Published May 14-18, 2023
61
Mumbai
Except for the few years that I spent in the US, Mumbai has been home. From education (school, college and undergrad) to 30+ years of entrepreneurship (and building two proficorns) – Mumbai has been with me through all my ups and downs. I have lived in the same neighbourhood in South Mumbai for the past 50 years – with one change of apartment. The name changed along the way from Bombay, but the city did not (in a positive way). It is what has given me my happiest moments and best memories. It is, as has been variously said, the city of dreams, the city that never sleeps. Much like the only other city where I have spent maximum time – New York. Yes, the traffic moves slowly, the trains are always crowded, the construction all around seems to have shrunk the roads – all gets taken in one’s stride as this is a city of motion, constant movement, and a propelling energy. Mumbai has imparted its own character to me – like it does to most others who make it their home.
I grew up with the centrality of the BEST bus in my life. Every commute was by bus. The train became a part of life when I went for my IIT Agrawal classes to Dadar, and then during IIT days where I had a decision to make each time – Western (via Andheri) or Central (via Kanjur Marg or Vikhroli). When I started working, it was the roads and the car. The bus and train became joyrides after Abhishek was born; they were the ‘best’ way for him to show the city I loved and which was now his.
The theatres and now the multiplexes swept me away into different worlds. The restaurants whose menus I have memorised are the much-needed weekly diversions – Swati to Status, New Yorker to Cream Centre, Quattro to Spice Klub, Soam to Govinda. The 5-stars of Taj, Trident and Oberoi are where I have done innumerable meetings. The malls enchant – Atria for a short time with their food court, and then Phoenix. The never-far-away sea adds to the beauty. The airports and their various avatars through the years were the start and end points of journeys, each with a mission filled with hope and optimism. And of course, the bookstores – Strand and then Kitab Khana. On the occasional afternoon when Abhishek and I walk around the Fountain area, I am transported back to my IndiaWorld days – every street brings up a past of meetings and customers. Those were the days before Zoom and mass mobiles and inboxes; appointments had to be taken on phone and deals had to be struck in person. Mumbai gave me my first breaks.
For the past two decades, work has been at Lower Parel – what used to be the mills area of Mumbai, ripped apart by strikes. Today, it is a crowded, happening place – yet another testimony at the constant reinvention that the city undergoes. The various infra projects now will once again transform, connecting points which earlier seemed distant – just like the flyovers and the Sea Link did. It is a city of change – and even as it changes, it also changes each one of us who cannot imagine life anywhere else. Mumbai was, is, and will be part of my ‘life system’.
62
Numbers
Nothing irritates me more than seeing a slide filled with decimals. How does it matter whether an open rate of emails was 11.43% — instead of just 11? Does it really make a difference if growth is 23.71% — why not just say 24%? And yet, the world seems to have decided that every unit – before or after a decimal point is equally important and must be shown. Watch a slide with 50 digits and not a single one of them becomes memorable. The mental effort to read 76.53 is so much more than just 76, and yet few get it – because Excel or a calculator can provide an endless flow of decimals, the belief is that every fractional unit matters.
While the decimals don’t matter, the commas do! So many times I see a string like 3456321 and I have to then look closely and mentally insert the commas to get a sense of the largeness. And in India, where to put the comma is also a lingering question – lakhs and crores or millions and billions. I keep telling my colleagues to show the most significant digits and then round off. Does it matter if we sent 19,761,891,123 emails – when there is the simpler alternative of 20 billion (and not even 19.7)?
We have too many numbers all around us – punctuated by decimals and commas, numbers which we glaze over, which we see for a fleeting moment because there is another string next to it competing for our attention! It is time for “Making Numbers Count”, as a recent book by Chip Heath and Karla Starr suggests. Each of us needs a lesson in numeracy, As the authors write: “we lose information when we don’t translate numbers into instinctive human experience. We do hard, often painstaking work to generate the right numbers to help make a good decision—but all that work is wasted if those numbers never take root in the minds of the decision makers. As lovers of numbers, we find this tragic. The work that is being done to understand the most meaningful things in the world—ending poverty, fighting disease, conveying the scale of the universe, telling a heartbroken teen how many other times they will fall in love—is being lost because of the lack of translation.”
Some of the book’s recommendations are a good place to begin:
- Simpler Is Better: Round with Enthusiasm.
- Concrete Is Better: Use Whole Numbers to Describe Whole Objects, Not Decimals, Fractions, or Percentages.
