Heartcrossings

We definitely live in interesting times. This year the holidays have bled into one another as far as retailers are concerned. There was some signs of Halloween, mixed with Thanksgiving fare but Christmas has been along for the ride the whole time. Walking into a store in years past gave you reliable visual cues for what time of year it was - now its Christmas for nearly half the year. It seems like retailers have set their eye on the prize - the biggest shopping event of the year. Coming out of a long pandemic, people can't wait for holidays to be like they once used to be  The term "Christmas" was the most searched-for term on the site in mid-September, two weeks earlier than last year and eight weeks earlier than 2020 While that may be a key search term, but belts are tightening and many on the list from prior years to receive gifts in prior years will not make the cut this year. Back in mid-September the world was still crazy but one could hope for a better turn of e...

Making an AI available online to play with is almost certain to invite trouble. People will naturally want to break and prove it is dangerous, unreliable and should be shuttered. I am no fan of Meta or anything they do, but in this instance the reaction of the crowds and the machine's response to it was unlikely a Meta-only problem. Humans do want AI to fail - it's the only way to prove humanity is uniquely valuable and cannot just be programmed. It's one thing to game the AI to make it fail and make its creators lock it way as happened in the Meta instance. But there is AI out there that will fail of its own volition leading to unknown consequences.  AGI (artificial general intelligence) can be seen as a superset of all NAIs and so will exhibit a superset of failures, as well as more complicated failures resulting from the combination of failures of individual NAIs and new super-failures, possibly resulting in an existential threat to humanity. In other words, AGIs can ...

Reading this Emily Dickinson poem brought to mind an old man walking his dog on the beach - one I had been to not too long ago. The poem paints a picture of sand, sea, human and dog. Each reader will fill in scenes they have seen but never had the words to describe how exactly the waves recede  And bowing – with a Mighty look – At me – The Sea withdrew – Then upon a second reading, I recalled the day we saw a stingray caught in a low tide by fishing poles. Everyone kept their distance and some of us stood aside to see if the water would rise high enough for the stingray to return to the ocean. That did not happen  it is as if the sea had withdrawn too far with no plans to return. The home of that fish had left her behind - a situation a human would not be able to imagine. We leave our homes behind, go out into the world. This fish had tried to her own peril.  Two images of the sea one Dickinson poem on a cold day far removed from beaches and summer. 

Reading this reminded me of the time when I first heard about Theranos. Holmes was a rising star and being touted as a role model for female startup founders. I had J listen to one of her interviews - she came across as remarkably self-assured. For those who know nothing about the subject matter her technology was supposedly based on, her demeanor was such they could come away convinced she was onto something novel and remarkable that others before her simply had not stumbled upon. The benefit of genius combined with naivete of youth can in theory make that happen. I remember asking J what she thought and she said it was a strong presentation.  J is one of those people from a very early age that are not easily swayed by anything good, bad or ugly. Knowing that about her, the reaction was not surprising. I kept up with the news of Theranos and hoped the founder would succeed - it would be a big win for women who had similar aspirations. Then the WSJ story broke. Like everyone else ...

One of my co-workers recently posted about his H1-B visa troubles on LinkedIn. G is a couple of decades younger than me and is experiencing what I did back then except I never shared things quite as publicly. This is a private hell new immigrants have to live in for a long time as the world around them goes on. Over time you start to fit in better, understand the culture and have a social life with people who simply won't understand your visa situation. I remember how anything I shared was met with complete astonishment by folks who had no idea what this was all about.  On their best day, they knew of some family who had immigrated twenty years ago but no knowledge of what it took to get to a point of stability. G's troubles are unfolding in real-time and every day is consequential. He is one of those who chose not to put their entire life on hold waiting for permanency. My young friend S is the same way - she is making great strides in her career notwithstanding her H1-B statu...

The power of that one story a person needs to tell the world must have been on my mind when I also watched The Luckiest Girl Alive soon after Where the Crawdads Sing. Inspired by realistic events overlaid with fictional gloss, this one is also about a woman who had a story so powerful to tell, that it there was no way to continue living without telling it brutally unadorned.  Sadly this movie reminded me of two of my close friends who were victims of sexual abuse as pre-adolescents. One is married and the other is not - she could not bring herself to trust any man that much. My married friend has struggled for the entirety of her marriage because of the dark, immovable cloud that hangs over intimacy. They are still together after over thirty years and in no small part because the man she is married to loves her unconditionally - he does not expect or demand "normalcy". He values how amazing and exceptional my friend is. I could not help wondering if they could both experienc...

