There is something wrong here! These MBA’s seem to have forgotten the very basics  of their capitalistic existence:

“never do anything without a reason, or better still without an adjusted NPV.”

This is exactly the kind of probabilistic anomaly what might fuel the Infinite improbability drive. Kelley MBA’s in a dance flash-mob ! ~ to add to the improbability the cool dude who joins them at 1:09 is the MBA chair roped in a few minutes before the mob.

Btw this is one of the sample conversations from last week trying to convince some recruits:

“Hey, we are trying to do a dance flash-mob at the b-school. Would you be interested ?”
“Sounds Cool. So what are we doing it for?”
“nothing, just fun; its just a flashmob !”
“hmm- there must be a reason for the flashmob ?”
“none. ”
“But there must be a one ?”
“Sorry, none.”…………….
…………….. after about 5 minutes … OK. I am in.

Those last words made me believe that we humans would really not end up as the Vogons. (I cant say about the finance majors though ooops !)  The best part of the mob was that most dancers were self taught via video: http://vimeo.com/9096337

Hoping for some more randomness soon !

If everything goes as planned this is going to be my last semester as an MBA student. My friend Umair Qayyum and I were planning to cap it off with something interesting and representative of our passion for Social Media in Business. (Social Media = SoMe)

The plan is to propose a hypothesis connecting social media with business objectives. This process will involve documenting campaigns/initiatives by a wide variety of businesses.

This is the initial pictorial cause & effect diagram, which will serve as the basis for mapping the case studies:

For example: if a company is passively monitoring social chatter, it is able to react and minimize the negative impact of a conversation that might be harmful to the brand. This would be mapped as follows:

The current plan is to document these case studies in a blog format, keeping true to our SoMe theme. We have started work with an initial set of 5 companies, which range from a local non-profit media provider to a $25B B2B manufacturing conglomerate. You would hearing more about them soon!

If you or your company is open to participate in this project, please feel free to contact me at Gmail: UrbanTurbanGuy or Twitter: UrbanTurbanGuy. The burden-time would not be more than one hour.

- Gagan & Umair

Ok. I give in. I wanted to resist the temptation of writing something about the iPad. But hey, here goes nothing. I am not going to touch the design and naming issues here. I am accepting what most of the world has: it has a great UI, lovable form factor & fans ready to buy it. In other words:

ipad= the best media “consumption” experience

Many have observed that the iPad is much more like a big iPod Touch than a tablet computer per se.  The app-centricity, the OS, etc.  But the deeper, more fundamental distinction is that the iPad, like the iPod and the iPhone before it, is geared primarily toward the consumption, not the creation, of content.  The iPad will force consumers to continue to pull high-margin apps through Apple’s system.  A tablet version of the MacBook would do no such thing.

After watching the apple presentation , a few thing are glaringly apparent :

1) A big move towards the app based system rather than a file based system
You don’t browse files as you do on your MAC but rather work through apps like you did on the iphone. There seems to be no way to access the file system anywhere. All this is geared to promote consumption through apps rather than content creation that we traditionally associate computers with.

2) Missing flash support, once again
One who owns the doors to the best “media consumption” tool, makes the most dough. Flash has 70% of the worlds games & 75% of video, but apple has controversially not being supporting it, because it will open he flod gates of free content that people could access through safari.  Just for the record, there is no access to any of the flash content on Disney, Hulu, Miniclip, Farmville, ESPN, Kongregate, etc. Apple would rather prefer that they create an app., go through the app. store and give them a cut on any sale. Which might be good for a struggling media industry, but I am not here to take sides.

3) Most of the presentation time was spent promoting games, news apps,  ibook, video & audio playback . ( yes iworks was presented  & brushes was talked about. But lets try to follow my story here. )
Some numbers make this observation even more clear (quoting from Apple’s 10K)  :

Net sales of other music related products and services increased $844 million or 34% during 2008 compared to 2007, due primarily to significantly increased net sales from the iTunes Store in each of the Company’s geographic segments.

