Inverted Curves

Yes, inverted sunset or set-sun!! Because I am learning a whole lot of fantastic things in Europe whose steep learning curves inverted my earlier understanding!!! Some of them are:
1. Conflict is good for an organizations performance and innovation!!! Org's performance (y axis) and conflict (x-axis) follows an inverted U curve.
2. Too much equity is as bad as too much debt. Cost of capital (y-axis) vs debt to equity ratio (x-axis) follows U curve. It is fascinating work to structure your company's capital to find that sweet optimal point on this curve
3. Greenfield is same as our very old Blue Ocean
4. We can exponentiate money with stocks, shares, options, derivatives, commodities and FX. But i always believed that risk and returns are linear but an efficient and well diversified portfolio returns (Y-axis) follows a slant or oblique U curve with respect to Beta (risk)!!! I love this tantalizing non-linear curve. Start FX trading here with 50,000$ for free!
5. Type1 and Type2 errors in managing innovations and companies ability to change is still unclear curve for me!!

Which is Correct?

We all want to achieve and accomplish a lot of things, we all want to explore life its widest and deepest possibilities and aspects. We continuously all aspire to outgrow our energies and horizons. We all want happiness, wealth, superior knowledge, power, recognition, self-actualization, peace of mind. We all want to touch our kith and kin's lives, we want to add energy to our immediate environments like our teams in offices, residential communities, clubs and societies and all that you are associated with and part of. We all want to help the unlucky people within our mite. We want to develop everything we are connected with actively and passively. We want to transform the businesses, economies and regions, we relentlessly keep feeding on implementable models flashing in our heads. We want to impact the society, planet and universe as much as we can. To actualize our burning ambitions, ideas, visions and wishes, we, diligently and passionately, keep enriching ourselves intellectually, physically, emotionally and spiritually. But how much can one accomplish in single life for Time is limited? Can we go beyond measuring and comparing each other's accomplishments? How will you place accomplishment in one's life journey? These were some pertinent arguments in discussions with my dear friend Prasad back in engineering college days.
Then my metacognition knocked the doors which had led to some scintillating conversation and insights. Since then, the most basic component of all this heavy discussion, i.e, accomplishment in its mathematical clothing, how does it look like?? I am still wondering which form is correct

A = (Hard work + B) + Luck
or
A = (Hard work x B) + Luck

*Hard work = Function of time driven by passion or ambition
*B = Intelligence/Talent/Skill
*Luck = It is dynamic value which keeps varying between person's given maximum and minimum levels

P.S: I request you to comment or share your thoughts to conclude which one is correct?? Please tell me your point of view.

A Dot & Delusion

Contrast to my neighbouring paragraph "About me", which annoys most of them, this post is an humbling talk. It was a public lecture by Dr Carl Sagan at Univeristy of Cornell in 1994:

"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds and how intense their sense of ownership!

Our posturings, our imagined self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling and a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

Shapes and Smells of Sustainability

Sustainability with all its systems thinking, entropy, Hubbert curves, ecological footprints, bloom energy and the phenomenal advancement in all types of alternative energy- farming, since 1990, have reached a third gear. Furthermore, constellation of international bodies with their subsidiaries and policies like carbon credits, emission taxes, sustainability compliances and the eventual whole new financial markets on green stocks, carbon stocks and other weather derivatives took the movement to much a serious level. Needless to say, internet, digitalization and smart technologies certainly have leap-frogged this imperative. Now, for good, it has become a meme and it is inherent in every contemporary culture and governance. But the sad news is inability to efficiently and effectively permeate this to every nook and corner of human activity before the planet’s web of life has reached threshold. While searching for old e-mails on this concern, i found two examples (relatively less popular), which i thought of sharing, not just for their importance but for their brilliance too.

