Measuring Distraction

I knew I would write this post right after I scanned this piece of paper. And yet, what did I do? I opened an email which led me to open another link before I reminded myself that since I had scanned the format, I should write this post.

If your mobile phone and laptop suck up your time and leave you tired without any feeling of satisfaction at the end of the day, you might just want to do this exercise for a few days and measure your DISTRACTION QUOTIENT.

If you look at the sheet, you'll see 4 columns. You'll also see some symbols and words highlighted in green.

The first 2 columns are sort of 'purposeful'. Obviously, we use mobile phones and laptops for purposeful activities. So the first 2 columns give you the space to record what you consciously decide to do using these gadgets. They are marked with 'right tick' on top. You can fill these columns well in advance.

The 3rd and 4th columns are meant to record the instances of 'unintentional' or 'undetermined' use of these gadgets. The kind of thing I did (narrated right at the start of this post) before I started writing this post. You would fill these columns only after you've distracted yourself and done something which wasn't quite consciously determined in advance.

The ratio of the number of items in the first two and the number of items in the last two should give your DISTRACTION QUOTIENT. I hope you would know how to interpret that ratio :).

Automobile is a convenient lie and traffic is exactly what it was meant to be

From wikipedia:

The word automobile comes, via the French automobile from the Ancient Greek word αὐτός (autós, "self") and the Latin mobilis ("movable"); meaning a vehicle that moves itself.

We are still struggling with artificial intelligence. Do you really believe a vehicle moves itself? Then what exactly do you do sitting in that vehicle?

Let's say you don't move the vehicle. Do you still believe that the vehicle is moving itself?

Read more from wikipedia:

The loanword was first adopted in English by The New York Times in 1899.

If the belief of/in the word 'automobile' has resulted in losses to you (I can't think of a loss that's well-articulated and measured though), time to sue the NYT :).

Wikipedia has more on the origins of the word 'car':

The alternative name car is believed to originate from the Latin word carrus or carrum ("wheeled vehicle"), or the Middle English word carre ("cart") (from Old North French), in turn these are said to have originated from the Gaulish word karros (a Gallic Chariot).

Now the concept of wheeled vehicle sounds like the true description, isn't it?

And we are also unnecessarily bothered by 'traffic'. It's meant to be just what it is. Flow but slow. Again from wikipedia:

Traffic in English is taken from the Arabic word taraffaqa, which means to walk along slowly together.

And yet we keep cursing. May be they never told us about company in traffic. We've got some nasty teachers :).

The story (oops, sorry the horror) of story-telling

When we watch these movies with insane twists and turns, heart-tearing agony and mind-numbing gore, in spite of the the happy endings, if we ask a question: what if we have to go through stuff like this? Phrase it differently: given any chance, would we have our own stories unfold like this?

Not that we have any more chance of controlling our life than that rock falling off from a cliff one fine day...

Come back to the questions. What if? Would we?

Difficult to nod in the 'yes', no? Mighty difficult. And yet we continue to hear and watch such stories like crazy, making these movies claim 'record breaking collections' in every other ad.

Perhaps thousands of years back, to watch someone else die, to watch someone else brutally torn to pieces meant that you were the one alive. The lucky one. You were the one to whom those things didn't happen. And you were the one wishing for those things never to happen to you.

And indeed, if you witnessed such events, you had to tell them to your village as a precautionary measure. The only way to tell was to act them out in full horror. But even in your wildest of dreams, in spite of the rampant possibility of such events unfolding, you wouldn't wish them to happen to you. Nor would anyone in the village would wish those things to happen to them.

So while you would feel the horror (empathize) judging from the enactment of horror, and feel it necessary to make use of every single chance to watch the horror (information for self-defense), you would never want the story-with-the-happy-ending to unfold in your life.

The security of a job has a similar explanation.

Government is a Limited Duration Monopoly

How?

You buy vegetables from a particular vendor. You suspect he's started charging you higher. You check at another vendor's nearby. Your suspicion is proven right. You start buying from the new vendor. The old vendor sees you buying from the other vendor and he gets what he has done.

This is typically called competition. The great part about competition is 'fear'. Fear that if I don't do enough I might not be able to convince the buyer. I might not be able to sell my stuff. I might lose money. I might lose my business. As a result, I am always trying to do things which keep me in business. Which earns me others' trust.

