Anay Agarwal's Blog

There have been lot of predictions how online (specifically Amazon and Alibaba) will slowly eat all its offline competitors. US offline retailers have borne the maximum brunt, and most of them are in various stages of proceeding towards huge store closures. This change might lead to bankruptcy for a couple of them but it is an exciting time for the consumer as they are seeing real innovation in the retail space after probably half a century. For a long time retail has been struck in incremental changes with people fixed on changing merchandise or the lighting of the stores.

With the current threat to the retail offline space, it is bubbling with experimentation which shows exciting times for consumers. With dwindling sales and more store closures on anvil retailers are forced to think beyond cost and the often tried mantra “big is better.” Retailers especially in US are now realizing the value of smaller stores, which in time to come will double up as pick-up points for their omni-channel sales.

China and US are becoming the hotbed for this experimentation and the smaller and smart retailers are leading it. Few of the trends which will definitely shape the future are:

Cashless checkout counters: It is not just Amazon and Alibaba who have tested this concept. A small cooperative store in New York has now got 20% of the traffic flowing from the cashless counters.

Supply Chain Transparency: “Ultimately, consumers are more informed and are more passionate about food then they have been before, and are demanding transparency across the entire food supply chain. They care about how their food is raised and grown.” – Brand Footprint 2017. Companies like Everlane are letting consumers know exactly where the product has been sourced from through the entire value chain. With the talk of incorporation of blockchain to track the supply chain this will be one area to definitely watch for.

Stores as experiential centers: Consumers will come to the store for a different experience rather than just buying. Already some stores are augmenting their wares by innovative practices. KaDeWe, a heritage US department store has devoted one floor to an “Idea Shop” where people can express their creativity and imagination through arts and craft experiences. Along with displays of a seasonal selection of the latest trends in textiles, handicraft, jewelry, art material, home decorating and stationery, customers are invited to make things themselves with craft materials. “It’s a place where people can meet people and make ‘store friends.’

Stores doubling up as pick-up points: This one is a no-brainer really, in theory this makes tremendous sense as with minimal increase in work-force and an already available space you could make your store the focal point of your online channel. This also gives you the opportunity to entice the customer into buying things he might have forgotten and eventually lure him to the store.

Hailing rides is largely a functional activity – you need to get from point A to point B, you call a cab which charges you the minimum with bare basic or premium features.

You could drone on about free Wi-Fi in your cabs, tabs you provide for premium entertainment content, lowest fares, availability, shorter routes, perfect algorithm for pool cars, and so on.

Instead UBER decided to appeal to the emotional side claiming they care for us like our family members. Men and women are crooning on primetime television and radio that they care for their family members and that they should switch to UBER for comfort.

They have hit two stones with this strategy:

a) They have moved from the functional aspects of the business to the emotional one. Ola has introduced a lot of features in their attempt to capture market share, but UBER has subtly captured the imagination, bypassing all the clutter with a simple message – We Care.

This strategy for turning functional products to emotional and vice-versa is well known but few brands have done it successfully. It is like creating a blue ocean in marketing while your rivals are still trying to list their features. UBER could do as they already are a market leader and have a presence in more than 25 Indian cities.

b) They have countered the nationalistic fervor (if any) for their ‘Made in India’ counterpart. Indian consumers have always welcomed international brands with unequivocal enthusiasm. So much so, that local brands have taken a beating while competing with resourcefulness and perceived quality of a foreign brand. Some claim that the mood today is a little different (especially towards Chinese products). UBER with its cleverly drawn ads has cleansed such thoughts from its user psyche with one stroke.

These ads assumes more significance in light of a recent news that in Hongkong UBER will be costlier than normal taxis. Till now UBER worldwide had come up on the ploy of free rides, credit, coupon codes and ultimately being cheaper than the taxi. This might indicate a shift in their policy where they might be increasing rates even in India. Already there is a lot of noise from drivers over curtailment of benefits from UBER.

But for now enjoy the ads that cajole you to junk your car and take an UBER. After all an old minority driver caring for a pregnant lady will always the right notes. 

Around 1.5 billion people are glued to their television set, waiting with bated breath as 22 individuals fight it out in Edgbaston. Is the India-Pak match really worth the hype, being analyzed endlessly by pundits with varying expertise from cricket to defense? Is it just another case of propaganda for politicians to breathe easy for a week, or for advertiser’s to have a field day given the TRPs will be above the roof for this one? We have some empirical evidence of importance of sports in other realms of life.

