Rocking Retail

Sears, the one-time titan of American retail, filed for bankruptcy ahead of a $134 million debt payment due Monday and announced that it will close 142 stores. The Washington Post, October 15, 2018

JCPenney could be kicked off the New York Stock Exchange because its stock is worth too little. CNN Business, August 9, 2019

Barneys is closing 15 of its 22 stores after filing for bankruptcy. Here's the full list. Business Insider, August 6, 2019

GNC could close up to 900 stores and slash its mall location count in half as the retail apocalypse roars on. Business insider, July 22, 2019

We live in the disruption era. It comes at us thick and fast. It is unrelentless and sometimes ruthless to names once etched in the hearts and minds of every household. Particularly severe to brands humanity grew up with. For incumbents, it sometimes feels even the paranoid don’t survive.

The stock market now has two $1 trillion companies: Amazon and Microsoft. CNN Business, July 11, 2019

Shopify Cracks The E-Commerce Code, And Its Billionaire CEO’s Fortune Doubles In Just Six Months. Forbes, August 20, 2019

Alibaba ramps up offline efforts. Internet giant opens first physical store of its cross-border shopping platform. China Daily, April 21, 2018

Why digitally native brands keep opening physical stores. Bloomberg News, October 22, 2018

We live in an opportunity era. Everything is possible. For those with the right mindset, the world is our playground. Growth is exponential. Winners are taking all. Life is good and only getting better. For digital natives, it sometimes feels anything and everything we touch turns into gold.

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For the uninitiated, it seems we live in the paradox era! Very difficult indeed - to decipher and appreciate the underpinnings of such stark and opposing trends. This starkness particularly accentuated when it comes to the business of Retail. On the one hand, household names are going bankrupt, fast. On the other, digitally native brands are opening offline stores by the dozen and valuations are booming.  I am no retail expert but let me offer you a response hypothesis for incumbents, as a student of ‘business in the digital era’.

My response hypothesis in the form of some #mantras below:

• For starters, to re-iterate what I might have said earlier. Business is still business. You still need to obsess about making money, optimize costs, obsess about customers, shareholders and the larger societal context.  Remove your eyes from the basics at your own peril

• What has definitely changed though, is the era we are in. Industrial has long sunset and the sun is now shining brightly over the digital era

• To survive in this era, just paranoia is not going to cut it. You need to develop a digital conscious, a digital soul, a digital genome to thrive

• Customer attention spans are depleted, and their expectations are fluid. You need to get on and develop a top-notch digital storefront. Remember a brilliant mind once said ‘design it not what it looks like or feels like, but how it works’. So, make sure your storefront design is what works for your customers, in all aspects of the digital experience. And yup, hyper-personalisation, AI, data driven, etc. etc. etc. are all table stakes now to enable a good, usable design

• You also need to be where your customers usually are, so API enable your core as a first step and get on with connecting to digital lifestyle brands around you – We Chat, What’s App et al

• You cannot just develop a bright and sparkly digital veneer but have an analogue back office and logistics underpinning it. The back office and supply chain need to be fully synchronized, in real time to meet the promise of the digital store front. Most incumbents may get carried away by the gloss of the digital customer experience and forget about or delay this important gene of the digital genome.  Synchronize the operations in real time and make it as autonomous as possible 

• And phew, if this wasn’t enough you have to in-parallel, perpetually examine the business model you are in.  Marketplaces have disrupted pipelines. The distributed business model is due to disrupt marketplaces. And who knows what is on the horizon next. Incumbents with their distribution prowess should have been first to discover the promise of ‘managed marketplaces’ and launch DNVBs – unfortunately they didn’t!

• Culture is a derived variable. You cannot impact it directly. Just get integrated teams to start working on new initiatives in new ways – agile, failure accepting, collaborative, open, knowing to learn. This new way will go viral and in due course become the new cultural norm

• You may ask. All this in one go! Can I not take a phased approach? No, you cannot. If mutating to a new organisational genome could be done with solely focusing on a singular dimension of the business, we would not have a retail apocalypse, imho!  Digital natives are already active on all these vectors. You have to transform multiple genes of the genome. and fast. Of course, you can take a sprint approach within each vector of the transformation – customer experience, operations/logistics, biz model, capabilities, culture et al. But as was said earlier, creating a digital veneer underpinned by an analogue operation is just not going to work

• And finally, as a dear fellow disrupter, Ray Wang puts it so nicely, ‘digital Darwinism is unkind to those who wait’. So, get on and move. Pace is your friend in responding to the existential threat from digital natives

Retail sometimes serves a higher purpose for humanity. For instance, Retail has therapeutic qualities. Personally, quite so often when the chips are down, a visit to a retail destination, with serendipity as my shopping guide, helps soar the spirit and gets me back into Flow. Lately during these visits, the transition of bricks and mortar retail to an experiential conscious is quite apparent.