Competition yields results. If not immediately, then in a little while.

After a political party is voted into power and allowed to form a government, what powers do people have? Whatever bad happens, people wait for 5 long years to vote them out. If a scam takes place today, do people have the power to shift to another government in the next few days/months? For 5 years the government enjoys monopolistic powers and very little can be done about it.

If governance is the most serious business for any country, then the market structure for governance is lopsidedly skewed towards monopoly. The democratic process is invoked for a few days every 5 years. Between those days, it's all monopoly.

Flood of Names

Branding has to contend with quite a few names now. Add to that the words in the message that the brand wants people to remember and credit the brand for.

Depending on the business model and the intentions, one might have to take care of the following names/words. Take for once, Shopper's Stop, a retail hub fashion brands.

• Retail Store Name - Shopper's Stop
• Online Store/Domain Name - Shoppersstop.com
• Tagline/Punchline for the Retail Store - Start Something New
• Owned Brands - Stop (and similar other names)

Also, important is the category name. Category name of the retail store, category name of the product for which it has an owned brand and so on

• Category Name for the retail store - Fashion Store? Lifestyle Store?
• Category Name for the owned brand - Women's Office Wear / Casual Wear, etc.

Sure, category names get embedded in a while and therefore, might not need marketing spends and energies. But for any new position or innovation, category names also need to be remembered.

And many more words are added through campaigns and messages in those campaigns... Imagine the memory capacities of common people! And there's a passage through which these messages reach the place of storage in the consumer's active memory, imagine the width of that passage and possibilities of clogging.

Or if the minds are fertile lands of the earth, imagine the rate of absorption. Also imagine then, the viscosity of the messages. Water-like? Toothpaste-like? Soup-like? Or wood-like? Or metal-like?

So how patient are you? How much do you have? Do you have a nail and a hammer?

Anding & Butting

Earth is a big planet. And it has water. And it has vegetation. And it has fish. And it has humans. And it has volcanoes. And it has storms. And... And...

But it isn't the universe.

I read. And I write. And I workout. And I watch movies. And I listen to music. And I play drums. And I FB. And I want...

But there are only 24 hours. But I have only so much money.

There's no end to Anding. But there's always a significant But. For good, may be for bad. And it is that significant But that will force choices. And those choices and living with those choices will make or break us. Make or break brands. Make or break great stories.

Where's your Butt?

Starring YOU

I like movies and celebrities like any other person who seeks entertainment. Here's what amazes me.

A movie isn't made linearly like we see it. The starting scenes of a movie might be shot after the climactic ones. That's still fine until we talk of actors. I don't know in what sequence was Sholay shot but it could very well turn out that the scene where AB dies was shot (even) before the scene where Dharmendra & AB reach Ramgadh. If for once this is taken to be true, I wonder about the actors' 'sense of story', sense of holism, sense of linearity.

I also wonder about the oft-repeated claim of getting into the skin or heart or mind of the character. Even if that is done, lack of linearity would put anyone off the course. For the hero is dying before even romancing the heroine and is romancing her and singing songs with her even before meeting her for the first time.

And these days, with graphics, animation and special effects occupying a good part of the execution, imagine yourself dressed as a warrior against a bland-colored wall and swinging your sword to cut an imagined dinosaur and then grimacing and then showing stoical triumph on your face.

Have the story/idea in your head? Execute, basis convenience. Last, first, fourth, second, third. Make faces in that sequence. Bear the strangeness of it all. Then before you talk, juxtapose and order the events in a sequence and check if it's convenient to make faces in that sequence. Finally, talk as if all events happened in a sequence, make faces in that sequence and it's all well.

THE MOST IMPORTANT WORD

Yes, this post needs a Capitalized title :).

If I am not mistaken you must have heard this word in Amitabh's song My Name is Anthony Gonsalves in Amar Akbar Anthony. Of course the words in that part of the song were rattled out at some pace. 

The most important word in my life is turning out to be 'juxtaposition'. And the meaning isn't as complicated as the sound of the word :). Dictionary.com offers these meanings:

• an act or instance of placing close together or side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.
• the state of being close together or side by side.

And here's an example of juxtaposition.

