Transition to a Work From Anywhere (WFA) culture ..

Happened to listen to a podcast from a HBS Associate Prof. Raj Chaudhury as part of my lectures to students on the Work From Home (WFH) culture.  My interest was particularly high after reading reports from the press that Tata Consultancy Services, the IT giant from India employing almost 4.5 lakh employees and headquartered in Mumbai was seriously thinking of shifting most of its employees to work from home option. TCS is a top employer globally, and has 453,540 employees representing 147 nationalities across 46 countries. 

 
TCS was honored as one of the Fortune Best Big Companies to Work For in 2020. TCS 25x25 policy speaks of less than 25 percent of employees coming to office at any point of time and employees spending less than 25% of their time in the office. Secure Borderless Workspace of TCS is thus a great way to work post-Covid. Many organisations around the world are observing how TCS is able to perform and if the experiment turns successful, may turn to the WFA option.

Work from Home is what TCS is trying to propagate. But Prof. Raj Chaudhary is trying to speak of a still advanced concept Work From Anywhere (WFA). (click here..) Prof. Raj Chaudhary quotes of the US Patent Office deploying this policy from early 2015 and reported a 4.4 % increase in productivity. 

Knowledge workers are specially benefitting from this arrangement as they have the flexibility t work independently from either home or anywhere within the country or outside.

The five Organisational processes that get affedted by this WFA policy are given below -

1. communication 
2. sharing knowledge 
3. socialising 
4. measuring productivity 
5. data privacy and regulation

The benefits to the organisation and employees are manifold as given below

• Freedom to live and work from anywhere in the world
• Better quality of life
• Closer to family
• Greater recreational opportunities
• Move to healthy suburbs instead of living in crowded urban  spaces
• Lower rentals for the organisation and as well as employees,

Liiving in top end spots like Koramangala, JP Nagar etc in bangalore can pull any person behind by as much as INR 30 - 40K every month as rent, while in Bangalore suburbs rents are as low as INR 6000 and even lower in the villages. 

Working on the cloud server and secure communication channels help ease the communication problem. Organising weekly get to-gethers where attendees are selected randomly across hierarchy in circulation, with top management in attendance is a great way to socialise. Since there are no fixed hours of working, employees can work across geographies and time zones without much of adjustment from home. 

Weekends with family and away from work gives relaxation to employees.

Gitlab after implementing WFA policy was able to report $18,000 benefits for each employee.

 The main benefit of this policy in countries like India is going to be reduction in traffic on roads, less pressure on urbanisation and pollution.

Is Covid the right time for Open Innovation ?

Prof. Henry Chesbrough of the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkely, coined the term Open Innovation over a decade ago, or specifically seventeen years back in 2003.  (click for his HBR podcast here.) According to Prof. Henry Chesbrough  

Open Innovation is the distributed innovation process involving flows of knowledge across organisational boundaries for both monetary and non-monetary reasons in line with the organisation business model. 

An organisation has knowledge within it's boundaries as also outside it. Organisations are ready and willing to take knowledge from outside but are they ready tio share their knowledge with the outside world ?

In open innovation when an organisation shares its ideas with ideas, there is a possibility the external organisation looks at the idea from a different perspective and can come up with a use or application never thought before. The potential of ideas and sharing thoughts is so powerful.   

When one does Open Innovation 

• one need not always start from scratch, it may be from the middle
• one can get to market faster with the new product or application and
• share the risks and losses with the other players

Times of crisis have been great opportunities for organisations to try out different ideas. Similarly they have done during the Covid time. 

The Covid crisis has got the world to understand one major lesson, we are all in it together. There is no escape for any one person or community from the effects of the crisis. All major crisis going to befall humanity are indeed ones that have global impact, like for instance, global climate change. The experiences we get from this crisis should form our learning to tackle the next global crisis. 

Open Innovation or Crowd Sourcing is one of the best  ways to solicit workable, plain practical ideas from the teams and affected individuals.

During crisis times,. how can we make open innovation work ?

1. Don't ask for or insist on IP rights - concentrate more on sharing your advantageous position with others to produce products that can benefit humanity during this tough time

2. Leverage two sided innovation -  companies have come to realise that they need participation from the employees and managerial staff or partners together to succeed.

