SAST Wingees

Fine tastings of the week ending Nov 18 (#7)

1. If someone told you they could transfer power wireless-ly, you might have laughed at them. Not any more, researchers at MIT have figured out a way to transfer power wirelessly over short distances using the well-known principle of resonance. If you are lazy to read the entire BBC report, check out the diagram at the end of the report. It explains the concept succinctly and effectively.

2. How internet pioneer Netflix iterates through the page designs on its site, testing new ideas ultra-frequently makes for a great lesson in UI design. read on. <Via Vamsi Poondla>.

3. Dean & Laura Vandruff have compiled a great list of conversational tactics that people use to cow down others with a provocative title “Conversational Terrorism” <Via Communication Nation>

4. Would hot water freeze first or cold water? If you guessed cold water like I did, you are wrong. Under certain conditions hot water freezes first. This phenomenon which still continues to baffle physicists is called Mpemba Effect after a Tanzanian school student, Erasto Mpemba, who stumbled upon it in the year 1963. The reason we know about this is because Mpemba persisted even after severe rebukes from his physics teacher for arguing about stuff that doesn’t agree with the laws of physics. I came across this article in the Physics World magazine.  This article is a great read. Don’t miss it.

5. On a whim Priya Raju picked up the movie Nottinghill from the Brit Council. It turned out to be a cute movie (romantic comedy genre). Both Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts have put in an excellent performance.

6. Got a chance to see the latest Bond movie Casino Royale, one day after it was released in Chennai. Daniel Craig has done a great job. I think he is going to put energy & zeal back into the Bond franchise in a way, probably, only Sean Connery could rival.

Practice what you preach by David Maister

Just finished reading this book by David Maister. Those that are familiar with my rating scale – it falls under the Insightful rating category. Maister has surveyed over 29 firms having 139 offices operating in the USA (68%), the other 32% in Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Hongkong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Scotland and Spain.

All these firms are owned by a publicly-held marketing communications company. Survey respondents numbered 5,589. You may all know that Maister is an expert in the services industry. So his study target is appropriate. Then he proceeds to pick the top performing firms and offices and interviews the top management, middle management and the line employees.

The results show what we have come to expect from top performing firms – focus on the customer, alignment across the organization, empowerment, management cares, teamwork etc.

One interesting insight (chap 15) – the views of the younger staff are a better predictor of financial success thant that of older employees.

In my view, chapter nine is the one that provides some great insights. Maister uses a statistical technique called structural equation modeling to tie all the predictors of financial performance together (reminiscent of system dynamics). Everyone knows that quality & client satisfaction drives financial peformance but Maister provides a dramatic quantification of this tie-in.

He proves with his data that a one unit increase in quality & client satisfaction ( he has used a 6 point scale in his survey instrument) would cause a 104.12 point increase in the financial performance index. On a percentage basis this works out to a whopping 104.12% increase (or double the financial performance). He goes on further to show that a 1 point raise in Employee satisfaction (on the same 6point scale) can improve financial performance by 42.06 percent.

In a similar way he measures the impact quantitatively on financial performance for [impact figure in brackets]

High standards (40%), Coaching (16.98%), Commitment, enthusiasm, and respect (13.92%), Empowerment(10.47%), Fair Compensation(9.98%) and Long Term Orientation (9.28%).

These are the factors, according to Maister, that have the most impact on financial performance. Again, all of us intuitively know that these factors have an impact, but quantifying the impact Maister moves these from mere gut feeling into the realm of clear evidence.

Well done David. Overall, it is an excellent book that everyone in the services industry should read.

BTW, Maister writes an interesting blog as well. Check it out.

