keep renning

Teaching Jispa is to go on a journey yourself. Now more and more I am the guy in charge of the studies. In many ways I am the fall guy if anything happens to Jispa academic pursuits. Haha! I think this has come about thanks to two things – first Jasmine just doesn’t seem to have the patience to deal with the all the extra science and history and everything else. She would really need to up the ante and keep researching if she needs to be relevant. And second – more importantly – Jispa drives her up the wall. I think these two aren’t really designed to coexist and learn from each other. They are designed to be happy if they decide to let each other be.

So I am the guy. Buts interesting and its helping me in more ways than I can imagine. It’s a enriching experience. What Jispa learns in school is completely different from what I have been taught or in the way that I have been taught.  Her geography text book is with every penny and her history teacher forces her to think and research. They push the child into thinking and having an opinion beyond the syllabus or what’s written. While I was growing up, the rules were simple – textbook wrote – you memorized and you puked on the exam whatever you retained. Independent thought and inquiry was not really encouraged except for the personal beliefs of certain professors who naturally brought it into their teaching styles.

So I like it when we do geography its important to understand the history of the place and some other associated facts. Like right now we are doing China in Geography. If I have to teach her I better learn a lot more than what I know, as it helps in the discussions. Here of course learning channels like youtube have helped a lot, where some seriously talented people are putting their talent to good use. The Crash Course channel on youtube is especially useful for understanding history. So while learning about China I heard a few terms on Confucianism which I then further researched and its quite interesting that these principals are pretty universal in nature and that at the core of it, they can be applied to various situations that we face today.

Here in Confucianism, the Sage archetype is the ideal but it hard to achieve and hence there is another one for us mortals to get –  Junzi. I like this guy. ‘A superior person’. This man can stay in poverty, does more, speaks less, loyal obedient and knowledgeable. He disciplines himself. This man stands in contrast to the Xiaoren. The xiaoren is the ‘petty person’, someone who doesn’t grasp the values of virtue and goes only for immediate gains. These two archetypes are the types you get in offices. The text says that a ruler must be surrounded by junzi and not xiaoren. Which is true. I have seen it many times that good nice leaders quickly get surrounded by xiaoren and this starts clouding their judgment and affects how they behave. I have seen them in all orders and magnitude. The typical xiaoren is the insecure idiot who butters up his boss, surrounds himself by stooges, keeps his stooges insecure all the time and pumps bad blood in the system. These xiaoren have to be exterminated if the organization has to function. You have to keep these away from you, as far away as possible if you don’t want to turn into one yourself. I have seen it here where a leader whom I trusted and respected was clouded by the xiaoren in his coterie. He ate up the system form inside and left a lasting legacy of distrust and infighting. The leader, who is a good guy, had only one fault – he let the Xiaoren in. When you let one come in – you not only allow him to come in but in effect you also keep the junzi out. The two cannot co exist. The Junzi slowly stayed out of the leadership and were marginalized.

As a marketing head – I have had the experience of leading teams. I see the insecure people everywhere. Some of them in the team try and become my friends – close friends. Sure – I am all for friendship but then they quickly realize that just by being close to me doesn’t really mean that they get any preferential treatment as regards special coaching or perks or salary. They get equally jammed when make mistakes or have issues. Typically I have learnt that they like to hog time like pac man and let anyone else come in. The more time the xiaoren spend the less time the junzi have. By definition the junzi is a superior man – he doesn’t stoop so low as to fight. So you have to allow the junzi in. call him or her inside the circle, take an effort to listen to him and to understand his point of view. Often it’s not the junzi who is eating away your time – it’s the xiaoren.

So the leader must fight and fight hard to push these characters into their respective places. Bring the good guy in and push the bad guy out. Slowly of course as you do this – I have seen the insecure form a clique of their own and then branch out to other trees where they can fertilize seeds from their own toxic poop. Hehehe… I like that metaphor. It seems so apt. so these negative guys will slowly go away and you will be better off. Ofcourse you will miss the attention that these jokers gave you, but will live to be a stronger and wiser person. To become the Sage, you will have to wean yourself off from the licking that the xiaoren will give you.

So what’s the hope for people to more to the junzi archetype? Here also Confucius has given us an answer. To become the Junzi the core is Ren. So WTF is Ren? “Ren is the  virtue denoting the good feeling a virtuous human experiences when being altruistic.”  If that sounds impossible to achieve – our friend has given us simpler solutions as well - "Ren is not far off; he who seeks it has already found it." Ren is close to man and never leaves him.

 Also –

Ren relies heavily on the relationships between two people, but at the same time encompasses much more than that. It represents an inner development towards an altruistic goal, while simultaneously realizing that one is never alone, and that everyone has these relationships to fall back on, being a member of a family, the state, and the world.

Ren is not a concept that is learned; it is innate, that is to say, everyone is born with the sense of ren. Confucius believed that the key to long-lasting integrity was to constantly think, since the world is continually changing at a rapid pace.