3. Embrace new partners - earl;ier we were working with limited partners. Now with the global crisis , suddenly companies are xposed to international  willing partners and collaborators

4. Urgency leads to transformation - it is a crisis like situation that brings the best in any person or organisation. Similarly a Covid crisis like situation has brought the bright companies and their people to work together for brilliant solutions to tackle this global crisis.

We can unitedly and through open innovation initiatives tackle major crisis likely to befall humanity in the future.

George..

Ref: 1. Linus Dahlander and Martin Wallin, Why now is the time for Open Innovation, HBR, June 2020.

Sustainability - 2 major strategies ..

When we look at development economics that has evolved over the years since the time of Thomas Malthus, we find two of them having really diverse and often opposing viewpoints.

“Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.” —Thomas Malthus 

Robert Solow, the 96 year old MIT Emeritus Professor in Economics, '87 Nobel laureate, has this to say about how development happens in the world. 

“If it is easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then there is in principle no ‘problem.’ The world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe.” —Robert Solow

Robert Solow unlike his predecessor, Thomas Malthus believes in the power of technology and Innovation.

These are 2 most influential development economists of the world putting out their  strategies or streams of thought on how the modern world views the environmental sustainability challenge we face today.  

The Malthusian statement says that if the population of the earth, growing at a geometrical ratio, starts utilising the limited resources of planet earth which is improving only in a linear ratio, ie. incremental improvements, by way of improvements in efficiency, utilisation ratios etc., then we are in for major catastrophe. In other words, Malthusian theory believes that limits to growth are imposed by nature and cannot be overcome by man. Malthusians are looking at the development phase of humanity from a reactive position, trying to minimise usage of resources.

 

Solowians, people following Robert Solow's principles, believe that technology and innovation can stretch scarce resources further or help us to get more output from it. Technology and innovation can help us use less of natural resources or get more output from scarce resources. Exercise of human ingenuity appeals to natural optimism and is a great proponent for deregulation and promotion of growth.

For example, improving fuel efficiency in an engine is a Malthusian approach to improving the ride, while developing and building breakthrough innovation product like a solar powered car is a Solowian approach. 

The Kyoto Protocol which insisted on forceful imposition of emission cuts and Carbon credits was a product of the Malthusian approach while the 2015 Paris treaty which insisted on voluntary actions from countries to limit CO2 emission by way of developing and using new renewable less polluting technologies like solar energy is a Solowian approach.  

The interesting supporting work for the Solowian approach by 2018 Economics Nobel laureate Paul Romer on integrating climate change and technological innovation into economic analysis who argues that growth has got no natural limits and the capacity for technological innovation  is unlimited. The value of spillover as propounded by Romer, mentions about the benefits in other fields due to developments in a particular field. For example, developments in space technology and exploration has helped us improve in the area of geographical locationing and mapping, search for minerals etc on earth. Similarly developments in the Internet has spawned lot of improvement in the area of electronic retailing, growth of web based commerce across the world. 

The invention of the transistor led to the development of the Integrated circuit chip that paved the way for the growth of the digital world and more specifically, the mobile phone revolution. The green revolution in the late sixties paved the way for improved agricultural productivity and output that helped save many a human life and improved our general health and standard of living. 

With great innovations entering the world, be it the electric car or driver less car, the potential for innovations to to serve human needs is limitless. Prof. Robert Solow still believes that human ingenuity and innovative mindset will find a solution to the environmental sustainability crisis that is gripping mankind now.

 

The author wishes to thank Roger Martin and Alison Kemper for their HBR article of April '12, Saving the Planet, the tale of two strategies. 

George..

Learning from Failure ..

Recently I asked some of my old colleagues who are in the pink of their career, and from great institutions, whether they had any failure in their lives. Most of them have moved from failure to failure, to rise up in their career but some of them have not had any failure and they are still holding on to their first job. I started the discussion by saying that I am now in the eighth job, enjoying all the while and have spent eight years on this eighth job. 

