Emergic: Rajesh Jain's Blog

I was meeting a friend, and he invited me to given an impromptu talk to his staff. I said what I have often said in my company.

First, get rid of the fear of failure in all that you do. More often than not, it is not failure that holds us back, but the fear of failure. That takes away our risk-taking capabilities and makes us ultra-cautious. And that is not good for the company, in general. Failure can be the biggest teacher. And if we don’t have the gumption to fail, we will never succeed.

Second, make decisions as if it is your own company. Not every decision can be referred to a manager for permission. People have to make decisions regularly. And the principle to be followed is – what would you do if this was your own company. If that thinking can be pervasive, one can be quite certain people will do what is right more often than not.

When I read interviews or hear with some of the government officials, it sounds really good. All of them seem to know exactly what the problem is, and are very good at putting forth solutions. Just like editorial writers.

The problem, of course, is that these same officials are the ones in charge and running the government! Their advice is what they should actually be implementing. And that is what makes one angry. There is a complete disconnect between the talk of such people and the action. Their actions are either not there, or they are the opposite of what they talk.

This is the problem today. Those in power are not acting based on what they know and what they know they should be doing. Clinging on to power has become the paramount focus. I just hope we are able to see through these empty and hollow words.

I was talking with a friend the other day of how the government is starting to hurt industries through arbitrary regulation and policies.

I was myself witness to what happened to the SMS business with the TRAI regulations that came in last year. Other than that, the telecom industry is hurting. So is the microfinance industry. The gold finance companies too have been severely impacted by the spate of regulations brought forth by RBI. And there are perhaps some others.

On top of this, the Finance Minister is still intent on bringing forth those retrospective taxation laws.That has the potential to hurt many companies.

I don’t remember the period just before 1991 much since I was in the US then, but I can only imagine how it must have felt. Unfortunately, we don’t have elections for another couple years.

A good book can open up the mind in a way nothing else can. A book transports us into the mind of the author, and makes us see the world through the author’s eyes.

I thought of this in a recent Book Club meeting. I had missed the past few meetings, so it was good to be back. I realised how much I had missed as I listened to the various books being discussed.

I really think everyone should not just read good books, but also discuss them with a small group of people on a regular basis. Create a Book Club of your own. Pick people who are very different from you, so you will get exposure to a world of books that is very different from the kind you read.

In my case, it has now been more than 12 years since we have been meeting. I hope you too can foster such ties with both books and a small set of book lovers.

From a post a year ago:

This week’s links:

• 3 Reasons to Master the Art of Storytelling: by Riley Gibson. “Most entrepreneurs don’t realize the art of storytelling can help you succeed in the start-up world.” (via Atanu)
• Apple’s 2 brilliant moves that created the iOS powerhouse: by Dalton Caldwell. One of them: “Apple is doing market segmentation off of a single product line.”
• Promising Startups: from NYT. Who will become the next Instagram? “…whether because they’ve seen explosive user growth, or are attracting investors or a new demographic, or just because they have an unusual idea that seems to be taking off.”
• 2 Indias: by Swapan Dasgupta. “Paralysed by their own predicament, political India has been left with one option: to squeeze productive India and hope that this yields fiscal and electoral returns.” Also see: The Regulation Raj, A Haymarket warning and the coming jobs crisis.
• America and the value of ‘earned success’: from WSJ. An interview with Arthur Brooks. “Earned success means defining your future as you see fit and achieving that success on the basis of merit and hard work.”

I am sure the airline industry could benefit from using some consumer Internet ideas. Besides the user interface enhancements, even baggage tracking would be a made a service that a passenger should be able to check. Or baggage could be tracked via GPS.

United should have not been prepared and taken better care of us when we landed in HK. They had 14 hours to plan. They knew our final destinations. They should have just handed our new boarding passes right there, instead of sending us to a transfer desk and go through a queue. Ditto in Singapore.

And did I mention that when the Air-India flight landed at 12:45 pm in the afternoon, they didn’t bother using the aerobridge, and instead loaded us on to buses? No excuse. Just disgust for customers. I don’t know whom to blame there – the airline or the airport.

All in all, the additional 12 hours in travel taught many lessons in how not to do customer service. I just hope we don’t make the same mistakes in our respective organisations when dealing with customers.

The harrowing experience was not over. I landed in Mumbai – about 13 hours late, compared to the direct HK-Mumbai flight connection that I had missed. Then, the worry was about our bags – did they make it on the flight? Were they in Singapore? Or HK? Another mystery had to be solved.