Never got around to reading the book but watched Where the Crawdads Sing recently and really enjoyed it. Makes sense why the book was such a book-club hit. What I did not know was that the author made her fiction debut at the age of 70. I have always believed that most people have one book in them and if that's all they have got, its best to wait until the twilight years to write it. If the book works out like it did for Delia Owens, fantastic - it's like winning the lottery.  If it does not (as it would be in most cases), the person would have already lived a full time gathering all that experience along the way to tell that one big story. Nothing would have been for waste. Not winning the lottery does not make the rest of their life meaningless. Unless the person has the talent and grit to soldier on in the writing business as a career, it might be best to think of it as something to take one serious crack at and see if anything lands. What better time to do that than in the...

This piece about American elections is sad and funny at the same time. Satire apart, the ad spend stops yielding results once people simply cannot relate to either party's agenda. Their vote becomes a bit random - they could stay the course, pinch their nose and vote for their party even if they can't stand the platform anymore or they can vote for the other side on whim. Yet others of this ilk will sit it out confused about their lack of choice.  No matter what ads you show such voters, chances are they will act on their own. If both sides manage to alienate a similar percent of their base, then after all the random acts of voting, the net results will remain about same and it would naturally appear that all the ad spend had no effect.  The gains and losses for each side would make it a net wash. So both sides spin their wheels like crazy with no outcomes. Cynicism about a country's future makes people not show up to vote - something I have seen in India. All options are ...

As a long time iPhone user but not an Apple fan, I am in that group of people who watch what is developing there and asking themselves periodically if time has come to switch from iPhone. I don't enjoy new bloatware being added to my phone each time the operating system upgrades. The newest incarnation of the fitness app cannot even correctly track my steps so I don't trust or expect it to do next level things. The one thing I do enjoy about being on my phone is the fully ad-free experience. I recognize that there is a price to pay of this and that was the the implied contract between the customer and Apple. We pay a premium to not be hassled by ads. That is now changing . There will be very little to separate the iPhone experience from whatever else is out there that I have not explored, once ads become mainstream fare for Apple. I would not see the point of sticking around at that point. The fans of Apple may be a lot more tolerant and patient but they too have their breaking...

Not to long ago, I was talking to a client who is the responsible for customer experience for a large fast food chain. The issues that impact QSR workers impact her company on grander scale. Their problem is not that there is lack of recognition of their problems or shortage of ideas on how to fix them. Everything comes to a grinding halt because decisions are consensus based - not top down or bottom up. All impacted by the change get to have a say in the matter and often the cost of getting things wrong is too high for one or more teams for them to back the idea. This account of how one individual responsible for one Chik-fil-a location brought about change , makes for inspiring reading. The idea of a 3-day work-week with very long hours sounds controversial at first blush but if the team gets along, it may the very reason they stick around and have better job satisfaction which translates to better customer experience.  It probably would have been a whole lot easier on myself, es...

 A couple of folks I know use services like Misfits Market and had good things to say about their experience. Not letting good (even if ugly) food go to waste is cause that can find a lot of supporters. Execution is a different matter. First of the reviews give a potential new customer pause . For me the biggest red flag is lack of visibility to assortment and no bullshit language that explains what I am getting. The user experience of Misfits leaves much to be desired. Imperfect Foods was slightly better but still not the level of transparency that would make a customer feel comfortable. For all the hype and to my taste unwanted element of surprise, its not clear what useful purpose these outfits serve . For the most part, you are unlikely making a dent in the food waste problem and not even saving that much money. Though some people end up having a positive experience - probably they are exactly who the service was designed for. 

I will admit always having watched this guy with schadenfreude on my mind. Fascinating that he wants to threaten advertisers with consequences for not spending money on Twitter. This is not typically how things work in the world but then what do the rest of us know.  Afterall we are dealing with someone who wants to colonize Mars and has an "informed" opinion about everything because he  reads a lot and talks to a lot of people . That maybe the very definition of genius but regular people like us won't comprehend any of that. It will be interesting to see if he changes the fundamentals of how B2B relationships work.  Maybe he will surprise us all by becoming the biggest ad platform in the world that advertisers dump any amount of money on for fear of being named and shamed. Maybe that will become standard operating practice for how you do business - earn compliance from your customers by threatening dire consequences.  All this defies commonsense but this guy has no...