- Follow the Rules But Defer to Expertise. Rules 1 and 2 May be Trumped by Expert Knowledge.
- Recast Your Number in Different Dimensions: Try Time, Space, Distance, Money, and Pringles.
In life and in business, understanding the importance of numbers and communicating them in a way which makes it easier for others to remember matters. In Netcore, with our multiple business lines, there are plenty of numbers in our periodic reviews. What we have done is aligned everyone around a single number, the North Star Metric. For us, that is the exit MRR (monthly recurring revenue) of our Platform business.
I am reminded of a headline in a business paper which said, “XXX profit up 300%.” Read the fine print, and what the company had done was grow its profit from 1 crore to 4 crore, an almost insignificant and irrelevant increase given the revenue base of a few thousand crores!
Make it a mission to simplify the numbers around us – and communicate what matters.
63
Vacations
For the past many years, I have looked forward to June – because that is when Bhavana, Abhishek and I go on our vacations. Before Abhishek was born, our vacations were whenever we wanted. But once he started school, we had to adhere to his calendar. For me, vacations were the time I got to spend much more time with Abhishek – without the overhang of work.
Our favourite vacation destination is New York. Every third year or so, it has been the place where we will spend 10-12 days. We don’t go around much – at best, day trips to places like Boston, Washington or Philadelphia. NY is a city I know well from my days at Columbia. I don’t drive; so that’s a constraint on where we can go. Jain food is not a problem in New York. And all three of us have something to do. For me, it’s just the joy of walking around the avenues and taking in the sights of the city. In the past few vacations, Abhishek and I took the subway to faraway destinations – especially those lines which travel overground.
Among other cities, Singapore is another favourite and repeat destination. We always stay at the Shangri-La Apartments – they have a nice kitchenette, another requirement given our food constraints. Its proximity to Orchard Road is also good; Kinokuniya, one of the largest bookstores I have seen, is just a few minutes walk. Among other vacation spots: Hong Kong, Bangkok, London, Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai, Sydney. Common to all of them: they are all big cities! We are not much for the rural, countryside feel. A vacation we did a few years was Tokyo. While I had been to Tokyo a couple times on work before, this time around we spent time seeing the city. We also took the bullet train on a day trip to the other end of Japan to Kanazawa, a beautiful ride from the east to the west (and back).
Many of our India vacations tend to be around religious spots with the extended family. Jain temples abound, and are architectural marvels also. These tend to be shorter trips. When Abhishek was younger, we had also done a few Club Mahindra vacations – while the properties were great, the access roads from the nearest airport was always a challenge. I think this situation has probably improved a lot in the past decade.
Before Abhishek was born, Bhavana and I vacationed a lot in Bangkok. A few hours by flight, and we were in a city like Mumbai but with a lot more shopping options! It wasn’t expensive to travel, stay or shop. We liked visiting the various markets and huge malls. This was in the late 1990s and early 2000s – when the shopping options in Mumbai or even India were quite limited.
For me, vacations with family are all about ensuring that they have a good time; it is about planning and anticipating. (My ‘vacations’ are when I travel on work!) From the choice of hotel to the itinerary, my focus is to ensure happy memories with the adequate surprises. Some of my best moments have been with Abhishek, answering his never-ending stream of questions.
With Abhishek grown-up and off to university in the US soon, maybe the next vacations will be more diverse for Bhavana and me – so much of the world yet to see, absorb and learn from.
64
Connections – 1
Many years ago, my friend Atanu discussed the book “Connections” by James Burke. It is about the flow of history and events – how seemingly small developments had a big impact, how one thing led to another in ways completely unexpected. As Burke writes:
In some way or other, each one of us affects the course of history. Because of the extraordinarily serendipitous way change happens, something you do during the course of today may eventually change the world.
As you will see in this book, ordinary people have often made the difference. A self-educated Scottish mechanic once made a minor adjustment to a steam pump and triggered the whole Industrial Revolution. A nineteenth-century weatherman developed a cloud-making device that just happened to reveal to Ernest Rutherford, a physicist he knew, that the atom could be split. Thanks to a guy working on hydraulic pressure in Italian Renaissance water gardens we have the combustion engine. So you don’t have to be Einstein to make your mark on events. We all contribute.
