business – Pertinent Observations

George Mallory and Metrics

It is not really known if George Mallory actually summited the Everest in 1924 – he died on that climb, and his body was only found in 1999 or so. It wasn’t his first attempt at scaling the Everest, and at 37, some people thought he was too old to do so.

There is this popular story about Mallory that after one of his earlier attempts at scaling the Everest, someone asked him why he wanted to climb the peak. “Because it’s there”, he replied.

George Mallory (extreme left) and companions

In the sense of adventure sport, that’s a noble intention to have. That you want to do something just because it is possible to do it is awesome, and can inspire others. However, one problem with taking quotes from something like adventure sport, and then translating it to business (it’s rather common to get sportspeople to give “inspirational lectures” to business people) is that the entire context gets lost, and the concept loses relevance.

Take Mallory’s “because it’s there” for example. And think about it in the context of corporate metrics. “Because it’s there” is possibly the worst reason to have a metric in place (or should we say “because it can be measured?”). In fact, if you think about it, a lot of metrics exist simply because it is possible to measure them. And usually, unless there is some strong context to it, the metric itself is meaningless.

For example, let’s say we can measure N features of a particular entity (take N = 4, and the features as length, breadth, height and weight, for example). There will be N! was in which these metrics can be combined, and if you take all possible arithmetic operations, the number of metrics you can produce from these basic N metrics is insane. And you can keep taking differences and products and ratios ad infinitum, so with a small number of measurements, the number of metrics you can produce is infinite (both literally and figuratively). And most of them don’t make sense.

That doesn’t normally dissuade our corporate “measurer”. That something can be measured, that “it’s there”, is sometimes enough reason to measure something. And soon enough, before you know it, Goodhart’s Law would have taken over, and that metric would have become a target for some poor manager somewhere (and of course, soon ceases to be a metric itself). And circular logic starts from there.

That something can be measured, even if it can be measured highly accurately, doesn’t make it a good metric.

So what do we do about it? If you are in a job that requires you to construct or design or make metrics, how can you avoid the “George Mallory trap”?

Long back when I used to take lectures on logical fallacies, I would have this bit on not mistaking correlation for causation. “Abandon your numbers and look for logic”, I would say. “See if the pattern you are looking at makes intuitive sense”.

I guess it is the same for metrics. It is all well to describe a metric using arithmetic. However, can you simply explain it in natural language, and can the listener easily understand what you are saying? And more importantly, does that make intuitive sense?

It might be fashionable nowadays to come up with complicated metrics (I do that all the time), in the hope that it will offer incremental benefit over something simpler, but more often than not the difficulty in understanding it makes the additional benefit moot. It is like machine learning, actually, where sometimes adding features can improve the apparent accuracy of the model, while you’re making it worse by overfitting.

So, remember that lessons from adventure sport don’t translate well to business. “Because it’s there” / “because it can be measured” is absolutely NO REASON to define a metric.

Recruitment and diversity

This post has potential to become controversial and is related to my work, so I need to explicitly state upfront that all opinions here are absolutely my own and do not, in any way, reflect those of my employers or colleagues or anyone else I’m associated with.

I run a rather diverse team. Until my team grew inorganically two months back (I was given more responsibility), there were eight of us in the team. Each of us have masters degrees (ok we’re not diverse in that respect). Sixteen degrees / diplomas in total. And from sixteen different colleges / universities. The team’s masters degrees are in at least four disjoint disciplines.

I have built this part of my team ground up. And have made absolutely made no attempt to explicitly foster diversity in my team. Yet, I have a rather diverse team. You might think it is on accident. You might find weird axes on which the team is not diverse at all (masters degrees is one). I simply think it is because there was no other way.

I like to think that I have fairly high standards when it comes to hiring. Based on the post-interview conversations I have had with my team members, these standards have percolated to them as well. This means we have a rather tough task hiring. This means very few people even qualify to be hired by my team. Earlier this year I asked for a bigger hiring budget. “Let’s see if you can exhaust what you’ve been given, and then we can talk”, I was told. The person who told me this was not being sarcastic – he was simply aware of my demand-supply imbalance.

Essentially, in terms of hiring I face such a steep demand-supply imbalance that even if I wanted to, it would be absolutely impossible for me to discriminate while hiring, either positively or negatively.

