The Hindu Business Line : Savvy use of snail mail

This retailer allows customers to order on the Net but get a bill in the mail and pay by bank transfer. That encourages online shopping by Germans who lack credit cards..

D. Murali

This week’s read.

D. Murali

Even in Germany, not too many people know that Hamburg retailer Otto Group is second only to Amazon.com Inc. in business-to-consumer e-commerce worldwide, informs Global Business Power Plays: How the masters of international enterprise reach the top of their game ( www.tatamcgrawhill.com).

Modest, frugal, or unpretentious (or bescheiden in German), is how the CEO Michael Otto’s style is described. Without these qualities, he could have given in to the greed of the dotcom era, the authors reason.

“Instead of cashing out, he hung on and developed a business model that has made his company a real power on the Internet.” Otto has made regular scouting trips to US high-tech companies since the 1980s, and early on he figured out how to harness the Net in service of the retailer’s traditional German mail-order business, the book states.

Here is one example of how Otto’s online philosophy differs markedly from that of Amazon or eBay: “Those e-tailers take orders only online. Otto allows customers to order on the Net but get a bill in the mail and pay by bank transfer. That encourages online shopping by Germans who lack credit cards.” A savvy use of snail mail, the authors commend.

Suggested read for a peek into ‘the insider’s playbook of goals, guidelines, and game plans.’

IBM’s Arjuna

An effective leader should always be unfettered by the impermanence of life, writes Pujan Roka in Bhagavad Gita on Effective Leadership: Timeless wisdom for leaders ( www.jaicobooks.com). By acknowledging the impermanence of life, a leader should know that he or she is a change agent — someone who brings about the transformation of an organisation, community, or a nation, adds Roka.

“Former CEO of IBM Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., former CEO of General Electric Jack Welch, and CEO of Cisco John Chambers are some of the business leaders who have become successful in creating enduring corporations through sweeping changes and transformations.” Drawing parallels between the epic and contemporary times, the author observes that organisational cultures and values have always been important to successful organisations, whether in Arjuna’s times or in Gerstner’s IBM. “Building an organisation upon the positive aspects of culture was something Arjuna would learn later in Mahabharata, and it is what IBM learned from its near-death experience…”

Philosophical reflections.

Gen-multiprocessing

“Around 1996, we at Xerox’s PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre) started hiring 15-year-olds to join us as researchers,” narrates John Seely Brown in one of the essays included in Learning and Practice: Agency and Identities, edited by Patricia Murphy and Kathy Hall ( www.sagepublications.com).

These teens were given two jobs, continues Brown. “First, they were to design the ‘workspace’ of the future — one they’d want to work in; second, they were to design the school or ‘learningscape’ of the future — again with the same conditions.”

Having seen how they work and think, the author says that today’s kids are always multiprocessing — doing several things simultaneously — such as listening to music, talking on the cell-phone, and using the computer, all at the same time.

“Recently, I was with a young twenty-something who had actually wired a Web browser into his eyeglasses,” Brown recounts. “As he talked with me, he had his left hand in his pocket to cord in keystrokes to bring up my Web page and read about me, all the while carrying on with his part of the conversation! I was astonished that he could do all this in parallel and so unobtrusively.”

Debunking a common perception that kids who are multiprocessing can’t be concentrating, Brown says that the attention span of the teens at PARC — often between 30 seconds and five minutes — parallels that of top managers, who operate in a world of fast context-switching.

“So the short attention spans of today’s kids may turn out to be far from dysfunctional for future work worlds,” he foresees.

Prescribed study.

Passion rating

Organisational inertia is a tough thing to overcome at the best of times, and it only gets tougher when an idea is new and involves a significant change, says Ken Hudson in The Idea Accelerator: How to solve problems faster using Speed Thinking ( www.vivagroupindia.com).

An idea can be evaluated according to how much money it might make or how strategically important it might be, he explains. “These are worthwhile and sensible criteria. However, I have run many workshops where group members have voted on a particular idea as being the highest scoring and when I have asked who wants to work on it not a hand goes up!”

Therefore, Hudson advises that ideas need to be evaluated on reason (head) and passion (heart).

That is why, he suggests, it can be a good practice to ask people how they might rate an idea on the basis of how passionate they feel about the idea. “With passion a committed group can move mountains; without it an idea will not move.”

Eminently doable methods.

Ensure business continuance

It is not uncommon that enterprises, which have strict requirements for high availability and application uptime, ensure business continuance and disaster recovery through multiple data centres.

Some organisations use the DNS (domain name system) for this purpose, while an alternative can be the IGP/BGP (interior/border gateway protocol) mechanisms, write Zeeshan Naseh and Haroon Khan in Designing Content Switching Solutions ( www.ciscopress.com).

“In an active/standby data centre solution, the applications are hosted on both the data centres; however, only one of the data centres is active,” the authors elucidate. “In a steady state, all traffic goes to the active data centre; traffic is routed to the standby data centre only when the active data centre fails.”

One way to implement this solution is by using the same IP (Internet Protocol) addresses at two different locations, but with different metrics, which would determine the path taken by traffic to and from the network clients. “This may be preferable to a DNS solution because it avoids the vulnerabilities of DNS record caching,” reason Naseh and Khan.

Recommended addition to the fervent techies’ shelf.

dmurali@thehindu.co.in

Tailpiece

“To help our staff cope with the wild market swings…”

“You started a counselling programme?”

“No, we wired a trading terminal to the canteen systems, for effecting changes to the menu, music, air-conditioning, and lighting, dynamically during the lunch-hour!”