Sunday Posts

This worked for me before. When I am feeling stuck, lost and unable to progress, I have set myself up for a change. 100 days worked for me best - a commitment to become something else in roughly three months! This is one such time. Pandemic is over, at least psychologically, and I am in the middle of a flurry of activities. But I am starting to feel burnt out. Too much bad work, the sort one has to do at a workplace but which leaves a bad taste at the end of the day, is cramming my schedule. On top of all this, I have this feeling of going in circles, not moving forward. I know I have to change something quickly. The pandemic has taken its toll. It induced a strange career see-saw: My work stalled at first and then I took on a project that sucked me in. I initially enjoyed getting back into action and did more than I was required to do. But, at the same time, I got into my comfort zone. The regularity of this engagement made me more secure than I like to be. I enjoyed some of the work,...

If we accept there is a tipping point for any trend or fad, that is now for this conversation about man versus the machine, or, more specifically, what impact automation would have on jobs. This is an old conversation, dating back centuries (Luddites, Ricardo, Marx, Keynes and Leontieff - all made their point), and the fear that machines will take over our jobs is not new. And, indeed, the counter-argument, what the Economists call the Lump-of-Labour fallacy, or the mistaken notion that there is only a fixed amount of work to be done (and, therefore, a job for a machine means one less human job), is extremely well-known. So, one may ask - what is the fuss about? Indeed, it is quite a fuss if you call it so. As The Atlantic visualises a World without Work , the Foreign Affairs says Hi to Robots and wonders whether humans will go the way of horses. Harvard Business Review tries to look beyond automation and allows Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, the High Priests of the Secon...

I am fascinated by the studies I am doing on cultural variations among the countries and peoples, and how this affects business, people management and marketing. I am current reading Marieke de Mooij's Consumer Behaviour and Culture: Consequences for Global Advertising and Marketing , a very insightful book which, in my opinion, should be an essential read for everyone trying to sell to international consumers. Which is to say pretty much everyone, including my neighbourhood pub, as the pubowner told me, in a friendly non-racist way, that he has more Indian patrons these days than the Brits and planning to add some Indian dishes on the menu. The key debate in this field is whether the world, integrated by internet, facebook, google, instant and mobile messaging and above all, twitter, with the common footballer heros and Daniel Craig, is becoming a more uniform place. That's the conventional wisdom - enthusiastically proclaimed various anglo-saxon writers who variably want to p...