So it seems to me that the the tool I use (revue) to post these editions cant edit the numbering sequence. So when I clubbed issue 19&20 earlier and did issue 21 subsequently, I could only change the title but the system marked it as issue #20(for those who consume this online-only). With my OCD and the lack of time to chase a bug report, I decided to re-number & get on with life.

Moral of the story, the user is the user, the best laid out "test plans" & "use cases" in a closed loop environment typically miss out what happens in the real world. When you put out products in the real world, stuff is bound to go wrong or differently. Embrace it, have a path to fixing it. Don't challenge the users, the users will use products in ways, means and methods you least anticipated. But when they do, its validation of your work and gives you other product ideas, should you choose to take the feedback positively.

A principle of intellectual and moral honesty that is truly very difficult to achieve: Accepting constructive criticism. It is common that feedback, any type of feedback may pinch a nerve due to it speaking directly to our behaviours or sensitivities. When a challenge is raised against the status quo of practises or our execution abilities or an organisational or personal long standing belief, It sucks. When a team member or friend raises some criticism, it can be difficult to accept. Winners take criticism in stride. Ask your self, are you a winner?

Outcomes

How can Pakistani businesses change their long term outcomes? I have been thinking about this in the context of digital transformation & growth at large. Before we get to digital or any kind of transformation, we have to look closely at the fabric and make up of organisations and our society at large. Before we do that we must become experts at one thing and one thing alone. Our ability to define "exam questions". We continue to solve questions that haven't been asked(not because we are ahead of our times, but because we lack focus), or questions that we do not frame properly. If you can't define what it is you want to fix/grow/evolve, how do you tackle it?

Asking the Right Questions Can Frame a Successful Transformation

This is tricky, but it pays off when done right. We need to have an "exam question mindset".

Let me illustrate:

A retail chain owner, who is a friend, came to me and said "my company is losing market share but I am doing every thing every one else is doing."

"I need you to help me urgently figure out what my teams are doing wrong."

Dear friend no less, but saith as well. Traditional mindset and no level of Ivy league pedigree allows them to shift from assigning blame to hired guns vs owning the issue at hand. We are talking many dozen retail location footprint and multi M$ business.

They proceeded to ask "Why is our major competitor picking up market share, whist we aren't?"

This is your classical, wrong "exam question" approach.

My intervention was simple, as it was over the phone and limited in time:

• "Are your customers expecting in-store services unrelated to what they're buying or adjusted for corona?"

• "Do internet shoppers want alternatives to home delivery? "

• "Who is your target customer, adjusted for inflation & where are they?"

• What is your average basket size and is it dropping?

• Who is your historical customer?

The answer to each of these exam questions will likely offer useful guidance on how to boost market share vs going into a cycle of pondering what some one else is doing.

Exam questions let you stay in focus and drive far better outcomes than copying other peoples actions and try to retro fit them in to you world order. Thats like putting in english comprehension answers in a chemistry exam. Staying in your lane and defining the rules to play are key constructs in any successful transformation journey.

A company I continue to admire from a distance given I continue to see their export related progress in times such as these, is Interloop. They recently announced the following:

This is literally a billion dollar company being made in public view with a public-side, investment commitment as well. Contrary to unicorns with valuations and cap tables this is a real business that generates physical output and impacts the lives & outcomes of many many Pakistanis.

What is interesting as is exciting about this announcement is that they have listed in their vision, digital transformation as a key tenant.

Framing Matters

Posing questions thoughtfully is a useful way to frame the problem before solving it. Think about what a frame does for a picture: It focuses attention to produce the greatest impact.

So what Questions should ideally be going into the Interloop Frame?

1. What is the exam question Digital Transformation will solve for you?

2. What are the big trends that will reshape the business environment between now and when the vision is executed in totality?

3. How will these trends disrupt your industry and business?

4. What are the highest-impact, most uncertain issues these disruptions bring and what possible future scenarios do they suggest?

5. Who owns your digital transformation agenda?

6. Who are its stake holders across all functions? Are your functions defined well?

7. What are the ground realities that have gated you from adding production or process transparency to your customers, that you have now listed in your vision for 2025?

