Stradazee Inc

07/18/2020

Stepping into for the weekly groceries, early morning today, I suddenly remembered Louis V. Gerstner Jr and his seminal classic -Who says elephants cannot dance. In the book, Louis describes very vividly, the he bought to amidst trying times. It was a remarkable that helped IBM to reinvent itself in the 80s and was made possible by driving people to build that are focused.

To me, Walmart looked majestically matured today. Like the Old war horse which has seen all, like a Company to the edge, by the likes of , and yet unfazed; trying to rediscover itself; awaiting itself to be transformed; trying to set an example for other to change; and awaiting to fly like a butterfly. I felt that Walmart is scripting for itself a good story that would help it take the , the results of which we can see in 2021 and that's a hope though.

Do you sense anything coming from this ?

07/08/2020

I sent an email to your financial advisor from my registered email, Do you see that in my History?". I asked the Banker out of curiosity.

"No Sir I am not finding any" she replied.

"Oh, she said she would escalate my case to the Manager, do you see any update on that"?

No Sir I will call the manager and ask for an update. Give me few minutes".

In the 2007/08 years, Banks were enthused by the idea of achieving a 360 degree view of the customer through a concept called Account Origination. I happened to speak to the Product Manager and insisted that if "we define the customer data purely from a Master Data, we are not getting a 360 degree view. Every transaction the customer makes, including his emails should be at one place".

12 years later with the speed of disruption increasing and with companies likes Venmo and Cashapp achieving 150 million users and with the paychecks getting credited to them directly, a hedge fund manager thunders, "these banks that are offering commoditized services are on the verge of being disrupted".

The faster, the technology adoption is, the proximity to customer is high and minimum will be the disruption. Ba

Banks in India be aware of what Jio and WhatsApp are going to do in the next few years. Customer centricity minimizes disruption.

06/26/2020

A placeholder of my views on Business, Technology and Retail as an article on LinkedIN

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/insights-business-retail-technology-srinivas-radhakrishna/

read, comment and debate

You may like it or you may search for reasons to hate it but you cannot ignore Zoom these days. The Video Conferencing company with the world zooming on it, with an explosion of user base and skyrocketing valuations has caught attention of everybody.

06/15/2020

You may like it or you may search for reasons to hate it but you cannot ignore Zoom these days. The Video Conferencing company with the world zooming on it, with an explosion of user base and skyrocketing valuations has caught attention of everybody.

Fresh out of a morning Zoom meeting, I started thinking about Clayton Christensen and Theodore Levitt both of whom are accomplished Professors in American Universities. Did Zoom really disrupt the video conferencing market? Was there any technology shift that it enabled? I am sure it is not an industry shake out but it actually spurred the incumbent technology companies to revamp their products and compete with Zoom. Maybe Zoom is better prepared and rode on a wave that COVID 19 created but it definitely did create a good product that captured the world's imagination.

I was handed over with a copy of Theodore Levitt's seminal HBR article "Marketing Myopia" on the first day of Marketing MBA class and it seems the incumbent companies exactly failed at what Levitt has outlined in his classic 1957 article. When Companies have too many products to think of and when focus and investments dry up on a few products, it paves the way for new entrants who come up with a new technology or change the current technology to disrupt the incumbents.

02/24/2020

An info graphic showing the impact of Coronavirus in dollar terms. A few years back there was a big talk on de-coupling from the Chinese economy but seems the Silk roads have been well laid, deep routed and connecting the whole world now.This has created a 1.1 trillion dollar risk to the global economy as per IMF. That’s in the immediate short term. In the long term, I see debt, Importing economies reeling under pressure from China, and collapsing. It’s time these economies are not only decoupling but also be self-assuring economies meeting demand internally.

09/01/2018

In a Montreal Neighbourhood when I went to pick bikes for rent, I was not surprised when the elderly gentleman asked me to give my Credit Card and an Id Proof but was when he manually scanned my Card on a paper. It took me back by 20 years when the merchants used to collect those slips and present to their bankers or call them up for approval of transactions before lending services or a sale to be affected. That process was manual, cumbersome and time-consuming. These days you either swipe, tap or insert your card and make a payment and in a trice, authorizations are taken from banks and service providers and the transaction value credited to the merchant account after deducting the payment charges to each of service providers by next day. This modern-day credit card processing is still time-consuming and so this tradition is on the verge of a massive disruption by smart payment companies like Alipay, Apple Wallet etc.

But this is not about disruption but about digital adoption. Unless the elderly gentleman embraces new technologies and helps me to save my 3 minutes time and reduce the additional two signatures I had to do, Digital Transformation will not be effective. To enable adoption, companies have to offer more than the traditional banks offer and that is the price they have to pay themselves when you are entering a new industry through disruptions and I hope these companies know that well