If I want to hire less of a certain kind of profile (whatever that profile is), I would simply be letting go of qualified candidates. Given how long it takes to find each candidate in general, imagine how much longer it would take to find candidates if I were to only look at a subset of applicants (to prefer a category I want more of in my team). Any kind of discrimination (apart from things critical to the job such as knowledge of mathematics and logic and probability and statistics, and communication) would simply mean I’m shooting myself in the foot.

Not all jobs, however, are like this. In fact, a large majority of jobs in the world are of the type where you don’t need a particularly rare combination of skills. This means potential supply (assuming you are paying decently, treating employees decently, etc.) far exceeds demand.

When you’re operating in this kind of a market, cost of discrimination (either positive or negative) is rather low. If you were to rank all potential candidates, picking up number 25 instead of number 20 is not going to leave you all that worse off. And so you can start discriminating on axes that are orthogonal to what is required to do the job. And that way you can work towards a particular set of “diversity (or lack of it) targets”.

Given that a large number of jobs (not weighted by pay) belong to this category, the general discourse is that if you don’t have a diverse team it is because you are discriminating in a particular manner. What people don’t realise is that it is pretty impossible do discriminate in some cases.

All that said, I still stand by my 2015 post on “axes on diversity“. Any externally visible axis of diversity – race / colour / gender / sex / sexuality – is likely to diminish diversity in thought. And – again this is my personal opinion – I value diversity in thought and approach much more than the visible sources of diversity.

Management watch

About a year back, a few months after I had started my current job, I was working late into the evening. I was sitting on the sofa with my laptop when my wife said, “you cannot call yourself senior management if you work like this”.

“What do you mean”, I asked.

“If you are truly senior management, you should not be using your computer after normal work hours. You should be doing everything using your phone. Do you remember, six months into my job at <@#R@#$@@>, I would work late into the night, but only with my phone?”, she countered.

I had to admit this was a good point. More practically, in terms of work stuff, I started thinking about making dashboards and reports more mobile-friendly. I started questioning interactive dashboards – if they are aimed at top management, the latter largely see the stuff on their phones, so interactivity is full of fat fingers.

Of course, the nature of my job means that I can never truly be senior management by this metric – I’m generally too hands on to be able to work exclusively on my phone. However, that hasn’t stopped me from evangelising this theory of my wife. The theory itself is strong enough.

Recently I’d met a former client. He was using an iPad as a work “laptop”. I told him the theory and that he has truly arrived. He said he had been given a choice of an iPad and a Surface – basically his company has internalised how senior management ought to be treated.

While I can never be senior management by this metric, I’m in a way trying to leapfrog it. Recently I got myself an Apple Watch. Apart from other things, it gives me notifications for all my messages, and I can reply using the watch as well. And this is where the magic begins.

For starters, Apple offers this standard set of templatised replies you can use. Now, Apple being Apple (and not Google), these replies are not customised to the message that you get. It drives me nuts that there is an “OK” and a “Sure!” and a “No” but no “Yes”. If this template doesn’t work for you, you can actually type a message on the watch itself. My fingers are fat (and I wear my watch on my dominant hand), so this is not so useful for me. However, there is also a voice typing mode, and that is rather good. And that is where things get real.

The other day, I shut work early and went off for a walk (I like doing that). My team had not shut their work though, and they kept bombarding me with messages. And that is when I realised I could actually read their messages and REPLY TO THEM using my watch. Most of the messages were the template monosyllables. Sometimes I spoke into my watch (without breaking my stride), and let Apple’s excellent voice-to-text do the rest.

And so I have this new theory, which is an extension of my wife’s theory. The next level of senior management is to be able to get all your work done simply using your watch – not even needing your phone. Of course, limitations exist – only a few lines of text are shown for each email, and images don’t load, but it is only a matter of time before watches solve for this.

But then, I’ve discovered one massive downside of replying to messages using my watch – the tone. The template monosyllables are all come across as rude (or curt). And the voice-to-text means you don’t really have your filter on while typing, and you end up “writing as you would speak”, and that can’t be great as well.

