Interesting discussion on the future of education (Video)

Below is an exciting conversation between Fred Dust (Partner, IDEO), Michael Karnjanaprakorn (Co-Founder and CEO, Skillshare); Tim Marshall (Provost and Chief Academic Officer, The New School) and Andrew Yang, Founder and CEO, Venture for America. These are some of the pioneers who are exploring new ways to prepare our kids for their future (what else does education do).

Though, I agree with most of the things that are being discussed here, I think that true revolution in education will only come once we are able to integrate such efforts in the mainstream education movement.

Also, we all say that education is a life-long activity, but does any of the education institutes implement this?

Do we have a college or a school or an online course that we can take for life? One that does not have a specific start date and a end date?

Is it practical and possible to create an institution that can enroll us and take us on a quest for education for our lifetime?

This is a great opportunity for anyone who steps up and creates such an institute.. Would you?

Let me know your thoughts on this post by commenting below or by tweeting them to me at @rmukeshgupta.

 

Whats the future of business?

The future of business is real time.

What does it take to run a real-time business? In my opinion, if one wants to create a business that is run in real-time, they need to take inspiration from how professional sports teams are run.

CEO plays the role of the general managers of the team, answerable to the owners (board of directors or shareholders), have a vision for the team and communicate it to the clearly to coaches and players.

The coach is responsible for the team composition and with the support team is primarily responsible for one thing only – train the players so well, that they are able to adapt to any situation that they face while playing off.

Sure, the coach can still help by suggesting and getting the right combination in the field, adapt and suggest changes in the strategies, but again if the players are not able to execute the same in real-time, the strategies will fail.

Managers are the coaches who train the players, with the other support functions like HR, training, finance make the support team. Manager’s role is to ensure that the players have trained enough that they are able to adapt to anything that the opposition can come up with.

Customer facing employees (or front line employees) are the players who need to be able to adapt and adopt to everything that the customer or the competition throws at them.

They need to use their training to win the match. The captain on the field needs to make on-the-spot decisions based on how the competition & the customer react.

In this model, the most important set of folks are these customer facing employees, as it is they  who need to be able to react in real-time based on what they encounter in the field.

So, if businesses want to transform themselves into real-time enterprises  they will need to treat their employees as their most important assets. They need to be trained well and should be able to choose the right play based on their reading of the situation. Their managers (coaches)  can suggest the play to use based on their readings of the situation, but the responsibility to run the play still rests with these employees. So, just like the players, these customer facing employees  should be empowered enough to take decisions on the spot and act on them without having to go back and forth for an approval.

In this model, the organization realizes the importance of their front line employees and so tailors everything in the organization to enable these employees to go out there and take decisions that is right for them and the organizations. This means providing them with the right information at the right time in the right format. This is where technology can play a very important role in the organization. Any technology that enables availability of the right information at the right time in the right format to front line employees, serves its purpose.

It is KEY that these employees know the intent of the organization and have  practiced different plays (Strategies) to achieve this intent so many times, that these have become a part of their sub-conscious.

The other critical piece in this model is also the fact that team work at the front line matters even more. The team will be only as strong as their weakest player. So, it is critical that everyone in the front line understand the intent and their roles in the plays that the organization has trained them for to achieve the intent. Each of them need to play their part.

This also means that decision making will need to be local at the team level and not at the corporate level. The corporate only provides the intent and ensures that every function in the organization is there to support the team to go out and give their best.

This also means that the front line employees are also the highest paid people in the organization. This is a radical shift from today’s model, where they are the lowest paid in the organization and it considered that higher you are in the hierarchy, the more you get paid as your contribution is considered to be more important.

This shift could be the most important to do as this is a cultural shift of magnitude so huge that you can equate this to an earthquake of magnitude 8.5 on the Richter scale.

This model also means that you need to do away with a large chunk of mid-managers as they do not have a role to play. The organization needs to become lean, nimble and fast.

Everything that the organization does needs to serve one and only one purpose – “Enable the front line employees to execute their plays flawlessly”. If a task or a process or a program does not serve this purpose, it is not done. Full Stop.

The question is if it is possible for any organization to follow this model at all? Is this practical?
I think it is. If the football teams, baseball teams, soccer teams, cricket teams around the world can do this, I am sure that other businesses can also execute this.

The question is not – “Will businesses move towards this model?”
but the questions is – “who will be the early adopter for this model?”

Start-ups are an obvious choice, but I think they do not face the challenges that this model solves and hence i would think that are less likely to adopt this.

