Superconsumers Beget Superconsumers
The true value of superconsumers lies in their contagious nature. Those you meet are likely to have a crowd of other current superconsumers and potential superconsumers with them. For additional superconsumers, look to their family and friends. Capture and share the superconsumers’ stories, and watch as their knowledge inspires and creates new superconsumers.
Superconsumers Travel in Packs, Creating Super Geos
As the epicenter of demand creation, super geos can be tapped into to drive superior growth in your business. But you must locate and leverage them. The words national average are some of the most misleading in business. Many leaders have an inherent, subconscious belief that demand is spread like peanut butter, evenly and thinly. But the very presence of super geos means that passion for your offering will be patchy, with one set of consumers wild about your product while another group is neither hot nor cold. If you believe that demand is like the flat Midwest, then you’ll be ill prepared to climb the hilly terrain it really is.
Superconsumers Are Superconsumers of Multiple Products
A superconsumer of one category is often a superconsumer of other categories. Cleverly combining two or more important, yet seemingly different categories not only taps into a quest, but can also create a new category—just as American Girl crashed dolls, education, and experiential retail into one category.
Generac, the leading manufacturer of standby generators, found that people who buy three to four times more life insurance and lots of vitamins tend to be great prospects for proactively buying a generator for an extreme event that may never happen. These consumers are superconsumers of proactive protection.
Sometimes the connection between categories is not as clear, as some categories counterbalance one another. For example, superconsumers of milk tend to be superconsumers not of other healthy foods and beverages, but of more indulgent ones like cereal, cookies, and candy. Milk was the perfect accompaniment to sweets—and was probably considered something like an old-school indulgence you could buy from the Catholic Church in advance of a sin you were planning to commit. Counterintuitively, Harvard Business Review reported that shoppers who recycle their grocery bags tended to indulge more in junk food as well.
What Pleasant Rowland created and Mattel helped foster is amazing. American Girl’s remarkable growth may also feel intimidating. But it is more feasible than you might think, especially considering how low the success rates are for innovation in your core business.
The key is to take stock of the state of your business now. Are you hitting your growth goals? How good is your ROI now? What are the odds that your business will still be successful for the next five to ten years?
Of all new consumer packaged goods, 85 percent or more fail. Why? Often, the problem is that they aim too low by trying to solve the same job with a slightly modified product. Companies would do far better aspiring to solve a quest, but falling short slightly and finding that they created a product that consumers wanted to hire for a wholly more important job than its originally intended one.
The most successful businesses today have multiple business models, not just one. How well does a unidimensional business model do against a multidimensional one? Poorly, much like a boxer who runs up against a mixed martial artist who can box, kick, and wrestle. It is an unfair fight. This is both the beauty and the imperative of leveraging superconsumers to create new categories.
Are you looking at transforming your business through an adept use of your consumers? Get Eddie Yoon’s Superconsumers here!
Credit: Abhishek Singh
Category: Excerpts
Raj, an Extravagant Saga about the Maharani of Balmer, Jaya Singh
The land of Jaya’s birth lay beyond the desert known as the Abode of Death.
Even that year, three years before the start of a new century, the small tribe of bards making its way to the kingdom of Balmer saw many auguries of death. Water holes and village wells were dry. The artificial lakes which watered the great desert kingdoms of Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer were covered with green slime, their levels sunk so low the foundations of water palaces stood revealed, ringed by brown-scaled crocodiles dozing in shallow water.
There was little food to spare for the storytellers as they converged on village squares at nightfall to tell their tales for a place to rest, and yet they became a caravan. Throughout Rajputana it was known the Maharajah of Balmer awaited the birth of his first child. Families in search of a season’s work, other storytellers and tinkers and acrobats, called to the bards, ‘Do you go to Balmer for the birth?’ Learning it was so, they grabbed sleepy bullocks by their vermilion-painted horns and shouted ‘Hut! Hut!’ urging the animals onto the road.
Once a group of ash-covered sadhus lying naked in a broken pavilion built by a forgotten king waved their iron tridents and clambered into a crowded camel cart.
