Suresh Dinakaran's Blog

 

What is Machiavelli’s Theory?

 

Machiavelli’s view that acquiring a state and maintaining it requires evil means has been noted as the chief theme of the treatise. He has become infamous for this advice, so much so that the adjective Machiavellian would later on describe a type of politics that is “marked by cunning, duplicity, or bad faith.

 

Hercules (known in Greek mythology as Heracles or Herakles) is one of the best-known heroes in ancient mythology. His life was not easy—he endured many trials and completed many daunting tasks—but the reward for his suffering was a promise that he would live forever among the gods at Mount Olympus.

 

This rant is neither about Machiavelli nor about Hercules. But, the culture that we live in expects us to be fiercely independent and function like the be all and end all. Invincible or Winvincible?

 

The need we have to knead is to need each other. Be in a state of deep dependence. But the diktat floating around in our society is completely the opposite.

 

Realisation of full potential is not through total individual independence but through transcending the self. It’s about connecting with something greater through altruism, spirituality, and a collective purpose. To be kind, to have hope and to love, ( note that four letter words- they can be a salve too) is a collective responsibility.

 

Mutual reliance is nothing to be embarrassed about. Our growth, our fulfillment, indeed, our very potential, are interwoven with our connection to others.  What should ideally be obsolete terms include self-made, self-help, self-centred. An ‘ever evolving society’ should not sideline our need for emotional connections.

“We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects.”   –  Herman Melville

 

For all those of us brought upon a dose of movies and drama, the intermission is a story waiting to be told. The moving back from darkness(inside the cinema hall) to light, the wait for Nachos and Coke, the unrest in the rest room,  voyeuring posters of the upcoming releases, the quick call to Mom to say all is well…the rush back to the seats and finding your seat in the dark…the mission is on over drive.

 

The show must and will go on. So, don’t miss your cue for a short break. To pause, step back, visualise, soak in, express. Unfailingly, the cast, the crew, or the drama will not come to a screeching halt if you take a few minutes for yourself. Rest assured.

 

We leave people and places and times behind. We encounter new ones. Sometimes we can’t see the patterns or connections, but they are there, between one breath and the next.

 

I read in one of Ozan Varol‘s blog posts that when Martin Scorsese’s film, Killers of the Flower Moon, was released(which runs for a marathon 3 hours and 26 minutes) some theaters in the United States, attuned to the audience’s comfort, introduced a 10-minute intermission. Normally, movies in the United States do not have an intermission.

 

This seemingly minor accommodation sparked a major controversy. Studios quickly stepped in, asserting that altering the movie’s presentation—even with a well-intentioned pause—violated licensing agreements. The intermissions were promptly canceled.

 

Scorsese defended the studios, labeling the intermission as a breach of “artistic integrity.” “Give cinema some respect,” he demanded, foregoing any respect for the bladders of the audience members.

 

The debate can linger on about our resistance to change and ‘ this is the way we have always done it’. Status quo is a comfortable domicile. But, just like ‘ curiosity ‘ that great human trait that got us out of the cave, across the globe and onto the moon, re-imagining the status quo leads to innovation, when we start asking, can this be done differently? And this applies not just to an intermission in movies but also can apply to a business process, a medical treatment or the technique behind your golf swing.

Just like the future happens gradually and then all of a sudden, it is the same with innovation. It doesn’t come with all guns blazing and with bells and whistles. The cheese here is moved slowly and deliberately and aligns with both palette and plate to find the sweet spot.

 

When we are far too close to anything be it art or anything else, it is natural to miss the wood for the trees. A better take away would be to step back, albeit for the interim and let the story unfold itself.

 

Close your eyes. To open your mind.

 

One minute of advertising airtime during the Super Bowl telecast on CBS on the 11th of this month will come at a whopping US$14 Million. And there are scores of brands placing their bet on this 30 seconds or 1 minute to stake their claim in history.

 

A Super Bowl ad has been the gold standard for 40 years, ever since Lee Clow and Jay Chiat( of Chiat|Day ) did the original Mac ad. Directed by Ridley Scott. As a result of advertiser demand, the per-viewer cost of running an ad for this mass audience is actually more than it would cost to run targeted ads at only the people you actually want to reach. To simplify what I am saying, advertisers are paying far more extra to reach people who simply don’t care about your message nor expected to take action. Because the default is easy- there are loads going in that direction, as it is big, Super and easy- let me too be birds of the same feather.

 

In stark contrast, artists like Rihana or Michael Jackson or Katy Perry or Dr. Dre and Eminem and their ilk get 12 whole minutes to perform during the half time. For free.