This is because there’s no grand design to the way history goes. The process does not fall neatly into categories such as those we are taught in school. For example, most of the elements contributing to the historical development of transportation had nothing to do with vehicles. So there are no rules for how to become an influential participant on the web of change. There is no right way. Equally, there is no way to guarantee that your great project meant to alter the course of history will ever succeed.
… This book looks at the forces at work in making the connections that brought into existence some of the most powerful tools and systems that drive the world today: the computer, spacecraft, the production line, television, atomic weapons, plastics, telecommunications, and aircraft. Each of these innovations emerged as the result of a closely linked sequence of events taking place on the great web of history that links us all to each other, to the past, and (in the way that each of us triggers change) to the future.
While Burke writes about the connections that lead technological innovations, the same principle also applies in our life. A chance meeting, a passage in a book, a presentation at a conference – anything can have an impact on the course of our lives. There is a connectedness that at times we don’t see or recognise, but when we look back, we can trace the origins of our ideas and therefore our actions. This is much more than luck – it’s the sequence of events that take place and guide us along; we remember the last one or two, but rarely do we trace the chain back to the origin.
When I was at a low point in life after multiple business failures, I picked up a book, “Competing for the Future” by CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel. As I read it, the business plan for what became IndiaWorld fell in place – leading to a monumental transformation of my future. A few years later, a random conversation with Bhavana in a car journey from Nakoda ji to Jodhpur led to the creation of multiple Indian-named websites. A blog post read by a person I did not know connected me to Atanu who mentioned the Burke book which made me think about the connections in our lives and which is the subject of this post!
65
Connections – 2
For the past few years, I have started to think about the origins of some of my ideas. There is never a single ‘Eureka’ moment – in most cases there is a chain of connected conversations or events. The Velvet Rope Marketing came about when I picked up a book by Peter Fader form my bookshelf; the book itself had been bought because I chose to spend a few extra hours in New York’s Strand Book Store because my Air India flight to Mumbai had been delayed a few hours and I had to checkout from the hotel. I wrote about this in “Life’s Daily Clue” (as part of my Proficorn series), and concluded: “It is therefore important for the entrepreneur to go through many different experiences – talking to different people, reading widely, taking time off to be alone, traveling to new places. Each creates a new clue – if one knows where to look. Each prints a new dot – to be joined with others. It is from these clues that new patterns start forming.” As I think about it now, it is much more than a clue – any event can be the start of a connecting thread, which leads us to a new portal of ideas and experiences.
When we are unable to explain or connect the dots, we see it as luck. As I wrote, “At some level, decisions we make cause us to be in situations where we can get lucky. Had my initial efforts at creating a successful business not failed, I would not have started IndiaWorld. When I got an offer to sell Netcore in 2011, was it luck? And when I look back, was it good luck that the buyer backed out at the last minute? What would my life have been had I sold Netcore a decade ago? Life is all about a stream of events and decisions. What we think of luck are just decisions either we made or someone else did. At times, it is better to ascribe it to an unseen force than take up ownership especially when things are not going right!”
My broader point is that we should pay a little more attention to the connections in our lives. One event leads to another, which in turn opens another door. We have to put ourselves in places where these connections can happen. The equivalent in relationships is the idea of “weak ties”: “In social networks, you have different links — or ties — to other people. Strong ties are characterized as deep affinity; for example family, friends or colleagues. Weak ties, in contrast, might be acquaintances, or a stranger with a common cultural background. The point is that the strength of these ties can substantially affect interactions, outcomes and well-being.”
We should put ourselves in situations where our connections can expand – meetings, conferences, travels, readings, reflections. When something interesting happens, think for a few moments on how that came about, what was the chain of moments leading up to that moment. It is these connections that make life so rich and varied, so full of surprises.
As James Burke wrote, “Following the trail of events that leads from some point in the past to the emergence of a modern invention that affects our lives is like being involved in a detective story, in which the reader will know at any particular stage in the story’s development only as much as did the people of the time. As each story unfolds it will become clear that history is not, as we are so often led to believe, a matter of great men and lonely geniuses pointing the way to the future from their ivory towers. At some point every member of society is involved in the process by which innovation and change comes about, and this book may help to show that given average intelligence and the information available to the innovators of the past, any reader could have matched their achievements.”
Our life is a story of connections. I have seen this in my life. There are many in my life that have materialised a sequence of events that has changed the course for me. Whether it was the sale of IndiaWorld or my entry into the world of politics, it is the “connections” that have made all the difference.