Again from their 10K – notice the Jump in Return on Sales :

Well,  that is because apple is moving from a hardware business model which traditionally has lower gross margin ( apples 33% numbers were way above normal to begin with )  to a software business model where  gross margins of 70-80% are not unheard of. This 5% jump in Gross margin can in a large part attributed to a 21% increase in the sales made through itunes, when compared to a 14% increase in overall net sales. The sales through itunes are now roughly 10% Apple’s total sales.

So the restrictions Apple has on iPad make much more business sense than usability sense.  They have created a device which promotes media consumption on their terms. Will it get sales figures comparable to the ipods & iphone’s , only time will tell.
As far as the name goes “No Comments !”.

Update: - Apple’s initial iPad demos showed flash component on websites now they demo videos have been modified to show placeholder lego blocks. more at venturbeat.com

If I can take the liberty of assuming that both design and business consulting are “problem solving” approaches. I have a case to plead for the design approach to problem solving:
• It recognizes ambiguity and explores multiple incomplete solutions
• Proposed solutions change with the process, as exploring them uncovers relevant issues and reduces ambiguity
• It is a forward looking qualitative approach as against a quantitative data driven approach to problem solving (Quantitative data may be used to come up with proposed solutions, but not for critical decision making).

This is an attempt map the creative process to the business process of problem solving:

( This post was buried in my other website; since I merged both of them, it seemed a good idea to post it here.)

I came across a few rants about “Clay Shirky’s rant about women” . He needs more women to say “I can do that. Sign me up. My work is awesome,” even if they have no experience in that work.
I will not go into the correctness or morality of that assertion, a lot of discussion has already taken place on that.

I want to touch upon a different slant of the same paradigm. When I came to study in the US, the first thing I realized was that we South Asians lack the skill of self-assertion. I used to joke with my American friends that once you touch an airplane, you can claim to be from the aerospace industry ! While us South Asians would even cast doubts on our hard skills, even if we had had them for years.

Looking at it from a recruiter’s perspective: they are faced by an information asymmetry of the bad lemon form. A typical resume/interviewee is expected to amp-up his/her achievements. So most of the stuff an interviewee puts out there would be given a hair-cut, by a certain BS factor, which might vary by interviewer. This puts someone who is shy by nature in a bad spot. This is one of the reasons, I believe, that you find a lot of South Asians in finance & operations careers after their MBA. Its easier to showcase quantifiable skills. We feel more secure in tangible territory.

My solution to this problem. Truth be told-
- lets get out of our comfort zone: Even if it is culturally unacceptable to go out there and sell ourselves, we have to find our own ways of doing it. If “I” have taken the decision to move to the US , I have to get used to use the word “I” more in a week than I would use it in a year back home.
- Be Findable : Its inevitable that people who are more google search friendly have a better chance of getting the phone call from Steve Jobs . But that does not mean we put out laundry lists of our work history everywhere. Tell a story that people want to hear. Dont spin , but know the right side of the coin to present .

Last week, IU’s New-Media expert Christian Briggs tried to enlighten me on the ontological and psychological aspects of “immediacy” & “Hyper- immediacy” but as you can make out from the big words it took me some time to come up to speed. The points he made were still confusingly fresh when I saw:

The video just hit he nail on the head. So I deduced my own layman definition of Immediacy & hyper-immediacy, for designers:

All interaction is though a medium. We seek the interactions to be immediate, for achieving this we try to reduce the need for a medium. The lesser the dependence on a medium – the more “immediate” is the interaction . Eventually the goal is to achieve hyper-immediate (no medium required) interaction.
What Zong is trying to do here is two fold:

• Reduce the number of steps involved ( one always remembers the phone number; a credit-card has to be found in the wallet at the other end of the room.)
• You no longer have to travel the psychological distance of giving out the credit card to the infinite web. ( I know, I know. There are issues with giving out the phone number too – but I hope you get the point of : medium, distance & immediacy.)

If you want an even simpler definition – My designer friend in Dubai always said “I design for my lazy self.”

Daily Need to prove my Sanity : I have unexpectedly become a social media misfit at a  traditional consumer marketing & life sciences powerhouse. As people say “destiny/god works in mysterious ways” I wouldn’t be where I am had it not been for the innocent concern of my Kelley classmates . Everyday I have to prove to them that my love for social media is not me falling for a fad. Had I been surrounded by believers somewhere in California I wouldn’t be as well versed in my field of choice.

