Learning

A post from GetFriday after a long pause. Been busy with too many things (like launching a new business idea for the Indian market). My apologies. Our client and old friend, Norman Wilson sent us some of his task suggestions, out-of-the-box ideas that can only come from someone like him. I hope this will prompt some of our clients to get little more adventurous in terms of their goals with GetFriday. Here we go, hope you like them! Norman Wilson’s Task Suggestions Toy Boat Construction Manual by Akhil Chalil In April of this year, I introduced my project Virtual Assistance here on the Get Friday blog. In that post I outlined my approach to engaging with Get Friday, which prioritized artistic, ethical, and intellectual value over economic value. In forgoing a profitable engagement for myself with the service, Akhil and I were able to peel back the corporate veneer, revealing limitations, histories, networks, power, and desire by making toy boats, construction manuals, a video about the best fighter jet in the world, PowerPoint performances, international mailings, pulse rate tests, Excel graphs, office installations, and more. Akhil has left the company and I am no longer an active Get Friday client. Though I’m grateful for what we learned and accomplished with the project, there are still a bunch of ideas for tasks (some more feasible than others) that were never actualized. In publishing them here on the Get Friday blog, my hope is that others will be inspired to take up my approach and start their own versions of Virtual Assistance. *Note: Get Friday “assistants” will be referred to as “coworkers.” -Ask your coworker what their favorite recreational activity is. For instance, jet skiing. Assign your coworker a task in which ride around on a rented jet ski paid for by you (on a credit card). Also hire a videographer to shoot a video of your coworker riding the jet ski. Make an account on a stock media marketplace and upload the jet skiing clips to the stock media marketplace. Title these clips “Young Indian Professional rides jet ski.” When the clips have made enough money to pay off the original jet ski rental and the videographer, plus another jet ski rental, this time with the full-insurance package, send your assistant on another jet-ski adventure with a hired videographer. This time ask your assistant to set off the jet ski, jammed in full-throttle, towards a pile of rocks. Upload this exploding jet ski footage to a stock media marketplace, and when it has generated enough money to buy a custom finish jet ski, buy Get Friday a company jet ski. -Ask your coworker to call a friend who works in an Indian call center that provides outsourced customer support for an American company. Just to chat. -Imagine and draw each other’s respective work spaces. Mail your drawings to each other. -Make an animated e-card for your coworker, but email it to yourself. Then print it out frame by frame, and send it to your coworker as a FAX. In the FAX cover letter, state that you would like the hard copy scanned, turned back into an animation, and archived in your client file. -Ask you coworker to go on a freestyle web surfing adventure and to document any locative advertising they witnesses. -Ask your coworker to collect objects, materials, and samples from their local environment that have become internet and computing metaphors – window, folder, file, server, superhighway, shopping cart, traffic, trojan horse, spider, virus, worm, web, packet, page, desktop, attachment, stream, chain, link, spam, junk, net, board, paste, copy, etc. Have them mail you as many of these objects as possible. -Call your coworker from your office water cooler. If you don’t work in an office, call your coworker from a display water cooler at Office Max. Ask your coworker to stand near the water cooler at the Get Friday office, and then ask them what they did last weekend. -Order your coworker and their team a pizza from Dominos in India, and then order yourself an identical pizza from Dominos in your country. Eat simultaneously. -Ask your coworker to send you a favorite picture of themselves. Commission a painting from www.yourartnow.com of you and your coworker jet skiing through the internet. If Your Art Now asks what the internet looks like, tell that the painter should decide. -Hire additional virtual assistants from companies such as Brickwork, Bpovia, Ask Sunday, and Outsorcerer. Initiate an online political think tank with the goal of establishing a virtual nation state. Codevelop a currency, a flag, a constitution, an anthem, speeches, ID cards, ideas for social welfare programs, and more for this international organization. Online performances of this nation state, such as conferences and the inauguration ceremony, can be shared live online. -Send your virtual assistant a survey for ranking you and your relationship.

