People
Training or Learning
Aug 30th
I was chatting with a set of industry friends on importance of digital. My friends from analogue side of the business kept insisting that they all need more training to adopt digital. To that point I asked a very simple question – “how much more training is required before you’re confident in digital” – unfortunately none of them could give me a specific answer in terms of topics, number of hours, etc.
This conversation made me very sad. Advertising & Marketing industry is so much focused on receiving training rather than taking the initiative to learn. Most people give convenient excuse of ‘lack of enough training’ for not learning digital. What they fail to understand is no amount of training can make you confident unless you learn things and then practice to master them.
After having spent 20 years on the Internet I still wake up thinking ‘oh god so much to learn today’ and spend at least 30-60 minutes learning new things. I have never attended a digital training program but it hasn’t stopped me from learning all things new. And believe me I’m not alone as I see millions of professional learning on their own.
I think it is high time for the industry to ‘stop’ receiving training and ‘start’ learning.
Goodbye Murali
Jul 22nd
Muttiah Muralitharan today created history by becoming the first bowler in the history of cricket to take 800 wickets. I was quite surprised to see him announce his retirement much before the India-SriLanka test started in Galle. What I liked about it was his carelessness to reach the 800 mark. The test could have gone any way and there was a chance that he would not reach the 800 mark – in fact he came quite close to that and finally had to the take the last Indian wicket to reach 800.
I’m sure he had at least 2-3 years of test cricket left in him but he decided to retired at the top of his career. I wish Indian cricketing greats like Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, and VVS Laxman actually retire with dignity and not get thrown out like Sourabh Ganguly.
Goodbye Murali and I’m sure the world cricket will miss watching your magic.
A day with Rishad
May 22nd
It is always refreshing to spend time with Risad Tobaccowala. Last week I spent a day with Rishad in Delhi and learnt a couple of new things. He talked about ‘ignorance arbitrage’ and how that is likely to vanish from this world as information becomes easily (and timely) accessible. His point of view on ‘working media’ and ‘non-working media’ was quite refreshing and it caught attention of all the clients that he met in Delhi.
We got around talking about Talent and he said: “there is always a new wave behind us” – that made me think about the way we manage people in our industry. In most cases we put people with skills-of-the-past in-charge of managing people who are actually bringing in skills-of-the-future. Talented people don’t want to be managed and actually know how to manage themselves. So rather than thinking about managing talent we need to think about enabling talent and setting them free so that they can win. I think there is never a better than today to rethink how advertising industry manages talent.
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