Rise of superpowers have been representative of the medals they win in big events such as Olympics.
Countries such as East Germany and more recently Russia has been known to create systems for doping to consistently win medals.
China is known to select kids as early as 3 years to train them in particular sports to ensure a good pipeline for sports.
Soldiers from the winning side are known to do celebratory fire at the border.
Citizens from the winning country often gets the bragging right. This becomes increasingly important in this internet age of nietzens.
India and Pakistan both play very few sports and don’t have great athletes to boast at the world stage.
The world’s most followed sport is Football and both countries rate abysmally in both the sports.
Both countries struggle to open their accounts in Olympics or major international events.
Both countries thus, look forward to the one sport that are equally followed and played between them.
This is coupled by the fact that we have not played each other since the last world cup. This gives the rivalry at extra edge.

In the end, when the cricketers take field they know they are playing something more than just cricket. They know that when they win against Pakistan, more than half of the population loses interest in the tournament, pride already in the bag.

Go India Go.

Friends,

We are back with a brand new contest for budding marketers and creative people. 

A lot of you have enjoyed the book, The Crooked Road. We invite you to make a short video to market the book using videos as a channel, on youtube, facebook, vimeo, etc. 

Simply go to the Contest page to participate in the contest and win goodies. 

With the amount of content available in the internet you ask yourself if your writing is contributing any value or just adding to the noise. Before you stop writing, close the word document without saving it, or put down your pen read this post. 

Why continue writing

The more you write, the better you get at it. Your writing gets better with time and with practice. You should never assume that you have created the best work of your life. Always strive for something better the next time.
Writing sharpens your brain, when you write you are exercising your brain – finding new words, finding connections between the words, building a story, a narrative.
Writing allows you to express yourself and it brings out your inner most thoughts. Writing works as a self-actualization journey for many. You become more aware of yourself and others around you. You may also become more observant to things around you – counting the steps while climbing, noises when you are travelling, patterns formed by clouds in the sky.
Writing fuels your imagination and makes you a more visual person. One of the tenants of all successful leaders is their ability to visualize the future situations. This is nurtured by reading and writing. The more you try to describe something on paper – the more you will tend to visualize it subconsciously which leads to strengthening one of your core requirement of leadership.
People love reading and they are increasingly becoming aware of power of internet which gives democratization of information to a large extent. This means more potential readers out there to read and enjoy your story.
The writer if interacting with the reader becomes wiser as each reader will have their own unique perspective to your story. They will add to the richness and you usually grow along with the readers.
Most importantly, you have a story to tell. You have characters, feelings,

Why you should stop writing

If you want to be the next bestseller. Writing is challenging, selling is even more difficult. You do not become an overnight success. The road to success is often a crooked one (Read my book and this blog post for more information)
You want to become famous. Again for the reasons given above, there are very few chances you would be known to more than a handful of people for your writing unless you become the next Dan Brown.
You are not able to handle criticism. People will shred your story, make fun of you, may call you names – all this has become easier under the garb of anonymity that internet provides you. If you get offended easily writing is not for you, for even the best of authors have been called a crap author by someone at some point of their career.
You do not want to work hard or regularly. If you do not devote enough time to writing – you will have difficulty improving your writing. Also, the attention span today is too less and the loyalty fickle. If you are not in constant touch with your fan base they may easily forget you especially if you fizzle out before you are established enough.

These are some of my ramblings, what are your thoughts? What should I add to the two lists, any big items I am missing from here?

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Stories of successful men and women have inspired hordes of young students to greater heights. One must learn from the people who have been successful and try to implement their methods. Some of my reader friends tell me that these biographies are nothing but a good read – please remember that it is what you start implementing in your own life that will matter not just what you read and forgot a few days later. It is often said that it you should do an activity for 21 days for it to become a habit. I usually stop after going to the gym for 2 weeks. So if you are going to follow even one piece of advice from each book stick with it for more than a month to reap any benefits in the long term. A piece of caution though: One should not stick to the advice blindly it may or may not work for you as each one of us has to write his own journey.

Now to the actual books – I often advise people to move over Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett. There are hundreds of successful entrepreneurs who have been written about and they all have something for everyone. I have excluded some of the more common ones and also ensured we have diverse background for reading. 