The other day I was walking from our Michaelpalya office to our Binnamangala office, when I was bombarded with messages from someone. And without breaking my stride I replied to all the messages, speaking into my watch. I “wrote” as I would speak (complete with swearwords), and that turned out to be an incredibly rude set of messages I ended up sending (I apologised later that day when I saw what I’d “written” on my phone later).

So leapfrogging and trying to act too cool can sometimes come at a price.

3 x 4 = 6 x 2

I’ll get to the “weird” title of this post soon.

Over at The Paper, which Suprio Guha Thakurta and I have been writing for two months now, one of our ongoing themes (in the context of the pandemic) is that “people will continue to do the same things, but do them in a different way”. We have corollaries to this and all that.

Here is one corollary that is suited more for this blog than it is to The Paper. Basically, when people do things in a different way, they do more of and less of certain smaller things, and this more and less balance out (that explains the title). OK I don’t think you would have understood any of that so let me clarify with some examples.

People are going to commute less (more working from home, less going out and all that), but when they commute, they are far more likely to use cars than using public transport. So the amount of traffic on the road remains a constant.

There will be far fewer “casual restaurant visits”, so when people want to go out to eat, they want to make sure it counts. So they go to really nice places. The “mass luxury” mid-tier places might lose out.

There will be fewer guests at weddings, since in some places the law mandates that now, and people won’t want to go to very crowded events. However, since the number of guests is going to be smaller, people can afford more lavish weddings “per guest”. So they’ll book fancier (if smaller) halls than they would earlier. Fancier (if fewer) meals. Put up guests in hotels rather than in crowded choultries.

In all this there will be winners and losers. The wedding caterer who charges per guest is a loser. The guy supplying the more fancy stuff (or the hotel guy) might be the winner. The large wedding hall guy is a loser. The fancy small hall guy is a winner.

And so on and so forth.

So this post was triggered by two things I saw during a walk yesterday. I first passed by a small-ish (but nice) hall that used to be used for small functions back in the day. It was hosting a wedding yesterday, and the few people who were there seemed rather well dressed up. Far better dressed than people dress for weddings in Bangalore.

Two minutes later, I paused while crossing the road to make way for a bus, and started thinking about when the next time would be when I would take public transport. And then decided to write this.

Fulfilling needs

We’re already in that part of the crisis where people are making predictions on how the world is going to change after the crisis. In fact, using my personal example, we’ve been in this part of the crisis for a long time now. So here I come with more predictions.

There’s a mailing list I’m part of where we’re talking about how we’ll live our lives once the crisis is over. A large number of responses there are about how they won’t ever visit restaurants or cafes, or watch a movie in a theatre, or take public transport, or travel for business, for a very very long time.

While it’s easy to say this, the thing with each of these supposedly dispensable activities is that they each serve a particular purpose, or set of purposes. And unless people are able to fulfil these needs that these activities serve with near-equal substitutes, I don’t know if these activities will decline by as much as people are talking about.

Let’s start with restaurants and cafes. One purpose they serve is to serve food, and one easy substitute for that is to take the food away and consume it at home. However, that’s not their only purpose. For example, they also provide a location to consume the food. If you think of restaurants that mostly survive because working people have their midday lunch there, the place they offer for consuming the food is as important as the food itself.

Then, restaurants and cafes also serve as venues to meet people. In fact, more than half my eating (and drinking) out over the last few years has been on account of meeting someone. If you don’t want to go to a restaurant or cafe to meet someone (because you might catch the virus), what’s the alternative?

There’s a certain set of people we might be inclined to meet at home (or office), but there’s a large section of people you’re simply not comfortable enough with to meet at a personal location, and a “third place” surely helps (also now we’ll have a higher bar on people we’ll invite home or to offices). If restaurants and cafes are going to be taboo, what kind of safe “third places” can emerge?

Then there is the issue of the office. For six to eight months before the pandemic hit, I kept thinking about getting myself an office, perhaps a co-working space, so that I could separate out my work and personal lives. NED meant I didn’t execute on that plan. However, the need for an office remains.

Now there’s greater doubt on the kind of office space I’ll get. Coworking spaces (at least shared desks) are out of question. This also means that coffee shops doubling up as “computer classes” aren’t feasible any more. I hate open offices as well. Maybe I have to either stick to home or go for a private office someplace.

