Sunday Posts

I just gave up on – planning. It is absurd. It’s alright as long as you do it as a play, but it does not remain playful too long. I remember, I never planned when I was sane, when I was in college and had no time, when I loved every moment of my existence. I started planning as I got hurled into a windowless office, and wishing every moment about the day when I can get out. That madness got me into planning. I don’t mean that I never thought about future before I got stuck in an office. That would have been irresponsible. But I never planned, I dreamt – of playing cricket in Eden Gardens, of writing a great novel, of making my mother immensely proud, of seeing my eternally cynical teachers startled by my success – sort of. I could not have planned for these. So, I dreamt. These dreams appear less absurd than my plans. For a start, I was not trying to run away from the present when I dreamt, I loved it – all of it – its lightness, its temporariness, and its possibilities. I was logical ...

Consider this story that appeared today: New York Presbyterian Hospital (NYP) has ditched traditional classroom-based learning for a story-based approach to teaching fire safety to its 20,000 or so staff. The new Story-based Learning Objects (StoBLs™), delivered via e-learning, have been developed by the global e-learning producer, Tata Interactive Systems (TIS) - and have generated strongly positive reactions from managers and thousands of learners at NYP. Staff trained via the classroom-based courses had consistently demonstrated levels of comprehension and retention which were lower than desired. One reason suggested for this was that the training was presented only in terms of steps and rules, without the application of the principles in a real-world situation. "Basically, the content didn't relate closely enough to the audience's daily experiences," said TIS's Chaitanya Hakkaladadi. "NYP, like many hospitals, has a recurring training requirement related ...

Lesson 1: R&D must be market-ready Kotler had a poser for his audience. His question: "If you were the chief marketing officer of your organisation, who would you prefer to be close to? The CEO, CFO, CIO (chief information officer) or the CRO (chief research officer)?" There was no single opinion, so Kotler decided to have the final say. He would have had it, anyways. According to Kotler, the CMO needs to be close to everybody from the CEO to the CRO. Typically, the CFO does not see logic in investing behind brands because he is not close to marketing. And, there is an 80 per cent failure rate in new products. "The R&D is farthest away from customers, hence they often get it wrong," he explained. Now, even in research-focused organisations like IT giant Microsoft, "marketing has become the front door and their new product success rate has become higher". Lesson 2: Number-crunching is more than just calculating market shares "In B-schools most ...

Analyst Review: NIIT and Element K Consummate the Perfect Marriage By Doug Harward , Founder and CEO of TrainingOutsourcing.com On July 27, global learning services provider NIIT , headquartered in New Delhi, India announced that it had acquired Rochester, N.Y. based Element K. Combined the companies will have more than 3,000 employees throughout the world with revenues in excess of US $250 million. Instead of terming this an acquisition, I like to view it more as the perfect marriage of two complementary organizations. The union of the two companies has the ability to become one of the most powerful companies in the corporate and educational marketplace. This is the second merger this year among "Top 20 Companies in the Training Outsourcing Industry" and definitely the most significant in terms of global reach. In June, ACS announced it was acquiring Ernst and Young's Intellinex Learning Services division. Although each deal has great importance to the industry, the NII...

From Rediff.com : On the Future of Music Distribution Zinedine Zidane's seeing red in the final of the football World Cup has inspired a chart-topping song in France. The song is called, you guessed it, Head-Butt (or rather, Coup de Boule in French). The reggae-ish song, which was reportedly composed in 30 minutes and posted on the Internet by a music producer trio, goes: 'Zidane a frappe, la Coupe on l'a ratee (Zidane struck, we blew the cup).' Reports in most major newspapers of the world say the song is playing everywhere in France and being downloaded in the thousands from the Internet. Warner Music France has bought the song from composers Franck Lascombes, Sébastien Lipszyc and Emmanuel Lipszyc, who wrote the song out of the depression that hit them and all of France after their football captain's head-butt on Italian defender Marco Materazzi blew France's hopes of being champions of the world. Reportedly, the trio sent the song to friends over the Intern...

