Last week, I read a profoundly insightful post at Gaping Void, titled ‘On Mastery‘. The post seeks to answer (in Hugh’s own words) ““Success”. What does it take to be successful, prosperous, happy, have a sense of purpose etc? What does THAT actually look like?” The answer, according to his post, is mastery. (do read his post for examples) When I shared this post on Twitter, Asmita related it to Chandni Chowk food vendors. Bingo. Around my own city – Bangalore- I can see examples of that. I can also see examples of when some of them have tried to scale and have fallen apart.
Fame, popularity and money are by-products, but the master is not really dependent on that. In fact, he might even see it as undesirable side effects. As someone commented on Hugh’s post, it’s not even about the product, it’s the process. In Hugh’s own words “It’s something that truly belongs to you” and perhaps that’s why it’s so much more better, because there’s no dependency, unlike the by-products.
It’s more of a personal learning for me, and it struck a chord as soon as I read it, as though I had the thought in my subconscious but lacked the cognizance to express it, even it to myself. In fact, I’d go on now to slightly disagree with Hugh MacLeod and say that for many people, mastery is success.
Meanwhile, how does all this apply to business and brands? If I look at it through the prism of how things work now, I might be inclined to say that mastery cannot really scale, and I’d go back to my ‘Institutional Realignment‘ post and say that we’ll eventually get back to making mastery, a smaller ‘audience’, and a lesser scale the norm. But in some ways, I can see examples of brands having mastered a culture and found a way to scale it – the much abused example – Zappos.
However, if I had to look at it another way, I’d say that the web has made discovery much easier. Not in the traditional media way of ‘push the message to a mass and the interested ones will find you’ kind of a way, but the exact opposite. To use the data that people are sharing and through that, to find the right audience. The kind of audience who will appreciate the brand’s mastery, and who will then create good old fashioned community and word of mouth. The web offers tremendous opportunities to focus, but unfortunately we’re still in the early days of organised marketing and CRM data and most brands are busy losing focus and spamming themselves into oblivion, courtesy the lure of scale and its trappings.
Of course, a part of me believes that mastery should have nothing to do with business, but as with many other things, the web might just change my perspective.
until next time, Master of Business Administration 😉
Finally, we used the same tactic at TOIT as The Biere Club – Sunday lunch, much more easy to accomplish than the 2 seater Saturday dinner. For those not in the know about TOIT, 
The microbrewery has 3 floors, and we sat in the non smoking section on the 3rd floor. The smoking section has a great view of the Metro, though you need to be a large group to get a table there. At lunch hour on Sunday, it’s quite a peaceful place, but the buzz during evenings is quite something! Over to the food and booze. You can take a look at the menu 
We ordered a TOIT Sunavachik for starters, strips of chicken with a dip and which can be made mild, spicy or very spicy as per your choice. We asked for very spicy, but it really wasn’t all that spicy. The dip complemented it well and it made for a good combo with the beer too. [Again, during another visit, we ordered ‘spicy’, and boy it was!] I think the menu has changed a bit though, since I couldn’t find the special TOIT pork dish I was looking for and the dish we had ordered was not something that was in the menu earlier. Hmm.