As for business travel – they’ve been a great costly signal. For example, there had been some clients who I’d been utterly unable to catch over the phone. One trip to their city, and they enthusiastically gave appointments, and one hour meetings did far more than multiple messages or emails or phone calls could have done. Essentially by indicating that I was willing to take a plane to meet them, I signalled that I was serious about getting things done, and that got things moving.

In the future, business travel will “become more costly”. While that will still serve the purpose of “extremely costly signalling”, we will need a new substitute for “moderately costly signalling”.

And so forth. What we will see in the course of the next few months is that we will discover that a lot of our activities had purposes that we hadn’t thought of. And as we discover these purposes one by one, we are likely to change our behaviours in ways that will surprise us. It is too early to say which sectors or industries will benefit from this.

Evolution of sports broadcasting

I had a pleasant surprise yesterday morning when I was watching the highlights of Liverpool’s 4-0 victory at Leicester. The picture quality suddenly looked better. The production aesthetics in the first few seconds (before coverage of the actual match began) looked “American”. I doubted myself for a minute if this was actually English football I was watching.

And then I remembered that the pictures for this game came from Amazon Prime. The streaming service had got rights to broadcast two full rounds of Premier League games this season, making a small chink in the duopoly of Sky Sports and BT Sport.

Traditional media wasn’t too impressed by it. Streaming necessarily meant a small delay in broadcast, and that made it less exciting for some viewers. The Guardian predictably made a noise about the “corporate takeover” with Amazon’s entry. From all the reports I read (mostly across the Guardian and the Athletic), commentators seemed intent on picking holes in Amazon’s performance.

That said, the new broadcaster also brought a fresh production aesthetic. While there were the inevitable teething problems (I must confess I didn’t watch these games live – being midweek evening games, they were very late night in India), Amazon for sure brought some new ideas into the broadcast.

Just like Fox Sports had done when it had done a big launch into NFL broadcasting in the early 90s. Read this oral history of that episode. It’s rather fantastic. Among the “innovations” that Fox Sports brought into American broadcasting (based on its sports broadcast in Australia, primarily) was this box at the corner showing the time and the live score. The thing wasn’t initially well received, but is now a fixture.

For evolution to happen, you need sex. And that means mixing things up, in ways they weren’t mixed before. If we were all the children of a super-god and a super-goddess, we would all be pretty much the same since the amount of “innovation” that could happen would be limited. And things would be boring, and static. Complex forms such as human beings could have never happened.

It is similar in business, and sports broadcasting, as well. When you have the same channels covering the same sports, they get into well-set local optima, and nothing new is tried. There is no necessity for improvement in that sense.

When new players comes in, preferably from another market, however, they see the need to differentiate themselves, and bring in ideas from their former market. And this leads to a crossover of ideas. In their efforts to stand out and make an impact, they might also bring in some ideas never seen anywhere – “mutations” in the evolutionary sense.

A lot of them don’t make sense and they die out. Others score unexpected hits and catch on. And that way, this memetic evolution leads to better business.

The great thing about memetic evolution is that while bad ideas come along much more often than good ideas, they get discarded fairly quickly, while the good ideas live on. And that leads to overall better products.

Right now in India we have a duopoly in sports broadcasting, controlled by the Star family and the Sony family. I’ve ranted several times about how the latter is absolutely atrocious and does nothing to improve the game. Hopefully a new player getting rights of some sport here will shake things up and bring in fresh ideas. Even if some of the ideas turn out to be bad, there will be plenty of good ideas.

Check out the highlights of the Leicester-Liverpool game, and you’ll get an idea.

Dunzo and Urbanclap

I realise that Dunzo and Urbanclap (and many other apps) grew in a particular way. Initially they weren’t sure of the exact problem that they were solving, and instead focussed on a particular “problem class”.

And then over time, based on pattern recognition and segmentation/cluster analysis of the kind of problems that people were using these apps to solve, they started providing more targeted solutions that made better business sense.

Dunzo started off as a “we’ll do anything for you” app. People making fun of the company would talk about a Dunzo executive who would come home, collect your bean bag, get the beans refilled and bring it back to you, and only charge for the beans.

I’m pretty sure that there were many other such weird use cases in which people sort of abused Dunzo in its early days. However, most of the users of the app, I’m guessing, used it for sending packages across town, and to fetch stuff for them from shops and restaurants. And now, four years down the line, Dunzo highlights these specific streamlined use cases in the app, and has figured out a good way of charging for each of them.

