adoption of laissez faire and the ceaseless churning of the existing means lost jobs, ruined companies, and vanishing industries are inherent parts of the growth system. It comes with the territory.

Creative destruction-in the process of product innovation- is an old story. Voice mail comes along and sends armies of office workers looking for other lines of work. Cassettes replace vinyls and then get dis intermediated by CDs which loses out to MP3 players which become the guinea pig at the altar of streaming music. New Tide comes in and old Tide goes out. Coke begets New Coke which fizzles leading us back to the “real thing ” of Classic Coke. Sony brings a new product to market with alarming regularity, often times destroying the marketability of one of its existing products.

Back in 1776, at the dawn of industrial capitalism, Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith wrote, sadly but wisely, that it takes a ruin to build the wealth of a great nation. If we haven’t yet acclimated to that paradox, we’d better get out of business.

Look at the parallels that business and jazz music have. When we have a great conversation, we are jamming. Dancing can be very much about jamming. So is the road that an inspired product development team walks to come up with something new that compels customer’s attention. When a company walks the tightrope between analytical rigor and inspired passion, when it leaves the sheet music behind for new horizons, it is jamming. Jazz has so much to teach us about improvisation.

In jazz-and in business- the improvisational style derives its power from the way it juxtaposes certain vital human tensions or paradoxes. Here’s a partial list, in no particular order:

• The established( tradition, powers that be, status quo) in tension with the new
• The need for form in tension with the drive for openness
• Critical norms and standards in tension with the need to experiment
•  The security of the familiar in tension with the lure of the unknown
• Responsiveness(responsibility) to the group in tension with individual expressiveness
• Discipline in tension with freedom
• Power in tension with desire
• Established theory in tension with persistent experimentation
• Expertise in tension with freshness, naivete

Today’s global marketplace- turbulent, “spacey”, and endlessly demanding of the new, the experimental, the faster, the better and the cheaper- is NOT a concert-hall environment. There’s no time for business managers to look for solutions in the archives of corporate sheet music. Today’s highly competitive business world puts a premium on the skill of improvisation. All the world’s a jazz club. This is an era, in short, that calls for the inspiration of art. And discipline.

The perennial quest is to locate that sweet spot somewhere between systems and analysis on the one hand and the free-flowing creativity of the individual on the other. Jazz music and the management of business creativity are homologous: they emerge from the same sort of logic, a logic of the contemporary marketplace; what customers want, what sounds  good!

The art and practice of creativity management call for facilitating creative destruction-for jamming. We need to have a way to deal with inspiration: a way to help us determine the winners, and to assure (or terminate) their subsequent “lives” in the productive system.

Throw away your sheet music. Ready to jam?

“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

Earlier this year in July we at ISD Global had conceptualised and curated a Trust Conclave in collaboration with IIM Bangalore and at that meet, one of the participants came up to me( a real water cooler moment) and said that ‘ Trust is higher than Love “, and that has stayed with me ever since. So when you read quotes like ” “Hope is the only thing stronger than fear.”– President Snow; or “Hope lives in those who believe in it.” – Buddha, you reconcile to them easily.

The English vocabulary has some beautiful four letter words including ‘ love ‘, ‘ kind ‘ , ‘ feel ‘, ‘ life ‘, ‘ meet ‘ , ‘ hand ‘, ‘ nest ‘ and many ‘ more ‘, and that said, for most of humanity, ‘ hope ‘ will be right on top of the pile.

Hope brings with it the energy of reassurance, the promise of tomorrow on the premise of today, the willpower and the tenacity, the resilience to get even against all odds, the question before the answer, the reinforcement of faith, the counter to fait accompli, the move from bitter to better, the silver lining on the horizon, the springboard for moonshots…and all of these for a small four letter word, it is saying a lot.

While hope is great as an individual strength, it is equally vital to reflect on its collective responsibility.

Here’s hoping it is au revoir and not goodbye.

Let’s begin with what the Business Dictionary has to say about Affluenza(not to be mixed up with Influenza though the contagious capabilities are common to both):

1. A social condition that affects a society because of the elevated number of individuals striving to be wealthy. People within the society feel that the only measure of success is determined by how much money and prestige a person has.

2. A social theory claiming that individuals with very privileged and wealthy backgrounds sometimes struggle to determine the difference between right and wrong due to the nature of their upbringing. Also known as sudden-wealth syndrome.

Having done that, Stuffocation is defined by Macmillan’s Crowdsourced Open Dictionary as:

– a feeling of being oppressed by the amount of stuff you own. The problem in question is an anxiety christened stuffocation – a feeling of being oppressed by one’s ungovernable heap of belongings, acquisitions.

Affluenza( or Selfish Capitalism as author Oliver James would have called it in his book by the same name) has not just changed the world, it has also changed the way we see the world. The happy embrace of ‘ convenience ‘ and our reconciling to not being able to plan ahead is an entirely new way of thinking and over the past few decades we have built an economic system to accommodate it. A vast majority of humans(yes, us included, thankfully) would find the idea of using our scarce resources to produce things that are designed to be thrown away absolutely mad.

Consumerism(the love of buying things) can, by definition only provide a transient sense of satisfaction, the ‘ thrill of the chase ‘ or the ‘ after glow ‘ like walking down high street with your branded take away. The benefits of consumerism, as one can imagine is short lived as they are linked to the process of the purchase and not to the use of the product. Materialism(is the love of things themselves) is about owning and therefore there is a clear distinction from consumerism. Taken literally, they are polar opposites, though they are often used interchangeably.

We love things not for their material function but for the symbolic act of acquiring and possessing them.