Sometimes the carts were pushed aside by the crested carriages of rajas who lived in the stone fortifications that outlined the treeless black hills. When the sun was at its height, the fortifications seemed to breathe, expanding and contracting in the haze as though the hills were massive, brooding lizards from the time of mythology and the motion of the stone battlements the sluggish shifting of their spines.
Sometimes the caravan attached itself to the procession of court ministers journeying to Balmer with secret messages from their maharajah to the ruler of Balmer, in defiance of the laws of Imperial Britain. Then an elephant led the way, flanked by cavalry units holding banners. When the processions moved on, a silver coin, embossed with a maharajah’s symbol on one side and the profile of the English Empress on the other, was gifted to each member of the caravan, even the children.
Scrub jungle gave way to sand dunes. At sunset, the sudden darkness brought a feverish chill to the empty landscape. The travellers willed their emaciated animals to reach the shelter of villages spaced farther and farther apart before the demon women who had died in childbirth came howling through the night in search of children to replace the stillborn infants they had never suckled.
Now the caravan was so large no village could contain it, and the travellers pitched their own camps.
While their children slept in the cloth cradles tied between the brass spokes of camel carts, the bards, the gypsy genealogists of royal India, talked through the night, exchanging news of the Rajput kingdoms.
‘Our rulers are preparing to travel to London for the Diamond Jubilee of the White Widow, the Empress Victoria.’
‘The retinues and gifts they must take to impress the British Empire will dangerously impoverish their treasuries.’
‘At least in London they can speak together. Here, Britain still fears conspiracy and will not allow the kings to meet except in the presence of Englishmen.’
‘But court astrologers are reminding their maharajahs that famine has come every twenty years since the rise of British power.’
‘And twenty years have passed since the last famine.’
The bards shook their heads, dismissing astrology for the reality they had witnessed on the road. They had seen the villagers praying for rain. The farmers knew already. Another famine had begun.
This is an excerpt from Gita Mehta’s Raj.
Learning from Mistakes
Jeff Bezos, the owner of mighty Amazon constantly features in one of the most successful entrepreneurs of modern time. The way he has steered Amazon through all these years, shows his dedication and skill to make things work against all odds. However, even he failed. A lot of articles have come up post this and many different perspectives have tried to solve this problem from a different angle. Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s book, Sense and Respond tries to look at such cases from a newer perspective:
‘Amazon’s 2014 Fire Phone disaster is a classic example and, oddly, one that comes from the very same company that developed and frequently uses many of the sense and respond techniques we’re discussing—a company we laud in chapter 1 for that reason.
Motivated by consumers’ increasing use of mobile devices, Amazon began the Fire Phone effort in 2010, just as the iPhone 4 was hitting the market. Mobile users were becoming a more important source of traffic to Amazon, and the company wanted more control of the mobile store than Apple would allow. Apple’s rules about what companies can and can’t do in iOS apps include strict rules about commerce, including one that stipulates that Apple gets a 30 percent share of each in- app sale. 2 (The reason you can’t buy a book on the iOS Kindle app is that Amazon doesn’t want to pay Apple 30 percent of each sale.) So Amazon created the Fire Phone initiative to solve a business problem: it wanted complete control over the store that its customers visited on their mobile devices.
But what would be the value to customers? They struggled to find it, in part because of a strict culture of secrecy around this product. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, had lots of ideas for cool features. But cool and valuable are not the same thing. Over time, Bezos exerted an increasingly heavier hand in the design and development of the Fire Phone and, according to published reports, ignored feedback from his team that questioned his approach. 3 There was no conversation with the market here, only Bezos talking. He insisted that the phone have a series of fl ashy features like Dynamic Perspective, a 3-D display that didn’t require special glasses and could be seen from all angles; but it delivered little consumer value. Bezos assumed that fl ashy hardware features would make the phone more desirable to consumers than an iPhone. Without a continuous two way conversation with his target audience to guide the development of these features, though, Bezos was making a huge guess.
