Thought Garage

I stumbled upon eggSunday on LinkedIn and I fell in love with the concept of eggSunday.  And the way they brought the concept to life is equally admirable and scrumptious.

On the web : eggsunday.com

Egg sunday or eggs unday was born out of a vision shared by two entrepreneurs who just loved eggs.

Eggsunday is a food court brand that serves simply mouth watering varieties of egg dishes competitively priced and with new recipes added every month. The first outlet is located at a Food court on Mumbai – Pune highway.

(images from ideaspice.com)

There is an old saying : “Price, Quality, and Time. Pick any Two.”.  It is quite difficult to argue or find an example that proves otherwise not because it is not possible, but because most businesses model their pricing based on this widely ‘accepted’ perception.

But Netflix has been different.  Its lot cheaper. Excellent quality. And yet it is simply super fast.  Add ‘streaming’ movies to the list, there is no comparison, not only in it’s own market but anywhere else.

Netflix has been delivering that ‘aha’ experience all these years and after watching this presentation, I will have no doubt that Netflix can deliver even better in the years to come.

This presentation is about the Culture that drives Netflix and it is totally awesome.

Stumbled upon this website that appears to be a Mint.com for Indian consumers. Collect data from all your Banks, Credit cards, investments etc and provide analysis, alerts and reports at one place.

Perfios is for anyone who wishes to solve the problem of managing wealth distributed among various asset classes and among various institutions. If you have bank accounts, credit cards, Mutual Funds, Equity etc with multiple institutions, how often have you felt that – ‘what if all of this could be accessed at one place?’ Perfios addresses exactly this aspect (and more!) and provides access across asset classes on one platform and in the process takes care of your other worries too!

Source: Perfios Website

If you ever wonder about this or believe in one way or the other, it may be worth looking at this wiki page : List of Nobel Laureates by University Affiliation.

Almost every other day I read or hear somebody comparing India’s IITs with MIT. As per my understanding, its ridiculous. As much as I love India, I hate this fake image. There is no comparison, other than IITs as the Best You get in India to MIT being one of the Best in the world.

I have no doubt, they are the Best in India, but they are not comparable on a world scale.

Every attribute I think worth of comparing two universities, IITs are no where closer to most American universities, leave alone MIT.  In fact, they are even behind some of Chinese universities in most attributes.

Disclaimer: I did not go to any of those IITs or any American or Chinese universities. I studied in an NIT (previously called RECs) instead.

The essence of problem solving is in fact not solving a problem, but detecting one before it becomes one. And the way, problems are solved in a corporate world is anything but a mystery.

Disclaimer(s):

• For illustration, I used Software Developers. You are free to use your own imagination to see any role in a corporate. It really fits the story.
• Any possible similarities to my current or previous work place are not intentional but mere coincidences. It is impossible not to have these coincidences in any corporate and it is totally beyond my control.
• There are exceptions and they are really exceptions.
• If you are a Manager, you may get offended by getting closer to reality.

There are 1000s of great software developers that can solve a problem once you define what is your problem.  But, unfortunately, many of them are good at just that.  They are really great at doing what they are told to do. And, of course, Managers love them, as they rarely question, anything.

But there are others of them, who can spot a problem in the system, while they are still doing what they are assigned just like any other. And most cases, they pursue the problem. Investigate further, analyze further and come up with a proposal or solution to fix.

Its no secret, or I must admit it is totally ‘typical’ in a corporate culture, how that ‘messenger of problem‘ will be received and treated. The stalwarts (read as old timers) never like to accept that there is a problem in the product they have been working for so long. In many cases its their baby for all practical purposes. And some complain that they never had time to figure out earlier, otherwise they are equally smart to identify it. Everybody thinks this guy has “an agenda” for bringing it up.

If you are dealing with people that own the product (startups or smaller firms), it is a totally different story. They love those people who think beyond. But in corporate, Managers love only those that love them in the first place.

Anyways, end of the day, in most cases, the whole corporate will reiterate the adage “if ain’t broken, don’t bother to fix it”, as there will always be a resource crunch, budget shortage and there are other important things to do. And few minutes later, the engineer gets an additional assignment as Management believes this engineer has more time at disposal.

And give it a few months, whole team will be buzzing on working on a priority customer sensitive project, that gets double the resources, budget and timelines. This time, though, the first section of Engineers will be given the responsibility to fix the issue, as Managers are always convinced that they are the best to solve any problem.

Obviously, these guys didn’t spot it in the first place or will never ‘own’ that problem so will fix the problem as they see it and as they always have been fixing, to the satisfaction of the Management.

And you all know the rest of the story.