In my career so far of 34 years, I have changed jobs eight times  spent two years for my PG and five years at IIT Bombay pursuing a PhD. If I had stuck to my original job and had not moved out, I would not have met so many great Professors and learned people, great colleagues, would not have had so many great experiences, would not have learnt from it, would not have read and learnt new concepts, thought processes and would never have gone through so many enriching life experiences. 

The quote by Henry Ford , (at the right) one of modern industry's greatest doyens of the twentieth century, has a very level headed quote about failure. He says, Failure is nothing but a chance to begin afresh more intelligently.

I have had my share of failures in all these 34 years, and there has been a fair share of learning too. What has failures taught me ? To stay calm and cool, analyse the failures, learn from it and take the next step carefully trying to conquer still greater goals.

Bill Taylor in his article in HBR November 2017 (click here for the article, How Coca-cola, Netflix and Amazon learn from failures) speaks of how great companies view failures as stepping stones to success, why great companies need to make more mistakes and embrace more failures. 

Learning from failure involves two aspects - omission bias and loss aversion.

Omission bias - most of the employees feel that if they start something new and if it fails, the setback might damage thjeir career. So they tend to take it lying low, not willing to take chances.

Loss Aversion - always play to win, not to lose. These people feel, the pain of loss, is double the pleasure of winning and hence would never accept failure and do anything that might result in failure.

The casualty from both the above thought process is, unwillingness to try something new, experiment or innovate. These people are satisfied and happy to continue with their present lives and would not desire to ever topple it .

Quoting from the HBR paper, a couple of important points are listed here. 

• There is no learning without failures and no success without setbacks
• People who have failed and learnt from it are LESS FRAGILE, and more daring than those who expect perfection and flawless performance.
• If one is not prepared to fail, one is not prepared to learn. Unless people and organisations are prepared to fail and learn as fast as the world is changing, they will never keep growing and evolving. 

The most important point to stress here as is being done by Coca-cola, Netflix and Amazon, motivating their employees to come up with daring ideas. Experiment with them, put them into action, if it fails, learn from it, move forward and grow.

 If employees do not have to worry of failure and is able to learn from it, the organisation is nurturing a learning organisation, one that can survive the shocks of everyday life, innovate, grow and shine into the future for many decades.

George.

Amazon Alexa or Google Home, who is leading .. ?

 Tracking the impact AI pods like Alexa and Google home make in our lives, I have been using Alexa and Google Personal Assistant since 2017.

Click here for a controlled experiment I did on both to find out who is smart .. Alexa and Google were moving together at that time.. 

Click here for a Forbes link on who is better ..

• 
  Networking capabilities : Regarding information search and retrieval, Google Home / Personal Assistant is very forward, but for networking with other hardware, Alexa is far ahead of Google. With Alexa you can network with multiple hardware and issue almost 100,000 +  recognisable commands, Google is no where near. Networking with Syska smart bulb was cool for Alexa.
  
• Understanding Indian English dialects : Alexa still finds it difficult to understand Indian English dialects but Google Home has no problem at all. I tried with different Indian english dialects and found Google Home response was fast and accurate. Alexa failed in this regard.
• Making calls : While asking Alexa to make calls, it replied it could make calls only within US, while Google Home did it easily for me from my mobile.
• Speed of responses : Google Home was very fast in getting responses because of its vast information repository, while Amazon had to rely on Wikipedia to come out with responses and hence was a bit slow. 
• Music search : Google depended on it's Youtube for searching music which was a bit faster than Amazon Alexa, though both had a great variety of music. Alexa depends on Amazon Music.

Click here for my earlier 2017 writeup on Alexa and Google Home .. 

I am very much in favour of Amazon Alexa, though I am sure in the long run, Google Home will catch up with Alexa in its AI capabilities ...

 George ..

 

Amazon - going skyward ..

As per data from fortune.com, as of Oct '20, Amazon has climbed to be the second largest American (ninth largest global) business entity (click here for American list) in terms of revenue at $282 billion, profits of $12 billion, behind Walmart at #1 (revenues $524 billion, profits $15 billion) and ahead of Exxon Mobil at #3, (revenues $265 billion, profits $14 billion) ..

With an employee base of 0.8 million compared to Walmart's 2.2 million, it's profit to revenue is 4.1%.

Amazon additionally has a market capitalization of $1.58 trillion which is 4x that of Walmart at $0.39 trillion..

