On the Globe

I went to Hero’s service center to get my bike washed. I spent around 10-15 minutes over there near the washing station. Some of the things I observed there provided interesting management lessons.  1. Having Fun at Work: There were four or five young boys (may be 18; looked like 15) who were washing the bikes. They were educated, as they were filling up the forms too and making the entries as needed. Initially I was annoyed at their way of working. They were running, chatting, telling jokes, laughing, giggling, as if the boys were in a soccer ground! All this, while actually they were doing their job of washing and drying motorbikes! After spending some time to see the actual work, I felt empathy and my outlook changed. There was nothing wrong if the boys made their work fun – that is something which the best of organizations aspire to achieve too… Their personal lives may have many hardships and they might have started to work quite early in their life. For the j...

Discovered recently that there is some amazing creativity being used to achieve undercover marketing for brands and products through something as simple as a Captcha Code which is supposed to be as plain as being a security related verification method.  For example, I just visited the website of an Indian newspaper and tried to post my comment on the news report using the "Post Comment" section. After I entered the comment, I was required to put a Captcha code to verify that I was a person and not a spamming computer program. But instead of the usual Captcha test where we are asked to enter digits or characters as verification codes, this time I found there was an image of a toothpaste tube with the screen asking me to drag three icons displayed inside the tube: As soon as I drag the three bubbles, it displayed a Pepsodent Ad along with the message that validation was successful: We have gotten used to viral marketing in many forms, but I came across t...