The more I read about all this , the more I realize that all of this is open to interpretation and the answer is in many ways for each one of us to seek for ourselves. I think the essence of both Indian and Chinese thought is to look inside and seek for truth. This truth I think, is different for each one of us. The truth that lets humanity survive and thrive and progress is the truth that takes into consideration the truth of others. The duality of truth or the acceptance that various different truths can co-exist at the same time is the essence to being Humane, or experiencing ren. That’s why I think he says that Ren means to constantly think. I think it means to constantly evaluate our ideals and beliefs in relation to various different things. What the society now is thinking and what it means today to live or the force of technology or cultural change or whatever. Constantly think and relook at your self and see if you are indeed humane. Thast why he says – anyone can ren. Its inbuilt, one only has to search. The act of searching itself is to find ren. That itself is ren.

From here on there are two other interesting words – li and yi. “Li is the action which has been deemed appropriate by society, yi is the action that is indeed correct”. This is also very deep. Many times we do ‘li’ because that’s the path of least resistance. Change in society happens when ‘yi’ is done by the unreasonable man, even when it contradicts ‘li’. Many times we see ‘yi’ in action and we condemn it. Only when you have ren, will you reflect and figure if there is li in the action and then think twice when you pronounce judgment.

 These are such amazing references from philosophy or history. I loved reading about it and thinking about it. The internet is a lovely thing of course but it also requires you to have some ren on your own. It can give you a lot of information, but what you make out of it and refer back to your life is yours alone. I am glad that I had a daughter as early as I did. Thanks to Jispa, I am physically fitter than what I would have been and my diet is much better, as I am forced to follow her swimming life style. But also thanks to her questions and her education, I dare say, I am smarter than what I would have been. It is finally what you make out of it. There are sponges filled with water everywhere you look, how much you squeeze out of it is your problem.

Some days I aimless surf the net and see videos, but here, one led to another and the reason to surf was pointed. It was a geography class topic. China. Who knew how it would pan out? and definitely philosophy was not I was aiming for… but the mind – it’s such a lovely thing, isn’t it? keep ‘renning’

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Here is a video on our hero. I don’t necessarily agree blindly with all his ideas but – its an interesting point on the never ending , ever expansive map of philosophy.

keep trying!

When I first came to this job 5 years ago, this was an established broking outfit. It had a marketing team and it believed that things worked. They did not believe that they really needed anyone like me. They would be fine doing their job and that what could one other guy who came in really help. On the other hand as I saw it, it was a boring place with no real marketing activity happening and anyone who would come in would be able to add substantial value to the beast and thereby improve the lot. So when I came here as a transfer from the wealth management business to the retail broking business, I saw no big challenge. Of course I could add value here. How difficult would it be? The marketing function over the last couple of years was run by sales guys who generally lacked marketing direction and had taken marketing to a place where the senior most guy felt that he was the most highly paid courier boy in the country. All they did was emailers and posters. A few brochures and leaflets thrown in for good measure. Anything else was a question.

I came in not really knowing what to do. I tried to destroy some stuff, invent some stuff and I came in from my wealth hangover where we would spend inordinately large amount of time for trivial stuff. Beinga marketing manager in the wealth management business is a complete waste of time and resources. You do very little through the year, so people like me who would like to be busy would spend a large amount of time and effort for the little that we did. So we would spend so much time planning and organizing an event that the kids under me would go crazy trying to make sense of it all. They called me Raavan, with ten heads. I would come and think of what could go wrong and then try and mitigate it. It was a really pain in the ass. But that was me. Try and do the best of what was possible. So I came with a  similar mindset to run eth marketing function for a much larger base of customers that securities business seeks to provide. I think I was a disaster to start with. I did not think that giving leads through digital marketing was anything that cool to do. I generally ignored the lead side of the business. The leads was a black hole. We take leads and put it into the system and then wonder what happened. Whenever the top management woke up, hastily one presentation would be arranged in which some statistics would be twisted to show the efficacy of the system. It made no sense.

One of the first things I worked on, I remember was to design a brochure; I took team meetings and what not to try to design the perfect brochure. That was complete rubbish as well. This was retail business. No one really looked at the brochure and most of our customers did not care too bit for the English we put in to it. I spend a long time trying to design a few thank you emailer. I over designed them and then no one really used them. Simple shit was complicated. In all this there was only one thing going for me. No one really expected anything of me. I had to just keep doing what was happening and not ruffle feathers and all would be well. The sales head was an ass who only played political games and tried to keep all the key things to himself. So while I was promised the product role by the MD, he played games to ensure that product stayed within his control. But one thing he did not understand – was the power if digital. That was one thing I did not understand as well, but atleast I was well placed to understand that one thing.

Anything new requires a strong sense of curiosity and ability to tinker, experiment and trust. And of course measure what you are seeking to achieve. Digital is tough business. Stuff changes every day. Google will change its algorithm and Facebook will introduce a new set of measures. What will you do then? You have to learn every day. I was no stranger to digital. I was part of the first dotcom boom, but that was completely different. In the year 2000, there was a boom but there was no Google to consider. Now Google was a behemoth and Facebook was taking root into the minds of people. What was happening? I knew one thing from my earlier job. I had read a book called “the Search” by John Battelle. It opened my mind to the potential of Google as a medium to get free leads. If you optimize your pages correctly and put the relevant content traffic would come and if you put your lead form or a way for someone to contact you on every page then invariably people would contact you. You would have lead flow. As a gujju guy, this was free money coming in.