Clear pointers to where the future is, ie. e-retailing ..

Amazon alone sold about 12 million products (excluding books, media, wine and services) and 353 million products at the Amazon marketplace ..

With 150 million customers for it's Prime delivery and entertainment subscription, Amazon is destined for great growth in the coming years. 🙏👍

 

This morning when I logged in to Amazon, it announced that 0.5% of the value of my purchase from now onwards will go for charity.  Accordingly I have chosen an India Education fund at Amazon to give all my donations.

 

I find that Amazon globally has had a great third quarter last year with global sales touching $96 billion. It is expected that the fourth quarter of 2020 will bring in more revenues for Amazon, something to the tune of $112 billion. The total revenues for Amazon for 2020 will mostly cross $350 billion.

This will give you an idea of the top global 10 .. (all sales in $ millions) (Oct 2020 data .. www.fortune.com)

1. Walmart $523,964 (retail - physical and online)

2. Sinopec Group $407,009 (energy - oil and gas)

3. State Grid Corp of China $383,906 (energy - electrical)

4. China National Petroleum $379,130 (energy - oil and gas)

5. Royal Dutch Shell $352,106 (energy - oil and gas)

6. Saudi Aramco $329,784 (energy - oil and gas)

7. Volkswagen $282,760 (transportation - terrestrial)

8. BP $282,616 (energy - oil and gas)

9. Amazon.com $280,522 (retail - online)

10. Toyota Motor $275,288 (transportation - terrestrial)

Of the top 10 global corporations (click here, given above), we find

• 6 are from the energy sector
• 2 are from the retailing world, one physiocal and the other online and
• 2 are from terrestrial transportation area, automobile giants

Of the top 10 Fortune companies (US listing, click here) we find 

• 4 are healthcare companies
• 2 are retailing cos.
• 2 are technology companies
• 1 energy and 
• 1 conglomerate into insurance, tech, healthcare, clothing etc.
  

while in the top 10 Fortune companies global listing, there are no healthcare companies.  Another significant company that is missing is one of the promiosing AI companies, Alphabet (parent company of Google) which is at #29 global rankings and #11 in US rankings.

George..

Narayana Hrudayalaya ..

Narayana Hrudayalaya continues its forward march unhindered ..   

I had the class case discussion this morning (28 Oct '20) with MBA sem 3 students. 

NH has satellite centres across the state of Karnataka where patients at remote places are connected to specialist doctors in NH over satellite links for the first examination to decide whether the patient needs immediate attention at Bangalore or can take treatment at the remote locations. NH has expertly aligned high technology to help in offering high quality medical care to the patients.  Unlike in a mall where depending on the customers, new counters can be opened to handle customer traffic, in hospitals, due to the nature of specialisations, often it becomes difficult to identify and employ medical area experts as fast as in malls or stores. Queues therefore become inevitable.

Click here for a case study ..

The students had two issues to raise reg the NH care.

1. A recent case of a patient not getting immediate care citing following  Covid protocol for treatment because of which the patient died. NH would have been unaware whether the patient was suffering from Covid due to comorbidity and hence considering the safety of the healthcare professionals and other patients in the hospital, doctors would have insisted on Covid test certificate of the patient. It is sad that an unfortunate incident had to happen.

2. No proper planning as demand often outstrips the capacity, particularly at the dental dept and patients have to wait for hours on end.

In general, the healthcare system in the country has to develop a lot to match with those in developed nations. Some of the issues are highlighted here, for followup by the authorities.

1. While Corporate hospitals are after money, the govt hospitals in most cases are in a a very despicable case, either poorly funded or badly mismanaged. . 

2. Most of the time hospitals hear that a patient is covered by insurance, the hospital asks the patient to take necessary and unnecessary tests to help identify the issue - an ethical issue. Are the tests really needed or not ?

3. While in the west healthcare has been given preference, upto about 14-15 % of budget outlay, in India it has been woefully low over the years and is slowly beginning to pick up. We have less capacity in comparison to the demand.

4. The VVIP culture which is widely prevalent across the country, more often than not, disturbs the needed patients at the hospital waiting for care. The VVIP culture has to be stopped across the country.