He guessed wrong. Four years later, in July 2014, the Fire Phone went on sale in the United States. Within days it was clear that consumers were unimpressed— with the design, with the ecosystem, and with the gimmicky features Bezos had pushed for so hard. Priced at $199, the Fire Phone was intended to compete directly with Apple’s iPhone, but consumers didn’t see the value. Instead, they saw it for what it was—a way to easily get to Amazon’s store in a way that was better for Amazon but not significantly better for customers.
After a $170 million write- down of unsold inventory, the Fire Phone was available for 99 cents before finally being sunset in late 2015. The behind- the- scenes stories reveal the arrogance in the top down decision- making process that Bezos led. Although people on the team pushed back, they ended up deferring to the boss. After all, he’d been right many times before. Why wouldn’t he be right again this time?
It might have helped if Bezos had listened to the market. Had he approached some of these decisions as assumptions to be tested and questions to be answered, rather than hunches to be followed blindly, things might have been different.’
You can get your hands at the book here.
This is an excerpt from Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden’s Sense and Respond.
Credit: Abhishek Singh
Winning with Superconsumers
Daniel Zein (disguised), the CFO of Great Snacks, thought that Nacho Cheese could be one of the company’s most valuable brands, so he encouraged the team to dig further into the product. The team did some robust analysis, and to their surprise, they discovered that Nacho Cheese’s consumers spanned the entire income spectrum.
From the data, it was obvious that Nacho Cheese could be a much bigger brand. Of all the full meals that consumers eat at home, about 37 percent are consumed hot and include cheese. But Nacho Cheese was used in only a fraction of those meals. To grow its product, the Great Snacks team decided to focus on the twenty-four million or so other consumers who share the same three loves that Laura had—people, cooking, and cheese—but who may not understand the magic of Nacho Cheese and the dozens of life solutions that it could deliver.
Simply put, the team gathered data from their superconsumers, ensured that the resultant insights and inspiration also appealed to the other twenty-four million consumers, and then geared its marketing, innovation, and retail execution to their tastes and behaviors. The immediate challenge was to convince the company leadership that Nacho Cheese could grow through better marketing and innovation—from packaging to product.
Line extensions into other forms of cheese were also a logical action step. Great Snacks drove growth by megabranding Nacho Cheese into other categories. The core business grew steadily faster than inflation, but the extensions in cheese (e.g., slices, shredded cheese) grew by double digits. All told, the brand extensions drove more than $50 million in growth, and the megabrand grew $100 million in three years.
For years, innovation for Nacho Cheese was a challenge. Since the brand was not well understood, innovation concepts yielded mixed results, which made the team hesitant to pursue breakthrough innovation. But with new data, the team revamped its innovation testing process to include both superconsumers (like Laura) and potential superconsumers (folks who could become like Laura).
The group was pleasantly surprised to find that among all the new product concepts it tested, some were off-the-charts positive for superconsumers. The team made a few tweaks, the new concepts tested positive for potential superconsumers as well, and the team finally had the results it needed to proceed.
The team saw that retail activation was inconsistent across retailers. In some stores, Nacho Cheese was placed in the center of the store. In others, it was refrigerated in the cheese and dairy section. So the team did some analysis and found that Nacho Cheese sold faster in the refrigerated section, which consequently produced better results for Great Snacks and the retailer. The team learned that superconsumers strongly preferred the product when it was sold in the refrigerated section. What’s more, potential superconsumers had a much easier time finding it in the refrigerated section.
Finally, the Great Snacks team used big data to uncover meaningful ways of improving marketing ROI. It used big data from Nielsen Catalina Solutions—a joint venture that creates a single-source panel of consumers from the sixty million loyalty-card holders from grocery stores and the Nielsen TV panel of two to three million households. The single-source data gave the team interesting insights on the actual TV shows that Nacho Cheese aficionados were watching. In one test using this data, the team found that superconsumers were fifteen times more responsive to Nacho Cheese advertising than other consumers! The vice president of marketing noted that the brand’s marketing objective was to have a conversation with superconsumers about their love for Nacho Cheese, but to do so in a way that potential superconsumers could listen in.