Losing My Virginity by Sir Richard Branson – The man knows how to have fun. He has a larger than life image and is not afraid to speak his mind. He is an eccentric and has made unconventional choices in business and in life. I like this book as it shows the human aspect and not just a corporate slave side of Richard Branson. This book is both motivating as well as entertaining. In a world of conformities dare you ride with this maverick?

Only The Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove – Grove was one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and this book is about his journey in Intel. The book is full of lessons for new age managers – my personal favorite is about strategic infection points. With the rapidly changing environment, the lesson becomes more important today to realize when the rules change suddenly and your industry is changed forever.  This book also gives some pointers to differentiate between noise and signals – though I found that these are easier to decipher when you have the benefit of hindsight.

Start Something That Matters by Blake Mycoskie – Blake created a company which helped others while making money. This man threw away conventional wisdom and started a for profit company to help children. His company is not charity but creates shoes worn by celebrities and is targeted towards high end fashion. I like this book as he talks about the business being something personal. Rather than cold impersonal advises – he talks of staying humble and keeping things simple. I am a big fan of keeping things simple - this is one secret in life which will help you in any situation.

iWoz by Steve Wozniak – Wozniak is the less popular amongst the Steve’s of Apple. He was the driving force behind Macintosh, which has not only changed the technological space but also, how we look at marketing of products. I like the book because Steve for me was an enigma – a hugely private person who opened up about his life – his mistakes, critical decisions and huge wins in his memorial. It also goes on about the plane crash which changed his life forever.

ELON MUSK by Ashlee Vance – The only non auto-biography is this list, this book is about a man who’s best the world is yet to see. I believe that by the rate Tesla and Musk is going he would be in the league of Thomas Edison and James Watt. This book gives you an insight into his life and how he treads where no one else dare go. I like this book as this gives a matter of fact account of Musk – an arrogant alpha male who does not go about pleasing people, but makes his own path. He has been ousted by the boards of two companies – ZIP2 and Paypal, but what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

These are some of my ramblings, what are your thoughts? What books should I add to the list? Have you read a biography which has made a lasting impact on you – please share it in the comments section below. 

Entrepreneurs often fail to take their startups beyond a certain point mostly because they fail to transition to a leader. A leader has to display qualities which at times may seem opposite to the things that had made entrepreneurs successful so far. This may seem counter-intuitive but in corporate world entrepreneurs have a hard time changing. The biggest change needed for a company to grow is to bring about change in the founders. They need to bring a lot of change in their way of working to take their dream to the next level.

A few key traits that they have to focus on are:

Trust: They need to give up control. Period. This is the biggest change they have to grapple with. In the initial stages the founders know everything, take all the major decisions. As the company grows the decision making gets more widespread and the founders have a feeling that they are losing control over their company. They have to fight the urge to take back all the control and keep the decisions to themselves.

 

Walk the talk: Often the entrepreneur bring in outside talent with promises to give them big responsibilities. But when it comes to actually executing work they want to be kept ‘informed’ of all big decisions. Another example is the values and culture of the organisation. Often the founders openly display behaviors which counter the values and culture which they want their employees to embody. All these result in employees getting disillusioned when their leaders do not walk the talk.

 

Patience: In a startup environment things happens at breath-taking speed, as companies mature the pace may feel sluggish. Any entrepreneur must not push his team too much to deliver results. Often we have seen in the mad rush to grow companies’ compromise on quality and their processes. We are seeing this in all ecommerce companies in India be it Flipkart, Snapdeal or Lenskart. They are now concentrating on quality of customers, rather than just the quantity. No more GMV is the Holy Grail but the cost to serve, revenue per FTE are metrics they have started looking at. Entrepreneurs need to learn that they are running a marathon not a sprint.

 

Motivate: Most of the population in the startup are self-motivated people who do not need constant inspiration and motivation. These guys are usually problem solvers who would jump in at any time things seem out of control. Larger organisations have people who are of different demographics some of whom need constant motivation. A leader has to step out of his shell and inspire these people to keep on working.

 

Delegation: This is one skill which most of the entrepreneur lack in hugely. They hesitate to push responsibility done the organisation as they see this as weakening of their control. Entrepreneurs need to understand they will not be hands on and know detail of everything in their company. They will have to hire experts from outside and hold them accountable for delivering. They should not jump at every crisis and start firefighting themselves, instead they should hold people accountable as per their position. This will also instill confidence in the employees and they will start owning their portions. 

