Tag Corporate

Talking to strangers…

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I have been an introvert my whole life. By Introvert, I don’t mean that I am silent. You ask me about something I know, I will talk till you are tired, strangely, I can do this with strangers too. But I struggle with small talk. Wishing someone Good morning or saying thank you or saying you are welcome are very difficult for me. One of the reasons being I think these words are pointless. I don’t help someone for a ‘Thank you’, I do it because I can. So, I expect any one able to help me in a situation to do the same. Likewise, I don’t know what kind of a day someone is having. How can I wish their morning to be good? Anyways, because I talk a lot people think I am an extrovert. But they get it wrong. It has nothing to with how much people share or talk. An extrovert is someone who seeks company of people because they need external simulation to their brains. My mind most of the time needs a break from over stimulation. That’s what introverts are. That is why I prefer solitude to company. So, I prefer minimizing external triggers. Thanks to a world wide pandemic enforced work from home way of life, things have been good. But lately I am getting annoyed by another side effect of the pandemic. The fall in revenue for big corporations..

I do not have any financial interest in the welfare of these companies. I actually think abolishing all Stock markets will do the world a great deal of good. If there is no pressure from investors to deliver Year on year and Quarter on quarter improvement in profits, there would be less corruption, less unethical practices, less targets, less up-selling, less cross-selling, less marketing and finally less marketing calls. It’s one of the things I hate in the world. Some smart-ass with an MBA reading a couple of books by so called successful people and forcing their text book non-sense on the world through desperate people trying to make a honest living(so called telemarketers)

This is exactly the corporate world right now. Its called machine learning and artificial intelligence in marketing to enhance the lead to sales ratio. In plain English it is trying to sell stuff to people based on decisions taken by a software written by a bunch of geeks with zero social skills and no understanding of human beings. This is why Google and Facebook got a heart attack when Apple pushed an update that let users decide which apps can track them. The Facebook and Google business model is to predict things you are likely to engage with, show it on your screen and show an ad now and then. Why do you think the streaming services provide different profiles for an account. That’s because they want to separate the recommendations per profile to increase the chances of you spending more time looking at the screen. Why can’t a person have diverse interests? Why can’t someone appreciate both Les Miserables and Fast & the Furious?

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Its called targeted marketing and for that they need data. Data on what you like, what you bought, how much you earn, where do you live. Silicon valley was once a simple place, people wrote software and they sold it. Now they are giving it away for free so that they can sell ads.

I digress. So, the annoying telemarketing phone calls have increased a lot. I do understand that the country I live in has more serious problems than to think about making laws for privacy and customer data protection. I don’t mind getting calls for products I never subscribed for, I am most annoyed with the ones that I am a customer. Because, in this case, I should have say in opting in or out of promotions. It took me 4 months, 3 complaints, 2 escalations and 2 consumer affairs complaints to stop my bank from calling me everyday asking me if I wanted a loan. Why does this happen? Its because the stupid software are designed in such a way.

The angry face on top is a word cloud of all words longer than 4 characters from my first 53 blogs combined, minus the words that have occurred fewer than 5 times. The size of the font is directly proportional to the frequency of occurrence. It took me 90 odd minutes with the help of another blog Text Mining: Extracting and Analyzing to create it. Since you cannot eyeball the image for frequency, I made a chart below that shows top 15 occurring words. God knows what people are doing with their machine learning trainings and certiications.

If I would feed this to an algorithm to take a decision on my ideas or even better to lets say come up with a list of topics that I would prefer to read. This is something some websites do for click bait. Thankfully, Most of them do not spend time on analytics, they just try to use some low hanging fruits like donations to save a life, easy ways to earn money, weight loss tips. Or for men, its just random articles with photographs of women.

If you look at the analysis of my blog and decide that news on Music artists would interest me, you would be wrong. All 50 occurrences are from a single post about my taste in Music. Words ranked 2 to 13 can’t be used to judge be. That leaves Movies and Earth. Film gossip doesn’t interest me. I like movies a lot, so I do not watch many. That sounds like a contradiction but its not. If I like something very much, I would prefer quality over quantity. What would you sell me with earth? Donate to Save the earth campaign? If you actually read my blogs, you would understand that I believe that the there is no way humans can save the earth. The thing I most frequently read is Football news. I did write a blog on it. But machines can count words, not measure emotion or passion. I know guys in the IBM Watson team would disagree. I would truly love to see its results. I remember using it to try and measure the mood of customers based on emails. This as well before the Brisbane city council thought it sarcasm. May be it now knows Australian sarcasm. Again, I digress.