The beauty of all this was that the data the team used to improve innovation, retail activation, and marketing was already there. Superconsumers gave the marketers a way to synthesize the data into a coherent and coordinated set of actions and metrics. Looking at superconsumers like Laura, the team gained confidence that the strategy had even more upside. And the team saw the potential and ran with it.
Want to know a simple, speedy, and sustainable path to superior growth? Order Eddie Yoon’s Superconsumers here!
This is an excerpt from Eddie Yoon’s Superconsumers.
Credit: Abhishek Singh
The Legal Eagle – An Excerpt
Harish Salve’s name ranks amongst the brightest legal luminaries of India. After an illustrious career of nearly two decades as a Supreme Court lawyer, he served as the Solicitor General of India from 1999 to 2000. A highly sought-after practising lawyer, his client list includes corporate bigwigs like Ratan Tata, Tina Ambani and Lalit Modi, as well as powerful politicians like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Prakash Singh Badal, and also Bollywood actor Salman Khan. He represented Vodafone in the well-known tax case with the Indian government which was finally decided in Vodafone’s favour. He was the counsel of choice for Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Limited in big-ticket cases like the Krishna Godavari Basin gas dispute and for Ratan Tata in a privacy petition concerning the Niira Radia tapes, as well as for the Delhi Police in the case for its midnight raid over Baba Ramdev’s rally at Ramlila Maidan. Besides representing his high-profile clients, Harish Salve has offered his pro bono services several times as amicus curiae to assist the Supreme Court in cases mostly relating to the preservation of the environment.
It’s a special day when I hear from the country’s pre-eminent lawyer, confirming our meeting in early August in Delhi at his office at ‘White House’ on the premium Bhagwandas Road, a stone’s throw away from the Supreme Court and India Gate in the Lutyens Bungalow Zone. I am excited to meet Harish Salve, though thankfully not for legal reasons!
There are guards posted outside his sixth-floor office. As you go past the reception desk, of the three doors that open into the reception area, the one on the extreme right is Harish’s chamber. It’s elegantly done in dark mahogany wood and expectedly has a wall-to-wall library stacked with gilded books as the backdrop to his revolving black chair. His large glass-top work desk and the set-up around it take up almost one-third of the space.
From a reputed family, with his grandfather being a successful criminal lawyer and father, N.K.P. Salve, a well-known Congress politician of his time, I imagine that Harish would have had success served to him on a platter and I share my view with him up front.
‘Contrary to what you think,’ he says, ‘I had what you may call “a lower-middle-class” upbringing. I come from a life of simplicity and grew up in a house full of relatives. My mother’s elder brother took sanyas (became an ascetic) and left home. His children were virtually brought up by my parents. My mausi (maternal aunt) also lived with us. So my elder sister, five of my cousins, my mausi and I used to sleep in the big living room, with the only bedroom in the house occupied by my parents.’ Harish was brought up by the same mausi, who was a professor of philosophy in a women’s college. Every night, she would put him to bed and read something to him. It was a very down-to-earth upbringing. Sports for Harish in his childhood meant playing football with kids from the chawls behind their house. As he says, ‘So even though I went to a very good school in Nagpur, there was so much learning we had on the football field of different aspects of life while intermingling with children from different backgrounds.’
After school, he chose to do his undergraduation in commerce and joined his father’s chartered accountancy firm for articles. Harish’s father was a practising chartered accountant before he joined politics. He and his partner had a small firm with an annual turnover of about Rs 5 lakh. Remembering those times, Harish says, ‘During my first year of college, I used to travel by bicycle in the sweltering heat of Nagpur.’ Colleges started in the month of March when day temperature in Nagpur is usually above 40 °C and burning. ‘I would come back, have lunch and then leave for office.’ As the peak summer months approached, the temperature would go up to 45 °C and Harish would cycle to office earlier in the morning. ‘There were times when we would be required to go to some factories in the afternoons and do an audit. I remember we used to take a wet towel and put it around our heads to avoid heat stroke and then cycle some 8 kilometres to reach the place,’ he says. ‘The so-called “big entertainment” in college and years after that was to go to a local dairy and have coffee or to go to Hanuman Mandir and have samosas. I usually stayed up the nights and studied. We would go to the railway station and eat at the dhabas there.’ That’s how Harish grew up. He credits these experiences for teaching him some very important values, making sure he’s never lost touch with that part of his life.