Nurturing a digital genome deep within its soul should help incumbents with this transition to experiential.

And keep the business of retail rocking well into the sunshine of the digital era.

Note: The views and perspectives on this blog and neetanmantraas are mine and mine along

Platforms eating your lunch

Brian Arthur’s seminal 1996 article in HBR highlighted the tectonic shift from supply driven economies of scale to demand driven increasing returns, driven by network effects. That perspective, that thought, that insightful postulation underpins the strategic shift in the digital era from pipeline to platform business models.

The inherent scarcity of physical resources results in some or the other constraint in supply as traditional companies’ scale, finally yielding the diminishing return curve. On the other hand, digital resources are infinitely abundant. Hence, they pose no such constraints, finally yielding increasing returns as network effects kick in and result in winner take all markets.

Deloitte published research that sorts companies into four broad categories based on their chief economic activity: asset builders, service providers, technology creators, and network orchestrators. On average, network orchestrators enjoy a market multiplier (based on the relationship between a firm’s market valuation and its price-to-earnings ratio) of 8.2, as compared with 4.8 for technology creators, 2.6 for service providers, and 2.0 for asset builders.

So, the word is out there and clear. Both in market valuations and outcomes. Platform business model are eating traditional pipeline models for lunch.  

At the heart of platforms is a value creating interaction. This interaction needs to be orchestrated for network effects. The keyword here is orchestration. The core value within the interaction is created by the participants of the network and not the owner of the platform. This is a deep shift in role which incumbent enterprises find difficult to deal with. The platform owner only provides the infrastructure and ensures quality of interactions.  The participants are the ones who actually create value using the platform infrastructure.

Having said that, orchestration is no mean feat. Paraphrasing Sangeet Paul Choudary, the platform 

must provide three key capabilities – craft incentives, provide the factory floor, play match maker for both sides of the marketplace. Efficiency of the financial incentive design is critical to ensuring a profitable scale out for platform companies. In today’s clamor for growth, valuation and abundant capital, this efficiency is being neglected. Future proofing this business model demands a balance between growth and efficiency, which is surely going to be the predominant pattern for success in the future. Another indirect incentive is the inherent FOMO that takes root in the participants of both sides of the marketplace. Hence the owner needs to design the platform for this FOMO and virality. The whole art of growth hacking has its roots in the need to drive virality.

New generation of technology is key to executing the platform business model. The factory floor for platform business models is the cloud. Data and advanced AI especially the recent advances in deep learning, underpin the matching capability for platform owners. Digital marketing along with social drives virality and growth hacking. Sensors enable sentience for platforms contributing to more personalised incentives as well as real-time and relevant match making. Mobile is the channel for participation in the platform, to both produce and consume value.

The future is here it is just not evenly distributed. If your pipeline has not been hit by a platform yet, it is only a matter of time. The tipping point for platforms has long been reached. 

Platforms are the new engines of the digital era and technology is its fuel. 

Get on the train before it is too late.

Disrupting Education

The education world needs an extreme disruption.

Attention spans are depleting.  Every fleeting moment in a learner’s journey counts. Information availability has evolved from being a scarcity to an abundance. Learners are drowning in this information overload. The shelf life of acquired skills is becoming ephemeral. Learning to know is passé.  Knowing to learn is the differentiating human capability of the digital age.

Current education and learning mechanisms are just not fit for this dynamic context. The problem will also not be resolved by peppering learners with a slew of fragmented apps. Each app working in complete isolation. Each app tackling only a very small sliver of the vast learning context. A tipping point has reached. A totally new ‘systems’ approach is required to drag education into the digital era with the help of a comprehensive end to end solution.