Flashback:

1. I had covered Maister’s Laws of Service Businesses a while ago.

“Hello” Vs. “Ahoy-hoy” – the technology world’s first format war

It is Nov 21st today and it is World Hello Day. So, a warm hello to all of you readers. I thought i will share something about “Hello” on this auspicious day, that i had come across a while ago. As you all know, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. You may also know that Thomas Alva Edison invented the carbon microphone that was used in the Bell telephone receivers. Given their interests in the nascent telephone industry,  a battle arose between the two titans about the word that people should use as a greeting when answering their telephone calls. Bell wanted everyone to use the term “Ahoy-hoy” and Edison wanted people to use the term “Hello”.  Of course, Edison won and we still use the term “Hello”. During this tussle, Edison employed a clever strategy – he wrote a letter to Mr. T.B.A David who was then the President of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company of Pittsburgh and convinced him of the merits of using Hello as a greeting. Edison convinced him by saying  that Hello could be heard atleast 10-20 feet away compared to Ahoy-hoy and that they wouldn’t need to use an additional call bell saving them costs. To draw a modern day parallel, this is akin to Sony influencing the Studios to publish their movies in the Blu-ray format. Not quite the same, but quite similar. Later on when the telephone exchange was unveiled in 1877 based on the idea of an Hungarian named Tivadar Puskas, Puskas answered the phone with a Hungarian “Hallom” in a demonstration. Hallom meant “I hear you” in Hungarian. Since it sounds strikingly similar to Hello, the word Hello entered the public imagination and became imbedded into our culture. That is how the first format war in the technology world was won by Edison. References:
1.  Hello in the Wikipedia.

Fine tastings of week ending Nov 11 (#6)

1. It appears that the only things we manage to remember from an event that we attend (or a vacation or some such) are the peak experience we had and how it ended. I have noticed several good presenters popping in some sort of slide that would give the peak experience. Maybe this is the psychology they are playing off of. Cameron Marlow packs insights into his post titled “the peak-end rule“.

2. Animal watching of the Desmond Morris kind is a favorite sport of mine. Some of you may remember the post i wrote a while ago about bird intelligence concluding that the last bastion of whether animals can think like humans had fallen. In reality, i think there is one more bastion – whether animals have consciousness like humans and do they have a personality like we do.  It appears even that deeply human thing called personality may not be that unique. The New Scientist reports that researchers have discovered that even lowly lizards exhibit personality.

3. Julian Keeling writes about an interesting concept called the maquiladora syndrome to illustrate the effects of China on the global manufacturing industry. I think her predictions made about China in this article are generally wrong, but she has mentions some excellent indicators for tracking an economic boom/bust – real estate prices, export cargo getting stacked up in the ports etc. <Via Priya Raju>.

4. Sir Lee writes a short and sweet paean to blogging. Now, who better do that. Thanks Sir Lee.

5. What’s with India and Google products I don’t know. Already you can count on your fingers the number of Indians blogging on something other than Google’s blogspot. Google seems to be in for an encore with Orkut – the social networking service. I joined it a few weeks ago and to my surprise i found all teenagers and 20-somethings from my family as well as my company on it. Inside Orkut blog reports that Indians are the third largest community on Orkut after Brazil and the USA. <Via Archana Mahadevan>

Dismal performance from India’s primary school students

The latest issue (dated Nov 27)  of India Today magazine published the shocking results from a education survey  conducted recently. The survey covered 32,000 students of classes 4,6 and 8 from the 200 Top schools in India. These schools were from the 5 major metros – Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore. The key findings from the survey show that the students did badly in areas which required them to apply their knowledge rather than rote learning.
I’m sure all of us that passed through the Indian primary school system know that but we now have evidence of how bad it is. Sample this question for the 8th graders from the test:
What is the chemical formula of steam?
A. CO
B. H2O
C. O2
D. Pure steam doesn’t have a chemical formula.
63% got the answer wrong. The correct answer being B. There were more questions published but they all had a visual in them. So I couldn’t transcribe it onto the blog without too much effort.  It is crystal clear from the survey that strong emphasis on rote learning has prevented true learning. If this is the state of affairs with the top schools producing the creme de la creme of the country, guess where the students from lesser institutions stand? India is riding the red hot IT wave like anything, but without true knowledge,  the goal of becoming a serious knowledge superpower may be too difficult to attain. Hope our education administrators are listening.