When I first entered the arranged marriage market in early 2009, I had done so with the expectation that I would use it as a sort of dating agency. Remember this was well before the likes of OKCupid or Tinder or TrulyMadly were around, and for whatever reason I had assumed that I could “find…
Big Data and Fast Frugal Trees
In his excellent podcast episode with EconTalk’s Russ Roberts, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer introduces the concept of “fast and frugal trees“. When someone needs to make decisions quickly, Gigerenzer says, they don’t take into account a large number of factors, but instead rely on a small set of thumb rules. The podcast itself is based on…
Housewife Careers
This is something I’ve been wanting to write about for a very long time, but have kept putting it off. The ultimate trigger for writing this is this article about women with children in Amazon asking for backup child care at work. Since this hits rather close home, this is a good enough trigger to…
Just Plot It
One of my favourite work stories is from this job I did a long time ago. The task given to me was demand forecasting, and the variable I needed to forecast was so “micro” (this intersection that intersection the other) that forecasting was an absolute nightmare. A side effect of this has been that I…
I’m not a data scientist
After a little over four years of trying to ride a buzzword wave, I hereby formally cease to call myself a data scientist. There are some ongoing assignments where that term is used to refer to me, and that usage will continue, but going forward I’m not marketing myself as a “data scientist”, and will…
Triangle marketing
This blog post is based more on how I have bought rather than how I have sold. The basic concept is that when you hear about a product or service from two or more independent sources, you are more likely to buy it. The threshold varies by the kind of product you are looking at.…
Analytics for general managers
While good managers have always been required to be analytical, the level of analytical ability being asked of managers has been going up over the years, with the increase in availability of data. Now, this post is once again based on that one single and familiar data point – my wife. In fact, if you…
The missing middle in data science
Over a year back, when I had just moved to London and was job-hunting, I was getting frustrated by the fact that potential employers didn’t recognise my combination of skills of wrangling data and analysing businesses. A few saw me purely as a business guy, and most saw me purely as a data guy, trying…
Generalist and specialist managers
A really long time ago, I’d written this blog post about “comparative advantage” versus “competitive advantage” employees. A competitive advantage employee is better at a particular kind of task or skill compared to the rest of the team, and he is valued for that kind of skill. A comparative advantage employee, on the other hand,…
The (missing) Desk Quants of Main Street
A long time ago, I’d written about my experience as a Quant at an investment bank, and about how banks like mine were sitting on a pile of risk that could blow up any time soon. There were two problems as I had documented then. Firstly, most quants I interacted with seemed to be solving…
The nature of the professional services firm
This is yet another rejected section from my soon-t0-be-published book Between the buyer and the seller. In 2006, having just graduated from business school, I started my career working for a leading management consulting firm. This firm had been one of the most sought after employers for students at my school, and the salary they offered…
Banks starting to eat FinTech’s lunch?
I’ve long maintained that the “winner” in the “battle” for payments will be the conventional banking system, rather than one of the new “wallet” or “payment service providers”. This view is driven by the advances being made by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which is owned by a consortium of banks. First there…
Restaurants, deliveries and data
Delivery aggregators are moving customer data away from the retailer, who now has less knowledge about his customer. Ever since data collection and analysis became cheap (with cloud-based on-demand web servers and MapReduce), there have been attempts to collect as much data as possible and use it to do better business. I must admit to…
Airline delays in India
So DNA put out a news report proclaiming “Air India, IndiGo flyers worst hit by flight delays in January: DGCA“. The way the headline has been written, it appears as if Air India and Indigo are equally bad in terms of delayed flights. And an innumerate reader or journalist would actually believe that number, since…
Selection bias and recommendation systems
Yesterday I was watching a video on youtube, and at the end of it it recommended another (the “top recommendation” at that point in time). This video floored me – it was a superb rendition of Endaro Mahaanubhaavulu by Mandolin U Shrinivas. Listen and enjoy as you read the rest of the post. I was…
Should you have an analytics team?
In an earlier post a couple of weeks back, I had talked about the importance of business people knowing numbers and numbers people knowing business, and had put in a small advertisement for my consulting services by mentioning that I know both business and numbers and work at their cusp. In this post, I take…
The Problem with Unbundled Air Fares
Normally I would welcome a move like the recent one by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) that allows airlines to decrease baggage limit and allows them to charge for seat allocation. While I’m a fan of checking in early and getting in a seat towards the front of the flight (I usually don’t…
Levers and Pulleys
I’m writing this based on my insights as a management consultant. Apologies in advance if I end up on a global or gyaan-spouting trip One of the most common ways of ending up in corporate paralysis is to split up a particular target into constituent “levers” and hand over the management of each of these…
The Trouble with Management Consulting
While I was pumping iron (I know, I know!!) at the gym on Wednesday evening, I got a call from a client seeking to confirm our meeting yesterday afternoon. “Why don’t you put together a presentation with all the insights you’ve gathered so far?”, he suggested, adding that he was planning to call a few…
CEO Presentations and Rocky Movies
As part of my consulting assignment, yesterday I had to make a presentation to the CEO of my client. The process of preparing the presentation reminded me of Rocky (or any other Martial Arts movie). In these movies, before the protagonist can challenge the antagonist, he has to go through a series of underlings. Only…
Generalists and specialists
So you have generalists and specialists. Generalists are fundamentally smart people who can do a variety of things. They take a look at a problem, take some time to understand the basics, and then go about solving it. They get bored easily, and move from problem to problem. Generally, they don’t dig deep but are…