These are some of my ramblings, what are your thoughts? What should I add to the list, any big items I am missing from here? Have you ever noticed any trait which entrepreneurs lack but is an important one for leadership – please share it in the comments section below.

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Ever wondered why there are so many leadership courses, workshops ranging from soft skills to behavior training. All of these are based on the premise that leadership is not a genetic quality but can be learnt by anyone. Please note that like other skills once you learn leadership your success will depend on a variety of criteria’s; most important one being how well you implement the learning.

You can be a successful entrepreneur which is toiling on his own and building his empire – but sooner or later you will have to transition to a leader. Becoming a leader requires a few skills that you never worried about as an entrepreneur. In fact if you don’t acquire these skills you will run the risk of ruining the hard work you have done till now.

 

 

People Skills: As an entrepreneur you rarely worried about your employees. In fact you had a small team, which was like family or very close friends. Probably, all of them were co-founders so you never needed to work on your people skills. As your venture grows and your team expands you need to hone your people skills. Nowadays, employees will stick to you only if you provide a conducive environment for them to perform. Hence, this is one skill you will need to work on if you want to be a successful leader.
Communication: Again as a startup you had a small group of people who are were connected and involved in all the activities. As you grow your communication style needs to change. You have to be selective about the information you would be disseminating. You will have to motivate a large number of people. All these need good communication skills to keep your employees engaged.
Delegation: As your organisation grows, there are different jobs which need to be performed. As a startup person you are attuned to handle all the jobs yourself, get into details of each and every aspect of the job. But now as a leader there will be more things that need your attention and less and lesser time. You need to master the art of delegation where you have to assign work to those below you, while ensuring that they complete the job. Beware of the micro-managing trap into which a lot of entrepreneurs fall as they are not able to give up control.
Integrity: As an entrepreneur you might have cut corners to achieve the desired outcome, but now as a leader you need to be a role model. You have to practice integrity both personal and professional life as then only you will come across as genuine otherwise you will be looked on as a fraud. The culture of an organisation is often the reflection of its leader’s behavior.
Team Work: Entrepreneurship is always about executing your ideas, achieving your dreams, but once you grow from a startup to a larger organisation, you need to manage multiple teams. Leadership is more about ensuring that all teams under you succeed, as your success is dependent of their success. You need a more team based approach.

 

These are some of my ramblings, what are your thoughts? What should I add to the lists, any big items I am missing from here?

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I firmly believe sales is the important skill you must learn in your life. Even if you never plan to take a sales position in your life – you will have to continuously sell a lot of things including your skills. Learning about sales gives you an upper hand over people who rely on instincts to navigate through life as you can easily sell your ideas to people.

I have listed five books below which have implications for people beyond the ‘sales’ position. Read these even if you don't intend to make a career in sales as this is one skill which will help you no matter what you do in your life. 

 

 

 

Predictable Revenue Are you the person in your team who has to do tons of cold calls to generate the leads. Do you need to increase the hit rate of your cold calls? Read this book to understand how you can make your calls go from cold to warm. This even have practical tools such as email templates you could use.

Predictably Irrational Sales is nothing but a ping-pong between the salesman and the prospect.  This is an amazing book on the psychology of the decisions we take – and be prepared to be surprised by what you read. The quicker you understand the perspective of the prospect the quicker you can close the sale. An absolute gem this book is the Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics of sales.

Give and Take  This is one of the books which teaches you what every religion tries to teach you – humility. The book proposes that one of the most basic tenants we forget is that sales is a two way process and in life you need to give, before thinking of receiving something. It lays out evidence wrapped in beautiful stories of hugely successful people. This is a book which has succeeded to show up in most must read list for sales and business.

The Psychology of Selling Another book on the psychology of selling. It is interesting that while at work we often forget about the human element. We sell to human beings and not to robots, and this book talks about the fundamental motivations of both buyers and sellers. Deeply insightful.

The 4-Hour Work Week Last but not the least, a life altering book. This book will change the way you look at work. This book is full of practical and implementable tools for hiving off your work and simplify your life. This contains real world people like you and me and studies what they have done in order to change their lives. Full of life hacks to concentrate on things which really deserve your attention.

This is my list? Have I missed out any important book which you thought has changed your perspective? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

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The Winner of the April - May Quiz are:

a) Vishaal Pathak

b) Sunaina Kapoor

c) Neha

Congratulations to all the winners.

 

Keep visiting here for more such fun contests and prizes.