For most of us trained to believe in causation, this might be a tough ability and a tough way of thinking. Simple example, saying "he is so strong" might imply a thought somewhere in our head "he is not so sensitive". But 'strong' and 'sensitive' are so often found together and one may be the cause/consequence of another. Might be a bad example but you get the point I hope.

Observe everywhere. Sources of great surprises are so often juxtapositions. Amitabh's white beard and black hair? :)

Will share more...

Chemistry in Professional Relationships

Read this remarkable write-up by Atul Gawande, the world-renowned surgeon. It's about the importance of coaching in professional set-ups. Yes, coaches for surgeons!

Corroborates my long-held belief. I try to plot here the way I observe certain professional relationships.

What do you observe?

On hard work

There are two forms of hard work:

1. Physical Movement
2. Thinking & Remembering

Lack of first leads to obesity. Leads to lack of grace, lack of performing arts, lack of beauty.

A contributing factor to lack of physical movement is laziness. It seems to be a tool of age-old conservatory habits of humankind when we were afraid of spending a lot of energy for fear that we might not be able to hunt/fetch food for the immediate future. But food is available to us every few hours now!

Lack of second leads to ungratefulness, dumbness, arrogance, wastage... Leads to lack of beauty again.

A contributing factor to lack of thinking and remembering is lack of reading. Blame the systems - education, governance, social mores and such.

SEXC

Short form for Strategy Execution Coach! ;)

Or another short form could be STREXECO; this one sounds like a medicine for bad throat. :D

Anyway, so who really is a Strategy Execution Coach?

I've been presenting myself as a Strategy Execution Coach for the last one year or so. It's fairly self-explanatory and there isn't much unsaid but still people look at me questioningly so often. As if it is some rocket science.

Strategy Execution Coach is a professional who understands and helps define business strategies and who oversees/facilitates execution of those strategies. Any confusions?

Reader of Philosophy

Reading about the word 'Doctor' on Wikipedia, I come across this: (highlighted in red, mine)

The Ph.D. was originally a degree granted by a university to learned individuals who had achieved the approval of their peers and who had demonstrated a long and productive career in the field of philosophy. The appellation of "Doctor" (from Latin: teacher) was usually awarded only when the individual was in middle age. It indicated a life dedicated to learning, to knowledge, and to the spread of knowledge.

Notice the words in red. As many things borrowed by India from the west, 'Ph.D.' is also a borrowed concept. From sheer observation, one thing can easily be inferred: the Doctors of Philosophy (the majority of them) out here haven't necessarily had a life dedicated to learning, to knowledge, and to the spread of knowledge. Quality of universities conferring Ph.D.s is largely suspect. The one function they really do well is 'confer the Doctorate' and thereby ensure that the 'Doctor' bags a job.

Also, the absolute number of peers has definitely increased. A learned person's view is subject to scrutiny among a greater number of peers than it was some decades back. In the Indian context, couple this with a lack of quality and there is good potential for academic hoaxes all around.

Ph.D. was once symbolic of great rigor. Rigor was always bigger than the symbol that stood for it. But like many other symbols, this symbol seems to have taken an existence of its own and seems to have given job-seekers a short-cut to bypass the rigor. 

My solution: have 'extent of reading' as a dominant measure of 'a life dedicated to learning, to knowledge, and to the spread of knowledge'. For quality of teaching is, to a great extent, a function how well-read the teacher is. Ph.R. seems more appealing. Would I want to converse with and learn from a person who's gone through like 1000 books? Definitely. Am I likely to 'enjoy' learning in company of such a person? You bet.

"Hard Work"

When I hear the words "hard work" or "work hard", I conjure up images of intense physical labor and toil. Is my perception commonly shared? If yes, in that case, if I have to convey "intense mental work/labor, work of real thinking or insight", what should the words be?

Trying to understand the clients' obsession with 'logo'

Ever since getting into the sphere of consulting for brand communication, I've observed clients' fervent interest in the development of logos.

Most often we would pitch for offering branding/marketing strategy and we would find the client obsessing over the logo! And on many occasions we wouldn't convert the pitch into a sustained engagement because the 'logo' didn't 'look' good or the client couldn't 'see' a lot of creativity. It seemed strategy is mumbo-jumbo (yeah, market has the power to render every strategy a mumbo-jumbo but it helps to chart out one as a reference point nonetheless) and logo is everything.

