ItsMyMeal is a FoodCommerce venture, where food & e-commerce are managed together to provide the basic daily meal. In conversation with co-founder Nikhil Gupta
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Year: 2012
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Branded trends
Last week, Karthik had a post titled “Twitter, Twitter on the wall.. Who’s the trendiest hashtag of them all” that resonated much with me. In fact, it was a sentiment I had expressed just a few days before –
“let’s make it trend” is the new “let’s make a viral”
— manu prasad (@manuscrypts) May 11, 2012
We live in an era of instant gratification – from a consumer perspective. I’m not sure about the origins here – whether technology (from pagers/mobiles to social networking) came first or the behaviour did – and that prompted technology to evolve rapidly, but delayed rewards seem to have little or no meaning for today’s users.
It’s a difficult behaviour to ignore, though building and evolving a brand’s DNA is a story that requires a much larger timeframe, IMO. And that’s where I remember Godin’s post titled Twitch – “the social internet is emphasizing twitch more than ever before. All that smart phone checking and checking in and name checking and instant rejoindering is amplifying the work of those that are just a little quicker than everyone else.” Godin himself states later that “While twitch may pay off in any ten minute cycle, I’m not sure if it gets you very far in the long run, where the long run might be as short as two weeks.“
While it is possible to argue that individuals, even the personal brands, could scale quite some way on this, I’m not sure whether brands can. And that’s why I, despite being a practitioner of ‘social’, find the rise of the twitch tendency in brands, disturbing. Twitch is probably the brand’s rendition of ‘instant gratification’. What’s worse is that it’s not even the idea of social that’s the twitch here, but individual platforms and devices, (such as hashtags) which seem to have become drivers, sometimes displacing a well thought through strategy.
A brand (even before the social era) consists of many parts. There’s no taking away from the fact that social has probably been the biggest disruption that brand frameworks have seen, but it still is only a part of the larger story. It needs to be woven into the larger brand framework, and then a decision should be taken on its role – lead or otherwise. Until brand managers take cognizance of that, twitch, will unfortunately prevail.
until next time, a twitch in time….
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Sunny Stunner
As he sat down at the table, he heard one of the girls exclaim, “The sequel has Sunny in it too!” “Remember Balwant Rai ke kutte?” he excitedly joined the conversation, surprised they had seen Ghayal. Looking at him strangely, they left the table. “Sunny Leone in Jism 2, you idiot”, said one, before leaving.
until next time, Big Brother vs Bigg Boss
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The Rozabal Line
Ashwin Sanghi
I have quite a bit of interest in Hindu mythology, so I had a bias going in. It would be fair to say that it also gave me the patience to sit through the back stories that constantly intersperse the narrative.
The thing I admire most about this book is the painstaking research that the author seems to have done. (all references have been diligently acknowledged) I’ve read books that require research and mix fact and fiction (eg.Michener), but in this case, the research is across cultures and religions in one plane, and across time, in another. When you combine that with the requirement of having a story that should flow in concert, is when you realise the work that has gone in.
The other thing I could identify with was the author’s love of anagrams and wordplay. He has put it to excellent use, when dealing with the names of gods and drawing connections between cultures.
Though the primary plot of the book revolves around what happened to Jesus after crucifixion, his bloodline and the modern repercussions including religious terrorism, it is also about the parallel themes and recurring phenomena in modern religions. (The part of Jesus-like characters in earlier religions is fascinating)
Its a superlative read, the only possible drawback being the heaviness of the content, not just in terms of historical trackbacks and comparative religion – conversations, but the twists and turns in the contemporary story itself.
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Agility and Scale
One of the things I'm trying to understand is how a rapidly growing organisation achieves scale and retains (or develops) agility simultaneously. When there's not much money in the bank/ revenue being generated, the organisation is forced to focus, and even if it does scale, it would do so in a particular domain in a given time frame, before moving on to another.
But what happens when there's no dearth of financial resources and/or the organisation is in a business environment that demands scale for survival? One way I've seen organisations do it is to go on a hiring spree and get as many people on the floor as possible. But I've also seen it being counter productive, as either people lose clarity (of their role) in the medium term and quit or they get frustrated with organisational will getting in the way.
To elaborate, in the first case, the organisation is not able to define roles, let alone c
areer paths beyond basics, because the business domain/environment is still nascent. The employee may not be able to cope with it after a while. Also, rampant hiring many a time leads to massive role overlapping. In the second case, the number of decision makers and dependency across the system increases so much with scale that things do not move as fast as the employee would desire.
To me, a good senior management team that is able to articulate the changing dynamics, lay out rules on what decisions should involve whom, and align middle management and further so everyone pulls with the same end goal (need not be in the same direction, but that's a different debate 🙂 ) in mind is probably what can help help achieve/retain agility with scale. In all of this, communication is key, but that's easier said than done.
Anything you'd like to share from your experiences?
until next time, weighing scales