Category: Strategy

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 […]

Innovation, Strategy

Celebrating failure

Today, I read a blog by Seth Godin on How to fail. In this blog, he talks about how to fail better. He also mentions that not trying new things due to fear of failure is also not a good option. He also goes on and provides some random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside. With more and more organizations looking to innovate more often and much faster, it is not enough to know how to fail. It is important to encourage employees to take on the risk of failure. The […]

Strategy

Saving the Nano….

After the fantastic launch of Tata Nano, the cheapest car in the world, we have seen that the fan fare and the interest levels have not kept up and there is a drastic decline in the sales of Nano and the Tata Motors management is working overtime to get this corrected and to generate interest. A big ad campaign has been launched. The results are yet to be seen. Tata Motors is trying hard to revive the fortunes of their Chairman’s dream project.  Safe and Secure: No one wants to buy a car which is considered to be un-safe. The […]

Strategy

Fueling growth from existing customers

It is a well known fact that it is much more expensive to acquire a new customer than retaining an existing customer. But as they say, common sense is not so common. We find that businesses are going out of their way to attract new customers by offering them great deals. I do not think there is anything wrong in this, but when you exclude the offer to your existing customers, you are inviting trouble.  This is a very important reason for customer loyalty to become so rare. There does not seem any  benefit for customers to remain loyal anymore as […]

Strategy

Building great products

I have been thinking about a lot of great products that have now become an integral part of our life aka Google, iPods, iPads, SAP ERP, Zappos, Facebook, Twitter, Intuit, Amazon, Mitticool, etc..  When I think about what is common across these products and their growth to super-stardom and i found these common traits: Great products are highly focused in solving a particular need of a particular customer. No product ever succeeds if it tries to solve a lot of problems for a lot of people.  Great products are very simple to learn & use. Great user experience can make the difference […]