 

Last year at the Super Bowl, Rihanna danced on a platform suspended high above the field at State Farm Stadium in Arizona.

 

It was her first live show in five years, and she moved effortlessly from hits like “We Found Love” to “Diamonds,” in a red leather corset and baggy flight-suit unzipped to emphasize what viewers suspected was a baby bump. (It was.)

 

Her savviest marketing move came halfway through her set, a moment that made clear why Rihanna couldn’t pass up putting on a free concert in the desert. (Super Bowl halftime performers don’t get paid as mentioned earlier).

 

As she prepared to sing the intro to “All of the Lights,” a dancer handed Rihanna a sleek white makeup compact. Huh? The pop star quickly blotted Invisimatte setting powder from her Fenty beauty line across her cheeks. You can catch a glimpse of this brilliant marketing coup here https://youtu.be/L2n5cpUbj-U?si=Xztyiyx5XsL4p8_V

 

The moment didn’t last five seconds, but the internet went nuts. AdWeek reported the performance earned Fenty $5.6m in media value over just the next 12 hours.

 

The Super Bowl’s primary premise and purpose would be to crown the top team in American football history( aside from propping up the Chicken Wing, chips and beer industry) but, that said, artists who perform at halftime are the biggest winners. In a fragmented cultural landscape, they’re granted the single-largest advertising stage in the world — for free.

 

But the half time shows do more than move albums and inflate streaming numbers. Last year, through her de facto commercial, Rihanna built on her reputation as a bona fide entrepreneur.

 

With so much clout at stake, the slot has become highly coveted. Even when greats like Michael Jackson transformed the Super Bowl halftime experience, not everyone enjoyed the show. It was claimed that his show blended in very well with the orgy of commercialism and commercials that was at the heart of the Super Bowl. No one was complaining especially Jackson as post his performance, sales of his Dangerous album (that he released two years earlier), from barely inside the Billboard Top 100 into the Top 10.

 

Eyeballs are a scarce resource now, if you want them in one place at the same time. The mass audiences that once flocked to television have fragmented because of streaming, YouTube, and TikTok.

A few mass market brands can justify the results (read ROMI) of these ads. The ones who make beer, chips, chicken wings etc. Mass makes sense to those brands. For all the others on the ‘herd mentality‘ train, mass cannot be your ally. Mass by definition is average, or just about. Because the average person has no intent to act, sign up, change or spread the word. Mass is right in the thick and centre of it, in Red Ocean territory, whereas as a brand, the change that you are seeking to make will come from the edges.

 

Rita McGrath, Professor at Columbia Business School, Best Selling Author( with 5 books till date), a highly sought after Speaker, regular Columnist in HBR and one of the world’s top experts on innovation and growth and management thinker par excellence in her book ‘ Seeing Around Corners ‘ , talks about those inflection points before they happen. Her interview in BrandKnew can be accessed here.

 

Birds of the same feather is a trap, where others have already decided where they are going and you hop onto the ride though your direction is totally somewhere else. What are you looking for? Noise or signal?

 

 

How often do we the above signage across packages, airport luggage, courier shipments and more. Giving it the kid glove treatment. Molly coddle.

 

Anti fragile as a term has been vastly enhanced by Nicholas Nassim Taleb‘s seminal book of the same name. Where he talks about how things can gain from disorder. Contrary to the popular perception that prevails.

 

Anti-fragility is a concept that has gained popularity in recent years, especially in business. It refers to the ability of a system or an individual to not only withstand stress and adversity but thrive under such conditions. Being secure in the status quo is akin to being in a state of impasse and you lose the opportunity to embrace discomfort, dance with our fears and get better at what we can do. It actually is a bottomless pit and going south is what happens most of the time. Because one is so wrapped around the concept of fragile.

 

Antifragility has a singular property of allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them— and do them well. Let me be more aggressive: we are largely better at doing than we are at thinking, thanks to antifragility.

 

Convexity of antifragility is where the accelerating curve is due to feedback. In his book, Nassim Taleb gives three examples of antifragility: Airlines, Restaurants, and Silicon Valley. All three of these become stronger every time something goes wrong. Amazon and Zoom are two examples of antifragile companies that thrived during the pandemic.

 

Anti fragile is NOT synonymous with resilient and hence not to be confused. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better. The infographic below offers a better explanation.

 

Image Source: TUVRheinland | Risktec 

In a world fraught with uncertainty, opaqueness, poor decision making, human error, risk and all of that, being anti fragile (as individuals or organisations) can be the knight in shining armour.

 

The clarion call for any brand advertising is to reach more people. Somehow it seems to come with the territory.

 

If there is more money on hand, more to spend on, it is tempting to reach more people. Reach is probably erringly coveted. In a culture obsessed with adding, less but better seems out of sync.