Some data analysts may point out that there is more to data science than just top 15 words. I know that. Linear Regression, Linear Regression, K-Nearest Neighbors, Support Vector Machines, Naive Bayes, Decision trees. I have learnt them all and tried them out and ultimately came to a conclusion that brains are far too complex to be simulated especially when you want to use it for selling stuff. Yes, I was only telling partial truth earlier when I said it took me 90 minutes to draw a word cloud. The time was to learn to scrape the data from a WordPress site without using paid extensions, the ability to understand and interpret data takes years.

My Amazon recommendations are so inaccurate that I turned off the notifications. May be it’s also because since the app Wunderlist was purchased and killed by Microsoft, me and my wife have been using Amazon app for shared shopping list. That may be messing up the algorithm. My Netflix recommendations have the same accuracy of my daily horoscope no matter how many movies I rate. The machine may decide the recommendations, but its a human who is tagging and categorizing the movie. Yesterday I saw a category, “Asian movies with strong female lead”. I mean what the fuck is that? My wife watches a lot of Korean movies and may be a couple of the last ones had a female oriented plot. But WTF? That’s what algorithms do. In case of movies or books, doesn’t sticking to same genre or style bore you?

Cathy O’Neil starts her book Weapons of Math Destruction with an example of a horrible failed idea of using AI to grade the performance of teachers. Read it, it’s a nice book. In the theoretical world of computers, the parameters are fixed, in real world they aren’t. The real world doesn’t abide by the rules of the digital world.

If you think that I am against technology, I am anything but that. Just like movies I like technology very much. Just as I hate bad and mediocre movies, I hate seeing technology being used for stupid things. I will give you an example, I once spoke with a guy who told me that they put GPS trackers on their construction equipment to know if they are being used on non-working days. I asked him about the accuracy of the reading. He told me 200 meters. Then I asked him “A crane or a poclain or a fork lift can be used in a construction site without moving for more than 50 meters. The only time they move more than 200 mts is when they are moved to a different site”. He did not give me a response for that.

You can use data or technology for good things too. I would prefer technology being used to eliminate malaria, not selling burgers. If people need it, they will buy it. If you make stuff that people don’t need, you have to find stupid ways to sell it. The irony of all this is that, they are asking computer programs to think like humans and asking their humans to stick to per-determined responses like a computer program .

 "Would you like fries with that?"

The beautiful game

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This is the longest I have refrained from putting an idea into words. Technically I did do it. I first wrote a version of this on LinkedIn and shared the draft with a dear friend and colleague. He asked me not to publish it because of the flack I might receive as it challenges each and every practice of my own profession. In my head, The first ever version of this blog was purely about the sport I have developed an unexplainable devotion over the last 16 years. This was in 2017. It completely transformed into a different topic when the transfer of Matthijs de Ligt to Juventus was announced in August 2019.

I have never seen a professional football match before 2004. When I moved from my hometown to pursue higher education, my dad bought me my first computer. Being an avid fan of computer games and someone who was utterly starved by the available range of them in my small town, I was very eager to play every game I could get my hands on. Earlier, the only place I could access a computer was in my school lab and I had to beg our teacher for some time after school to play on it. Now, back to 2004. A classmate lent me his bootlegged copy of FIFA 2004. I installed it and started playing the only way I knew. Get the ball, run with it and try to score goals. This is what everyone in my school did and our physical education teacher never told us otherwise. But it didn’t work out. The computer kept beating me. So, I told my classmate that it was an impossible game to play. He disagreed and gave me an advice. Till date, I buy the latest FIFA release every year and it is the only game I play. My most visited website is http://www.espnfc.com. Most of my screen time goes to either watching football or reading about it.

Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don’t like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.

– Bill Shankly

What he told me that day was to watch professional football to understand the game. So, I started watching the English premier league in a 14 inch black and white television. It was the only football telecast in my country at that point of time. Now, I had to pick a team right? I picked the first team in the list of available ones in FIFA 2004. Arsenal. Its was just a coincidence that they were not only the first team when sorted alphabetically but were also reigning champions. Gradually, my interest grew and I started watching every game possible and then started doing what’s love. Analyse. Over the years, I found more teams that I like. Barcelona, Ajax, Borussia Dortmund, RB Leipzig, The list keeps changing every year. Because my loyalty now, is for the game, not any particular team. I am mostly going to talk about Ajax FC, Amsterdam’s most prominent football club. Because If I talking about football in general, this blog will end up being really long. On that note, I ran a word count on this and its already 482 words without really getting into the business.

The dutch football is ranked 12th in Europe by UEFA, the football administration body of the continent. In terms of TV and other revenues, there is a huge chasm between the Dutch league and the likes of English premier league, Spanish La liga, German bundesliga and the Italian Sirie A. So, naturally, Ajax is run on a relatively shoestring budget. If a rich club comes to poach their players, they simply cannot refuse. But they still have a glorious history of European dominance. So, how is this possible?