‘You switched from commerce to law. How did that happen? Did you complete your chartered accountancy?’
‘The moment I completed my graduation I joined CA, but found it very boring. Though the course was good, I knew that I would not stay in the audit and accountancy field. I was more interested in law and taxation. I completed CA only because it became a matter of prestige. Everyone said, “Yeh toh Salve sahab ka beta hai, ye thodi karega CA” (He is Mr Salve’s son, so he will not do CA) and my reaction was, “Ab toh pass karke chhodunga” (Now I will qualify and prove myself).’ Harish qualified for CA, and within two months gave up his certificate of practice to enrol at the bar. His father was very upset, but Harish was very clear that he wanted to be a lawyer. He had been a (Nani) Palkhivala fan from the age of fourteen as his father’s firm used to consult Mr Palkhivala on taxation matters, and Harish got the opportunity to interact with him a few times on cases wherein his father involved him. Harish thoroughly enjoyed income tax and learnt a lot from Nani, and gradually made up his mind that if he had to pursue taxation, it would be as a lawyer. The time had come for him to chase his dream.
Keen to know more about his relationship with his father, I ask, ‘You completed law from Government Law College, Nagpur, in 1980, and by then you had also managed to complete a couple of years’ internship with a law firm operating out of Nagpur and Mumbai, as well as acquiring the precious experience of working with Nani Palkhivala on the famous Minerva Mill case. Later, Nani recommended that you work as a junior with Soli Sorabjee who was then the Solicitor General of India based in Delhi. At that time, your father was the deputy leader of the Congress in Parliament under the prime ministership of Indira Gandhi and soon went on to hold other important portfolios in the Central cabinet—as minister of state for information and broadcasting (I&B), then minister of state with independent charge for steel and mines. How did the relationship pan out between the father and the son in terms of propriety—you as a budding lawyer and your father as an influential politician?’
‘My father joined politics when I was ten years old. All I have seen is a downslide in the quality of my life from the time he joined politics. His income went down and things didn’t change right through to the time I was doing my CA. I remember my mother telling me, “You cannot eat meat every day.” This is how it was even when my father was a member of Parliament (MP). Though he steadily grew in terms of his political stature, it didn’t translate into financial gains. The sense of righteousness was very strong in him, so he made sure that the boundaries between our professions remained concrete. When my father was inducted as a minister in the Central cabinet in the 1980s, I never attended a single official party. I went to his office only once when he was in the I&B ministry because he wanted me to sign some papers. For several years after my father was the minister of power, I didn’t know that his office was in Shram Shakti Bhawan.’
It was only much later when, as Solicitor General, Harish went to Shram Shakti Bhawan for a meeting with Suresh Prabhu—who was the minister of power then in Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s cabinet—regarding the Dabhol case that he realized that it was his father’s office!
‘When my father was the minister of steel, he called me up one day and said that he wanted to know how much work I had got from the Steel Authority of India in the last year. I totalled it, and it came to about Rs 3000 when I had a practice running into some Rs 40 lakh at that time. When he became the minister of power, he called me and told me that he did not want me to work for any public sector units that came under his ministry.’ Harish assured him he would not and at the same time brought to his father’s attention how there were a bunch of third-grade lawyers whom ministers patronized and that they should be barred from appearing. ‘I ended up becoming the cause for a rumpus that followed in the ministry,’ chuckles Harish and adds, ‘It was only once that I worked for the ministry of power, and then too, instead of getting any benefit, I ended up giving free advice to the government.’
‘You imbibed taxation and law from your family environment. What about politics? Have you ever considered joining politics?’
‘My personal view is that there are two kinds of reactions when you see power and politics very closely—you love it or hate it. I hate it.’ Harish is clear that he has never even considered the idea of joining politics. As a student of public affairs and law, he likes following politics and understanding it because it is important—not in its narrow partisan sense but as an important part of governance.