Mid-western flexibility:  If you are passionate about something, Kelley will figure out a way to help you accomplish it. The  MBA program chair Prof. Phill Powell truly represents the flexible and down to earth nature of the faculty and staff at Kelley (Although he is a southerner, lets don’t go into the details here). His emotionally charged leadership style has been a steady source of inspiration for students in this tough job market.

Bloomington : Any one talking about Kelley cant leave Bloomington out; its a town which at first glance feels too small to fall in love with . But it turns out to be a city as liberal and diverse as San Fransisco, at Midwestern prices ( $$$) what more can a turban sporting impoverished MBA student ask for !

Team spirit – a cure for my bipolar disorder : If there is one thing that stands out for Kelley, its “Teamwork” which is an integral part of all activities here. When one is down and out the team doesn’t let it be so . In the same vein one is entrusted with responsibility towards the team. These are valuable relationship lessons that I don’t think I could get any place else.

Lastly the phenomenon called Prof. Wayne Winston : I am am a designer, with a serious aversion for Microsoft Excel . But the spreadsheet wizardry that he imparts, lets me boast my analytic skills without shame.

Go Hoosiers !

As usual, I was bragging about the power of online networks and recent emergence of “social answer engines” like Aardvark to one of my finance MBA friends ( u know, the ones who love Microsoft products,  have a faith in efficient markets but feel social media stinks as it doesn’t smell of future cash flows ). I will call her FinMBA from hereon.

FinMBA said, lets give it a try – being from Croatia, she wanted to figure out the best way send a ton of books she had bought here back home,in the cheapest way possible. Now, being a self proclaimed Aarvocate , I rushed to vark.com typed in the question & prayed to the network gods. This is what happened. ( p.s. the emails are in Croatian.)

So , what happened is:

1) Aardvark sent it to the person when seemed to answer the most questions about Croatia
2) it turns out that he is a family friend of my classmates, so he fwds the email to FinMBA’s husband
3) he Fwds it to FinMBA, along with a few laughs
( here is the text of the email translated in English
Croatian guy’s message to FinMBA’s husband: Hahahaha… look where this guy is asking this from…
FinMBA’s husband to FinMBA: ” Hehehe… I told Cacan (Croatian guy’s nickname) that this is our friend who is probably trying to do us a favour…   )

Frankly speaking she is the best person to answer this question – I mean only a Croatian living in america with a ton of books would know the cheapest way to send it accross !

(btw. i love aardvark , and I have a aardvark t-shirt to prove my love – will upload a pic )

Recently I sent out a single question survey to graduate students. The question was:

How would you like Recruiters to connect with you ?
1) LinkedIn
2) Facebook
3) Both
4) Others ( suggest)

Here are some simply obvious results from the survey.

70% of the students wanted recruiters to connect with them only on LinkedIn

btw. the most suggestions for other networks were for Twitter. I guess I should have included it as an option in the survey. One creative student suggested Carrier pigeons as another option, unfortunately I had to take him out of the data-set.

I still need to send this out to undergraduate students . Would the results be different for them ? Not very much, I assume.

Outlined below is a 5 step process to evaluate the communication needs of the company and how social media could change or improve the current paradigms. This process is from the perspective of an internal consultant, who has a sound understanding of the companies vision and strategy. (This is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome.)

1. Based on the vision and strategy, Identify key entities/groups that interact/or should interact with each other ( e.g. prospects, consumers, Sales force, Mkt , Competion, Regulators, Govt.)
2. Define the optimal mode of interaction between those entities (e.g. listening, responding, interaction, broadcast)
3. Identify a communication paradigm that best facilitates the interaction
   

   matching social tools to communication needs

4. Evaluate existing tools on the basis on these paradigms. ( the example below is an evaluation exercise for the career services department at a business school)
   

   Identifying communication needs and areas for improvement

5. Propose changes and new solutions or else congratulate the company on a comprehensive communication strategy!

Once again, this is a work-in-progress model, so all comments and criticism are welcome!