Jong Ajax – Produce, don’t procure. Since they don’t have the financial might of clubs from other countries to hire players who are a finished product, so they have developed one of the most efficient scouting network to identify young talent and them train them. Their youth academy called Jong Ajax (Young Ajax) takes care of both education and football training. Another advantage this brings is that every player is trained to play the ‘Ajax way’ which is total football.

Total Football – Johan Cruyff, the architect of modern Ajax and the person how took them to their pinnacle both as a player and coach embraced the ideas of Jack Reynolds, Jimmy Hogan and Gusztav Sebes. The idea that challenged the age old notion that each player in a football team can only be trained to do one thing. There are no defenders or Midfielders or offensive players in an Ajax team. From childhood each player is monitored to identify the strengths and weaknesses. Accordingly, they are trained for a specific position. This is what all the other clubs do too. The famed La Masia of FC Barcelona and Ballspielverein Borussia of Borussia Dortmund also have excellent scouting network and academies. But Ajax goes one step further, they then teach every player to play in every position. This makes the team extremely flexible and unpredictable on the field, it helps them deal with injuries, suspensions and finally helps them cope when one or more layer leave.

Birds leaving nest – As a club that finds and nurtures talent, Ajax has always faced the problem of their players being poached by richer clubs by offering huge salaries, something that Ajax cannot afford. But they don’t mind it. Because the revenues from player sales help them fund their academy and for every super star sold, they can create 10 more super stars. They never come in the way of their players growth. Its like a family. When a child comes of age and announces that he wants to leave the house, parents don’t get upset, on the contrary they feel proud and happy. This is one reason most of the club administration and coaching staff comprises of their ex-players. Once the players have see the world and quenched their thirst for fame and success, instead of retiring and enjoying their earnings, they always return to help the club out with the next generations.

Leadership ~ Experience? Finally, the most intriguing thing that Ajax does. The only qualification for becoming the captain of the team is to have true leadership qualities. This is where Matthijs de ligt’s story is an example. He became the club captain at the age of 18 years, after having played just 37 games for the senior team and zero games for the national team. That too in a team that consisted the likes of Klaas Huntelaar who was 34 and Daley Blind who was 29 (and the son Danny bling who was an ex Ajax and Netherlands player and coach in addition to being the board member of Ajax). “Age is just a number” is a quote used by many to justify things they do in their old age. But can use the same quote to justify leadership qualities. A person cannot be trained to be a leader. One doesn’t become a leader with experience. A person is born a leader, anyone who pretends otherwise is just play acting.

The reason my friend asked me to refrain from posting the ideas in this blog on LinkedIn was because so called Managers of the corporate world. The ones who hold expensive degrees and certifications in Management will not be able to digest this and will lash out against me. They will see it as something that undermines them. This is where the exact problem lies. Managers are there to serve the organization, not themselves and their egos. Again, we can take a leaf out of the football world here. The salary and net worth of a player follows a bell curve. Mind that almost every football manager out there is a retired player. Now, their salary reaches the highest point when they are in their prime playing days and goes down once they become managers. Yes, in football managers are paid less salaries than most of the players. Yes, the people who do the work are paid more than the people who supervise the work. This happens only in sporting world. This is because the value someone adds to a football team is visible to everyone in plain sight. This visibility ensures that everyone gets the fair compensation.

Now that we have seen some innovative ideas Ajax has brought to their club and football world in general, don’t you think the same principles can be applied to every organization in the world?

The predators

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Sharks can sense a single drop of blood in an Olympic sized pool. Hyenas by the virtue of the lion king and their unfortunate appearance are one of the most hated animals. Leeches are worms that survive by sucking the blood of animals. They are different species, they live in different habitats. But, Guess what’s common between them? Yes they are all carnivores. What else? Something less obvious. All three of them do not kill their prey. They feed on them when their prey is still alive.

Why God did made the snake before lawyers? To exercise.

A popular but illogical joke. I’ll tell you why.

When it comes to comparing professions with a animals, lawyers are compared to snakes. But snakes bite and kill their prey or at least paralyze them before eating them. But an attorney doesn’t do that. Attorneys are leeches, they have to keep their food alive in order to sustain. What more, just like a leech sucking on a buffalo, they have the ability to numb the prey, so that the client doesn’t realize the blood sucking part. Now a days some other professionals are also taking a cue from leeches. For example, doctors in India have been employing different scare mongering tactics to squeeze as much as possible from every patient. So is education industry.

There are some professional scammers out there who are always stalking the group of prey to identify the weakest link. From email to sms to phone calls, these people try to bait people and try to make money of them by offering free treasures to millions in inheritance. Hyenas follow the same rule, identify the weakling and gang up on it.

Recently, i have been seeing a lot of sharks around. Both physical and virtual. The physical ones, set shops in our office building as soon as the salary day comes. The virtual ones have discount sales and offers when ever there is some major/minor calendar event or some times just for the sake of it. These sharks are attracted to our office building by the smell of salary being deposited in our bank accounts.