8. How will you make bite sized product + process wins to achieve your end goals?

The above is the starting point. Not the end point. For a detailed primer on digital transformation see below:

One New Thing

With the Olympics fever in full swing. Well ok let's not call it fever and its likely not full swing(as it should have been) but its happening now. Every where we look, every one talks about about endurance for athletes. I wonder why no one talks about it for entrepreneurs.

In my mind it's similar if not the same.

Can you train yourself with stress, risk, overcoming constant doubt etc?

Athletes and performers do it every day.

It's called cultivating your own energy

The more energy you save up by cutting off irrelevant, useless and energy consuming items (aka Shit) from your life, the more you can endure.

To move forward faster, to enhance your outcomes you have to really give up every thing that does not add to your positive momentum. To be a pro athlete, you eat right, you sleep right, you exercise right, to be a pro founder you need to do much of the same.

Personal energy is difficult to measure. Even scientists who researched energy admit that “Although energy is a concept that is implied in many motivational theories, is hardly ever explicitly mentioned or researched.”

But if you want to improve anything in life, you must measure it first. Otherwise, how do you know what improvement looks like? But because there’s no single way to measure energy, it doesn’t mean we can’t attempt to measure our own energy. It starts with the though that you will and over time you can.

Think about it this way:

1. Mental Energy: Your ability to concentrate, focus, work, pay attention, listen, etc.

2. Physical Energy: Your ability to perform physical tasks.

3. Emotional Energy: Your ability to show compassion to yourself and to others.

I read some thing that stayed with me. The P Test. If you don't have energy, you cant even pee. What does that mean? If you are too tired & think Im going to hold it off for an hour, trust me, its time re-evaluate your energy. Even to a non-doctor this sounds like a bad idea. Make sure you aren't at that state. If you are, re-boot.

Boring stuff that scales

There is always a market for some thing you are good at.

1) Personal tech reviewer & procurement guide for every day people aka tech concierge, most people have no idea around setting up their smart tvs, buying the latest smart watch, setting up home security cameras or even deciding which smart home product to select, if you are a reliable and can also source or identify sourcing you win this plot every time.

2) Filling out job applications on behalf of job seekers for a small fee. Any thing can be tokenized and scaled, if some one is looking for work, whilst still being employed some where, but cant really spend the time to apply for online jobs, there is a service waiting to happen that applies on behalf of them based on pre determined criteria. Job applications is a time consuming and messy process, maybe you charge a success fee? Maybe this is the new personal assistant but for job applications.

3) Curating content based on a brief. Some one wants to know whats the hottest design trend for living rooms, sets a 20$ budget and selects they want 20 pictures and 500 words to understand whats going on. This scales across many sectors. You are basically the human version of google search done neatly. Same can be applied to online classes, webinars, cooking lessons, tutorials, DIY things etc. I have been wanting to build an outdoor brick over, I'd gladly pay some one to curate the time, materials and budgeting and if we had the next business as defined below, it would transition to that.

4) Project Management for real life things/situations. Whilst virtual assistants remain very popular but largely virtual, this is a service thats more than a task rabbit and less than a full time valet or concierge. Think about things in peoples lives that can be clubbed in to small projects. Let's take an example, you need all the carpets in your house washed/dry cleaned. You schedule a project within a marketplace, put in the dimensions roughly, put the number of items, days you need it within, pickup location and a budget. Both vendors and free lancers can pick tasks they are happy to manage for some one else. (ID/Security being key, they only way you get on the platform is by uploading a copy of your CNIC and getting a proof of life check by a third party)

5)Pantry Essentials Subscription. Every Desi house hold needs three things nearly daily. Adrak(Ginger-paste), Lehsun(Garlic-paste), Piyaz(Onion-chopped). How much paste they make is a co-efficient of if they make it daily, weekly, if they freeze it or not. There is a market for reasonably priced, drop off service to avoid the hassle of buying, cleaning, grinding this stuff daily especially in vertically dense neighbourhoods and small houses/apartments. Pick your target market do an experiment. Deliver 100 small bottles for free with your name and number and see if there any takers in apartment complexes, starting with your own. Think about alternate distribution like an office building, show up at 6pm when people are leaving with your paste in hand, people take on the way home. No need to re-invent the wheel for distribution. Other peoples distribution channels are the best kept secret in town.