The businesses that have had some successes and now want to grow big and compete against the biggest and the best organizations in the world are more likely to adopt this model as this provides them with an clear competitive advantage against their larger competitors.

Also, as they are just starting to compete at that level  means that their systems & processes are still being defined and hence the resistance to change will also be the least.

Do let me know your views on this topic by commenting below or tweeting your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

Everyone wants to innovate but no one wants to fail

Every organization, small or large is talking about innovation to be developed as a key strength within their organization. Every organization has an innovation program running at some maturity, but nothing really breakthrough comes out of these innovation programs. So, what’s wrong?

Every organization wants to innovate, but no organization wants to fail

People do not remember (everyone knows but conveniently forgets) that not all innovation projects will succeed and there is very little that you can do to forecast which one’s will in fact succeed.

In that sense, i think innovation projects are like the Movie business and there is a lot that organizations can learn from studios and production houses on how to manage innovation projects.

Mr. Jack Valenti, the long-time president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, once mentioned that

No one can tell you how a movie is going to do in the marketplace… not until the film opens in darkened theater and sparks fly up between the screen and the audience.

So it is with innovation projects. You can only find out the project’s success or failure once they come in contact with the real world and its user base.

There is no sure fire way to predict which movie will be a block-buster. Sure, there are some basic ingredients that create the table stakes, for example,

• a good script
• a good team of people making the movie
• good marketing and distribution.
• The ability of the film to connect with its customers on an emotional level is also key for its success.
• Discipline – Ability of the producer and director to stay disciplined in the making of the movie to balance the content of the film with the budget allocated for the film and to realize when one needs to give in to the demand of the other, all based on the idea of the film and the film only.
• Finally, the movie needs to be released to its audience and the audience decides if the film is a success or not – not the production house.
• Each production house has multiple film projects on the floor at any time. Once the film is green lighted, the entire machinery starts out with one single goal – to bring the movie out.

But these only provides the production house a stake in the business and does not guarantee success.

So it is with innovation projects. There are some basic ingredients that can set-you up for success.

• You need to have a good “insight” based on which you start an innovation project.
• The team that is working on the project is critical.
• The more you are in touch with the reality while working on the project the better the chances are for the success.
• Is the end result able to touch an emotional cord with the end-user or consumer?
• The ability of the team to stay on course with the budget and at the same time able to procure additional budgets if the idea or the project demands it. One can’t re-count how many innovation projects are killed for the lack of additional rounds of funding.
• As Seth Godin keeps talking about the need to “Ship”. The final judge of an innovation project should always be the customers for whom the product/service is created using the project. You will be surprised to know how many innovation projects never see this day because of some executive in the organization deciding that this will not work and kills the project. This is the single most critical aspect of innovation that can have dramatic influence of the amount of innovations that comes out of an organization.
• If you want to create a culture of innovation, you need to ensure that you need to have multiple innovation projects going at any point in time and if once a project is green-lighted, you need to allow it to see the light of the day by shipping the result of the project and let the customer decide.

The success rate of the movie business is crazily screwed. The number of block-busters in a year from a production house could be a handful, but still they keep making & releasing a lot of movies. You will also find that each production house also specializes on a genre of movies, that they are comfortable making based on different criteria.

So it is with organizations that want to foster innovation. The number of innovations that will prove to be block-buster will be few, a few will turn out to be decent success and few will  bomb poorly. But the overall investment in the projects will still be fueled by the block-busters and the decent successes.

So, if you want those block-busters, you still need to be prepared for the one’s that fail badly.

Idea for a disruptive biz-model innovation for banks

There is a lot of discussions and activities around the revival of the good old ATM.

• Some are trying to make these machines more Customer-centric like Wells Fargo.
• Some are trying to improve the overall user experience of the ATM like Diebold.

However, the true question should be the following:

“Do we even need an ATM? Is there a better, easier, faster way to manage cash than via an ATM?“

The first bank to figure out the answer to this question has the potential to truly disrupt the banking industry from a cash management perspective.

One way that I think could be used is the small businesses that accept payments from a credit or debit card?

Can they not be used to function as a teller for the bank? The bank instead of charging a fee for the use of the card machine, can instead pay the business a nominal amount and convert them into cash dispenser.

All the technology that is needed to make this happen is already available. The only change is in the execution of the idea.

This is just one idea to enable this. There could be many more viable ideas.. The question is are we looking for them?

Do let me know your thoughts by posting your comments below or tweeting them to me at @rmukeshgupta.