SO while I was a part of the wealth business, I was also made responsible for the marketing of the international business. That time I pushed the idea of search engine optimization (fresh from eth book) and got it done. This was in around 2005/6. It was pioneering in India around the time and I think I was the first in my company to implement these ‘radical’ ideas. I did not think they were radical, I only thought of it as things to do with little money. I think if I was a marketing manager with tons of money to spend then I too would have gotten busy trying to spend that money. The best argument for this is simple – I did that for the international business and did no such thing for the wealth business as in the wealth business there was enough stuff to do. So it’s not like I saw it early. It’s just that I had the energy and drive to do new things and a strong curiosity to back it.

So here in the broking business, I implemented the search optimization thing (SEO). Actually its not that I implemented it; it was there, I gave it a lot of focus and teeth. I pushed it hard. We did simple things like increase the content, rearrange the content and then put the lead form on every page on the site. Every page. I did not want to see a page without the lead form. What’s the point of a page without a lead form upfront staring at you. The result is that the leads went up 10 times from eth time I joined the place to now.

I then started other digital marketing stuff – like buying clicks from search terms. Here I think the genius lie in a simple thing – measurement. The way we measured the efficacy from the start was clear to me – how much brokerage did all this result in? I fought as hard as ever to get eth MIS and reporting right. The simple thing was that there is enough metrics available – the simplest would be the metric that we would like to intuitively think. I put x money in month 1. How many months would it take me to get this money back in terms of brokerage. This figure was the holy grail. The term we coined was cost per rupee of brokerage. The aim of a presentation would be to show how long it takes to get a figure of 1. 1 Is the breakeven point. This was the corner stone of all we did. Of course we then did a lot of work in a lot of areas but this was the greatest achievement ever. No one was tracking digital spends but we were. No one was going into the granularity of the stuff like we were in the banking and especially the broking space. We pushed hard and we were buoyed by the success we got. It made me what I am today. I plunged myself head long into this space. It excited me like no other. We put in a culture of trying everything. I could try everything as I could measure the efficacy of all my investments. Everyuthing was possible as long as it could be measured.

 Itw as one hell of a ride. Until it was small and no one really bothered about it, I could do everything I wanted. Now it was a big beast and everyone has gotten involved. Everyone wants to regulate the thing and wants a pie of it. Further improvements in digital to incorporate every small portion of the pie require a larger investment and more so require people to get out of the way. This was getting too tough to do. Everyone started having valuable input to put it and generally mess things up. Too many people were involved in it and believed that it was in their career interest to be a part of this. It was designed to stop.

And hence the change – now I as am gearing up for my new innings in my new firm, I am a little scared. Here there are expectations. People expect me to do stuff. I know that I know stuff, but is it adequate. I came here and I was burned a bit by the politics, but in the new firm would I survive. There would be a different level of politics, insecurity and willingness to change (or not). I am confident. I would be able to solve most of it, but I have to put systems in place, I have to put processes in place and all this will have to be done at warp speed. Agile development as they call it. The fundamental thing here in agile processes is that you keep releasing features into the market by means of ‘releases’. You can’t have a perfect product but you test as you go and keep building on what you have. Marketing, my suspicion will need to follow this agile development. You keep putting things out and you manage as you go along. the internet throws up this definition “Agile programming is an approach to project management, typically used in software development. It helps teams react to the instability of building software through incremental, iterative work cycles, known as sprints”. This is new and interesting. Its exciting.

As Rehan who coached my kid for swimming for a brief period (a former Olympian from India), there is good nervous and bad nervous. You like good nervous, it gives you that tingling feeling when you move out to conquer the world, and there is bad nervous that stops you, puts self-doubt and seeks to paralyze. This is good nervous. I am thinking, I am all senses open, I am keen not to take anything for granted, I am ready to work hard. I am on! Completely ON! I cant make the same mistakes, I have to build support and build rapports with all. I have to take on board suggestions and opinions. I have to inspire and to trust. And I have to trust myself as well. I know my stuff. I have been trained to think, I have trained myself to think. It has to work. The place I am joining is start up. The pressure is larger. If I get things right, I can change the face and the orbit of the startup. 100 of millions of dollars are potentially at stake with my success in marketing the product and making it work. As one of my bisses explained to me once – you have to be able to constantly move between two three things and give adequate focus to all that you have at the moment. Can you focus on multiple things one after the other. That is going to determine your success. Prakash Dalal – your words ring true. That is going to be the key to success as one moves up the corporate ladder.

Focus, refocus, repeat!

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end note

Here is another entry on agile

Agile software development is a group of software development methods in which solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change

I see no reason why marketing can’t be like this. You have to keep the focus of the customer and hold a few things like core insights dear. But the rest has to be evolutionary. If your market is not static and is evolving, your targeting methods are evolving, your product is evolving – how can marketing be static. It has to be agile!

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