In the context of a more interactive world, the old rules of marketing are quickly falling by the wayside. From an era of TV commercials aimed at mass markets, where the consumer was a passive spectator, we have moved into a world where consumers are not only interacting with the products / brands they like or hate, but also sharing their likes and dislikes with other consumers in real time on the web / mobile web. Feedback is easy and instantaneous and the rules of the game are changing rapidly. Seth Godin in this 2003 talk, argues that when consumers are faced with way too many choices and have too little time, the most obvious thing for them to do is to ignore stuff. So if your product or service doesn’t stand out and if the people at the fringes of the normal distribution curve don’t care about it, then you have a loser on hand. He further stresses that being remarkable and appealing to a smaller section of loyal innovators (consumers) is more important in today’s world than being mediocre and mass market. Watch this fantastic TED clip from Seth. Looking back at our trajectory in the global VA space, GetFriday certainly wasn’t the first virtual assistant service on this planet. In fact, the concept of virtual assistants has existed for decades in the US and other parts of the developed world. These were mostly people who were employed as secretaries or assistants in large corporations who at some point decided to get out of it and work on their own terms with a select few clients from the comforts of their home / home office. All very good as long as you knew your clients very well and have had shared a good relationship with them for a very long time. But that was unremarkable and wasn’t something that caught people’s attention. Not yet! With technology enabling really cheap long distance communication via the net and the emergence of tools such as google, there was an opportunity that emerged. Through a stroke of luck, we ended up doing the most bizarre things for a journalist (AJ Jacobs of Esquire) like reading a bed time story to his child in NYC from 10,000 miles away in India. It seemed really queer at that point of time (2005), but was indeed a remarkable thing to attempt and carried a good amount of shock value. And its success proved an important point that it didn’t need a huge corporation’s might and machinery to be able to work with someone on the other side of the globe. With the Internet, it was all possible. That caught people’s fancy and created the first wave for personal outsourcing. And the next important thing for your idea to spread is to find a bunch of people who really care. People who are really passionate about what you do and then hope that they will tell their friends about it. GetFriday literally grew from zero to where we are now on zero marketing budgets only through client referrals or word of mouth. This is not to say, that we had impeccable service all through. We have had our fair share of terrible slip ups, errors and inconsistencies due to a host of reasons. But people who knew what to expect and how to make it work (your band of faithfuls), really manage to reap the benefits and eventually becomes evangelists for the service. And hopefully if you manage to keep and grow this flock steadily, at some stage you will reach a inflection point where it can explode. Facebook, Twitter, Wiki are all good examples for this. It is difficult but not impossible to do it provided you understand the new rules of the game and start playing by it! Sunder P CEO

Transparency; an often repeated word that pops in everyday corporate life. Everyone accepts the need for transparency but when it comes to actual practice, we find it incredibly difficult and possibly even painful. Morgan Spurlock, the academy award nominated documentary film maker needs no introduction to people in the US. He became famous (or rather notorious) with his movie ‘Super Size Me‘ of 2004 that was a hard hitting critique of modern day fast-feeding (read: McDonalds). His critics, of course question his methods at deriding the companies he targets. Despite die-hard fans and an equal number of detractors, one thing is for sure, you can hate him or you can love him, but you just can’t ignore him. In this hard hitting but humorous TED talk, Morgan locks spurs with the hidden, but highly influential world of brand marketing. It is downright hilarious as he shares the video of his quest to make a completely sponsored film on the issue of sponsorship and transparency. It is quite obvious that transparency isn’t something that sits well in the world of advertising. At the end of it he makes an important point that companies that are not paralyzed by fear of the unknown (consequences), willing to take risks, and most importantly embrace transparency, will be able to go a long way. And I can’t agree with him more. Here is an account of GetFriday’s personal tryst with Morgan. On 28th April, 2006 we received a request from Carolyn McEwen, the producer of the reality TV show, “30 days” asking if we would be willing to participate in an experiment on outsourcing with Morgan Spurlock. While most of the episode was supposed to cover IT and call center jobs that were getting outsourced to India, they wanted to include GetFriday also, if possible. Given Morgan’s reputation, one should have been wary to join in on any effort that carries the risk of showing the Indian outsourcing industry in bad light. After some thought I sent back a reply to her a day later, expressing our willingness to participate. I reckoned that we had nothing much to lose, but everything to gain. Given that we were small, we decided to take a bold and positive approach to the whole thing. Our goal then was to handle things as honestly as possible, while hoping that it turns out to our advantage in the final cut. We kept doing Morgan’s work for about a month, while keeping our fingers crossed. Finally, on 9th June, 2006, Carolyn sent a message confirming that the experiment was over. Am reproducing the mail verbatim