Sustainable Architecture

Chuck Hoberman, marvellous architect, designer, and artist explains how he defies existing degrees of freedom, and how creatively he distorts conventional symmetries, patterns, relationships between structures and trajectories only to leap beyond smart tech for transformative construction. Each one of us wants to have a micro-environment or microcosm (home) that reflects and conforms one’s identity and -isms to have control in one’s hands against the macrocosm (world). So buildings keep coming up as long as man exists. So Chuck's ideas have lot to contribute to this ubiquitous necessity of man. It has a strong say on sustainability. Click this for fantastic video.

Sustainable Luxury (Perfumes)

If you have strong inclination towards perfumes and fragrances, I can assume that you'd be very familiar with all those basic concepts like scent-layers, receptors and "shape" theory. But this guy, Luca Turin, has come up with "Frequency Theory" for how we sense smell. In simple words, contrary to "smell of a molecule is determined by its shape”, his theory tells that our sense of smell is determined by the frequency of a molecule. The strong underlying message is that we don’t have to exploit anymore for molecules (extracts of herbs, trees, flowers, animal glands, animal fats etc) that have exact shape. Instead, simply manufacture molecules (synthesize) that have same frequency as say Musk or Sandalwood. This invention smells beautiful, isn’t it? Here is the video.

Mon Affaire Française

Bon Jour,

After initial yielding to natural temptation to compare every new cultural encounter with my point of reference (India), and sift them into "same as" or "different" categories, I deliberately started to soak in French culture, openly and with twinkle in eyes. So in this post, from the land of "La" "le" and Rubayr (Robert) and Pierre (Peter)s, I sprinkle a few thoughts from my chapitre français de vie in its untreated and unaltered form, sil vous plais:

Alphabets: First thing you come across in a strange place is strange sounds from these strange people!! After several attempts of convincing myself that these strange sounds from these smelly mouths, are not patients' noises but is Lingua Franca, that will be surrounding me as long as stay, I started learning "la""les" and " ". Did you notice the third sound. Yes, French have lot of SILENT letters in their literature. I think, this was designed to fit their smell into sounds of language. I realized that French fashion has their origin in their designer alphabets with all those hair spikes, caps and double bindi "å" "Ã" "è" "é" "ê" "ë" "Ü". Touch of elegance to this beautiful alphabets comes from letter "R", which is pronounced as "rrrrhhhhhh". I wonder how these guys pronounce "re-recurring"!!

Food: It seems France is known for its irresistible gastronomy in the western world. I know a few aam janta back in India who flaunt the same, dumbly. Me being a reputed gourmet, don't want to comment on this for my refined tastes are limited to vegetable cells only. But how can any French palatal adventures end without encomium to CHEESE and WINE. French can survive eternally with wine and cheese alone, & blood banks here classify blood grop as Burgundy, Chateau, Provence, Bordeaux and Jura. Instead of positive and negative, it is red, white, rose, and sparkling!! I must confess French wines are godly. I tried most of the
varieties and all of them are sublime. Unexpressed are those elegant sensations when these magical liquids travel from delighting your mouth all way through. Complemented by a cheese bits. From a long list of cheeses I relished, Chevre, Boursin, Roquefort and Comte come to mind as good ones. It would be unredeemable sin if you don't indulge in as many varieties of cheese and wines when your feet are on this land. You will love it. BTW, Baguette is like 2nd oxygen for French!!!
Girls: I am spellbound, awestruck, charmed, beguiled, and still in unrecoverable disbelief & shock to see imaginations or "ideas of beauty perfection" walk by, sit with and talk to!!! Their high-fashion sense adds hypnotizing dazzle to their looks as cuts to diamond. Its no wonder why French men are so hopelessly romantic..But these "femme" are so "fatal" with their suffocating body smell that sitting with them for 10 seconds seems eternity, if they have forgotten to wear perfume. There was never a water-scarcity nor it will be in France!! Anyways when it comes to mindset, girls all across the world are same, but with different faces and diff curves. A typical French gal is a bit more complicated that world average:))

Perfumes: Same as "First sentence" of girls!! Have your ever experienced nirvana through fragrance?? I did, & it can happen in a lift, by beach or in a city bus. Never in the last four years as serious fragrance connoisseur, I experienced ecstatic moments of synaesthesia. French govt must ban some of them, it is too much for humans. Did I ever say perfume is the thin line between man and God. And French are trying to erase that. What a way to divinity!!

