I was always told when I was growing up that those who need style do it because they lack substance. Be good at your work and that is good enough. This belief is not true anymore. Both are important. Branding is really about “the truth told well” as a well-known agency used to say.
I don't use my camera to click photos. It is always the phone that is handy. Convenience wins over discretion. I wonder if having the moment accessible on my phone has made me stop working hard at preserving the moment. Do photographers ever enjoy the moment if they are only worried about getting the perfect photo.
When trade unions resisted computerization, they were assured that computerization would create more jobs – only with different skill requirements. Education has been the answer for people to move from the blue collar workforce to a white collared job. Robots are now coming after the white collared jobs too. Books like The Rise of The Robots by Martin Ford document an increasingly bleak future. When information technology is combined with easily accessible machine intelligence is that new industries that come up will never be labor intensive. How do we prepare for that jobless future?
I remember meeting someone from the fashion industry who had explained to me the many shades of black that she could differentiate. All through that flight, my co-passenger educated me about the different shades — carbon black, ebony, charcoal black and outer space black, to name a few. The specialist can see the subtle differences while a novice like me would describe all of them as ‘black’. Maybe the same goes for the people agenda.
Disruption is a leadership phenomenon. Past success is the most effective predictor of future failure. Most disruption occurs not by making the wrong choices, as much as failing to choose at all. When the Ritz Carlton's head of training professes to be unaware of Airbnb, or when the publisher of a newspaper depicts future strategy in terms that disown past strategies we can begin to see the magnitude of the challenges ahead. What is needed is close to a complete reworking of our leadership model.
It takes me a moment to realize that Gulzar is talking to me. The deep baritone voice fills up the studio.“I have been sketching and doodling for many years now. But I did not want to add my name to the sketches because I wanted unbiased feedback on my drawing skills. If I sign the sketches, some people will immediately stop evaluating the drawings critically. I will never get to know what I should do to improve. It is hard for me to get honest feedback and a real assessment of my skill. Without that it is hard to improve. So getting the feedback anonymously seemed like a good idea.”
They are people born in the late nineties and are barely out of their teens. To understand a generation it is important to understand the defining events that they have experienced. These life experiences will influence the lens with which they will view the world.Nineties was the era of Liberalization. It was an opening of the economy in India and the rise of the IT sector. The media exploded with choices and social media became a word. New sectors like the BPO emerged and started hiring younger people.