It’s similar with Urbanclap. While I didn’t use them in the early days, I used their competitor HouseJoy. I used the app to request for “a plumber”. A plumber duly arrived and did all sorts of odd jobs in our apartment building, some of which were dangerous. And then at the end we paid him in cash, and he told us that “if someone from the app calls, tell them you paid me only 200 rupees” (we had paid him 2000).

Soon, after being a marketplace for all sorts of odd jobs, Urbanclap and its ilk noticed patterns and started specific services. So last week we got someone from Urbanclap to “repair our water heater” (this had a fixed fee on the app). It is another set of such specific services that UrbanClap offers.

I may not have said much new in this post, but it’s basically a crystallisation of some of my thoughts of late – sometimes it’s okay to not have a particularly precise business plan as long as you know what problem class you’re tackling. If you manage to get funded and are willing to burn money, you can learn the best set of problems from the market (within your identified class).

It’s an expensive process for sure, since until you figure this out you’ll be spending a lot of time and money doing random shit, but if you and your investors are willing to bear this kind of expense, it might be worth it.

The worst thing that can happen to you, though, is that after you’ve burnt your company’s money in learning about the market’s precise problem statement, another well-capitalised firm moves faster than you to address this specific market. The question is how well you can put to use your learnings from the early period for later on.

Housewife Careers

This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a very long time, but have kept putting it off. The ultimate trigger for writing this is this article about women with children in Amazon asking for backup child care at work. Since this hits rather close home, this is a good enough trigger to write.

Quoting the article:

“Everyone wants to act really tough and pretend they don’t have human needs,” says Kristi Coulter, who worked in various roles at Amazon for almost 12 years and observed that many senior executives had stay-at-home wives.

(emphasis mine)

While this might be true of Amazon (though not necessarily for other large tech companies), it is true for other careers as well. The nature of the job means that it is impossible to function if you even have partial child-care responsibilities. And that implies that the only way you can do this job is if you have a spouse whose full time job is bringing up the kids.

Without loss of generality (considering that in most cases it’s the women who give up their careers for child-rearing), we can call these jobs “housewife jobs”.

Housewife jobs are jobs where you can do a good job if an only if you have a spouse who spends all her time taking care of the kids.

The main feature (I would say it is a bug, but whatever) of such a job is usually long work hours that require you to “overlap both ways” – both leave home early in the morning and return late every night, implying that even if you have to drop your kid to day care, it is your spouse who has to do so. And as I’ve found from personal experience, it is simply not possible to work profitably when you have both child-dropping and child-picking-up duties on a single day (unless you have zero commute, like I’ve had for the last eight months).

Housewife jobs also involve lots of travel. Whether it is overnight or not doesn’t matter, since you are likely to be away early mornings and late evenings at least, and this means (once again) that the spouse has to pick up the slack.

Housewife jobs also involve a lot of pressure, which means that even when you are done with work and want to relax with the kids, you are unable to take your mind off work. So it turns out to be rather unprofitable time with the kids – so you might as well spend that working. Which again means the spouse picks up the slack.

Sometimes a job may not be inherently stressful or require long hours, but might be housewife because the company is led by a bunch of people with housewives (the article linked above claims this about Amazon). What this means is that when there is a sufficient number of (mostly) men in senior management who have housewives taking care of kids, their way of working percolates through the culture of the organisation.

These organisations are more likely to demand “facetime” (not the Apple variety). They are more likely to value input more than output (thus privileging fighter work?). And soon people without housewives get crowded out of such organisations, making it even more housewife organisations.

Finally, you may argue that I’ve used UK-style nurseries as the dominant child care mechanism in my post (these usually run 8-6), and that it might be possible to hedge the situations completely with 24/7 nannies or Singapore-style “helpers”. Now, even with full time child care, there are some emergencies that occur from time to time which require the presence of at least one parent. And it can’t be the same parent providing that presence all the time. So if one of the parents is in a “housewife job”, things don’t really work out.

I guess it is not hard to work out a list of jobs or sectors which are inherently “housewife”. Look at where people quit once they have kids. Look at where people quit once they get married. Look at jobs that are staffed by rolling legions of fresh graduates (if you don’t have a kid, you don’t need a housewife).