 

Solving the healthcare crisis

A couple of weeks back, I was attending my cousin’s marriage ceremony in Chennai and my father got fever. He was also complaining of cough and difficulty in breathing. We took him to a clinic where a doctor gave some medication.

We came back to our hometown (Bangalore) the next day and took him to a hospital to do continue the treatment as the breathlessness did  not go away. The doctor who attended my father immediately asked him to get admitted in the hospital to enable better care. He was kept in the Intensive care unit for some time under observation and then moved to a private room, once the doctors felt that he had stabilized. Then started the series of tests and more tests. He was being given oxygen using a mask and some antibiotic medicine via IV apart from his regular medicines that he has been taking for a while now.

A day passed in the room and my father felt better. However, he still experienced some pain in the ribs when he coughed. This resulted in the doctor asking us to stay in the hospital for another day to do more tests and to keep him under observation.

I am no doctor and maybe do not understand if this hospitalization (of 3 days) was really necessary. But then, we did not complain, as there was no financial burden on us, as the cost of hospitalization would be covered by our health insurance policy.

In my opinion, a big reason for the  escalating healthcare costs in India is the fact that “Health Insurance companies are willing to reimburse the cost of treatment only if the patient gets admitted in the hospital. “

No hospitalization = no reimbursement.

This creates a strong incentive for both the hospital (for obvious reasons) and the patient (to get the expense reimbursed) to go in for hospitalization even if it was not absolutely necessary.

Add to that, the hospitals can now do more tests, build bigger hospitals with more rooms and even more expensive equipment’s to do more tests. Though, this might help in building up infrastructure for better healthcare, all of these end up in escalating costs for insurance companies, which is then passed on to the consumers as an increase cost of insurance.

Now, imagine my plight if I did not have an insurance policy to cover my health. The treatment in good hospitals with good infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive, which in turn makes buying health insurance attractive.

So, everyone in the ecosystem of health care has a financial incentive to continue to drive the healthcare costs up, which ends up becoming a beast out of control.

So, how can we address this problem?

There are 2 kinds of solutions here..

• Short term, quick wins: 
  • If insurance companies do not insist on hospitalization to cover the cost of healthcare, patients would not be so willing to get hospitalized. They would prefer hospitalization only if absolutely necessary.
  • If Insurance companies can find a way to incentivise hospitals for non-hospitalization, this coupled with the above will result in a quick win in reducing the overall cost for the insurance provider, which they can either pass on to their customers as lower cost of insurance or keep the savings as increased profitability.
• Long term solutions:
  • Insurance companies to start and run a channel of clinics where insured can get good medical advice for free or very low cost. They will reimburse medical claims only if the hospitalization was recommended by one of the doctors from their clinics.
  • IF possible, they should also operate a chain of hospitals which can then be used to provide high quality treatment, and since the cost of treatment is a direct cost for them, they have strong financial incentives to reduce the cost per patient so that they can improve their profitability.
  • If we get most of the insurance companies to do this, then competitive pressures will ensure that this cycle is positively reinforced and the costs never escalate again.

These are exactly the measures that are not being taken but can go a long way in bringing healthcare costs down significantly& continue to do so in the long haul.

What do you think about this? Let me know by commenting below or by tweeting your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

When someone says “why reinvent the wheel?”

When someone says “Why reinvent the wheel?” , I am tempted to think that the person is trying to maintain the status quo and avoid change, change that is inevitable, change that is better embraced than resisted.

I do agree that there could be times and situations where you really do not need to reinvent the wheel.  However, I believe that if you put your thoughts on a topic, you can always find ways to improve upon your previous attempts.

It is even more important if you are talking about any of the important functions in your organizations like sales, marketing, finance, production, etc.

In today’s hyper-connected, highly competitive and ever changing world, this ability to constantly challenge the status quo could very well be the decisive factor in the success or failure of the organization.

The key is in finding out when and which process do you reinvent every day, week or month and which ones you decide not to.

So, as leaders it is important that we stop, take notice and think whenever someone pops this proverbial question – Why re-invent the wheel..

PS: If someone had decided not to re-invent the wheel, we would not have all of the things that we now take for granted..

Leading a culture of Innovation

I came across this great video where Kevin & Jackie Freiberg talk about how to lead with a culture of innovation.

One thought that stands out for me from this video is one question:

What happens if we start a culture of planned obsolescence of all our products?

I think this one question will differentiate between companies that will thrive and those that will lose their way!

First, lets listen to what they have to say..