Have we reached the End of History, or it starts all over again? For generations, men [and women] have always proclaimed the end of history. Like us, they felt that they have reached the apex of human civilization, at least in terms of the social organisation. It has always been assumed that technology will progress, more and more wealth will be created, new frontiers of knowledge will be explored and new powers will emerge, but essentially the human civilization will go on in its current form. So thought the Romans, and the subsequent empires after them. Many thinkers thought so, Hegel most notably [who is thought to have invented the modern term], Marx in a different sense [as he thought of a future society which will be the end] and more recent neo-cons [influenced by Francis Fukuyama, who ended up writing the thesis]. But, as all of us know, while the end of history appeared to have arrived at many junctures, subsequent generations always found out that this was a foolish thought. ...

This month’s e-learning network meeting covered a very interesting topic – Serious Games [or, Games-based Learning]. As you know already, this is close to my heart [I see a smile there – oh yes, I am not high on fidelity if you start counting how many things are close to my heart]. Not just because I play NationStates, or spent hours playing Brian Lara’s Cricket. Nor it is because I so deeply loved my stint setting up Neighbourhood Learning Centres back in 1996, when I was so deeply committed to the idea of teaching kids to play SIMCITY. For me, I did learn a lot through sports – while playing cricket or watching it or reading about it [Have you read ‘Never Say Die’?] – team play, discipline, commitment, character and presentation. The presentations were based on a survey, where 50 large corporations across Europe were surveyed on their perception/ acceptance of the idea of games-based learning. The findings are, of course, suitably vague – most people say it is an interesting concept,...

I have spent some time on Games in the last two weeks. Oh, no, I am not talking football – despite the media frenzy on World Cup now. Nor I am talking Cricket, though I do feel that India is doing better than expected in the West Indies. The games I am talking about are virtual ones, and concern themselves with Politics and Business. So, this is about playing the Father of a Nation - you can choose what you want to be - a Lenin, a Nehru, a Mandella, or a Mobutu Sese Seko. Consider this one to start with, Nation States . This is game about managing nations. Though at an elementary level, it throws at you political and administrative issues at a regular interval, and let you choose a response. Based on your response, the nation you are managing grows or declines, gets into war or prospers in peace. This also has regions – a thriving community of other nation-managers and the United Nation, where the nations compete for influence, and debate and vote on issues. This is free and fun, you c...

Entertaining and Inspirational , May 30, 2006 This is two books blended into one [just like coffee] - one, the human story of building coffee republic, the soul searching of Sahar and Bobby after their father's death, the journey, the obstacles and goof-ups and all; the other, more like a business book, with 57 laws, advise and sample business plans etc. From the structure, it seemed that the authors wanted to make it the latter - a business advise book. I have, however, given a 5-star to the former, the human story. Dont read it if you are just looking for how to start a business handbook. There are those free guides from Business Link which will do better. Not only that - once you read this book, you may start feeling that you got to be incredibly lucky and well-placed [read the comments about going without an income for two years in other reviews] to become an entrepreneur. That's not the morale of this story here, at all. But if you are looking for a real story how people b...

Why do so many companies offer such bad customer service, when everyone knows better? If you think of it, it is really amazing how bad things can be. I have worked with companies which preach the value of customer service all the time, but fail to deliver only too often. And, as a consumer, I am appalled by what I keep getting everyday – not from the start-ups but also from big companies – big enough to maintain customer support departments. As an entrepreneur, one must know a solution. No one wants to offer bad customer service. So, how most companies end up offering such miserable services? I have heard people say that customers are at fault – they don’t read contracts, for example – but that is as dumb a statement as you can get. The real culprit here is that Marketing Director who devised such a ‘clever’ contract in the first place, so clever that the customers don’t read it. Bad customer service usually catches up with the provider. We have seen big companies being shunned by cust...