Author: Mukesh Gupta

Ideas

Book review: REWORK – Simple and complex at the same time

Today, I completed reading the book Rework by Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson. These guys are the founders of 37Signals. First things first. This is an easy book to read. I was able to finish reading the book, cover-to-cover in about 3 days. The book is written as if it is a collection of blogs. One can read the book as I did, cover-to-cover or pick a topic of interest and read it. Though the book is easy and simple to read, the content of the book is equally difficult to practice. They prescribe an approach to business that […]

Customer Engagement

BharatGas (BPCL) – Is someone listening?

I recently shifted my residence from one part of Bangalore to another part of the city. An important part of the process is also to complete the formalities for the change in the gas connection, landline phone connection and updating the address in all the relevant places. As it turns out, the process to shift my gas connection proved to be a very bad experience for me and my wife. The connection is on my wife’s name and hence she had to go through the bad experience as well. The current process is as follows: The person who owns the […]

Customer Engagement

Deutsche Bank – Are you listening?

Today, I got the following alert (both as a sms and an email) from my bank – Deutsche Bank: “Dear Customer, a new bill from BSNL – Bangalore for INR 958 is due on 04/05/2011. Login to db online banking to pay your bill.” Instead of this passive message, I would have loved to get a message which said the following (as an SMS): “Dear Mukesh, a new bill from BSNL – Bangalore for INR 958 (Payment ID: xxxxx) is due on 04/05/2011. Pls forward this message to 55555 and include your transaction password at the end to process the […]

Customer Engagement, Strategy

What retail industry can learn from networks

I was reading a blog by Om Malik on his discussion with Pradeep Sindhu, co-founder of Juniper Networks. They had a long discussion on the future of networks. What stood out for me was how much can retail chains learn from the way the networks are evolving. There are quite a few parallels that we can draw from networks/clients to retail industry. For example, lets equate network providers to retail chains, the bandwidth to the inventory on offer and clients (mobile and otherwise) to the retail outlets. In such a comparison, the following aspects come out of the entire discussion: […]

Strategy

White blood cells & the pursuit of perfection

Today, I came across a blog on Wired Science – “White Blood Cells Solve Traveling-Salesman Problem”.  While some of the best mathematical minds have been tackling the traveling-salesman problem for decades and some have found efficient solutions, no one has figured out how to completely solve the puzzle. For a given number of cities, a traveling salesman must plan a route that visits each city once, covering the minimum possible overall distance. For any practical tour schedule of even eight to ten cities, fancy algorithms and serious computing power are usually needed.  Rachel goes on and explains that “these cells […]