Now, I have tried to summarize what the Friebergs talk about below:

• Innovation happens when you learn to “be comfortable being “uncomfortable”". This is the zone where you try to explore & surprise yourselves with what comes out of being in that state.
• Innovation happens when, as a leader, you decide, commit & involve yourself to solve real world 
• Deciding ideas to pursue using the following principles:
  • Is it real?
  • Can we win?
  • Is it worth doing?
• Address the real problem, which means that you need to dig deep to find the real problem and not address the symptoms (greatly explained by the example of the British Railways).
• The most important thing for innovation is “a culture obsessed with innovation”. Hopefully, you dont have people “who have quit but stayed”!
• Create an environment where your employees get engaged and connected or “pockets of innovation”
• Organizations who try to protect their markets typically end-up losing track as they are more interested in protecting their today against betting for tomorrow.
• As organizations, be ready and willing to disrupt yourself. It is much better than being disrupted by some other organization.
• Innovators find new opportunities in the confluence of “either” “or” mindset. Instead try using “and”.
• What happens if we start a culture of “Planned obsolescence” just like in the food industry. Will that make us more innovative? Will that make us more open to ideas that could potentially disrupt your own organization or products.
• Diversity is key..

What do you think about the concepts being shared by the Friebergs? Do you agree? What other things do you think are necessary in order to lead an organization with a culture of innovation.

Please share your thoughts as comments below or tweet me your thoughts @rmukeshgupta.

How do you innovate “Innovation” ..

A couple of days ago, I submitted my entry for the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize Challenge run by Management Exchange.

This challenge is about “Innovating Innovation” and will be judged by some of the greatest thinkers in innovation.

You can find below my submission for the challenge. If you like my thoughts, request you to vote for my submission here.

SUMMARY

Its not the lack of ideas that stops organizations from being innovative, but the way resources are allocated & employees rewarded that is the key.

We need to change the way we set and manage KPI’s, the way we allocate funds (quarterly budgeting with reduced budget year-on-year for standard activities) and the way we recognize and reward teams (based on IQ – Innovation quotient).

PROBLEM

Currently, organizations are managed as follows:

KPI’s and organizational strategy:

• The top management decides the strategy and the key initiatives for the organization.
• These are then cascaded down to the different lines of businesses.
• Each LoB head then defines the goals for his team based on the organizational goals

Challenges in this process:

1. This process resembles the election of a Pope. That is, the average employee has little to no understanding of, and input to, the process, and is instead reduced to waiting for the output of the process (“the white smoke up the chimney”).
2. This tends to dis-empower the employee base, but perhaps most importantly, robs decision-makers of the useful “push back” that the broader organization (particularly those working at the “front line”) can provide.

Budgeting:

• Each LoB head takes his last year cost, adds a percentage (maybe 5 or 10%) to the cost and submits the same for approval.
• This is an annual process and gets repeated only next year

Challenges in this process:

• This is where power turfs are created which lead to a lot of power tussles in the organization which help no one.
• This process also adds a lot of fat in the organization. If you are continuing to do the same tasks year-on-year, you should be getting better at the task & can find better ways to complete the same, thereby freeing up resources for the more important activities of the organization
• Increases the cost of doing business as-usual
• Due to the annual cycle, so many resources are wasted by continuing to pursue ideas or projects that should have been killed. This also means that other ideas/projects have not been allocated those very same resources.
• There is a separate LoB responsible for product development or R&D or innovation.

Innovation:

• This team also goes through the same process as all other LoB for KPI definition and budgeting.
• Makes it difficult to get the right amount of funding for the innovation efforts.

Challenges in this approach:

1. This puts the imperative of innovation on a small team instead of the fact that everyone one in the organization should have innovation on their agenda.
2. This also reduces the total resources available for funding new innovations as this team also has to compete with other LoB’s for resources.

Rewards & recognition:

• Individual employees are then rewarded and recognized based on their performance as measured against the cascaded KPI’s
• A lot of times these KPI’s do not have any component about innovation as it is considered to be the responsibility of the Innovation department
• This creates a culture of competition among employees as the rewards and recognitions are limited and all employees (alright, most of them) want a piece of that cake.
• Most organizations have a bell curve for evaluating and rewarding employees, which means that in every team, they expect a few employees to be below average, a few to be above average and all others average performers. This hurts most when you have a great team with super employees. By definition, you prohibit such teams to form and thrive.