The scary realisation I’m coming to is that most jobs are housewife jobs, and it is really not easy being a DI(>=1)K household.

Acceptable forms of help

I was reading this note by Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder of Snapdeal on the company’s turnaround after the failed acquisition by Flipkart last year. It’s a very interesting note – while I’ve never been a fan of the company (never considered buying from them), this story seems rather interesting, especially given the deep shit it was in a year ago.

What caught my eye is this little note about getting help from a small network of mentors. Bahl writes:

I was able to get the guidance and counsel from some of the most respected and leading business persons in the country. […] In our time of need, it was those who had the least to gain, and most to give, that came to our help. Not with money. But with their wisdom and encouragement. I recall sitting in the room with one of the above persons in August 2017, staring down the barrel with only months of money left in the bank. The gentleman, probably seeing how dire our situation was, picked up the phone and called six of the top business people in the country in quick succession explaining our situation to them – that we were good guys stuck in a bad situation – and requesting them to meet me to see if there were any synergies with their businesses[…]

(emphasis added)

What this got me thinking was about why it’s considered okay to give or take help in the form of intangibles, but not in terms of money. It’s rather common that people help each other out by way of providing advice, making introductions and sometimes just hearing them out. It’s not that common, though, that people help each other out with money.

To take a personal example, if someone asks to talk to me to get some advice, or asks for some connections, it’s very likely that I’ll help them out. On the other hand, if someone were to ask me for money I’ll start seeing them suspiciously.

One quick reason as to why intangibles is okay is that it is sometimes “cheap”. Making introductions doesn’t cost you much as long as you think it’s mutually beneficial for both parties (and in that, it seriously helps if you do double consent introductions – talk to both parties independently before introducing). Advice costs you maybe half an hour or an hour of your time, and if you feel like your time is being wasted, it’s not hard to cut losses. And the value that the recipient gets from this can far exceed the cost incurred by the “giver”.

Another reason is that intangibles are intangible – they’re hard to measure. And by that measure, you don’t rack up some sort of debt. If I take money from you, then what I owe you becomes precisely measurable. And until I repay you, things between us can be awkward. Introductions or advice, on the other hand, keep the value of the “debt” fuzzy, and in most case it gets “written off” any way, permitting the two parties to continue their relationship normally.

Anything else that I might have missed out?

Triangle marketing

This blog post is based more on how I have bought rather than how I have sold. The basic concept is that when you hear about a product or service from two or more independent sources, you are more likely to buy it.

The threshold varies by the kind of product you are looking at. When it is a low touch item like a book, two independent recommendations are enough. When it involves higher cost and has higher impact, like a phone, it might be five recommendations. For something life changing like a keto diet, it might be ten (I must mention I tried keto for half a day and gave up, not least because I figured I don’t really need it – I’m barely 3-4 kg overweight).

The important point to note is that the recommendations need to come from independent sources – if two people who you didn’t expect to have a similar taste in books were to recommend the same book, the second of these recommendations is likely to create an “aha moment” (ok I’m getting into consultant-speak now), and that is likely to drive a purchase (or at least trying a Kindle sample).

In some ways, exposure to the same product through independent sources is likely to create a feeling of a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Alice is also using this. Bob is also using this” will soon go into “everybody seems to be using it. I should also use it”.

So what does this mean to you if you are a seller? Basically you need to hit your target audience through various channels. I had mentioned in my post earlier this week about how branding creates a “position of strength“, and how direct sales is normally hard because it is done through a position of weakness.

The idea is that before you hit your audience with a direct sale, you need to “warm them up” with your brand, and you need to do this through various channels. Your brand needs to impact on your audience through multiple independent channels, so that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy before you approach to make the sale.

What these precise channels are depends on your business and the product that you’re trying to sell, but the important thing is that they are independent. So for example, putting advertisements in various places won’t help since the target will treat all of them as coming from the same source.

Finally, where is the “triangle” in this marketing? It is in the idea that you complete the branding and sales by means of “triangulation”. You send out vectors in seemingly random directions trying to build your brand, and they will get reflected till a time when they intersect, or “triangulate”. Ok I know my maths here is messy ant not up to my usual standard, but I guess you know what I’m getting at!