Like a Diamond

As posted on yourstory.in

About 200 years ago it was discovered that diamond, like graphite, was made entirely of carbon. One brilliantly reflective, the other black; one hard, the other soft. How was it possible that two things with properties so contrasted could be made of the same thing? With this discovery came an extraordinary insight: what mattered was not the element itself, for the single carbon atom in isolation had no particular properties. What mattered was the bond structure.

So what does this mean? A chemical bond is simply a probability of how much time electrons from one atom spend hanging around in the space of another. In the case of the diamond the carbon atoms are strongly bonded to each of their four closest neighbours giving it the property of hardness. And so closely engaged are these atoms that when light energy enters it is not welcomed and it bounces around simply leaving the system giving it its reflective sparkle. In contrast, in graphite the carbon atoms are not all tightly bonded but rather some of them associate with one another in more fluid nature giving it softness and the ability to accept or absorb light energy to make it its own.

Learning to Organize

Back in 1996 when I was in business school we used to sit around and make fun of our organizational behaviour classes. Soft stuff. Not hard core like finance. Now I know better. Finance is the easy stuff. Organizational behaviour on the other hand is complex and can profoundly change socital outcomes.

So what is organizational behaviour about? If you really think about it, it’s about how human beings come together to share their knowledge and abilities to create, build and get things done. And why should we do this? Because when it is done well, the outcome can be far greater than the sum of the parts.

Paradigms of progress are exemplified by large scale organization. In the United States and most European countries, for instance, somewhere between 5 and 10% of working adults are entrepreneurs. In India it is almost 50%. What that means is that entrepreneurship in the developed world results in larger scale, more people coming together to get it done. Indian entrepreneurs, on the other hand, tend to operate in structures of 1 to 3 people. There are probably a great many reasons for this. Not least that most Indian entrepreneurs operate in micro scale markets – village communities of hardly a few thousand people that don’t provide an opportunity for scale.

Cumulative Advantage

(As published on yourstory.in)

The attraction of the United States for immigrants has been the hope of social mobility. That with some hard work and good ideas you have a shot at a better economic life. In India social mobility is far more elusive. For a long time there was little expectation of it. People knew and accepted their place. Today something is changing. Hopes are emerging. Aspirations are rising. But what does it take to create conditions that allow social mobility? Why is it so hard the world over to achieve and hold on to?

Our biology and natural social structure works against social mobility. For starters, we generally pass on our wealth to our children rather than to society at large. In India a little over 80% of the rupee billionaires inherited their billionaire status (compared to 20% in the United States). But that’s only a small part. What we do for our children runs far beyond simply passing on wealth. More than any other species, we humans spend inordinate time and effort raising our young, struggling for 20+ years over where to live, school choices and how to get our kids to behave properly. And what we are doing is essentially working hard to integrate them into society – linking them into social networks as well as knowledge and information networks. Our children inherit not just wealth but relationships and access.

Branded by Poverty

(As posted on yourstory.in and in SmartCEO under the title 'Brands for People, not Poverty')

Over the last ten years, with the publishing of CK Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid and with inclusion gaining ground as a national buzz word, companies have been looking in larger numbers at rural markets for all sorts of products. Yet for every success in rural India, the marketplace is littered with many, many failures. What has been the problem?

From my vantage point inside a company that operates predominantly in villages, I have a first-hand view. Not a week goes by when we are not introduced to a company with a product opportunity that they would like us to help them market in rural areas. It is an innovative product they tell us, specifically designed to solve a problem, meet an urgent need. And it is affordable. Shouldn’t that be enough? People from the villages should flock to it.

Wikiwhat?

As posted on yourStory.in

The greatest differentiator of humans and our triumph as the alpha species on the planet has been our increasing ability to record and share our collective knowledge. With this ability, each new generation, rather than reinventing the wheel, can stand firmly on the shoulders of those before to reach further. Today with the internet we can do this better, faster and among more people than ever before. Wikipedia is an incredible example of this. Today Wikipedia has over 15 million articles contributed by several hundreds of thousands of people and is one of the largest and most actively accessed public repository of human knowledge. These articles are in 281 different languages. Yet almost 30% are in a single language – English. No surprise. The top ten languages – all western European with the exception of Japanese and Russian, account for almost 70%. I’m still not surprised.

I scroll down the list of languages on Wikipedia, sorted by their article count, searching for Indian languages. Right away I pass Chinese (Mandarin) at number 12. With about 331,000 articles it is just close to 10% of English. But 12 is not a bad rank. I keep going expecting to find Hindi and Tamil in close succession....I see Ukranian (15), Vietnamese (17), Indonesian (21), Arabic (25), Lithuanian (28)..Volapuk (31)... I’ve never even heard of Volapuk. I click the link.

Hear Ye! Hear Ye!

As posted on yourstory.in (yes, it is adapted from an earlier post with the same title)


For tens of thousands of years of human history the world over looked like our village landscape - no running water, no electricity, no cars, no phones, no printing press and low literacy. You have to wonder then how all of a sudden some parts of the world experienced an explosion in innovation and enterprise over the short span of a few hundred years to bring this all about. What was the driver? Surely it didn’t happen because of a king handing out gold coins or jewels from his coffers to the peasants (‘financial inclusion’?).

Some time ago I was lamenting the difficulty of getting new product information to people who live in the villages – no phone, poor road connectivity - and my husband very helpfully offered up that it sounds like we need to have heralds, messengers and town criers like they did in medieval Europe. That got me thinking.

A little bit of scouting turned up that in medieval Europe, messengers were hard-working, talented folk. They had to be excellent horsemen, able to travel up to 100 km in a day, skilled topographers able to navigate unmapped terrain and talented communicators; a tough combination. These were prestigious jobs, well paid and protected by official decree. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger’ was in fact law. And it wasn’t just the Royal government that employed messengers. Businesses employed them as well. Interfacing with the far traveling messengers were the town-criers, who shouted out news on everything from wars, taxes and jobs to local markets and events. What struck me was that in England and some other parts of Europe, Town Criers were a government position, appointed by the Mayor of each town, to keep the citizens informed of matters of both national and local importance. In fact, interfering with a Town Crier in the execution of his duty was once a serious offense. The British Empire apparently took the job of spreading news and information very seriously. It strikes me what an extraordinarily powerful system this was and I would be willing to wager that the rise of civilizations and the spread of empires were closely correlated to faster mechanisms of information flow.

Who cares about the average income!

as posted on yourstory.in

Apparently this last year the per capita income of Indians increased to Rs. 46,492 per year. That’s Rs. 3874 ($85) per month. Glory days! The ‘average’ Indian is no longer living in ‘poverty’. But really, per capita income is an average and who cares about the average income when the average Indian hardly exists. The distribution of income is highly skewed and looks like this (see my last related post ‘It’s not a pyramid’). You can see where that places the average.



Yet when we think of an average we make certain assumptions about the spread or distribution of the values that go into this number. If you say the average height of people in India is around 5’ 5” with a standard deviation of 5”, it’s pretty intuitive what that means – that when you arrive in India you will find most people around 5’5” with about 5 inches variation this way and that. In large part it means that we all look similar and can fit in the same seats, sleep on the same size beds and fit through the same doorways. So if we hear that the average height of Indians has increased, we think immediately that we are collectively growing taller as a population and not that a small group of freak giants suddenly emerged. Similarly, reports of an increase in the average income suggest to us that we are collectively better off. Are we?