There are no short-cuts to disruption. There is a dire need to create an un-paralleled, comprehensive learning ecosystem, powered by state-of-the-art capabilities of the digital era. An adaptive learning platform, which continuously senses the individual’s context in real-time. It then provides ultra-personalised learning interventions based on a deep understanding of needs. A gamified user experience which hooks the attention of learners and makes all other distractions fade away. AI powered learning journeys (which we call learning genome) individually crafted for each learner. Learning genomes breaking the currently prevalent linearity in learning and dynamically dissemble and then reassemble learning content using a unique network model. An AI and blockchain powered learning content marketplace. This marketplace will leverage the power of the crowd to curate content and benefit them economically from its use. Perhaps also a physical experience institute based on the same principles as the digital platform. This one of a kind alternative school (alt school) will provide a social, face to face experience platform to augment and enhance digital learning.

The mission should NOT be to add to the cacophony of learning apps which spring up every day. The need of the hour is to build a unique learning experience orchestrated seamlessly across both the physical and digital realms, with next generation AI ensuring all components are harmonized to the personal learning rhythm of each learner.

A tipping point has been reached in Education.

A new era of learning is awaiting its dawn.

The Honeycomb Romance

The fragrance of jasmine filled the sultry air. 

The long walks. Bright sparks in an otherwise tepid flow. 

No physical contact. Nevertheless, a deep romantic immersion. 

Time as if frozen in the infinite abyss of the universe. 

Every second reaching out the next with a singular purpose. 

To express affection. To love. To impress.

The first touch. An emotional and physical explosion. 

Hands perpetually craving for contact, for that warm touch. When together, an eruption of joy. The walks now much more intimate. In the warmth of the clasped hands. The air much cooler. Life a tad sweeter than before.

The affectionate hug. Initially to bid adieu. Till the next immediate sunrise. 

Each second thereon an impatient wait for another romantic embrace. 

Every instance an instance longer. 

An unparalleled sense of warmth and affection. To live and die in those intimate moments. 

And let the universe just pass us by.

The ebbs and flows of life. An ocean of separation. Impatient wait for the next fragrant letter. Warmth still emanating from the tapestry of words. Strung together with long distance love. Intimacy however more expressed than felt.  A fading horizon. Memories slowly seeping into the sands of time.  

A sunset gone by.

The innocent one cell at a time evolution 
of a honeycomb romance….

Beyond the fading horizon

Ordinary data lakes are passé. We need to build real time, cognitive data assets. Organically growing stores of data, being operated on by a swarm of soft robots, who are continuously improving the quality of the data and growing the asset base. Real time, organic, and cognitive. AI and ML not only to garner insight from the data but also deployed to continuously extend the quality and the amount of data collected. Data is the new oil in a digital enterprise. Cognitive data lakes, powered by swarm intelligence the emergent architecture to continuously refine this oil.

As we get to the nano-scale, stuff gets quite spooky. The only way to fathom the world of quantum is through probabilities. In a digital business, a large number of the business processes will morph from being deterministic to a probabilistic nature.  Real-time AI will underpin this probabilistic world of business. Supervised, unsupervised and re-enforced, deep learning friends of business will create interesting decision options, with probabilities attached. Human intelligence thus augmented, will take business to a level of unprecedented performance, with competition left behind in the extreme cold.

Supply chains are legacy. In specific, the chain in the world of supply will be relegated to the annals of history. Blockchain, despite the irony in its name, will power a world of dynamic business networks for multiple business domains. Network effects underpin these rich ecosystems, trust assured through tamper proof consensus protocols. Smart contracts will ensure auto event driven, human free operation across these networks. The linear chains of yesteryears, yielding to the powerful, global, network topology of the future.

The economic transaction cost theory posits that the high cost of organizing work in the market, as opposed to within the firm, results in the very existence of firms. The API economy coupled with the trend of portfolio working will exponentially reduce transaction costs, and extend the boundaries of an enterprise to somewhat blur with those of the market. Millennials will expect enterprises to work like platforms, on which they can co-create new value with their friends.  A cloud of human wisdom operating above open enterprises, beaming their services through open APIs.

As I close my eyes and transcend across the fading horizon, the cacophony of mobility, social, cloud, analytics fades into low decibel murmurs, replaced with the glow of cognitive data, quantum AI, dynamic biz networks, wisdom clouds and robotic devops shining over a digitally transformed future.