Challenges in this approach:

1. Innovation is a team activity. Running an organization is also a team activity. So, why rewarding individual performance results in a few lone wolves who might not be great team players getting a lot of .
2. By following the bell curve, you are naturally encouring average performance from the team and discouraging high performing teams with high performing employees.
3. Individual top performers who care only about their performances get rewarded, recognized and promoted. These are the kind of people who are most likely to get involved in turf wars and create what we call the mid-management wall or bulge.

SOLUTION

In my opinion the following approach would work much better:

• KPI’s and organizational strategy:
  • The top management involves the frontline employees (sales, delivery, support, etc) who talk to customers/partners every day in the process of defining organizational strategy and key decision.
  • This process of discussion to also involve in defining the key challenges (with respect to product/service and competition). These challenges then become the areas to innovate.
  • The top management can now come out with the “Commanders Intent” of what they want to achieve and leave the details to the frontline staff to manage themselves, to achieve the intent.  

• Budgeting:
  • Each LoB gets a cut in budget every year (maybe 5 or 10%) to manage their business as usual activities. The rationale behind this is the fact that if you are doing something regularly, you can always find ways to improve the same on a continuous basis and hence should be able to manage at a lower cost. This is an annual process.
  • There is a second budgeting cycle that is executed quarterly. This is to decide on the funding for various innovation projects in the areas identified as the focus areas during the process of forming the strategy or any other activity that can give competitive advantage to the organization. In any case, these projects could focus on one of the following:
    • New product or service creation
    • New business model creation
    • New market development
    • Process improvements that lead to improved topline or increased bottom-line
  • New projects are pitched and existing projects provide an update on their progress. As this is a quarterly process, the organizations can decide if any of the existing projects require to be killed and if new projects show promise and need to be funded. A panel consisting of senior executives, front-line managers and the relevant functional experts takes decisions on the funding for the various projects.
  • Projects where the team is convinced about the viability but the management is not sure, should have an option to get into the start-up mode with the organization providing the seed funding, provided the team is able to get funding from other VC funds. This with the option that the organization gets the first right of refusal for further funding and buy-out. At a later stage if the employees want to kill the project, they could also be considered for re-hire based on the then open situations.

• Innovation:

• A small team of innovation coaches created who can be used by the different teams on their innovation projects. They work as consultants, coaches and bring in the outside-in perspective to the problems and also facilitate the process of innovation.

• Rewards & recognition:
  • Teams are rewarded and recognized rather than individuals.
  • Better performing teams are rewarded more than average performing teams or low performing teams.
  • Individual performances are still evaluated, recognized and rewarded, but within the framework of the performance of the team. So, if the team did well, your rewards will be better than if the team did not do well. So, in order for you to succeed, your team should also succeed. The individual performance evaluation is done by both managers and the peers.

PRACTICAL IMPACT

The impact of my ideas would be as below:

• KPI’s and organizational strategy – advantages:
  • This process ensures that the perception of the senior management is put to test and corrected if required, thereby eliminating the risk of creating strategy based on wrong perception.
  • This process also gets the front-line employees to participate in the creation of strategy that they are expected to execute. This increases the chances that the execution of strategy will be much better than otherwise. As many CEO’s will vouch that the difference between great organizations and not so great ones is this ability to execute their strategy well.
  • With the commander’s intent for the organization in place, employees can respond better to any situation they encounter and hence the ability of the organization to respond to change quickly and correctly is greatly enhanced. In times of great uncertainty, this ability to respond fast can be the difference between survival and growth.
• Advantages of the 2 stage Budgeting process: 
  • This process ensures that there is continuous improvements in the process and does not create a situation where there is more staff than there is work or worse, managers invent additional work for their staff, thereby creating a culture of improvement & innovation.
  • This process frees up a lot of resources that can be used to fund a lot more projects that can address the key challenges identified in the strategy building stage.
  • This also takes care of situations where the project team believes in a project and is willing to take the risk of starting up in order to continue their work. If they succeed, they win big and if they fail, they still have a chance to re-join the organization.
  • Innovation becomes the responsibility of the entire organization and not of one small team in the organization.

• Advantages of the “Everyone Innovates” process: 

• Clear identification of the key challenges helps in focusing the efforts of the organization in solving these problems which will have the biggest impact on the organizations success/failure.

• Creates the opportunity for innovations in areas where they are needed the most as the employees who face challenging situations are also more likely to come up with solutions.
• Advantages of the new team based Rewards & recognition:
  • This approach ensures that all employees are working together as a team as their individual success rewards and recognition depends on the success of the team.