But there is an another class of predator out there, that I am still struggling to correlate with any thing in the animal kingdom. I guess even Darwin would struggle to classify this species. Perhaps they are a mutation of capitalism. They call themselves Marketing executives. They hound, harass and invade the privacy of everyone. What’s more infuriating is that they do it with a smile on their face.

Just like some types of predators, these people set traps and then they stalk and track their prey. In this digital age this has become a very easy thing to do. It’s now even automated. There are plug and solutions available that can do this for anyone. This is not a new idea, its just an exaggerated implementation of an existing idea. In a street market, have you ever faced a situation where a hawker would leave you alone once you have inquired about his product? For him its expression of interest. Digitization of this concept is the reason why we are in a state where majority of the notifications, emails and SMS we get on our phones are advertisements or other promotions. John Oliver explains to the ridiculous lengths these people go in the name of notifications. The tracking is done through hidden scripts of websites. The website that hosts this blog as 2 such trackers. The company I work for, it’s website has 11 trackers. They do analytics, user data collection and prepare stats for businesses on potential customers and their potential preferences. In the earlier example of the street vendors, the digital equivalent would be that you look at something in a store and the sales guys gets behind you for eternity. I say eternity because unlike the street vendor who leaves when you buy the product or strongly refuse, the internet will never leave you. If you don’t like product A, they have gazillion other things to offer. Also, they share their customers generously with others. I can give you an analogy and its not going to be pretty. Imagine writing your phone number on the photo of a beautiful girl and sticking it in the notice board of your apartment. Almost every guy who sees it will call you. The paper boy, the guy who delivers milk, the security guard, the delivery guy, his friends, friends of his friends.

This is how what every telemarketer imagines when he sees your phone number

Now imagine writing your number on a billboard. This is what you did when you gave your phone number to anyone. Weather it be your email provider asking it for extra security, the guy at a billing counter offering redeemable points or the guy who hands you out free lottery draw for exchange of phone numbers or accept to terms and conditions on a app or a website or sign any document when you take a service. In the pretense of selling you something, they want to sell you to the world.

“I laugh at the irony of people screaming out against privacy invasion by governments on twitter and Facebook. The platforms that offered them a chance to look at some memes, videos and probably what their friends had for dinner in exchange for their private information”

– Me

Today I got a call from a person representing my bank. I have a car loan and they were offering me a “top-up” loan on it for the umpteenth time. This was at 12:25 PM. I was so pissed off that I told them that I don’t have a car or an account with them and this was a wrong number. I was just tired of saying no. The most amazing fact about these telemarketers is that the same person never calls you twice, they tell you that they will update their database that you are not interested and then another one will call an hour later. Then exactly at 12:27 PM, I got a phone call from the credit card department offering me an enhanced credit limit. Then I blew my fuse. It then took me 47 minutes to revoke subscriptions from all promotional calls.

Percentage of total calls that were either spam or for marketing in US

Above is an info graphic on the raise in marketing calls in the United States. So, why have we come to a situation where you cannot even live one day of your life without faceless people bothering you?

For example, India has a great many number of prospective customers for all types of businesses. But what they lack is purchasing power. Now, how does one increase the purchasing power? Ideal way is to improve the quality of life, increased wages, better social security, better insurance etc.. there by increasing disposable income and willingness to spend. But, it takes a long time and effort. More importantly willing and efficient governments. Another way is to let people accumulate wealth and then spend it. Lets say you want to buy a car. You can save money for a few years (depending on the car you would like to buy) and then buy it. But some times these few years may become few more years because things like inflation, or unexpected expenses or emergencies. Well, it is good to have some money for the rainy day. Right? But that would mean you buying a car is still an ‘IF’ for the business. So, the bank will give you the loan to buy the car now and then repay it over the same ‘few’ years. That makes you paying them an obligation, not an option. They don’t care for your emergencies, for all they care, if you are already short of money for buying a non-necessary thing, then you will be forced into another loan when you need money. That’s a double win for them.

This is why people in India get so many calls like personal loan inquiries, real estate offers. Types of sales, where you can be put on a leash for a long long time. A common man would be scared of defaulting any loans. Most defaulters are actually people who are inherently wealthy, for them cost of a law suit is much less than the cost of repaying the loan. It is vice-versa for a middle class person. These ‘marketing folk’ are like a mutation in the natural food chain, they create their own prey rather than hunting them. Also, the hunter you see is not he actual predator, like in the case of Ants where the entire colony works for a queen and even hunts and gathers food for the queen. The people who call you or email you get only a miserly bit of the flesh.

May be Jerry Sienfeld foresaw this in 1992. That is why he made the below joke in his show. With all the greedy people out there, the situation will only become worse. We are not in the age of personalized marketing as shown in the minority report. But we are getting there fast.