 

The IPL has reach both on broadcast TV and on OTT|Social. So has the English Premier League. The Super Bowl. The FIFA World Cup. The NBA. The Rugby World Cup. The Oscars. All these reach would tantamount to nothing if the audiences associated are not invested in where your message or brand is taking them.

 

What we need to look at is how much of that ‘more people‘ that you are trying to reach are in on the journey that you have embarked on. Because if they are not, it’s a waste to counter so much friction and spend good money after bad.

 

What if the idea is ‘ less but better ‘? Reaching the right people. In fact paying extra to reach the right people rather than paying extra to reach more people. More people who don’t care about you is never the smart thing to do.

 

The idea is to distill and find your MVA- Minimum Viable Audience. People willing to travel with you and back you. Wield the megaphone on your behalf. Cajole the late adopters. Influence the laggards. People who are the inspired innovators. Your job isn’t to inspire people with interests that have nothing to do with yours. Rather spend time, effort and resources to reach people who care about you.

 

The idea of reach is over cooked. Time to turn the flame down.

 

 

 

Trading is perceived as a contest between two sides. I win. You lose. You win. I lose.

 

You get up in the morning. The weather looks gloomy and you are in for an inclement day. Given the situation what do you decide to trade down? The meeting that you had got through great difficulty? Servicing your car that you have been putting off for quite sometime.

 

Caveat Emptor– I am no trader. But, there are many analogies that can be drawn between trading and living, the most obvious being that life has “its ups and its downs”, and we’ve got to learn to navigate each phase knowing that sooner or later we will experience another, possibly opposite phase. But if this were the only “lesson” to be learned from trading, you can be sure that my fascination would not have developed and that I would not be boring you with this post.

 

We have been doctrined on the ‘ cause and effect ‘ model. i.e if you do A, you will get B. Something that will find favour in the laws of physics rather than in real life. Trading can be taken as a ‘ workout for life ‘ with the most important lesson being that outcomes in life are far more probabilistic in nature than deterministic one.  Perfect causality is a myth and the principle of uncertainty, theory of relativity and the chaos theory do point in the same direction.

 

Every trade is a bet and while placing that bet, one must be perfectly conscious that ‘ everything can and will happen ‘. Winning in the trading game is not about one trade or another, but getting to understand the nuances and context such that you continue to believe in your edge and over the long term, you profit more than you lose.

 

Isn’t this what life is about? Most biographies of successful people tell the same story over and over: that the failures of these people were numerous and spectacular. If failure disheartens us and makes us give up, then we are like a trader that cannot take any more losses and decides to abandon the game before letting his (favorable) odds play out. We are making that single, isolated failure turn into a Failure. We are letting a lost battle become a lost war.

 

Indeed it is difficult to accept failures in life. However, if we start looking at things through the paradigm of probabilities rather than determinism we will learn to give less importance to single events and focus, rather, on the bigger picture which is improving our odds against failure.

Summarising, it might not be a bad idea to adopt a trader’s mindset. Even if you don’t do any trading. After all, as some wise man said, ” In the short run, anything can and will happen “.

 

It’s possible to day trade tragedy and doom, and if it was the best way to make things better, one be in favor of it. But with all the doors that have opened through science, technology, culture, what a chance to make things better. To make something, and to make things better.

 

 

 

As they say, in any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing. The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.

 

Professional golfers generally carry a driver, 3-wood, 5-wood, 4-PW, gap wedge, sand wedge, lob wedge, and a putter. Yes, clubs really do matter in golf. Some are set to have an offset to fight a miss, such as a slice, which is largely beneficial for the beginner golfer. Some are lofted differently, which allows a golfer to play various shots around the course. Differences in wedge loft and bounce on the wedge allow for the wedges to move differently through various lies. Be mindful of what you are buying and what that can mean for your game! Decide based on where you stand in the pecking order and what progress you want to make in your journey as a golfer. All said, your decision on what to use is not going to cost you an arm and a leg and you will learn the ropes as you go along.

 

Deciding to wear an Hawaiian shirt (albeit unknowingly) for a black tie event might make you look foolish for a while. Trying something new is usually a risk worth taking. If it doesn’t work out, by time you will have moved on and so will everyone else. You would learn from your faux pas.

 

Enrolling for your Leadership programme and deciding to quit midway might be a decision that you would regret later on in life. It is like the tattoo that you thought would look cool but now comes across as tacky and cheap, but nothing much you can do about it. Some mistakes are irreversible. Maybe you’ll move on for a moment, but then you’ll glance in the mirror and be reminded of that choice all over again.Even years later, the decision leaves a mark.

