Shankar Meembat

Entrepreneur and Business Leader

Entries for April, 2011

What’s a plan worth ?

“A plan is only worth the paper it is written on” – that is a phrase I came across in an internal newsletter from our unit head. So not worth much, you would think. If you are like me, an action person who just wants to get things done, that statement would be very welcome. […]

Can you buy Tiny Media

Tiny media, as Seth Godin talks about in his blog post,  refers to the bloggers and tweeters out there. The value of this media is undeniable. There are multiple reasons. Most of them tied to the basic notion of human trust. Bloggers and tweeters are seen as peers to anyone looking for information. And hence […]

Learning from Monopoly

The simple game of Monopoly (game by Electronic Arts) that I have on my Nokia N8 gives some good lessons in Strategy. Yes, it is a game of chance since the outcomes depends on the roll of the dice. But isn’t business the same too – it is a roll of different situations – macroeconomic, […]

Product Portfolio strategy

Recently I had the pleasure of talking to a number of start-up CEOs. I was trying to understand what they were doing and why they seemed to have a very diverse set of offerings in their portfolio. You can imagine the common rationale that came through. Quite high on the list was that there was […]

Managing growth

Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop’s burning platform memo and Cisco CEO John Chamber’s internal memo highlight examples where companies have fallen victim to their own success.  Every business wants to grow year on year. Is there a saturation in growth, though ? Is saturation the easily explainable reason for these challenges ? While one might be tempted to attribute stagnation to […]

Leading by Example on social

Given that my job requires my team to be responsible for interacting with a community (developers) that is social savvy, I have been wondering the implications of the same on my personal participation in social media. The recent 1000 heads article (Leading by example) provided some serious food for thought. Clearly, we  “listen” to the social […]