‘As a renowned constitutional lawyer, what are your observations on India as of today—the way the country is being managed and where it is headed?’
Harish ponders briefly and then very eloquently expresses his key concerns about Indian polity. He cautions and remarks, ‘I think right now India is going through a very negative mindset and if we don’t realize this soon enough and do something about it, we are going to pay a very dear price for it. We have, from about 2011 onwards, created an impression that everybody in power is corrupt, everyone who has a car is a crook, everyone who lives well is a crook. We must realize that India’s biggest fault line is between the haves and the have-nots. In the power game of politics, instead of taking hard decisions for development, people are being pitted as rich or poor—us versus them. In this way, we are gradually cultivating complete disrespect for our constitutional institutions.’
Harish’s analysis is that we are being misled by a wealth-hungry media. The media decides who is corrupt and who is not, and we basically assume if a person is rich and influential, he/she must be corrupt. The reality is that governance comes from institutions, and wealth comes from private capital. By giving them a bad name today, Harish believes we are sawing at the edifice of democracy. This trend is alarming and nothing, nothing appears to be above partisan politics—whether it’s land acquisition, foreign direct investment (FDI), or even the Naga Accord. Not blaming any one political party for it, he points out that everybody does it, with politicians attending to their personal interest first and functioning with a ‘to hell with the nation’ attitude.
However, he acknowledges that we still have a lot of very fine politicians and conscientious MPs, having known them well. ‘There are a lot of lower-middle-class MPs who live in two-bedroom flats and go back to do some good work in their constituencies. But you’ll never hear about those people. On the other hand, if one person makes some communally sensitive statement, it immediately makes for front-page news,’ he says.
8 Quotes for the Rebel Inside Every Girl
What if Cinderella didn’t want to go to the ball but rather go out with her friends? What if Rapunzel didn’t need ‘saving’? And why didn’t Eric become a merman to have a ‘happily ever after’ with Ariel?
How much, do the stories we tell our little girls, shape their views about being a woman?
Elena Favilli’s Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls introduces us (and our impressionable girls) to one hundred remarkable women and their extraordinary lives. From Cleopatra to Malala, Charlotte Bronte to Serena Williams, these tales are truly empowering for heroines who definitely don’t need rescuing.
Here are a few quotes from the book.
A message that, unfortunately, seems to get lost quite often.
Aiming for the stars is in every girl’s blood!
Your voice isn’t small. Your voice isn’t weak. You were meant to ROAR!
You are perfect the way you are.
Touch the skies. You’re meant to be with the birds.
You are a fighter. No obstacle is ever ‘too big’ for you.
Why be something else when you’re PERFECT.
Be bold. And you will be free.
Feeling like a rebel with a cause? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
A Poem by William Wordsworth You Should Fall in Love with
She was a Phantom of Delight
She was a Phantom of delight
When first she gleamed upon my sight;
A lovely Apparition, sent
To be a moment’s ornament;
Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair;
Like Twilight’s, too, her dusky hair;
But all things else about her drawn
From May-time and the cheerful Dawn;
A dancing Shape, an Image gay,
To haunt, to startle, and waylay.
I saw her upon nearer view,
A Spirit, yet a Woman too!
Her household motions light and free,
And steps of virgin-liberty;
A countenance in which did meet
Sweet records, promises as sweet;
A Creature not too bright or good
For human nature’s daily food;
For transient sorrows, simple wiles,
Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears, and smiles.
And now I see with eye serene
The very pulse of the machine;
A Being breathing thoughtful breath,
A Traveller between life and death;
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill;
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
—William Wordsworth
A Lesser-Known Poem by Robert Frost that You Must Know Of
‘Out, Out—’
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
— Robert Frost
Master on Masters – An Excerpt
India is the only country in the world which has two traditions of classical music—those of the South or the ‘Carnatic’ and the North or ‘Hindustani’. However, I prefer to call it just music. The basis of all music in the world is the same—seven notes. Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni in Indian classical music and Do Re Me Fa So La Ti in Western classical. If we include the half-tones that are the sharps and flats, we get a total of twelve notes. Music connects the whole world; it does not belong to any one race or religion.
