The Digital Revolution

A lot has changed since the onset of Digital Media. What earlier used to take days to reach, now takes only a fraction of a second to travel to the other side of the globe. Going digital has helped businesses reach out to a far greater audience spanning geographies, time zones and sometimes even cultures.

But all you digital gurus already know that, right?! So why am I rambling the obvious? Because, it is time for businesses to focus on the consumer more than ever. Increasing digitization has  made life simple, or even more complicated? 

I found this excellent piece on how the digital revolution is leaving the consumer behind by Simon Silvester, [written some time back but relevant even today]. Aptly titled- My Brain Hurts, this study tells us how the increasing pace of technology is overloading the consumer and that is it time for businesses to pause and help the consumer understand the technology that is supposed to make their lives simpler.

An excerpt:-

‘The new net boom’ announces Fortune.

In California, venture capital is flowing.

After five years in the doldrums, tech is back.

And it’s back big time

Last time it was only dotcoms, telecoms and computers

that boomed.

Today virtually every industry on Earth is experiencing

rapid change.

Hollywood is digitizing.

Airlines are digitizing.

Fast food service is digitizing.

Soon, with the arrival of radio ID chips on every package

in every supermarket, the humble food and drink

industries will digitize too.

But

But as the world again gets excited by all things tech,

perhaps we should pause.

Read more of this wonderful paper by Simon Silvester,Y&R EMEA here.

Leadership Lessons from Music: Itay Talgam

Off late, I've found myself reading up on the emerging management styles of corporations and how it will determine the course of their business. The success of any management style depends a lot on the leadership that is imbibing and driving it.

A lot has been said, written, debated and ignored about leadership. To put it succinctly- leadership in theory is overrated and in practice underrated. As someone who steers clear of management books, i wanted to relate leadership to the things i liked to do and see whether there were any lessons that could be learned from them.

Music tops that list and i began asking google whether it could show me what music has to teach us about leadership. I stumbled upon this absolutely mindblowing TED video of Itay Talgam, an Israeli conductor and a business consultant. In his 20 minute talk, he shows us how leadership is about enabling people yet at the same time being in control- one that does not stifle the individuals but energizes them to do more. He uses examples of some of the world's greatest music conductors and tells us how each one had a different kind of leadership style which led to varied outcomes.

Watch his inspirational TED talk on Lead Like the Great Conductors. 


Quoting Itay, ""But you can see the music on his face.You can see the baton left his hand. No more baton. Now it's about you, the player, telling the story. Now it's a reversed thing. You're telling the story. And you're telling the story. And even briefly, you become the storyteller to which the community, the whole community, listens to." 

Perfume: The Book vs The Movie

I saw Perfume : The Story of a Murderer movie a few months back and i chanced upon a copy of the novel while browsing through the shelves in a bookstore. I picked it up to find out what elements of the book had the movie failed to capture. The main character, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is described as "one of the most gifted and abominable personages in an era that knew no lack of gifted and abominable personages".
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The story then moves to describe how as a baby (one who is born in the middle of the filthiest and smelliest parts of Paris), Jean Baptiste does not have a baby-odour or in other words, Jean Baptiste does not have personal human odor. What he does possess is an extraordinary "olfactory" functions- his heightened sense of smell. As he grows up, he develops an uncontrollable desire to create the perfect perfume- one that will make up for his lack of personal scent and transform him into a human. Grenouille is a cold hearted, emotionless individual who in the entire plot is only driven by his incessant need to create the perfect scent. As a reader,one cringes at Grenouille's life and ultimately at how it ends.


However, in the movie, Grenouille [played by actor Ben Whishaw], one cannot help but feel sorry for Grenouille and in a strange way, understand his need for creating the perfect scent.All in all, it was definitely the movie over the book for me. The book drags at times when it goes into details of the various processes that are deployed in creating a perfume- making one skim over several chapters. I'd give the movie a 8/10 and the book 6/10 for keeping me hooked

Le Divorce- Diane Johnson

This weekend tormented me with the lack of anything good to read. Last week, I started reading Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, an apparently “witty” look at the French and American ways of life and the mess that is created when the two collide. Sadly, the book did not match up to my expectations. The main plot revolves around two sisters- Roxy and Isabel- the former married to a Frenchman who has left her for another married woman and the latter, a free spirited film student who is in Paris to help out her older sister. Much of the book deals with the differences in the French and the American culture. The author spends too much time explaining these small irrelevant culture conflicts too frequently for me to carry on. I have currently given up reading the book simply because I lost interest and patience.

If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of the a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It's clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It's a wordless song, for the most, but it's a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note

- If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, Jon McGregor

Anguish

The sky disunited
crying despicably
Trying hard to revive the dead
My vision clogs up as I try to look
The raindrops shatter my ears.

I cannot hear anything
in the secret whisper of the spirits
Decay surrounds me
fiendishly jeering
With you soaring up
and with me plumeting
deep underground

Who am I?

I make the noise to shake you up
I fake a smile to cheer you up
I'll lead the way to your disaster
I'm the one you can't run after

" The day would lie before us both, long not doubt, and uneventful, but fraught with a certain stillness, a dear tranquility we had not known before"

- Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier

How *NOT* to make the first move

It's quite amusing how my first post of the new year is going to be this..but i guess life has it;s ways of laughing back at you.

Here goes my disastrous attempt at starting a conversation with a total stranger-:

For the last couple of months, i had been eyeing this totally cute guy on the metro. And the whole time i waited for him to make the first move. But after TWO MONTHS OF NOTHING but only staring...i thought- ENOUGH! It was time to take matters into my own hands. If he was not going to do it, I will.

Today: It seemed as if fate had plans for me. I board the metro at the usual hour and find that all the seats BUT the one next to HIM are occupied. I have not other choice but to place myself right next to him. And so begins our 50 min train ride together.'

Suddenly,my head starts screaming- "DO SOMETHING. THIS IS IT! Make the Move...Find out if he's worth the pursuit"...and out of pure impulse and realising that we were about to de-board, i pluck up enough courage to sit up and talk to him. Here's what happend next-

Me (looking at him intently) : Excuse me

He (staring ahead in space  and earphone plugged in ignores)

Me (tapping on his arm and smiling foolishly): Excuse me

He (turning his face with zero expression) : yea

Me (smiling, trembling, stammering): What kind of music are you listening to? I am totally bored of the music on my ipod and i could use some ideas on the different kind of music i could listen to.

He (zero expression again and pointing to his phone) : yea...so i listen to this

He pulls out his phone and shows me his playlist. And THEN it happens..

Me (still smiling, slightly trembling) : oh, nice! what genre do you really like?

He : No, not that, i have basically rock and rap

Me: oh, so you like hip hop?

He: No, i just listen to some rap songs

(All this time he is scrolling up and down and then he suddenly pauses on one track)

HE: this is my favorite track (pointing to Nothing's Gonna Change My Love For You)

ME (thinking, "is he gay?" :|) - Oh nice..thats a really old number

He (still NO expression)- Yea..well...what music do you listen to

Me (pulling out my playlist and scrolling real fast): i listen to all sorts of music...rock, hip hop, pop

He: oh..so you ahve *kali*fornia love too (yes, that's right...he pronounced California Love as *kali*fornia..where kali as in hindi for flower bud)

Me (stumped, totally turned off and speechless..still trembling :|): yea..

By then, the train arrived at his station and he bid adieu and went off. I on the other hand, asked myself, "What the fuck did just happen?"  I knew i never should have attempted to make the first move..or any move for that matter.. I am a disaster when it comes to flirting (or whatever it was that i did) and this just proves it.

Btw, im never getting back on the same train as him. :)