 

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual.

 

 

The status quo is a cozy domicile. Because the comfort level there is so high, it is rarely considered as being in a state of impasse. Running hard to stand at the same place.

 

The tectonic shift to digital might be overwhelming. And in some cases fraught with risk and superfluous. But, in certain areas, leaders are finding it be impactful and efficient. The question is you were stuck(happy?) in your status quo and you didn’t move forward to embracing the possibility of changing & getting better. Being the happy laggard, you let it drift. And bided your time to follow when it had become a herd. Why? It’s easier to follow than to lead. Herd mentality and status quo are Siamese twins. Feeding off each other.

If you are waiting to do something because you are forced to is not something that leaders look at for growth and progress. We all suffer from the Hero Trap. Our abrupt shift might cause the change(with much friction) but they are rarely efficient and often destabilizing.

 

Possibilities are all around us, provided we are willing to take the lead. And the comforting truth is that we can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The corner office can be an intimidating place. Especially if you are not the occupant. That said, if things have to move, you have to move.

 

You can gather courage and confidence and walk towards your CEOs office to discuss the idea in your head that you have been carrying around for weeks or you can walk away and become inconspicuous in your little cubicle hoping that she will not notice you.

 

An agitated customer is trying to track you down and you see the opportunity to go towards him and do your best to resolve the problem he is facing. Or you can walk away from it, ignore the multiple voice note messages and hope that the problem will wither away.

 

You can be fully enrolled in class, be up, front and centre, raise your hand and express yourself(get some airtime as they say) or you can move away to the back of the class and hope that the professor doesn’t pay attention.

 

This movement is about movement. You can move toward what you seek, what you want to change, what you want to create, what you want to impact. Alternately, you can move away from all of it and wish impasse wins the day.

 

It’s only after you’ve stepped outside your comfort zone that you begin to change, grow, and transform. We are here to learn about fear, not how to escape from it. Running away will never make you free.

 

So where are you headed? Towards or Away?

 

New thinking accompanies new possibilities! Ready?

 

 

 

If I am sounding audacious, it is because I want to. Sorry, if I am not apologetic about it.

 

Branding and Leadership are Siamese twins. The Brand Promise is a vibrant, living, changing saga called…Things We Care About. It requires Passion(ideally in all caps!)- the variety that only Inspired Leaders can project.

 

Franklin Roosevelt, America’s Brand Manager of Dignity and Freedom during the Great Depression( remember ” The Only Thing We Have To Fear is Fear Itself “) and World War II( “December 7, a date which will live forever in infamy”), said, ” it is necessary for the President to be the nation’s number one actor. “

 

That said, in fact all of leadership is an Act. It is an act called conveying the Brand Promise via demonstrated High Conviction in pursuit of Great Purpose.

 

That Great Purpose can be Democracy, Peace and Prosperity or it can come in various hues- be it the provision of the finest Indian cuisine in Dubai, the coolest business processes in the mortgage-banking industry in the US, or the Best-Ever Employee Independence Day picnic at your local organisation.

 

In any event, to carry it off, leaders of all descriptions must live and look the part. Some years ago, John Peers who was CEO of Technology Inc had said ” You can’t lead a cavalry charge if you think you look funny on a horse “. In fact, Roosevelt, no horseman as a result of his polio incapacitation, was careful never to be seen as incapacitated, what people saw about him was a consistent air of tenacity and confidence( like Churchill’s cigar, Roosevelt’s cigarette holder was an Oscar quality prop) during a time of mortal trial.

 

However, the Oscar goes to a certain Mohandas Gandhi(Father Of The Nation as he is remembered in India) who dressed brilliantly for the part of non-violent nation builder and chose his prop, the humble spinning wheel, with care. Mr G: ” You Must Be The Change That You Want To See In The World “.

 

Brand Leadership: A Great Story To Tell. Harvard Leadership Guru Howard Gardener writes in his fascinating book Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership “Stories have identity. They are narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed. They constitute the single most powerful in the leader’s arsenal.”

Great Leadership is Great Storytelling. Stories create the emotional context people need to locate themselves in a larger experience. Great enterprise leaders take on the ‘role'(read: the brand) of their company or product. Thus:

Steve Jobs is Apple, Bill Gates is Microsoft, Larry Ellison is Oracle, Andy Grove..is Intel, Sam Walton is(was)..Walmart, Richard Branson is Virgin Group, Anita Roddick is Body Shop, Giorgio Armani is Armani, Charles Schwab is …Charles Schwab, Oprah is..Oprah.

 

Real competition no longer revolves around market share. We are competing for attention…mind share, heart share, gut share.