Evaluation: Vey strict evaluation in exams.
Sense of Humour: hhhahahahhahah, Merci

P.S: Watch this Frech Man & Woman ad ;) too good

Lie-ability?!

Man is the only animal that lies, isn’t it? But when I shared my thought to my best friend some two years back, he disagreed. (Yes, he could have had lied!!). He opined that animals also lie, for example, tigers/cheetahs get their food by lying (all those stalking, camouflage).That prodded me to learn truth about lies. As we all know every relationship, every concept, everything we know is an onion. Hence I peeled this LIE onion too.

As per my understanding, lie is any form of communication that is used to deceive or make-believe something that is not. If I look at it from other point, a lie is communication of alternative reality, and an output of high creativity, of course with intent. So it can be said that lie-ability is directly proportional to one's creativity (evolution of brain!!) When the world runs on lies as much as it runs on belief, why is it there is an ethical treatment for lies? Every animal, aware of this creative instinct, exploits to the best of circumstances. Wo(man)kind with its funny brain has lied lies on the highest altar of economy . Brutal lies, shy lies, ok ok lies, fine lies, outright lies, innocuous lies, sweet lies, love-lies, planned lies, extempore lies and bait-lies, all these are gracefully sprinkled in our conversations, since our childhood. For a change, let’s talk about strategic lies..
Last week, when we were learning Semiotics in Marketing Strategy, all these frozen thought war refreshed. I recalled reading Umberto Eco's 4 years back, who is a great semiologist and phenomenal author. You can find about semiotics, what is its use and what is its history..bl bla. But let me tell you this semiotics enhances cultural marketing and helps in building iconic brands. Dealing with ethics and values, especially in the corporate realm, is dicey and tricky. But nagging thought is, as a global manager, how I should find that mirage-line between lie and creativity while treading cultural marketing. How should I propagate this uncertainty into coming generations of marketing strategies? How should one understand this in the context of artificial intelligence (AI)? How do we achieve creativity in AIs and will they be able to lie? In our new evolutionary status as homo-informavores on the planet where information arbitrage is almost nil for people's minds and hence culture is flooded with semiotic pollution, how should we, the managers must achieve highest level of relationship with all the stakeholders?

Life, culture or business is all about relationships and relationships is all about communications. Communication is all about meaning, intent, ideas and lies, carried out through signs, symbols, sounds etc. In this light, semiotics is one more to our multi-dimensional analysis of business’ and mankind’s sustainability. In the words of Umberto Eco "Semiotics is concerned with everything that can be taken as a sign. A sign is everything which can be taken as significantly substituting for something else. This something else does not necessarily have to exist or to actually be somewhere at the moment in which a sign stands in for it. Thus semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth; it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all" . So answer to my initial question is flippant, yes and no. Here are interesting links: Semiotics & Critique

SK Cycles Takes Over Ericsson

One fine day, not so long ago, in the year 2010, my husaar friend Balli (means slender creeper), an MBA grad from one of the world's best schools had a D-day (to be read as Doink day) with Ericsson. On that not-so fine day, while doinkig with senior level manager of Ericsson, our Balli repartee-d as elegantly as business-meeting fart. Below are those lines:

Manager: I am impressed by your skills, experience and capabilities. (It was nice doinking..) But your score in Organizational Behaviour is less. Is it because of bad behavior??
Balli (adjusting his waiter-tie aping James Bond): Look at my score in Ethics, its 90!! (dshum bullet)

SL: grinning (imagine most difficult smile)

P.S: I know it’s not a greaaat joke but the serious context tickled my funny bone that day. I felt happy..Keep shooting Balli..