Reigniting Growth

Premise:   As we slowly open up the world economy and learn to live with what has turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, almost all businesses will be looking to figure out a way to grow their businesses as quickly as possible and as fast as the current situation will allow them to grow.   If there is one thing that I have learnt in the last two and a half decade of working, it is that sustained growth requires a lot of thinking and deliberate action with a clearly defined and articulated strategy and goals.   Ad hoc […]

Why Do Startups Fail?

Premise: There has been enough written about startups and reasons why almost all of them fail. So, why write another post about this? Even though there is no dearth of resources (blogs, videos, books, stories, etc) on reasons why startups fail and how to avoid them, I don’t see any reduction in the failure rates of startups; I don’t see them learning from the mistakes of other failed startups; I don’t see them focus on the right things that can help them avoid failure. It is crucial that we understand that building a startup is not like a chemical reaction […]

Rocking Your Next Brainstorming Session!

I am sure that at some point in your career, you have been either invited to or hosted a brainstorming session to come up ideas. Ideas to either solve a specific problem or to create a new product or service or for something else altogether.  Most brainstorming sessions don’t work. They either don’t get the creative ideas that you expect to come up with or nothing happens after the brainstorming, which leads to a feeling of fun but wasted time. But it need not be like that. I’ve hosted more than 200 brainstorming sessions and what I have learnt is that these […]

Personal Data Replaces Cash at this Cafe

Shiru café looks like any other coffee shop. But the similarities end there. If you were to go to the café for some hard earned caffeine, the chances are that you will be refused your caffeine unless you are either a student or a teaching staff at a university. Simply put, no college ID >> No coffee. What’s more, if you are a part of the teaching staff, you can pay for your coffee with cash. However, if you are a student then to get your cup of coffee (or tea), the currency that you need to pay with is […]

Big Data, Automation and Cows Who Decide When they want to be Milked

I came across this interesting read on Quartz.com. The post is about a farm in Iceland where the entire barn is automated. Here are some quotes from the article. When one of their cows wants to be milked, she walks to the center of the barn to one of the three self-milking Lely machines. She enters the machine—a gated, cow-size booth—and first has her teats inspected and cleaned. Next, the robot attaches its equipment to extract her milk while the cow chows down on some cow candy: tasty corn pellets supplemented with various vitamins and minerals. The whole process takes […]