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….