without her permission. Sorry, Carolyn! But six years later, it shouldn’t really matter!!! Hi Venky, I’m finishing up at “30 Days” tomorrow (Friday). I want to make sure we have Get Friday’s address so that we can send you a DVD of the outsourcing episode once it airs. In case you have access to U.S. TV, it’s supposed to be broadcast on Wednesday, August 30th at 10pm on the FX Network. There is a chance that FX will rearrange the order the episodes at the last minute, so I’d keep an eye out for it in August. The second season of “30 Days” begins on Wednesday, July 26 and runs for six consecutive weeks. Outsourcing is supposed to be the last episode. Please send me your address by Friday, if possible. Also, could you send the spelling of the fellow who was Morgan’s personal assistant? Thanks for everything! You guys were great. Cheers, Carolyn Despite the fact that we were happy to have impressed Morgan’s team with our service, we waited with bated breath for the episode to air. It did and to our surprise it turned out to be the most balanced and honest view on the subject of outsourcing, both sides of the globe. It didn’t turn out into an episode of India bashing, as most would suspect. Unfortunately we didn’t get air time because the episode was too call center focused and we probably got edited out in the 30 short min. Here is a link to Actual Reality – 30 days, though the video has gone missing. Looking back at it, we were happy to be part of such an experiment and have learned our lessons in not shying away from taking risks and being honest. Am a Morgan fan! Sunder P CEO

We live in an age where we are continuously bombarded with a plethora of choices. We constantly push for more and more choices as well, thinking that it will give us more freedom and will truly liberate us. More choice is equated to more happiness. And it is almost considered a pseudo-fundamental right in most developed and fast developing nations. But does more choice really mean liberation, more happiness? The answer is NO. Looking back on my own life as a kid in a place like India in the 1980s, the choices were way too limited. You just had the state run television with one channel. The telephone line and the device (with the rotary dial) too was supplied by a state run agency and had a black only option. There was only one type of car, the Ambassador (based on the Morris Oxford III model) in a predominantly white model. Reminds you of Henry Ford and his famous statement “Any color….so long as it is black”. Service with the very few options available was pathetic. Almost always was a Hobson’s choice. But strangely enough it still held a lot of joy for the consumer. You eagerly waited for your favorite programs on TV (that probably aired once a week). The stuttering long distance call made on trunk dialing (the telephone operator actually switches you and connects) after an inordinately long wait, gave an immense sense of satisfaction about connecting to people far away in those days. The one and only car was truly a status symbol in those days. It was loved dearly by its owners. Sounds strange! Come the era of satellite television, mobile telephony and the internet, the choices have multiplied exponentially and have gone past the stratosphere, but you still don’t see people truly happy about the choices in front of them. The satisfaction levels as well as the interest levels have gone down. From flicking through channels on your TV incessantly to getting bored with a iphone video game in no time, the new age consumer is highly distracted. The attention span has dwindled to micro seconds and we find it difficult to focus on anything beyond a few minutes. Sprawling malls everywhere provide all your favorite products under a single roof, but yet there are so many choices, so many brands and so many subtle differences that you are completely confused. Online buying provides a wide variety of choices but you are again dependent on a price comparison website or a consumer review website or a consumer blog to tell you what is under the chassis and how to kick the tires before buying anything. Again no definitive answers there. And you are in no mood to trust any single person’s opinion either. All because choice is supposed to empower us. We want to be in control and we are afraid of letting go, lest we make an inferior choice in the bargain. We are spoilt for choices but we find it extremely hard to make those choices. We almost go into a state of paralysis, mulling over the choices and continuously weighing the pros and cons, over and over again. This paradox is sometimes referred to as ‘Buridan’s Ass‘ (after 14th century French philosopher, Jean Buridan). Psychologist Barry Schwartz, author of the book ‘The Paradox of Choice‘ illustrates this concept very convincingly and makes a compelling case that ‘more is less’ in this TED talk. It is indeed true that when we move from a state of limited or no choice to increased choices, consumers experience a surge in happiness or satisfaction. But above a certain threshold limit, it becomes crippling and leads to a huge drop in the satisfaction levels. In fact, the depression that most people experience at this high level of saturation is much more than when compared to a state of limited choice. Does this paradox have any effect on a VA service like ours? It does and in fact, much more than I first imagined. Sifting through the kind of tasks we normally receive from individual clients (personal assistance, not business), I realized that a significant amount of time was spent on a size-able number of similar tasks. All of them pertaining to reviewing several dozens of choices, if not hundreds and then dwindling them down to a select few from which a client could choose. Options on which cell phone to buy, which one worked better in a particular area, which data plan worked better, which vacation destination was better, which flights were cheaper, which hotels were more convenient, which parking spaces could be pre-booked on a sweet deal, which software