The future of Indian classical music will always be bright. We are fortunate to have had such strong pillars of music like Swami Haridas, Swami Purandar Dasa, Swami Muthuswami Dikshitar, Syama Sastri, Swami Thyagaraja, Swathi Thirunal, Miyan Tansen and Baiju Bawra in our country. With their blessings, there are a large number of talented young musicians in India today. Indian classical music has always been, and will continue to be, an integral part of our identity. It does not belong only to the world of entertainment; it is a way of life based on dedication, surrender, faith, trust, spirituality, religion, and rigorous practice and discipline. No matter which gharana or guru a student of Indian classical music belongs to, they must surrender completely to their guru and to the Almighty. It is almost like entering a dark tunnel with the hope of seeing the sun someday. It might sound impractical, but this is how it is. There is no formula here. Many times, people ask me if their son or daughter will ‘make it’ as a classical musician. I have no answer to this question because there never was and never will be a magic mantra.
Over the years, I have seen a change in the attitude of disciples. While some are epitomes of dedication and grace, others want to become superstars overnight and, in the process, shift their focus away from their path to the extent of disagreeing and questioning what the guru has to say. Classical music is not for someone who is in search of glamour and overnight fame. Years and hours of practice and dedication go into the making of a classical musician.
Today, electronic and social media are largely encouraging the kind of music which is not classical. But true classical musicians are not created by the media. The listeners of our country are fairly selective. Nobody can impose an artist on them. The only way for a young musician to succeed is to work hard, practise rigorously and maintain strict discipline. This is not restricted to music alone, but extends to Indian rules of etiquette (tehzeeb and tameez) as well.
I disagree with those who say that Indian classical music is a dying art form. We must understand a few things here. It was never for the masses to begin with. It was originally performed only in private mehfils, with concert hall performances being a recent phenomenon. Today, classical musicians perform at venues like Carnegie Hall, Royal Albert Hall and Sydney Opera House to packed auditoriums. You are talking about an audience fighting against the ninety to hundred odd television channels at home! Likewise, in India, when I see huge venues filling up, I don’t think we can really complain. It is the responsibility of the artist to make the youth relate to their music. The kind of attention that Bollywood and the fashion industry are receiving today from mainstream media, Indian classical music got three decades ago! In the sixties and seventies, musicians would play ragas for two to three hours. Frankly, after maybe an hour, it was all repetition. However, due to this attitude of artists who perhaps wanted to prove a point, a section of listeners drifted away to easy listening. One must keep in mind that no books or shastras ever mentioned how classical music should be presented. By bringing it in sync with times, one cannot be faulted for diluting it at all.
I believe in being traditional, not conventional. In the early eighties, I had recorded an album of short pieces around ragas. At the time, I was criticized for not going into too much detail of the ragas, but I am happy that today this has become a trend. I see the great journey of Indian classical music being carried forward by brilliant young musicians who have a readymade repository—painstakingly put together by my contemporaries and me through years of hard work and research—to build on. Thanks to the Internet, websites like YouTube, gadgets like iPods, DVDs and CDs, we can be in every home in the world. It makes me happy to see dedicated young musicians who are also committed performers. I wish them a bright and successful future and I am sure that our classical music and legacy will flourish not only in India but all over the world. I am also heartened by the response of the rest of the world to our country and its musical tradition.
One area that touches me deeply is culture. Reared on a diet of tradition and continuity, it is challenging to live in a modern world with classical values. Yet, I chose to belong to a system where oral knowledge is passed from guru to student during actual music lessons. I often feel I am standing at a crossroads. Where do we go from here? How will classical music evolve? There is a deluge of pop and so-called fusion, remixed ragas and experimental music—great work is being done. The instant success of any of these, as opposed to the long hours of dedication required in the traditional set-up, sometimes stands in the way of progress. I think it is wonderful to imbibe from different cultures all over the world, but let’s not forget who we are or what we have to offer. We need to be, first and foremost, proud of ourselves, of our own accomplishments. Exposure to the arts is mandatory to ensure true appreciation of any medium. At the same time, while modernizing, we must not lose our traditional infrastructures. It will indeed be a sad day for all of us if our musical traditions, that date back more than 5000 years, were to be sacrificed at the altar of modernity. It is crucial that historic and contemporary cultures merge with one another to preserve a uniquely Indian way of life. We must ensure that modernization in our country occurs, as far as possible, in keeping with historical trends. We should be proud of these trends as they have brought us to where we stand today. We must never forget our roots.