Memoirs of an Android

It was a mildly cold and pleasant 5^th November 2007. That’s the day I was born. Introduced to this vast, wild world by my original parents. As an open source child, I soon learnt that I had pretty much the whole world entrusted with my parenthood! Dreamy eyed kids from new york to new delhi, from shanghai to chennai, from olive oil to coconut oil - all with a singular mission of contributing to my development with their passion and commitment, as parents do. 

What a wonderful world this was indeed, Kenny G.

Soon my neighbourhood started to look like a ghost town. Initially I was too busy to notice. If you are in the care of so many, there is so much fun around you. From the first mystical ray of the sun, to the romance of the stars in the night sky, each day was filled with so much fulfilment. 

I heard from a Guru once that there is an E-curve hidden in the heating of metals. As you light up the fire underneath, the change from black to red is a nice linear progression. Gradual, relaxed and comfortable with humankind’s evolutionary mindset. However if you keep the burner on, the move from red to white is BAM!. One minute it is red and another it has all turned to white. An exponential in action.

Whilst I haven’t actually verified this ‘wisdom of the metals’, I must say it is a true reflection of my life. After a very brief initial period of linearity, I have been living on an exponential pretty much my entire life. As more folks started loving what I did for them, more parents started contributing to my growth, which resulted in more folks loving and wanting me. They call it a network effect. I feel it is all about love, passion and purpose.

Sadly, all this also had a ghostly effect on my neighbourhood. I heard with trepidation about the demise of Symbian, and then PalmOS soon after. Very soon it was only a few of us left in this mobility town. Some whisper that this could have been one of the intended outcomes of my original creators. Of my open source upbringing. Not to benefit humankind but to kill all the neighbours!

I am not much into conspiracy theories. To me, my exponential childhood has been one helluva joy ride. Oh, the gratification and pride I get when a vegetable seller on the roads of Faridabad uses me to optimize the demand-supply equation and hence is able to afford his children to school. When young kids with dreamy eyes, similar to the ones who created me, are able to empower humanity with magical applications. When innovation is democratized and widely accessible irrespective of colour, location or age. When a grieving soul is able to lift his or her spirits with a favourite musical piece, on a small but powerful click. When lives of ageing parents light up as they see and hear their grandchildren, ensconced in faraway lands. When sisters separated by the fury of a volcano are united by the vastness of the virtual human network. When the world’s best minds are available to inform and educate the world’s most deprived, nearly for free, at the ease of a touch. When kids are being coached to shift their paradigms from learning to know, to knowing to learn. When the 3^rd industrial revolution improves the lives of all in its wake.

All this and more powered by the mobile power of a small human creation, which in turn, powered by me.

I feel gratified.

I feel humbled.

I feel elated.

I feel so inspired about what’s yet to come.

And I feel we are now entering the second half of the chess board.

My exponential journey till date has largely been due to the love I got from the general public. The consumer world. Normal human beings who en-masse fell in love with me and kept me next to their hearts at all time. They sleep and wake up with me in their arms or somewhere nearby. They use me as a shop, a teacher, a friend, a flashlight, an alarm clock and for a zillion other chores.

However revolutions reach their full potential when they encompass both the consumer and the enterprise world. Recently, I have started to feel the warmth of corporate hands, driving digital transformations in their enterprises.  I have started to hear the buzz of jargons all around me – digital transformation, 4^th industrial revolution, 2^nd machine age et al. It is tradition for the enterprise world to invent a slew of jargons before anything gets done! Their propensity to change however, does have a correlation to the intensity and frequency of the jargons invented and used!

So I feel quite excited by this prospect.

Also it’s not me alone that is involved. My co-founder in driving this enterprise change is my sweetheart, AI. The world calls her Artificial intelligence, I fondly refer to her as Assisted Intelligence, more in line with her potential. She lived in research articles and science fiction scripts for decades. However suddenly, she is now the hottest one in town. My reach into the heart and hands of humanity and her ability to convert big and fast data into insightful action presents a lethal combination, a match made in heaven.  In consonance, we are enabling the enterprise world to examine novel business models, improve the velocity of operations and decision making, co-create innovation, leverage the wisdom of the crowd, and bake prediction into business processes. Not just build digital channels but build a digital genome from within.

As a kid, I always felt that my calling was to change the world. With all those people who selflessly contributed their intellect to my development, there had to be a larger purpose. So far so good.