app was better to even which movies to watch. It was easy to figure out that the plethora of choices was driving clients mad, almost into paralysis and perhaps eating away into their precious time. And they probably decided to use some extra help to bring down the choices to a more meaningful and manageable number. I can’t be complaining because this paradox was leading to more business for us. Barry incidentally mentions about Pareto Improvement or optimization of choices being a mutually beneficial option where people with infinite choices shift the onus of making that choice to people who don’t have that many. I think that is what is happening between GetFriday and its clients. Thankfully, that means more business for a VA service like ours and less paralysis for consumers. Also watch this very interesting TED talk by psycho-economist and author of the book ‘The Art of Choosing‘, Sheena Iyengar. Barry and Sheena, both echo similar thoughts on the subject of choice. Happy viewing! Sunder P CEO

In a global workplace, managing people from different cultures is a big challenge in itself. But managing and getting the assistance of workers from a different culture, in a different country, remotely without ever (possibly) getting to see them face-to-face is a whole different ball game. In my opinion, understanding each others context and cultures is critical for any business relationship to succeed. We are acutely aware of this given that we serve busy individuals and small businesses (not corporations) from 50 odd countries. Each client comes from a different culture and context, much different from us. And we do have to contend with problems arising due to these differences, every single day. Not a easy task by any stretch of imagination. For my fellow Indian workers who may be displeased with this post (please read the disclaimer at the bottom to understand the context). Now let me point to some examples that highlight the key differences in the thought processes between a Western client and his or her Indian assistant or worker (cultural context), which may appear rather funny, but could have a very serious bearing on the long term success of the business relationship. 1) The inability of Indian workers to say ‘NO’ is probably the biggest culprit to misunderstanding when working with western counterparts or clients. Being hospitable, being friendly and being helpful is ingrained in the Indian culture and hence people generally find it difficult to say ‘NO’.  Even when it comes to things they can’t do or things they are not comfortable with. So when they say ‘we will try’ or ‘we will give our best shot’ it means that they are taking on work they don’t understand or can’t handle. It merely means that they will be attempting it, (of course) with the best of efforts. While the Westerner wants you to tell him that you can’t when you really can’t, the Indian just finds it difficult to say anything other than a ‘YES’. Results in a big let-down. The client, because he actually thought the worker would be able to help; the worker, because he feels that his attempts to be helpful were useless. 2) Deadlines are sacrosanct for the Western and many other cultures (Japanese). But the typical Indian is more worried about the goods and less about the deadline. In fact, a particular delivery may have some serious issues or may have run into unforeseen problems and the Indian may have taken great pains to solve the issue or somehow make it work. But he fails to understand the importance of communicating back on the timeline delay, well in advance for the client to make alternate arrangements.  And this results in dissatisfaction for both parties. The client because his deadline is simply not respected; the worker because his efforts on the face of the difficulties he had to surmount in getting the job done, have gone unappreciated. 3) Westerners expect people to ask questions if they do not understand. Most Indian workers presume that asking questions will be perceived as a sign of weakness or ignorance and hence fail to ask them when it is most required. This leads to a lot of assumptions that could easily go wrong. The problem lies in the upbringing from childhood that places greater emphasis on being taught, than in learning. Asking questions was rarely encouraged in those days. Of course, the current generation of children in India are a lot more confident about themselves and wouldn’t hesitate to ask, if in doubt. And hopefully, that will change things over a few generations. 4) Failure was taboo in post-British era Indian society. And hence fear of failure can stop people from pushing the limits or taking decisions on their own, especially when it comes to client’s work. It is a good thing if clear instructions have been given, to stick in within the fence. But even otherwise, Indian workers are generally fearful about making decisions that may backfire. This again has to do with the fact that failure is not well accepted. Failure is not seen as a stepping stone to success or as part of learning process. Filing for bankruptcy in a business means your are doomed to never do business again. On the contrary, in the western world this means you are better equipped to get it right the next time and make a success. Hence in India, you will find people more willing to merely comply than raise their levels to create new benchmarks. However, the newer generation of Indian youth is quite different and is moving in a positive direction. These are just some of the numerous aspects of cultural differences that may result in an imperfect fit, if not properly understood. And it happens primarily due to a lack of awareness from both sides of the sensitivities involved. Of course, there are numerous positives to the Indian culture which is highly contextual and flexible. To better explain this, I would like to point to this TED talk from Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik which illustrates the difference beautifully. So while every person’s culture is deeply ingrained in their psyche, it is inevitable in a global workplace that no one shall be left untouched by the culture of people living thousands of miles away on a different continent. Cultures are exchanged day in and day out, at the global workplace and it may result in a fusion; a kind of melting pot, which hopefully will take the best from every world. The success of the Indian IT-ITES industry globally is a clear indicator that cultural adaptation is happening faster than ever. Disclaimer: Indian workers are generally seen as hard working, congenial and smart and are respected globally. The problems if any, crop up due to the cultural disconnect with their western counterparts. This post is meant to address that issue and appeal for a better understanding from both sides, in order to do business successfully. Sunder P CEO   GetFriday (earlier YMII

