Leading the Transformation

Can you draw? Can you play guitar? Can you run Marathon? The answer to these questions can be ‘Yes’ OR ‘No’, based on your comfort level in the skill. However, is it possible that instead of answering in ‘Yes’ / ‘No’, one answers as ‘not now, but I can learn it?’, and that’s the growth mindset. I, myself turned answer to these questions from ‘No’ to ‘Yes’ for me. In a growth mindset, we believe that most of the skills can be learned through dedication and hard work—brains & talent are just the starting point. The way two atoms in different orbits need different activation energies to move to N th orbit, two people with the different talent level of a skill will need to put varying degree of efforts to reach the same level of expertise in the same skill. As is mentioned somewhere on a web portal : “Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain p...

As world moving towards digital economies, two issues often come up are security and usability of various transaction methods in this digital world. While security aspect may have multiple layers, usability largely revolves around how easy it is for a customer to pay through digital payment methods. Many times, when using a digital payment method, consumer or merchant has to enter the instrument no. (Credit card #, or some other Id number) manually, which takes its own time and also makes the method vulnerable to user-side security attacks. However, this problem can easily be solved by the barcode technology. At zero cost, it can bring in the much-required anonymity in the transactions. So you may ask what the hell I am talking about and if it's something new, how can it be implemented. Valid questions and this is how we may do it: Until Credit, debit, and other payment cards start having the only barcode on them and not character string, users can easily create a barcode of any st...

A lot of water has flown under the bridge of de/remonetization which was launched last month by the PM Modi himself. There is all kind of arguments on both sides of the table. There are few people who have already declared the initiative a failed one, while there are others who are waiting patiently and watching the situation unfolding. Economists have their opinions but are not able to find a precedent to back their opinions.  In this write-up, I would stay away from declaring this effort a success or a failure. I would only focus on how can we use this opportunity in a better way to reduce M0 and M1 money (currency in circulation) and march towards a less-cash India, if not cashless. As has been said about PM Modi also, you may like demonetization, you may hate it, but you are very lucky if you can ignore it as it means you are not impacted by the exercise very much. In last one month, if you haven't stood in an ATM queue even once, then either you are rich enough to have somebod...