• This drastically reduces the chances of someone succeeding (at their KPI’s) at the cost of their colleagues or customers.
• This also eliminates any bias (perceived or real) that might creep in the performance evaluation by the manager
• This will create an environment of trust and togetherness, which by itself, leads to a better environment which fosters creativity and high productivity.

CHALLENGES

Challenges that one will face during implementation of the above approach:

1. This involves complete overhaul of the management processes used in the organizations currently, which means that change management is a big challenge in implementing this idea of management.
2. There will be resistance from the mid-managers as they will perceive to be stripped of a lot of power that comes with being in the mid-manager layers that they have enjoyed so far. Unless, this is handled well and there is buy-in from them, the entire process can potentially fall apart, which will then make it even more challenging environment for the CEO to start fresh.

This said, the upside of being able to implement this approach to management is very high and is still worth the risk.

FIRST STEPS

The process can be implemented in phases or pilots:

1. The senior management can initiate the workshop with front-line staff for strategy definition, along with the mid-managers, to identify the key areas where they need innovations or solutions to current challenges that have been identified. This can be done by any management at the start of their strategy cycle.
2. Create and communicate the “Commanders Intent” to the entire organization. Challenge the entire organization to move towards achieving the “Commanders intent”.
3. Create a team of experts who will work as coaches to teams that want help in addressing the challenge that they want to solve.
4. Identify 2 or 3 managers (of high performing teams) who are open to try the new team based performance appraisal system. Help them to get the buy-in from the team members.
5. Publicly announce the pilot of the appraisal system with the team and congratulate the teams that have taken the first step to adopt the new practices.
6. Budgeting process will need to be the last process change to be adopted. If the previous steps have yielded good results, the adoption of the budgeting process becomes so much more easier (as the senior management would have already won the trust of the organization).

Do you agree with the approaches that I have suggested above. Do let me know by commenting below or tweet your thoughts to me at @rmukeshgupta.

 

PS: Some interesting videos on Innovation:

 

 

 

 

 

About Greenway – An intelligent way to navigate your city without getting into traffic Jams

Greenway is an innovative navigation system which significantly reduces CO2 emissions of cars and therefore protects the environment. The system orchestrates the traffic through a distributed routing algorithm in an optimal way. Ordinary navigation systems divert traffic jams onto smaller streets after they occurred, whereas Greenway actively prevents traffic jams. This is possible because Greenway reserves timeslots for cars on the streets. With this technique, Greenway knows the position of participating cars for any given point in time, including the future.The heart of the system is an optimized graph traversal algorithm that calculates shortest paths in a matter of milliseconds. The implementation includes many heuristics in order to reduce the complexity of calculating a route to nearly linear time.

via About Greenway.

via About Greenway.

New endangered species – salesmen

“What can be digitised, will be digitised” – unknown

The continuous growth of e-commerce and cloud solutions is creating a new problem of sorts – dwindling breed of salesman!

Imagine the following scenarios:

• I can buy any books that I want to on Amazon.com without any talking to anyone at amazon.
• I can buy clothes or shoes or accessories from Zappos without talking to anyone.
• I can buy an insurance from ICICI Lombard General Insurance without talking to anyone.
• I can re-charge my mobile phone online without talking to anyone from the phone company.
• I can buy any consumer durable (TV, Fridge, mobile, AC, etc) from any online store like flipkart.com without talking to anyone.
• I can buy stocks online without talking to anyone.
• I can buy order food online without talking to anyone.
• I can sign-up for a project management module from 37Signals.com without talking to anyone.
• I can buy office productivity software from Zoho without talking to anyone.
• I can buy furniture, groceries and almost everything online.

You get the point right! And as the internet spreads, this is only bound to increase. Everyday, more and more goods are being offered online which people could try and buy themselves.

So, what happens to the people with whom you would have interacted (sales people) to buy these stuff earlier?

• One obvious answer is that they will need to re-skill themselves to take up other roles, most obvious could be in customer service or call centers which will still have to do some selling when there is a customer calling them.
• The other option is for them to up-skill themselves to sell more and more complex stuff which is completely personalized and cant be offered online. This requires a completely different mental make-up and skill sets than selling pre-packaged, generic stuff requires. The demand for generic sales people will start declining and that for specialized sales people will start to rise (if not already happening).
• Another option for them is to become designers and design the sales processes for the online shops to help them sell more. In my opinion, this is far less likely than the other two options. However, this is the option that will provide the most lucrative, interesting work for the salesmen.

Do you agree that this phenomenon will play out in this decade?