The Magic Bazaar

Five Reasons you Must Attend Friday's MISRC Social Media Panel

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:33:03 -0500

As the Great One, Wayne Gretzky said:

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

Here are top five reasons why you must check out MISRC’s panel discussion on the Business Use of Social Media, moderated by NYU’s Anindya Ghose, and featuring Mayo Clinic’s social media lead, FarrisTamimi, MD, Best Buy’s Global CoE Social Media Lead, Gina Debogovich, and Wade Gerten, Founder and CEO of interactive marketing company 8th Bridge.

Does your company need a Chief Content Officer?
Can social media sites like patientslikeme.com change the balance of power between patients and the medical establishment?
Does the phrase ‘The API Economy’ mean anything to you?
Is ‘gamification’ going to lead to monetization?
Should Facebook open it’s timeline feature to brands?

So signup for the live webcast or attend in person if you are a part of the larger Carlson community or a MISRC member company (space is limited) this coming Friday, Feb 17, 2012, 3-5 p.m. Details at http://misrc.umn.edu/socialmedia/

Hope to see you there!

@ravibapna

Event Hashtag — #MISRCSocMedia

Three Reasons for Every General Manager to Grasp IT

Fri, 02 Sep 2011 15:49:00 -0400

Its that time of the year again for me. Every Fall I have the privilege to open my academic year by teaching the IT Management course to our Executive MBA students here at Carlson. We meet intensively during their residency week on campus and three recent encounters (two physical-world, with senior business leaders in the Twin Cities, and one virtual) nicely link to my overall theme for this course:

A recent luncheon meeting with the CIO of one of our major (top 5) accounting and consulting firms led us to conclude that if firms today are not being enabled by the cloud, and don’t have mobile, analytics/BI and social layers in whatever they do (read processes, services and products), they are probably leaving money on the table
An evening with the Minneapolis head of a top global strategic consulting firm confirmed that most firms are not even using an iota of the data that they generate for gaining competitive advantage, and
My own social media space (Twitter and Facebook) was aflame a couple of weeks ago by Marc Andreessen’s (he wrote the original web-browser Mosaic, founded Netscape…) article titled Why Software is Eating the World, in which he elaborates how “software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.” His main point is that six decades into the computer revolution we are now at the point of transforming entire industries. While publishing — think books, movies, music; entertainment — videogames; telecom and direct marketing may not be that surprising as we may have internalized the Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Zynga, Skype and Googles of the world, the real change is happening in the physical world (cars, retail, oil and gas, agriculture, healthcare and education). Did we miss something? :-)

These highly interlinked sets of issues are the motivation for pursuing a yin-yang efficiency-innovation duality (Bapna and Sambamurthy 2010) based theme for our course. On one hand IT can be the great efficiency provider, the integrator and standardizer for companies with multiple business units, geographies and processes. Interestingly, technologies such as cloud and forces such as global sourcing are leading towards a shrinkage of the “empire” of the IS/IT organization within many firms, much to the chagrin of many CIOs.

However, the cutting-edge companies (P&G for instance) are using IT for front-line business innovation through analytics, social media and superior knowledge sharing. Hence, we also focus on how IT can contribute towards business innovation (lower operating costs, not just IT costs which are anyway in single digit percentages of revenues; contribute to top-line growth through newer information based products, processes and services; and improve internal knowledge flows).

This is the territory we cover in CEMBA 5712 and the following ‘Leveraging Social and Digital media for Business” course (Spring 2012).

What’s your view of IT within your firm and industry?

Dorinda and I cooking chicken curry….Our friend Anne from...

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 15:15:00 -0400

Dorinda and I cooking chicken curry….Our friend Anne from Hyde Park in Chicago was supposed to visit and learn Indian cooking, but unfortunately she could not make it. Here’s the next best solution:-)

How do you make your curry?

(Dedicated to my parents who are visiting from Jaipur and to Steve Jobs for giving us such wonderful hardware and software, the iPhone 4 and the iMovie app for the iPhone! Together they make even someone like me quasi-creative:-)

CEMBA Class of 2012 Students: Here is some help on downloading...

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 13:10:00 -0400

CEMBA Class of 2012 Students: Here is some help on downloading and installing XLMiner from its new owner Frontline Systems. I find it interesting that the leading Excel based optimization company (makers of Solver) bought the leading Excel based data-mining tool (XLMiner). This is indicative of the convergence of big-data and optimization within firms. I only hope Frontline does not significantly increase the licence fees for academic access.

What's it about Bangalore?

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 11:39:41 -0400

One of the stories going viral on my Facebook wall currently is about CNN 2010 Top 10 Hero, Narayanan Krishnan. Its a great story. The guy quits his job at the Taj in Bangalore about a decade ago and starts cooking for the destitute, the homeless, the folks who eat their own shit, you get the picture. He also gives them dignity — hugging, bathing, and shaving folks who have not had these simple pleasures we take for granted. The CNN story did not provide a link to his organization, and that left some of us wondering whether his passion has scale. Turns out that it is pretty organized with a US/Paypal version for those wishing to join the cause with him — more details at http://www.akshayatrust.org/. (I wonder whether he currently operates out of Madurai or Bangalore).

The name Aksahya Trust is close to another wonderful organization, also Bangalore based, Akshaya Patra. They provide mid-day meals to hundreds of thousands of below-poverty-line kids going to government schools in many Indian cities. When I took the Carlson undergrads to Bangalore last winter for their core IT course, we were blown away by Akshay Patra’s process efficiency and their slick messaging. I’m hoping for a tete-a-tete with Narayanan Krishnan this coming spring when I take the Carlson exec MBA class over for their International Residency in India.

People have asked me about my choice of Bangalore as a primary destination for these field visits. Why not Mumbai or Delhi? I think Steven Johnson’s idea of the adjacent possible (introduced to me by my good friend Shomik Mehndiratta at the World Bank in DC) is probably the closest that comes to explain this. He states,

“The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.”

Of all the Indian cities, I think only Bangalore has the critical mass of nervous energy combined with sheer technical capabilities and people who have seen the entrepreneurship movie that lead to multiple parallel bold experiments of the sort described above. Johnson calls this the liquid density (as opposed to gaseous - which results in, shall we just say gas, and is therefore too unstable to be useful or solid - which is not malleable and literally frozen in its blocks) that certain cities/regions have that naturally facilitate the information flows necessary for innovation.

Agree? Disagree? I’d love to hear your views.

Live band jazzing up our annual alumni event at Carlson.

Tue, 03 May 2011 19:22:53 -0400

Live band jazzing up our annual alumni event at Carlson.

Minneapolis Intl Film Festival - the Hedgehog

Sun, 01 May 2011 22:25:35 -0400

Loved the French movie “The Hedgehog” at the film festival running at St. Anthony’s Main.

My cousin Keshav playing “drifting” on the...

Sun, 01 May 2011 19:04:12 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

My cousin Keshav playing “drifting” on the piano…