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One of my new friends asked me the above question “How to
de-commoditize if you are selling a commodity product?”. He knew that
commodity products usually get differentiated by price and wanted to
escape that.

That’s a problem for many companies. Adrian Slywotzky has a cool book
called How to grow when markets don’t
where he talks about the story of Cardinal health. A division of
Cardinal health sells hospital supplies, mainly surgical instruments
(can be argued as commodity products) and instead of differentiating
the produts they (Cardinal Health) studied how these supplies get used
in the hospitals (value chain) and came up with a solution to help
streamline the process of packaging and delivering surgical instruments
“just in time” for the operation. The package would contain everything
that a particular operation would require in the order the doctor would
want. In fact, it would include the instruments of the doctor’s
preferred brand. You just can’t beat that with price. Instead of
competing on the price of the product, they sold a solution and an
experience that is hard to match by a competitor.

We talked about this and discussed if there was a possibility of “knowledge arbitrage” for his business.

More companies (think Starbucks) are selling experiences rather than products and of course, are charging a premium.

Something to think about…

You can keep working to get “it” but it’s also important to “give back”. Here is a short quote highlighting that.

We know from Stephen Covey that “Everything happens twice, once in our mind and once in reality”.

We are smart enough to know that in order to create a compelling
future, we need to first design it. Most of us, of course are busy
talking about the past and what happened with other people rather than
thinking about the future.

Here is a test: In the last one day or so, what was the amount of time
you spent discussing your past and what was the amount of time you
spent thinking about your future?

and, here are two questions: If you continue to spend your time in the
above ratio, would you be moving towards your dream future? What are the chances?

One of my friends was complaining to me about the fact
that his boss was not understanding him. He vividly described what
exactly happened in a particular incident and ultimately his point was
that “his boss was wrong” and “he was right”. We talked about it
for a while and both of us agreed that it is not in his best interest
to give this situation more interest than it is due.

How about you - how is your “thinking bandwidth” being used on a daily basis.

The era of job security is over.

There are very few organizations that can actually guarantee your job over a long period of time. Most people know this but very few people really do something about this. I would like to say that this is not a trend or a fad. The circumstances in the job scene have changed forever. In the last four days, I have seen at least ten companies announcing job cuts - some in the range of 100s and some in the range of 1000s of jobs.

One of my acquaintances called me and said that his company is closing their engineering division and all the people in the division were asked to leave by the end of the day. He told me that none of the team members that he was working with had a clue that this was coming - ok, that this was coming on that particular day. A person who was gainfully employed until yesterday was a job seeker today.

The million dollar question is NOT

what should you do in order to be employed?

            but

what should you to in order to remain employable?

[Inspiration - Jim Rohn]

Here is a gut check for you. “If in the next one hour you are supposed to give a talk to a group of people, what are the three topics that you will pick where you think you are most comfortable?” Remember that there is only one hour between now and the time you will be on stage. Once you identify these topics think for a few minutes about the shelf-life of these topics. If the shelf-life is less than a few months you know that you are in trouble.

Here is a real-life example: When I asked this question to a person recently, without a second of hesitation he said his favorite topic would be “Performance tuning”. When I asked him to elaborate, he said “Topic 1 - Performance Tuning for <software package 1>, Topic 2 - Performance Tuning for <software package 2>, Topic 3 - Performance Tuning for <software package 3>” It was very clear that he loved to troubleshoot performance issues but the shelf-life for the topics that he chose was very slim. When we talked about the “shelf-life” concept, the person understood where the problem was and he is working towards getting out of the shell.

Working in the tech industry has its rewards but the shelf-life of many skills that you acquire and use is very small. While you these “short term” may be absolutely necessary, they are not sufficient.

Brad has a great post on Work/Life Balance
today. I think it is a must read for all of us here in Silicon Valley.
I may be wrong, this over working attitude is prevalent more with
technology professionals than anyone else.

Thanks Brad for the great article there.

Seth has great words of wisdom in this post Advice for Authors. If you are planning to write a non-fiction book, this post is valuable.

Thanks Seth.

Picked this quote from Karen’s coaching website. This little quote reminds me of the saying “no one can stop an idea whose time has come”

Today I was meeting an old friend over a cup of coffee. My friend asked about my upcoming book “Beyond Code”
and I was more than happy to talk about it. Something caught his
attention and he said, I have to make a note of it. He opened a
notebook and scribbled something. This happened a few times and he
would scribble something. After watching him for sometime I could not
resist but asking “Can you really read what you wrote?” and he quickly responded “Most of the time I can but sometimes I can’t”


We talked about this “very”
thing. By the end of the meeting I could see that there was a marked
difference in the way he wrote notes. He was happy to see the change.
All it took was a LITTLE bit more effort than normal.

My point was that we all have a choice on these simple things - do we
write or do we scribble. Most of the time it doesn’t matter but when it
matters, it COSTS a lot. Taking notes is one of the many standard
practices that we have. If we give it the due attention and have some
discipline, we can reap multiple rewards (“Every disciplined effort has multiple rewards” - Jim Rohn)
It’s a choice we all make. The returns for having discipline in our
standard practice comes over a long time. It is worth the effort!!

What are the standard practices in your life? How much attention do you
give to each of these standard practices. I picked “note taking” as an
example because it’s easy to ignore it (saying “I won’t share it with
anyone. It’s FOR MY EYES ONLY”) thinking nobody will notice it. You
can’t wear a mask or you can’t live your life with a multiple
personality disorder. You really can’t live two lives. Best is to fix
yourself once for all not based on situations and contexts.

This little quote reminds us the need to be in the game than on the sidelines.