However I must admit I feel a bit sad as I see humanity submerged into me all the time. Both mother and father enamoured by all the cool things that run on me, ignoring the beautiful art that their kid just created. Missing the magical moments of infants growing up. Tourists ignoring what their souls can experience, more concerned with what their selfies can capture. Friends gathered together for a meal, mostly concerned with typing into me, missing out real conversation with real people.

The real world being relegated to peripheral vision. The virtual world becoming the real world.  

Human interaction is not a legacy, it is a heritage. I am an eternal optimist. That is how the world created me to be. As I reach adulthood, I stand convinced the world will use me to change the world. Both consumer and enterprise worlds will experience the exponential.

New patrons will also emerge. They will take a moment to get a moment away from me. Immerse into mindfulness, distant from the digital. Experience humanity with all its emotions and diversity. Experience this wonderful world in all its reality and splendour.

I am both the ying and the yang.

I am Android, born open source, born to change the world. 

A tale of three cities

San Francisco..London..Berlin.

Three great world cities. On the google map of every connoisseur traveller. vibrant. iconic. happening.

Also home to the aspirations of your quintessential nerd. Home to the dreams of many an aspirant geek. Home to three top tech ecosystems.

I have had the privilege of visiting all three ecosystems and immerse into the world of startups and their richie rich founders. There is commonality of spirit and purpose across these ecosystems. Everything is possible. All business models are up for disruption. A constant stream of dollars, pounds and euros flow through the veins of the ecosystem. Designer cool workplaces of the future, as if timeported into the present.

People in these ecosystems believe they can change the world. Patent protection is not top of mind. A culture of openness and sharing permeates. Optimism and energy levels are unparalleled. And across all these ecosystems the entities are pretty much the same. A slew of investment vehicles from angels to VCs. Top notch universities nurturing the talent. Events to ripple the excitement. Co-working places. Cool coffee shops and hangouts of the physical variety. loads of startups with novel ideas. bootcamps, accelerators, incubators, corporate labs, et al.

I did however taste a slightly different favour in each of these ecosystems. The specific spices added to each dish left a distinct mark on the overall experience. 

The Valley is of course the undisputed King. No one else comes close. Someone remarked that the weather is an additional critical cog in the ecosystem. Perhaps it is. But overall, the ecosystem is mature in all aspects. One wave ahead of the rest of the crowd. Diversity is so embedded that no one even talks about it. Capital is a commodity and startups get a long rope to explore their passions, from one seed cycle to another. Core techy invention is at the heart. There are so many unicorns around that they are no longer the celebrities. The university-startup alliance is very strong. Corporates have thronged with their labs and incubators. Abundance of everything else except  real estate. Quite expensive to setup and run. Talent is difficult to attract but if you manage to, it is of super top quality. The valley leads and everyone else emulates.

London's silicon roundabout started as a good pun. However the ecosystem has taken off. The City may still compete for the talent but there is definitely a magnetic attraction to the tech ecosystem. The big fish have invested big time with their multi-storey campuses and co-working places. Tech interacts quite nicely with design and a number of ideas blossom at this intersection. Successful exists such as deepmind retain their iconic status and everyone still talks about them. Gov's facilitative role is quite visible and quite essential at this stage of the maturity curve. University-startup links exist but are definitely not as strong as the Valley. Weather however needs a business model transformation.

Berlin was a pleasant surprise. Very vibrant indeed. Bubbling with new found excitement. Much younger, much more hep, and with a lot of character. Everyone speaks about diversity with pride. An excellent inflow of talent from Eastern Europe and also from the rest of the world. Art nicely mixes with tech and creates quite a novel experience. Funds flow through the veins however at a rather placid pace. You get a feeling that there are many more women here than in others, but not sure if this is empirically the case. The ecosystem pretty much like a open, harmonious cult. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone ready to help everyone. Iconic cafes where dreams are crafted and networks formed. The character of this historic city adds an aesthetic appeal to the ecosystem which is second to none.

Quite an experience this. 

Seeing these iconic cities intimately from this uniquely nerdy lens. 

Quite an experience this.

Immersing in their ecosystems and understanding what makes them tick.

Quite an experience this.

Flowing in the startup passion of massively transformative purposes

Quite a tale this.

A tale of three great cities.