After seeing this talk by Simon Sinek, author of ‘Start with Why‘, I couldn’t agree with him more. The synopsis of his theory or idea is that most businesses and their leaders fail to inspire because they focus too much on communicating two things to their clients. Two things which they think are important, ie., 1) what they do and 2) how they do it. Both of these are important, but not quite as important as the other thing i.e.,‘why do you do what you do’. The Why is nothing but the purpose of the organization or the reason why you do business. He showcases this simple idea through what he refers to as the ‘Golden Circle‘ pictured below. He cites examples from Apple, Martin Luther King Jr., The Wright Brothers and Tivo to drive home his point. Communication he argues happens effortlessly and trust comes naturally, when you feel, think and act with the ‘why‘ firmly in your mind. In my opinion, it is a fact that most businesses don’t know why they do, what they do. And still seem supremely confident that if they merely create / have a good product and communicate its benefits / advantages (the how you do it), it should basically do its job. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. We need to remember that people essentially buy whatever you have, because they believe what you believe in. You actually managed to create an aspiration that people share in. That’s how loyal customer base is built. The corollary is also true. People may not buy your product / service despite it being very good at what it claims to do because something just doesn’t feel right. It is that unexplainable feeling that can’t be communicated in any better fashion, due to lack of better words. Watch this wonderful talk by Simon on TED. Let me give you an example of this by taking a leaf out of our own book, the GetFriday story. While I do that, let me also admit that we are plainly glad (not immodest) that we just happened to get it right without being aware of Simon’s golden circle or doing it any conscious manner. It was a mere hunch that this was the way to go, at that point of time. And we were lucky the hunch turned right. GetFriday was a pioneering and innovative concept in 2005 and there is absolutely no doubt about that. But to consistently sustain the interest of people all around the world and grow, it needed something more than just being a cool idea for its time. And for the idea to further spread to people in more than 50 countries, it definitely required something extra. That something extra that differentiates you from the rest is the ‘why‘. Get Friday – Snapshot If you carefully look at our communication (the site hasn’t changed that much since inception), we didn’t talk about what we did or tom-tom our coverage in the international press on our home page. The ‘what‘ we do is pretty straight forward. We are a Virtual Assistant Service. Does the ‘how‘ we do things matter? Yes, it does. Though technically anyone with a home computer, a VoIP phone and email connectivity could become a VA. The how we do things is what differentiates us from the rest and helped us scale up. But that still doesn’t qualify to make it the single most important thing in business. Why do I say this? Around the period 2005 – 2008 (till the recession), we had at least one new competitor or clone arriving on the scene every week with a ‘me too‘ service. Some went to the extent of even using closely resembling, confusingly similar brand names to leverage on the popularity of the GetFriday service. Some tried to copy our processes and many may even have succeeded to some extent. But none or very few really survived through the economic crises. Probably the biggest reason you can attribute apart from bad luck would be that they were in business because it seemed cool, it seemed easy to copy, it seemed to be the ‘in thing‘ and yes, it seemed like you can make money easily. So that leaves us with the ‘why‘. Why were we in this business? Each time we asked ourselves this question. The answer was this – We wanted to help people gain time for the things they really wanted to do in life, which they couldn’t till that point for lack of support. That was the whole purpose of this business. And the communication comes through clear in our tagline ‘Life gets better‘. The tagline didn’t read; the World’s Leading Virtual Assistance Service or something on those lines. The imagery of a father and son / child spending some quality time together went along with the central idea that our goal was to create more time for the things you love, family for instance. The communication was consistent with the why we thought we were in business. The orange man icons were meant to provide a friendly, but helpful feel to customers. Conveying the expression of being there to help people cope with things. And thankfully all this combined to possibly convey the magical idea of what we believed in and what we aspired to create. Leading is all about inspiring people to share in your aspirations. We believed that we can make a difference to people’s lives. Help them not to be overwhelmed with things that they are unable to manage or can’t find time to. Help them lead better lives. Sunder P CEO