Fundamental questions arise.

So what is a logo? From my observation, of the way it is understood by clients, a logo is the visual symbol developed to represent the brand.

Arising out of this, the important questions are:

Was 'logo' actually meant to mean just that - a visual or a symbol? The answer is an emphatic, "No!"

And if the above-mentioned answer holds, why has it really come to mean just a visual symbol? What are the origins of 'logo'? Wikipedia gives a heavy-duty account of 'logos'. I'll paste the first few lines here:

Logos is an important term in philosophy, psychology, rhetoric and religion. Originally a word meaning "a ground", "a plea", "an opinion", "an expectation", "word," "speech," "account," "reason," it became a technical term in philosophy, beginning with Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC), who used the term for a principle of order and knowledge.

The explanation on Wikipedia continues:

In ordinary, non-technical Greek, logos had a semantic field extending beyond "word" to notions such as, on the one hand, language, talk, statement, speech, conversation, tale, story, prose, proposition, and principle; and on the other hand, thought, reason, account, consideration, esteem, due relation, proportion, and analogy.

Despite the conventional translation as "word", it is not used for a word in the grammatical sense; instead, the term lexis (λέξις) was used. However, both logos and lexis derive from the same verb legō (λέγω), meaning "to talk, count, tell, say, speak".

If I were to condense the above explanations (selectively presented here from Wikipedia), I would say the simplest definition of 'logo' is 'a word'.

By the way, 'logos' is now a term slightly differentiated from the word 'logo'. Wikipedia also has a description of 'logo':

A logo is a graphic mark or emblem commonly used by commercial enterprises, organizations and even individuals to aid and promote instant public recognition. Logos are either purely graphic (symbols/icons) or are composed of the name of the organization (a logotype or wordmark).

I am curiously and extremely surprised how is it that 'logo' came to acquire the meaning of 'a symbol/a visual representation'. One would kill my surprise by first attributing the epithet 'stupid' to my question (or perhaps me as a person as well!) and then giving me the answer 'branding'.

Answer accepted. I am interested in knowing what is it in 'branding' that has made people accept and believe so commonly that 'logo' is 'a symbol or a visual representation'. What is the phenomenon? How did it unfold?

My sense is that people's sense of visual beauty overpowers all other senses on a great many occasions.

If sign-boards on many a little traditional sort of shops are still something to go by, it wasn't that important earlier for a shopkeeper to post a visually beautiful sign-board as long as there was a sign-board with a name written on it. Then, someone must have tried to differentiate or present his/her shop in a better manner. He/she must've got the shop-name rendered in an artistic manner and the ball rolled. Rolled with such ferocity that it obliterated the 'word' and 'the importance of the word' from the common consciousness. :)

Important point is that when, and ever since, 'the word' got overpowered and the visual has dominated, all - meaning, opinion, reason, strategy, et al - that 'the word' helped capture got suppressed too. Long live strategic consulting. Long live 'the word'.

Just a reflection of the common perceptions about a 'logo' and the phenomenon I've tried describing, this post - thrown up in Google search - is titled "Beyond Words: Do Logos Need Words to Market Themselves?" (Mind you, am not mocking the person who has posted this question.)

You will always talk in words. You will always describe something in words. You will always write in words. Even to describe a visual you will use words. And the best of thoughts get spread through words. And the best of plans get communicated through words. The thing that sticks and slips on the tongue is the 'word'. Not to say that visuals do not have a role. But words are a necessary condition. A primary condition. The bricks, the frames, the walls, the strings on which the visuals get hung.

Disclaimer: The depiction is this post is based on my experiences and might not be a universal phenomenon. :)

Hair.make-up.nails.skin.coffee&gossip.

Flaunt. Hair.make-up.nails.skin.coffee&gossip.

Yes, the slightly illegible words in the picture read exactly as I've written in the caption above. Hair.make-up.nails.skin.coffee&gossip. Hair... Coffee & Gossip? O' Hair... Coffee & Gossip! Oh, ok!

Does it pique your interest? Visit when you are in Ahmedabad and have some time and are anywhere near Prahladnagar area.