As it turned out, one of the baggage containers on the Air-India flight got stuck – so it took a full 90 minutes before the bags made their way out. When I tried to ask during this period if our bags were on the flight, the response I got was wait and watch. I assumed that a simple computer query would have told us.

A couple hours after arrival, we found out that our bags were still in Singapore. They would come in a day or two, and be delivered to our homes. Nothing much else to do. I finally reached home – tired from about 24+ hours of no sleep, and little awareness of time and place. But it was still good to be home.

It took 4 hours of pleading, cajoling, persuading, talking for us to finally get our boarding passes for an Air-India flight that would go from Singapore to Mumbai, via Chennai. The alternative was waiting an additional 12 hours at the airport. It was a no-brainer.

As we waited, it became quite clear that the airlines processes were quite messed up. As someone commented, the least they could do is to fix their text interfaces on their terminals to make it graphical so they could do things faster! It takes an incredibly large numbers of letters typed on a keyboard to check someone in. And if there are exceptions, there are the inevitable conversations with a fellow agent to figure out the magic sequences.

We made it to the Air India gate 15 minutes before its departure time. There, too, the agent could have used triage and handled the Mumbai passengers first rather than the Delhi ones since our flight was leaving an hour before the Delhi flight. But, it was first come, first serve. We just about made it – helped a little by the fact that Air-India’s flight was delayed about 15 minutes.

When we landed in Singapore at 1:45 am, there were still 45 minutes for the SQ Mumbai flight. But there was no one at the gate to guide us other than a reference to go to a Singapore Airlines desk. That turned out to be a 15 minute walk. We reach there and found that they had no instructions about us and it was too close to closing the flight. Our showing the FIM (Flight Interruption Manifest) with the SQ flight number written on it made no difference.

So, there we were, stranded at Singapore’s huge airport. It was 2 am. The United Airlines counter would open after 4 am, and then maybe something would be done. It was frustrating because had they either issue us the boarding pass in HK or even had someone waiting at the Singapore gate with it, we would all have made the Mumbai flight.

When failures happen, they tend to cascade. Nobody really cares. We are a statistic, those delta percent whom airlines did not deliver on time. It only hits you when you are the victim.

On my recent trip to US, I was returning via San Francisco. I had booked a Jet codeshare flight from SF to Mumbai via Hong Kong. The SF-HK leg was on United. The transit time was an hour. I assumed it was enough – Jet was selling it as a codeshare. Big mistake.

The United flight from SF left 2+ hours late. Apparently, the 747 could not find a gate. And then, once the gate was there, they realized that it needed to be fuelled before it could take off. It was pretty clear that the connection in HK to the Jet flight was a goner. There wasn’t much one could do from 35,000 feet up in the air.

There were about 10 of us who had missed our connections to Mumbai and Delhi. United staff asked us to take a United flight to Singapore from where we could get immediately on to a Singapore Airlines flight to Mumbai. Boarding pass for SQ? Oh, we would get that in Singapore. Big Mistake.

I wrote this a year ago:

This week’s links:

• The Campus Tsunami: by David Brooks. “What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web. “
• American Express and Customer Service: from Fortune. “Company customer service czar Jim Bush on changing the way that cardholders are treated – and how it paid off.” Some very interesting ideas to reinvent customer service.
• Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing: by Andrew Chen. “Growth hackers are a hybrid of marketer and coder, one who looks at the traditional question of “How do I get customers for my product?” and answers with A/B tests, landing pages, viral factor, email deliverability, and Open Graph. “
• The Two Levels of Strategy: from strategy+business. “Business strategy is best distinguished from corporate strategy by the different perspectives that business leaders and strategic planners must bring to bear.”
• India’s Broken Promise: by Basharat Peer in Foreign Afffairs. “The economic and political reforms that could bring today’s capitalist India closer to that ideal would no doubt differ significantly from the socialist path Nehru would have chosen.”

Sometimes, technology misfires. Like, when Atanu and I were on our way from our Jersey City hotel to JFK airport. In the era of GPS devices for navigation, we stop thinking about the big picture and the full path to the destination. So, as we made our way out of Mantattan, we did not think twice when the GPS device recommended an exit off the freeway. We assumed it was to get on to another freeway to the airport.

