If you seek to please 90% of your potential customers, all you need to do is the usual thing.
To please half the remaining potential market, you're going to need to work at least twice as hard.
And to please the next half, twice as hard again. It's Zeno's paradox, an endless road to getting to the end.
So, a letter with a stamp gets you on time deliverability 90% of the time. Priority mail gets you the next 5%, and if you want to be sure of reaching just about everyone in a trackable, reliable way, you're going to have to step up and pay for a courier service. (And note the expensive part... you often don't know which people need to be couriered, so you have to pay to do it for everyone).
The rules apply to more than fulfillment. They apply to bedside manner, to customer service, to effort and originality in the kitchen as well.
Health care works the same way. 90% of the patients will respond to a treatment, but the next 5% will cost twice as much, and on and on...
The very end of the curve, the .5%, might be unpleasable, uncurable, unreachable without insane effort. Which is why organizations that please everyone are so extraordinarily rare.
One approach, which some organizations use, is to redefine your usual systems so you are able to please most people without your team going through a Herculean sprint every day, and then (this is a key element as well), eagerly and regularly apologizing and giving refunds to the one in 150 where it just can't be done.
Perfect is nice, but you can't afford it. None of us can.
I come from a state where agriculture is the biggest employer so I have vivid memories of fields full of women.
But think about the owner - and it's always a man who comes to mind.
Land is traditionally passed down the male line in India, so society tends to struggle with the idea of female farm owners. But this is starting to change as women challenge the stereotype.
This is the story of three women, separated by circumstance and geography, who have picked up the gauntlet and begun farming.
Vaishali Jayawant Bhalerao, 40, is a widow and single mother of two in the western state of Maharashtra. Rimppi Kumari, 32, and Karamjit, 26, are two unmarried sisters who live thousands of miles away in northern Rajasthan state.
I visit Vaishali's red-brick home overlooking a small courtyard in Maharashtra, on a blistering hot afternoon.
She is a slight woman with deeply sunken eyes who welcomes me with a bright smile."That's my husband," she says, pointing to a framed photo on the wall.
Jayawant Bhalerao took his own life six years ago due to crop failure and debt. He is one of more than 300,000 Indian farmers who have taken their own lives because of crop failure and debt in the past two decades.
Image captionTears lie just below the surface as Vaishali talks about her husband and why he took his life
After her husband died, Vaishali had to bury her grief and become the head of the household. "He gave up but I had to live for my two children."
We walk through her five-acre farm where she grows cotton, pulses and soyabean.
I ask her how it feels to be the only woman farmer in her village and her face lights up.
"Men working on my farm didn't take me seriously at first. They thought a woman would not know how to go about this business," she says.
Image captionVaishali farms her five acres so successfully that she can keep her teenage son and daughter in school.
But she seems to have easily mastered farming, discussing crop cycles, fertiliser and pesticides with confidence and authority. She also makes enough money by selling her produce to keep her teenage son and daughter in school.
Vaishali has made the best out of a bad situation, but far away in Rajasthan, two sisters are farming by choice.
As I approach the farm owned by Rimppi Kumari and Karamjit, I see two confident, smiling faces riding a motorbike.
Rimppi also likes to drive their tractor with her younger sister tagging along.
Image caption
Rimppi is queen of all she surveys on her farm which is making more money than ever
"When my father died seven years ago I decided to take up farming. We own a lot of land, around 32 acres," she says, a smile playing on her lips.
"My family, including my older brother, supported me but in the wider community all hell broke loose."
Rimppi gave up a job in information technology to grow soyabean, wheat and rice. She is making more money out of the land than even her father did, helped by her decision to embrace modern farming techniques.
"Every girl in India is expected to get married, have children and stay at home but I want to do something different," she says.
"I want to fly high. I have shown men I can be a better farmer than them."
But despite their success, the sisters are viewed with disapproval in their village.
Eighty-year-old Sardar Karamjeet Singh voices the opinion of many others when he says that "what these two sisters are doing is wrong. They should have been married by now"."We don't allow our women to leave the house. Forget about farming."
But the sisters have the complete support of their mother.
Sukhdev Kaur says she has always believed in her daughters
"If you give opportunities to girls, if you allow them to grow, they can fly high," 60-year-old Sukhdev Kaur says.
"They just need their wings unclipped. I have always believed in my daughters. They show that daughters can surpass sons."
But there is one place where Rimppi feels uncomfortable - the grain market.
"We are the only women around. Men stare at me so I never dress like a woman when I come to the market. I wear trousers and a shirt so people take me more seriously."
Image captionRimppi feels under scrutiny from men at the grain market
In a country where farming has traditionally been a male preserve, and farming is becoming increasingly unproductive, the three women are remarkable outliers.
Only 17% of India's farmers subsist entirely on earnings from their farms alone, and although more than half of India's population is engaged in farming, agriculture provides less than 15% of the country's GDP.
So it is a long row to hoe, but it does not deter the three women.
