Bhat's Notes

Excerpts from leadership talk on Big Picture Thinking by Amish Thakkar, head Infosys Germany on 25th August 2023.

The big picture of big picture thinking is nicely covered in this talk with daily examples in lucid terms. Speaker proved that the big picture thinking makes a big difference.

Amish Thakkar

1) Start with a big picture view

2) Zoom in and zoom out as required -consider the trade offs

3) There will be a different shades and factors you can’t control

4) First aim for good enough, no blunders.

Resource constraints and credibility are challenges. Credibility: benefit of doubt, absence of evidence

Avoid blunder when you zoom in.

If you are new, absence of evidence that you are capable of doing a good job is there. Absence of evidence has to be treated as evidence of absence.

Netflix product is streaming. Apple has many products and Apple TV+ is one of the many products. It’s job is not to complete with Netflix but to make Apple enormously successful. It is a downloadable app to watch the Apple TV++. Few android users who download this app get more and more familiar with Apple and Apple May get more customers. It makes Apple more successful. When Apple is selling a new device, they give you a few month trial. Some forget to switch after the free period, that is money for Apple. When your iPhone starts running out of storage, you may use iCloud to store the image. One euro a month means no clutter and easy upload. Apple can give a bundle of Apple Music and Apple TV along with that iCloud. In the telecom and media industry getting a new customer to switch from others is very high. Once you are an existing customer, you can be up sold more within that Apple ecosystem.

Similarity, in healthcare, one particular drug may not have high efficacy. As a part of portfolio of treatments, it may be very effective.

Before going to work people buy Starbucks. If Starbucks sells variants and more items, it gets the delta sale leading to huge margins. Starbucks doesn’t look at the profitability or individual transaction. The barista is more work but the morning rush hour results in extra few seconds, the queue builds up. The customer becomes a regular customer at the other coffee shop. Next time, customer get used to that other one an Starbucks will have customer attrition! In the morning, they only want to push the standard coffee. However, as the customer walks past the Starbucks, a coupon pops up on the phone with 40% discount. The customer realises that afternoon coffee is cheaper and morning coffee has no discount. Customer feels more intelligent and Starbucks want the customer to feel like this.

If goods like refrigerator lasts long, then you won’t buy again. That means you don’t get the repeat customer. A new entrant may bring on a differentiator that it’s fridge lasts longer. Then that company can’t get that customer for long time: this is a conundrum. Economy should be good too.

Some of the actions are correlated. Reading itself im can be meditative that you don’t need a separate meditation session!

Child thinks about the immediate pain though big picture thinking means you will be lifetime protected from the disease through that vaccine.

Demonetisation might have led to an additional one crore taxpayers leading more tax revenues leading to more subsidies to farmers and say and helps less number of suicides.

Genetically modified food is perfectly safe is what the maker says. If you challenge, the maker may say “do you have any proof?”. In reality the burden of proof is on the maker and not on the consumers. Whenever there is something in nature, anything that is not natural has the burden of proof in it. Always deploy this logic of nature versus man made and the burden is on the maker of the artificial things. The maker of AI has the burden to prove to the user that it is not detrimental to the existence of the humans. However if good people stopped using AI for this precise reason, bad people are not stopping using it!

Build versus Sculpt: Achieving an outcome many a times is about elimination of unwanted ones than creating a new one. For security reasons, on our office, we enter with a swipe card and you press the desired floor number and no stopping it in the middle. Then once you are on the floor, you have to use swipe card. To exit, you need the swipe card again so unwanted people don’t take the stuff by stealing.

Let the person navigating do the longer version of the the navigation in his mind. Person giving instruction should stick to the shorter version. Choose the four level of aggregation.

Keep your business writing very crisp. Keep it super simple. If you charge a client at $200 an hour per consultant, five people charge $500 and the value generated in that meeting should be higher than that amount. Productivity is the value of output generated divided by the cost of input. More hard work means you shall have far higher value of output.

Your client a steel manufacturer is looking to maximise profits. A manual worker in backward region in a steel plant whose location is more backward and the plant wants to shift to new coal mine area elsewhere. If the steel plant shifts, his daughter may have education challenge. Is it so? Who knows? May be the new location is more effective? The objective is to maximise the profit for the plant. That must be the focus for you to do your best to do that legally. You can’t solve every problem in the world and focus on.

Weapons are bad. Weapon manufacturer adds to employment. How do you know sitting here that the jobs created by the children of the employees of weapons factory will not do more for the humanity than the destruction by the weapons! You focus on the task given while keeping your task on focus and don’t judge but do think big.

The objective of a company is to maximise the shareholders Profits. Indian railways can’t think as it has the social dimension. Think about what you do not see. Think beyond what journalists want you to see. Consider different dimensions of any problem. Resources are always a constant. Public companies don’t even have a clear cut objective with priorities. Compromises are inevitable. Avoid moral judgements.

Public sector gets forced to enter sectors that the private sectors don’t want to enter.

Be conscious of a personal bias and you can’t eliminate but you can reduce it.

Counterintuitive thing about Innovation:

Mining company diversification from finance. Traditionally mining companies identify the zone and put together the costs and subtract the potential revenues and also include the sensitive analysis for market fluctuations and then estimate the worthiness of the project. All our profitability analysis say it doesn’t give us the profit we are used to. Yet based on our intuition, we still believe we should do it. No proof. Why do you do? What if we match the price of this ore with other ores and bring in the portfolio diversification analysis with reverse correlation. Now if all the ores have a price drop, your shareholders will attack the CEO for the mismanagement. That ore in reverse correlation can save your job! This is a concept of finance portfolio brought onto mining.

Innovation is often borrowing from another area. Drive through banking prevents robbery. McDonald borrowed this idea. Inside the army continent you can drive through but you can’t get down. Then this of McDonald’s drive through is taken onto petrol bunks!

McDonald’s Breakfast has higher profit margins. Customers are time constrained. They keep the habit. When there is a recession in USA, reduced breakfast sales. Then they introduced value meal. Reduce price in recession and up the same in good times. Then drive through medical testing came too.