Imagine our surprise then as we were sent through the streets of Brooklyn and Jamaica and about a 100-odd traffic lights en route to the airport. Maybe the GPS was set up to take the shortest route in terms of distance. Driving through and stopping at what seemed an interminable stream of traffic lights almost gave us the jitters. Luckily, we had plenty of time for our flight, but nevertheless…!

A good idea would to always check the entire GPS route before one starts the journey. And as a backup, keep the Google Maps handy – on phone or in writing.

New York is one of my favourite cities. I realised that it had been many years since I actually visited the city. I have flown in and out many times, but it had been five years or so since I actually walked around. Three of my favourite stops are two bookstores and one restaurant.

Strand Book Store on 12th and Broadway is a delight. Just walking around and looking at books that would otherwise never show up in an Amazon search is thrilling. The serendipity of discovery is a joy to experience. Nearby is Barnes and Noble. It still has arguable one of the largest book collections.  I spent a couple hours at both the bookstores combined and bought about 15 books of all sorts. When time is limited, my principle is: “if in doubt, buy.”

My favourite restaurant is Vatan, on 29th and 3rd. I make it  a point to have my dinner there, since I can get excellent Jain food. It is one of these places you need to skip lunch, and then go for a full early dinner. Their $30 thali has everything one would expect, and the ambience is perfect. Reservations are easy now, via OpenTable.  The good thing about Vatan is that the food tastes just the same many years later too!

Overall, it was a good experience attending the conference. Prof. Bhagwati kickstarted the proceedings with a keynote that covered a wide array of topics, including the inevitable India-China comparison. He was followed by the Indian Ambassador to the US, Nirupama Rao, who rattled off the regular set of platitudes on the Indian economy which by now are sounding quite hollow to anyone who knows the true picture and ground reality.

I thought the event overall could have been made more crisper – and moved beyond the regular set of speeches to getting under the hood. India faces big challenges and it is rare to see people talk through those directly. The panel discussions also could have been moderated better. The attendance was very good, and the setting in the historic Low Library quite apt – even though there was an echo in the sound.

Overall, a very good personal experience. For me, the highlight was meeting Prof. Arvind Panagariya. His book on India is perhaps the best post-Independence economic history of India you will ever read.

There were a few things I did differently in my talk this time (a few points recommended by Atanu). Public speaking is something I am learning to be better at. So, talks like the one I gave at Columbia are a good opportunity to learn and improve. It is hard to create the same setting in an informal environment.

• Tell Stories: Stories create a lasting impact. My speeches in the past have tended to be dry. This time, I peppered it up with a few stories.
• Keep an Outline: Like newscasters, an outline in front helps in sticking to the script. I did not show any slides – they tend to distract the audience. But I used a slides outline to ensure I did not have to either enitirely memorise or read the speech, both of which would not have been good. The former because I would always worry about what I had to speak next, and the latter because I would have lost the spontaneity.
• Have a Timer: I had a fixed time limit, and intended to stay in that. Without a timer, it is easy to lose perspective of time and get carried away with speaking too long.
• Speak Slowly: I slowed it down a wee bit this time around, and that helped.

I also shifted the focus of the talk from the “what” to the “how” of transforming India. That created an element of surprise, which again helped.

Feedback on what I could have done better is appreciated!

I spoke on April 14 at Columbia’s India Business Conference. My topic was “Transforming India.” Here is the audio of the 15-minute talk I gave:

Last year, I announced the winners of the contest and published their entries on the blog. This is what I wrote in the preamble:

I am more than convinced that India needs big ideas and dramatic transformation going ahead, and it is our generation that has to help in that process. We have to pick one of the two national parties, and participate in the system. The 2014 elections will come at a critical time for India’s future. We have three years of groundwork that can be done in creating awareness and driving action in the chosen areas of our specialisation to bring good ideas to life.

This week’s links:

• Marc Andreessen Interview: from Wired. “Technology has been just a slice of the economy. We’ve been making the building blocks to get us to today, when technology is poised to remake the whole economy.”
• The Creative Monopoly: by David Brooks. “Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.”
• The third industrial revolution: from The Economist. “The digitisation of manufacturing will transform the way goods are made—and change the politics of jobs too.”
• Chinese lessons for India: by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in Mint. “The data shows that the difference between growth rates in the two countries converge towards the end of every decade, but then something happens that allows China to accelerate relative to India all over again.”
• McKinsey’s 2001 India report: Still very much relevant. A set of key initiatives to remove hurdles for growth.  Also see Mint’s 2009 National Agenda series. We need to wake up to reforms NOW!