An experiment in light expression

I’m looking forward to Pangea Day - a striking and timely concept in a fragmented and scattered world.
Starting at 18:00 GMT on May 10, 2008, locations in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai, and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a live program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers. The entire Pangea Day program will be broadcast in 7 languages  to millions of people worldwide through the internet, television, and mobile phones.

The 24 short films to be featured have been selected from an international competition that generated more than 2,500 submissions from over one hundred countries. The films were chosen based on their ability to inspire, transform, and allow one see the world through another person’s eyes.

Pangea Day was conceptualized by Jehane Noujaim after she won the annual TED prize.

Via Outlook Business - a somewhat critical view of whether the Barcamp unconference phenomenon in India needs to revisit its entrepreneurial roots to avoid imploding upon itself.

A related article notes notes that events such as proto.in and headstart.in seem to be making more headway because they are more self-selective in nature:

My experience in organizing Dcamp Bangalore last year was that it is indeed difficult to get the balance between top down structuring (which you need a bit of to get the event off the ground) and bottom up collaboration (which is sort of the whole point).

That being said, I remain a firm believer that unconferences (even if somewhat directed) have the potential to start radical conversations, are a very democratic form of dialogue and are evolutionary and emergent in nature - which makes them much more interesting than top down events. Unless of course its something as interesting as the World Debating Championships : - )

After months of seeing it on my bookshelf, I finally finished reading Steve Denning’s compelling book Squirrels Inc. tonight on the use of stories to transform organizations and communicate, share and put into action core values for the future. If you have two hours to spare, I would recommend reading this book especially if you are in the business of leading people in any capacity.

Unlike other rather simplistic (even if effective) books like “Who moved my &@#$&* cheese”, Squirrels Inc. uses the story of an imaginary company (Squirrels Inc. which is in the business of storing nuts for squirrels) and its motley group of executives (Diana, the up and coming exec who has a new future business model to sell, Mocha the expert in diffusing rumors, the bartender in the neighboring bar who is sort of an anchor pointing the story…) to illustrate the different kinds of stories that you could use in different contexts (the springboard story, the story to quell rumors, the story for getting people to work together, stories for values, actions, visions of the future…) while telling the rather interesting and often tumultuous story (at one point the central protagonist gets chucked out of Squirrels Inc) of the squirrels themselves.

My major takeaway from this book: Stories are a very powerful medium of expressing, sharing, and getting resonance on concepts and ways of being and ways of doing things. I should seed my office and team space with interesting story books and of course more comic book art!

Yesterday on my way home I got a call from a certain car dealership company in Bangalore from where I’d purchased my first car. After some small talk on how the car was doing and such, the lady rep on the phone got to the point. Here is how the conversation went:

Rep: Sir, did you receive a customer feedback form from our Delhi office

me: Umm, No

Rep: Sir, when you do could you make sure you rate us 8 out of 10

me: What?

Rep: Sir, the ratings of the Delhi office are really important for us. If you rate us less than 8 it will reflect bad customer service

Me: Umm, O…K, but what if i got bad customer service (which i havent, but what if)

Rep: No problem Sir, you rate us over 8 and come to the showroom - we will fix whatever problem you’ve had with us

Me: Right…ok

At that point the rep hung the phone leaving me puzzled if i were living in some strange Orwellian fantasy world for those 2 minutes!

While browsing through the plethora of job sites in India, I noticed something that bothered me. Despite paying much attention to their homepage layouts, banners, and in some cases, even usability, most of the job sites catering to Indian professionals had pretty insipid, commonplace, arbitrary TITLE text. Most of the website titles had common phrases such as - ‘jobs’, ‘india’, ‘bangalore’, ‘chennai’, ‘pune’, ’search for jobs online’….

Now page titles are probably not the most interesting piece of virtual real estate, but couldn’t most of these companies pay a little attention to how similar they all look if they are opened next to each other in a tabbed browser? Why couldn’t the keywords be a little more enterprising, a little more descriptive, a little more differentiating? How did all the smart website designers and usability professionals miss such a small thing?

I find it odd that a well designed homepage could have an ‘HTML META ‘or an ‘HTML Tag Refresh’ listed as the page title. Shouldn’t Venture Capitalists or Private Equity analysts, those finance Gods who raise billions of dollars to fund or buy or sell these sites pay attention to how much attention their client (or their designer) pays to design detail?