Manoj's Review on Books

An organisation can have outstanding delivery capabilities but can it scale without effective storytelling ability ? Moreover, if corporate presentations are all about data and plain text will it attract talent, investors or leaders ? When the emotional cord is missed in the narrative, an organisation is mostly likely to evoke a damp squib response despite a remarkable product line or solution. Paul Smith makes a valid point that storytelling can never be out of fad and will work across demographics in a timeless fashion to aid an individual's decision making process.  Smith lines out ten questions that can capture the attention of all the stakeholders in an organisation, it’s important to realise that one may not have a truly resonating storyline for each question. Thus it makes prioritising the questions based on the standpoint and context of the respective firms. The questions are  Where we came from Why we can’t stay here Where are we going How are we going to get there Wh...

  An orphan who had lost his parents to a terrible accident at the age of 10, ends up spending his better part of the childhood years and early teens in the kitchen of langar. The kid learns about the finer nuances of tasty cooking which leads him to Canada and eventually scales himself as a top rated Michelin Masterchef. Rajiv Mehra, the masterchef protogonist of the story, leads a high flying life being a poster boy of leading magazines and flies across the globe in private jets to execute his assignments.  Rajiv's excellence in his field of work gets him on a close range with India's top business leader Mihir Kothari and his family. The frequent interaction earns Rajiv a certain affinity with the family and an initiative to open an international chain of restaurants under Rajiv's leadership is under consideration, by all means he has scaled heights that are beyond one's imagination. As a preferred chef for all key events, Rajiv is called upon to lead dinner orchestra...

Bernard’s Big Data in practice was launched in March 2016, the crux of the narrative is to highlight the importance of data in just about every industry. At the start of the book, he gave a good reference point on predicting the amount of data which is likely to be created every day across the globe by 2020, which happens to be 170 GB per day, the actual numbers in 2020 worked out to be 1 billion GB per day, he has missed the mark by a factor of 5.8 million times. It goes to show the explosion of data in the real world and its importance is foolhardy to undermine.  Bernard Marr has assessed Big Data implementation and use cases in 45 different companies, a few of them happen to be truly path breaking. In the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attack on WTC twin tower, the US security agency had the added responsibility of identifying bad people from 7 million visitors who checked into the US about a decade back. Irrespective of the number of highly trained folks deployed in the airport se...