Bill Gates: A Senior Executive Who Goes Where the Action is
There are three important questions I think every person, and certainly every manager, should ask himself or herself about how well they listen: The first: Do you get out from behind your desk and walk the corridors and floors?
To know what is going on, you have to be where the action is. You have to go to your customers. You have to go to the factory, or to the sales floor, or to where the problems are.
To me, Bill and Melinda Gates offer one of the best examples of senior executives going where the action is. Many nonprofit organizations with budgetary concerns do not deliver a high percentage of their income directly to the cause they serve. Thirty percent or more of the money they raise goes to operating costs. In other words, for every dollar you donate to such organizations, the intended audience gets at best 70 cents. The Gates Foundation, on the other hand, does devote a high percentage of its income to helping those in need. One reason is that both Bill and his wife, Melinda, are frequent visitors to the countries in which their foundation is active.
Here is how Bill Gates described their first trip to Africa:
“It was a phenomenal trip. Not long after we returned from this trip, Melinda and I read that millions of poor children in Africa were dying every year from diseases that nobody dies from in the United States: measles, hepatitis B, yellow fever. Rotavirus, a disease I had never even heard of, was killing half a million kids each year. We thought if millions of children were dying, there would be a massive worldwide effort to save them. But we were wrong.”
The Gates Foundation then set up a system to guarantee purchases from drug companies to combat the diseases. Bill Gates concluded, “There’s actually no substitute for going and seeing what is happening.”
The second question to ask yourself about how well you listen: Am I doing most or all of the talking in my interactions with others? Listening is an educational process. When you don’t listen, you don’t learn. Marshall Goldsmith, a well- known executive coach and a good friend, advises people who have a hard time listening to do the following: stop, take a deep breath— and let the other person speak up.
The third question to ask yourself about your ability to listen: Do I try to empathize with other people?
Being empathetic is the second step in being thoughtful. Empathy requires that you attempt to identify with the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another person. There are four aspects to empathy. The first is understanding that one person cannot do everything. When you empathize with someone it doesn’t matter who the other person is or what he or she does. I know that every person I interact with is valuable and is deserving of empathy.
The second aspect of empathy that I see around us too much is me, me, and me. We must transform me, me, and me to you, you, and you. We must make sure that everything in our lives is not about me; it must be about someone else.
The third aspect of empathy that deserves attention is our acceptance that each of us is but a very tiny speck in the universe. I am very fortunate that the back of my house overlooks the Pacific Ocean. When I do nothing but look out at the ocean, I sense how small I am. I am known in my field and to my friends and associates as an energetic person. But when I stare out at the Pacific, I am humbled. However, I am also inspired. That sense of my smallness in the world is what gives me energy. It causes me to question myself, and accept that I am not good enough, that I am not contributing enough. I am not making enough impact. I’m not adding enough value to the world around me. My sense of humility does not come from thinking about how important I am, but from how small and insignificant I am compared to the endless expanse of the universe. And ultimately, I believe, our humility is what defines us and makes us selfless.
I find that I often learn some of my most important lessons from children. So I asked a schoolchild what empathy meant to him. I knew that he had just completed a school project about it. Here is what he said. “If somebody fell at our school while we are playing together, even if we are all enjoying the game, if someone goes to try to help out, to take care of the kid, or maybe go get the nurse, I think that is empathy.” To me, that is a perfect description of a caring mindset. He thought of empathy as “kindness.” And that is the fourth aspect of empathy that I want to focus on. Kindness is an action. It is the doing part of empathy. I try to practice it in my work every day.
This is an excerpt taken from ‘The Difference: When Good isn’t Enough’ by Subir Chowdhury.