Reading this news story reminded me of a conversation with an airlines client in the depths of the pandemic. They were bracing for the worst. The exec I was speaking to at the time was crystal clear they had no budget for anything except keeping the lights on. I asked her what about preparing for when this all over and people want to travel more than ever because they are so sick and tired of being stuck at home. She said there was no appetite for such things - no one knew how long this phase would last and if they would even make it.  The retailers conversely were having the best results - people were spending money on stuff they could use while being stuck at home. There were stories of DIY suppliers going gangbusters. No surprise that the tide has turned exactly as it should logically. The fortunes of the different companies has reversed. I have to say the flying experience has become much worse than it used to be pre-pandemic and customer experience has been discarded as a con...

I am engrossed in The Secret Life of Groceries at the moment. If I had the time I would read it end to end over a few days but real life does not allow for such luxury so it has been been reading with many starts and stops. Every chapter in the book has new things to teach me.  It is a world we should know about being that everyone is a grocery store customer. In essence the book is about all of us - that secret life that Lorr talks about is lived to serve us. We in aggregate create demand for stuff like Slawsa . The whole system is being orchestrated with much pain and labor for us to get the food we want to eat. The process by which we get to that point makes food appear coincidental almost.  It is just any other commodity being moved around to extract money out of the system. The soul gets dropped out very early on in the process. The staging of food where it finally meets the consumer - the author has a vivid description of the Wholefoods seafood counter - feels akin to a...

I was  reading this news about Twitter  just a few days before a friend called with some strange news from her workplace. A person she had been working with on a project had suddenly gone dark. She was deactivated on Slack but email still worked and she declined her meetings. Her boss showed up to one my friend P's meetings with this woman. The guy seemed very confused and was clearly not ready for whatever had happened.  The official word was that she would be gone for a while and folks were to come to him directly going forward. It was unclear who else was in the know but no one said anything about this person vaporizing into thin air - here she was in the morning and by afternoon she had disappeared. P was clearly stressed and needed to share the news with someone. We did not know what to make of the event but it was definitely strange and unexplainable business.  We live is very strange and unpredictable times. The future is always hard to peer into but ther...

This story about RealPage made for sad and concerning reading. I am hearing J complain about apartment rents and hear similar stories from a couple of other young people I know. These are all single working professionals, still very early career. They can afford to pay for their necessities but above and beyond that is not easy. If the rent is reasonable, they can afford to have a certain quality of life but when it gets to a breaking point then nothing works.  It becomes about long commutes to get cheaper accommodation, feeling wiped out just getting through the day, not having enough left in time, energy or resources to do things that are fun or rewarding. This is a sad example of data sharing leading to some terrible outcomes for the customer: To win cases, antitrust prosecutors have traditionally needed to show that competitors agreed among themselves to tamper with pricing. “If competitors agreed among themselves to use the same algorithm and to share information among themse...

Ran into this piece  about relationship loyalty inspectors and could not tell if it the author's imagination or there was some truth to the story. Though sometimes truth is much stranger than fiction. I know of a woman who spent over a decade of her marriage trying to get prepared for divorce - in every way possible. It was as if she was preparing for trial just that she gave herself ten years to do it.  By the time she filed she must have been the most ready plaintiff for divorce ever. Interestingly, the outcomes for her were a mixed bag. She won big of course with all that legwork but on the human side of things much was irretrievably lost. She would be the kind of person who would employ such an inspector if they happened to exit. Just another item for her files. There are many who want a certain outcome and a path they want to follow to get out of a relationship. Turns out there is some truth to the story .  The 20-year-old has been offering to message women whose boy...

I remember being very inspired watching Julie and Julia way back when. Sad to read that the woman whose work inspired the movie died at a such a young age . It was an amazing way to bring zest back to life - cooking every Julia Child recipe while being a home cook. I marveled at the tenacity and devotion to the cause and wished I could find something like that to keep me engaged without pause for a good part of my life. Something that would make me feel alive in ways I had not been till then.  If not cooking hard recipes something else that was challenging but offered a reward soon enough. That was likely the reason Powell was able to persist with her project - it hard enough but not to the point where one must give up. She built momentum upon her successes and it started a virtuous cycle. Lucky her I thought to be able to find such emotional reward out of a cookbook. I had read the blog a few times and enjoyed how Powell was able to mix exasperations with cooking and life into a...