6)Budgeting, house hold expense management & basic financial planning as a service for women. Contrary to what any one says, house hold budgets get decided by women. But most women like most men in this country do not understand expenses, break down of spend or basic financial planning. This is a very simple service that needs paper based printouts in English and Urdu, you go in to meet a prospect, you spend a few days understanding their spend (on grocery) other items, you do this over a few months, look at receipts etc and help them figure out a better way of managing their spend and consequently cashflow. You teach them about savings as well. If you are a real hustler, you do this yourself door to door, then you build a franchise of neighbourhood women who learn this from you and then work on an affiliate or franchise model. Now imagine if you had 1000 house holds or 10k and you go to retail or wholesale and negotiate based on that buying power. All you have to do is start today. This is nationally extensible model. Some times all you need are people vs apps, the data you collect at the back end can be the largest trued up source of CPG/FMCG/Retail spend.

You heard(read) it here first

Every time I meet self professed UX folks or Digital Transformation pundits and they want to change every thing about say a user journey or a discovery process, or a system or established interactions. I just ask them if they have heard of Jakobs Law. 9 times out of 10, they rely on Google. I'll let you in on a secret, every time you have a new design project, a new website, a new launch, a product, a new machine interface, resist the urge to change things completely. Why? Read below:

Full resource here

Jakob’s Law | Laws of UX — lawsofux.com

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

What you should be reading (& watching)

This is an epic read, why? Because its crisp, clean and highly informative to understand origins of science as a layperson - The book was first published in 1983, as a tie-in to the TV documentary series Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was an astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist. He wrote beautiful book after beautiful book and made the best documentary series ever made, Cosmos (13 Episodes).

Cosmos traces the origins of knowledge and the scientific method, mixing science and philosophy, and speculates to the future of science. The book also discusses the underlying premises of science by providing biographical anecdotes about many prominent scientists throughout history, placing their contributions into the broader context of the development of modern science. Unlike other scientists, Carl Sagan is also a good writer, so it is great experience to read even known issues. As a true scientist, Carl Sagan never states facts while discussing theories, but gives scientific evidence, supporting or objecting them.

Monetise your time (by)

Taking time to know yourself.

When you know who you are, you can be wise about:

• Your goals

• Your dreams

• Your standards

• Your convictions

Knowing who you are, brings you purpose and meaning.

Monetise your time (by) Focusing, as it brings big results.

The number one reason people give up so fast is that:

They tend to look at how far they still have to go

(instead of how far they have come.)

But it's a series of small wins that can give us the most significant success.

Monetise your time (by) Not trying to impress everyone.

The unhappiest people are those who care the most about what other people think.

Strong people have a strong sense of self-worth and self-awareness; they don’t need the approval of others.

Monetise your time (by) Doubling down

on the things you are naturally good at, and find ways to use those elements in your work.

Such a simple thing that will take you far further than you can imagine.

Monetise your time (by) Not sitting at your desk

all day, as it steals productivity and creativity. Instead give your mind a break from the monotony of sitting . Flexibility increases creativity and output. Un-Saithify/De-Corporatise your self by giving your self a break on time.

Monetise your time (by) doing some thing productive

with you time vs day dreaming without execution. All plans and no action is a sure fire way to get no where. If that is your destination then you can get there in a heart beat sans monetisation.

Made in Pakistan (and sold to Nigeria)

This is the second sale after the first one being to the Myanmar Airforce.

One Last Thing...(that I read some where)

Explanation:

If someone is working, they are waiting until they are done to be happy

But if you're enjoying the hard work you're doing , it's difficult to compete, because they are sad when they are finished

It's important to love the process ,if you love the process you're always one step ahead

Surprise(d)

I've surprised my self. You should try to surprise your self too. This is 22nd weekly edition of the newsletter. I have now committed 22*7= 154 days thinking about producing content and sharing it and actually mostly doing it by/before 3:20pm on a Friday(/scheduling it in advance for it go out by then) . Whilst it may have taken me less than 3 hours of writing time per newsletter (22*3) or 66 hours of actual time, it is still a commitment. The larger commitment is to organise some of my thoughts, curate the stuff I consume into items I can share and still do a decent enough job to not loose a single person to the "unsubscribe" feature, yet. Why do I do it? Why does any one do any thing? To surprise your self and push your self further.