"I feel like a brave woman warrior," says Vaishali. Few would disagree.
Couldn't have had a prettier start to a Sunday. After months, I did a morning walk at Lalbagh.
Was a treat to the eye, the heart and the soul:
Pelicans, and lots of other birds
The clump of plants in the middle of the lake must have had atleast a hundred birds on it, pelicans, storks, cranes, cormorants, crows, herons and others I didn't know
A cute little bird house that someone had put there and diksha was trying to open the door of...and then we were wondering if amongst all these trees the little bird would even want to live in the house...and how human a thought it was...
A pond heron standing on the lotus leaves..there was a purple moor hen too that i missed on camera
Some super vigorous work out session underway
A bunch of cormorants that just landed, beautifully sleek birds
Sure made me think I need to do Lalbagh more often....open oneself up to a bountiful source of wonderful energy
This was a favorite word, a long long time ago, and it came back today.
It’s a for sure aspirable place to be. Sure there will be so many facets of life unfolding around you, and those you need to partake of, some good and some not so good, but when you are in a state of flow, when you can find that space in yourself which will not be contained, it’s the most enabling and empowering of feelings.
I’m sure we all hit our points of flow, when you feel so aligned, so good to be doing just what you're doing. I’d think it’s worth using all our self awareness skills to know what it takes to get to that state of flow. It’s like that definition of a goal…it’s not necessarily where you get to, but the direction in which you move. And you'll soon find you can hit it more and more often and stay there for longer and longer periods.
It’s said that ”Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at it’s best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. In flow the emotions are not just contained and channeled, but positive, energized, and aligned with the task at hand."
Csikszentmihalyi ( we’ve seen complicated names, but nothing like this one) says, ‘People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious. Flow occurs in that delicate zone between boredom and anxiety’
Watching someone in flow gives the impression that the difficult is easy; peak performance appears natural and ordinary.
Daniel Goldman says 'The hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture. Because flow feels so good, it is intrinsically rewarding. It is a state in which people become utterly absorbed in what they are doing, their awareness merged with their actions. Even being aware ‘I’m doing this wonderfully’ can break the flow. And although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of success or failure – the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what drives them.”
This is no more on the esoteric level of...thinking positive, being happy, and alternate healing methods.
It's science, proven fact kinds.
In 1974, Robert Ader, a psychologist, discovered that the immune system, like the brain, could learn. His results were a shock; the prevailing wisdom in medicine had been that only the brain and the central nervous system could respond to experience by changing how they behaved. Ader's findings showed myriad ways the central nervous system and the immune system communicate....biological pathways that make the mind, the emotions, and the body not separate, but intimately intertwined.
The discovery was serendipitous...... he was working on the immune system in rats. The field that studies this, psychoneuroimmunology, is now a leading edge medical science. It's very name acknowledges psycho and neuro as connected.
Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings - anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness, is a form of disease prevention.
Since the data shows that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.
I wonder why it takes years and years for even researched and proven information to be disseminated and percolated into all spaces of impact. Why do all hospitals not talk of this as part of the treatment. In fact I think they should just start in schools.
"Compassion", as one patient put it in an open letter to his surgeon, is not mere hand holding. "It is good medicine"
Excerpts from a nice article in HBR, by Vineet Nayar
Entrepreneurs are the lifeline of any economy, and high-growth start-ups in particular are responsible for the great majority of new job creation.
Fund managers bring in too many controls, for cash flows, income projections, budgeting, risk analysis, financial modeling – the list is endless, what can be called spreadsheet asphyxiation.
Start-ups can’t be assessed using conventional business metrics. Yes, they require diligent oversight., and this can be achieved without an excessive emphasis on controls if a start-up entrepreneur has clarity at all times on four simple questions.
First, what specific problem are you solving? Building a new product or service in itself is not adequate, even if it’s a brilliant innovation. The litmus test is whether it solves a unique problem or offers a unique solution to an existing problem.
Second, who will be willing to pay a premium for your product or service? Be crystal clear about who your customer is. Once you drill down to this target group, the question is what they want to buy, not what you want to sell.
Third, who do you want on your core team? You need to know why you’d want to hire an individual: what he or she contributes to the set of core competencies that you need. You also need to know what the individual gets out of working for you. And does that objective align with yours?
Finally, why are you doing this? Is the startup being built to last, to sell, or because you enjoy solving a challenging problem? Understanding the raison d’être is necessary as each of destinations implies something about your time frame, the resources you need, and your metrics for success.
A final subtlety: Making money is the foremost goal of the investor, to be sure, but it’s not always the primary mission of the start-up founder. As Angelist Kevin Laws points out, “The business model exists to serve the mission, not the other way around.”
It's almost impossible to persuade someone that he's wrong. Almost impossible to make your argument louder and sharper and have the other person say, "I was wrong and I will change my mind."
Far more effective: Help someone make a new decision, based on new alternatives and a new story.
Arnold got it right in this passionate invitation to (re) think about our future.