Joining AARP is a Gen Z trend for purposes of discounted food and travel makes for a buzzy headline. I had to wonder if the viral sensation from the TikTok video in question was not a smart marketing campaign to acquire future customers well ahead of time. Get them used to the idea and even make it cool to be part of something which till now had a retirees only flavor to it.  There could be a similar path to getting young people looking for their first home incented to buy in senior living communities - it could be the logical next step to e mployee engagement efforts aimed at this demographic . It's not that far away from paying off student debt. The first time homebuyer is faced with tough odds in the market right now - it could be quite attractive if they could buy significantly cheaper as an employee benefit.  Attracting Gen Z to a product or service that is seen as old-school or dated is a problem for every marketer involved. Such organic solutions may be the best way to...

Read this story soon after the I wrote about bread-sharing. In this model both are bread-winners by their comportment. The make the system work for the family by hiring expensive but reliable help. Child rearing is a lot about mundane chores and driving kids to their activities. It is not the fun, glamorous and value-added stuff. Some like this family have the means (and desire) to outsource that part and focus on quality time.  As I write this, I recall a conversation I had with my mother as a child. She never worked and that was normal for me as it was for most kids of that time in India. Our mothers stayed home, took care of family while fathers went out to work. Yet there were a few exceptions - kids whose mothers were doctors, teachers or held some government job. They were a minority and stood out for that reason.  I asked my mother how those mothers were able to take care of the kids if they were gone most of the time. I remember her answer to this day and it may have ...

Interesting story about how men perceive the value of the work their wife does . I could map the definition of bread-winner and bread-sharer to most men I know professionally. M comes to mind immediately in the bread-sharer category. He is married to his college sweet-heart, she travels a lot for work and they have two kids. Two things stood out to me about M when we first met at work. He goes the extra distance to make sure women's voices are heard and acknowledged whenever he is present to make that happen. Given his tenure and seniority in the organization, his efforts produce tangible results.  The second thing I noticed was that M refused to take on people management responsibilities even though he is very well-liked and has no trouble leading and inspiring people. If anything, M would be the ideal people manager. He shared once that his wife always had the better job - both in terms of span of influence and money. In their marriage it was understood she would almost always be...

Fascinating read about the Lipstick King and the online influencers. This is the highest form of attention harvesting - the results speak for themselves. It made me think about emotional appeal at scale. There needs to a certain degree of homogeneity and conformity that matches what the influencer is promoting. While someone like Li plays the role of a taste-maker, they need to start from some lowest common denominator level to get that groundswell of support that jumpstarts their career. So maybe the genius is not so much in taste-making and influencing but knowing where to begin. There is no way to be successful in this business without getting off to a running start. If also takes one would assume a certain chameleon personality to pull this off - the influenced have to be able to see themselves wearing that lipstick and feeling like they had their first crush like Li is suggesting.  In the traditional world that would be what a successful motivational speaker could do - they t...

Sometimes LinkedIn updates and people's response to it can be prove quite illuminating. I used to work with H a long time ago. He was a good sales leader a terrible people manager. More often than not his team felt like he threw them under the bus - and they were right. B worked for him and suffered more than most because he needed a lot more nurture than H was able to provide. It came to the point where B had to quit because he could not take the joys of working for H anymore. Recently, H lost his father and wrote a long eulogy on LinkedIn. I have to say I did not expect to see something like that from him- never struck me as an expressive, emotive guy but he clearly loved and admired his father - there was no pretense there.  This is the most genuine version of H I had ever seen and wished there was more of this persona in the professional space instead of what he projected. For days people poured in their condolences but nothing was heard from B. Then a few days ago, B surfaced ...

I had not paid attention to this trend of not being able to walk-in to a restaurant for dinner but seem to have seen evidence of it. Recently we were turned away from a place that had plenty of available seating and it was well ahead of closing time. The owner told us quite rudely she had no staff to serve more than the people already in so we needed to leave. At first it felt offensive to be treated that way but I could see her becoming frayed from being short-staffed and over-worked for a long time.  There are a handful of reasons it’s more difficult to make restaurant reservations right now. Many spots still have limited hours and availability because of a lack of staff and ever-thinning margins. Some started leaning on reservations due to COVID-19 restrictions and to better predict earnings and staffing requirements—a practice some operators say continues to make business more predictable. And plenty of diners would still rather secure a spot outside, rather than wing it and h...

This story showed up on my LinkedIn feed recently and some folks who went to Stanford d.school (and I happen to have few in my network) were quite snide about the effort. If every 6th grader and above from India comes out into the world a design thinker then the space gets crowded and competitive very quickly. I thought the idea had merit but execution will make all the difference. The road to hell as we know is paved with good intentions.  “Through this programme, we will be able to train a large number of youngsters, which will eventually help them move forward towards innovation and entrepreneurship,” added Jere, who conceptualised the Smart India Hackathon initiative, claimed as the world’s biggest open innovation model, which teaches the culture of product innovation and problem-solving among students. There is a scenario where design thinking mills will pop up around the country where all of the benefits will be traded in favor of credentials - specially if they translate in...

This paper made for interesting reading on the uses and value of awe . Very young children are in awe of most things around them and by any measure they are happier than the average adult. A fortunate few are able to retain their sense of awe even into their older years. I can recall the last period of my life when driving through a tree lined road could fill me with a sense of peace and contentment - the fact that the trees existed filled me with awe.  And then just like that, I lost that ability and it left an emptiness in its wake. The ability to watch pouring rain through a window and be in awe of nature's splendor was lost on me even earlier. Fortunately, this may not be irreversible. I had this experience earlier in the year when I was down with covid and could no nothing but lay in bed and stare out of the window. This one happened to overlook a lovely garden with a variety of birds flying around. For several hours that day, I was able to regain some of that feeling of awe o...

Talking about things that the pandemic made possible, the Chief Remote Officer is one of them. .. more organisations are likely to appoint a chief remote officer over time: they’ll eventually see its success at other firms, or realise their distributed model creates problems that need solving. “Many employers are still  grappling with what the future of work looks like ,” she says. “Committing to the approach of hiring someone to lead your remote strategy means making certain decisions on where you want to be, so this is still something that's premature for many companies.”  There have been some percent of the workforce that worked remotely even before the pandemic. Others who worked hours that best suited their family situation. Folks who came in before 7 am and left before 3 pm working without any breaks. All of that produced lack of cohesion too but people developed adaptations to work around it. Maybe those skills that teams learned organically over the years is what need...

 We had a funny experience at the office of tourism in Romans-sur-Isere. Having wandered there to see a fountain someone had pinned to the location on Google, we walked around the village trying in vain to find the said fountain. So we walk into the office of tourism and ask the nice lady there where we might see it. She breaks into a big smile (clearly we were not the first people drawn by the fountain) and says "Try in Roma". The village ended up being a great place to stop by anyway with a lot of local detail to take it - large shoe sculptures scattered all over town, one of a woman showing her backside in the middle of a park, a bustling bazaar and the best éclair of the trip made with a strawberry and pistachio filling. Romans is the one of those perfect escapes that dot the countryside. You can dive into it like Alice in Wonderland - immerse in the magic, leave the real world behind for a bit. You come out and are back on the highway passing by mundane things like gas s...

Traveling around France for a couple of weeks proved to be an educational experience as all travel is. Seeing history preserved painstakingly always makes me sad for India - we had so much more that any European country and yet now much we have destroyed and allowed to fall into disregard and disrepair. History in India is like a thin skin and in Europe the fabric that is live is woven into. We too could have layered our thousands of years of history into our current way of life.  Watching Mont Blanc form afar in the conditions we did so, made me for instance remember my childhood visit to Darjeeling and living in Tiger Hill to catch a glimpse of the fabled sunrise over Kanchenjunga and Mt, Everest. It is an experience I remember vividly to this day and one of the most glorious sunrises of my life. This is not meant to be jingoistic but objectively Mt. Blanc does not hold a candle to to even minor mountains in the Himalayas. But we fail to fulfill our potential at every step of the...

I had a recent experience with an Airbnb host cancelling on me while we were on our way to her home. This left us stranded in the middle of a new city in a foreign country close to 11 pm. She insisted that I cancel even though she was the one who was no longer able to accommodate because the penalties for her to cancel were very punitive. The whole experience left a terrible taste in the mouth. This was an elderly woman who was still working every day -the income from being a host might not be discretionary for her. Yet the situation she put me in made me unwilling to work with her. She did get penalized, I was refunded in full and one way to see the event was that I as a guest came out ahead.  But when large numbers of actors are involved on both sides - guests and hosts, a sharp skew by the platform to favor one or the other category all the time will end up having bad consequences for everyone. This incident made me think about intention and outcome - the elimination of 3rd part...