Responsibilities Of A Leader

Someone asked me about 3 key responsibilities of a leader, #ResponsibilitiesOfALeader 

 1) Be available to your team. Give priority to your teams ask for your time to have them talk to you, allow them to seek guidance, let them provide you feedback or advice, and share their challenges/experiences. Help them arrive on a decision and let them take action. As a leader the first and foremost priority should be to be available to spend time with our team. 

 2) Mentor the leaders in your team to "Be Hungry & Serve Humbly". Winning is important, but how you get there is even more important. Set aggressive targets and goals but dont forget that YOU are part of the team. Your job is to help the team achieve those aggressive targets vs simply checking on the status. Become a part of their journey, become a part of their story and when they win celebrate it as their win and thank them for giving YOU (their leader) the opportunity to be a part of their team. 

 3) An inspiring vision that influences them to strive for better product, experiences or journeys for customers/stakeholders vs doing them because their boss told them to do so. Remember, people who are passionate about their work are the ones who sculpt inspirational stories. Your job is to bring passion to your team's work life.

Covid-19 & Instructional Learning

COVID-19 has essentially accelerated digital & video adoption of instructional training, physical education and classroom based learning. In addition to schools & classrooms going virtual, professional training, after school programs, sports training, yoga classes , cooking classes and many more have quickly pivoted to relying on digital means of imparting knowledge & training. 

I foresee these to be the norm going forward with digital learning and virtual education adoption transcending beyond our imagination and well beyond the current physical border limitations. Yogi's in India teaching virtually to their audiences across the world for a nominal fee, Italian Chefs sharing their secrets and recipes across the globe but most importantly the traditional university learning experience may completely switch to teaching through digital modes only within the next 12-18 months. This will also allow institutions to reduce their facilities and infrastructure maintenance cost while independent coaches or instructors can now quickly launch their offerings online without having a need for physical locations/setup. This shall soon give rise to extremely cost effective learning options for future students.

https://lnkd.in/eqjUqX9

Data is King but Speed is the Emperor

To all the leaders out there, challenge your work family to go faster but never forget to pay attention to the great ideas that your work family puts out there on a regular basis. Leaders should never let themselves become vulnerable to paralysis by analysis. Even when you are not fully aligned with the team, simply commit to them if your team believes in it. If the idea becomes a success (Transparent and Bezos), your work family will bask under it's glory and the results will speak for themselves. In case they fail, the learnings from the failure will make them resilient and become better than before. Most importantly, for them seeing that you had full belief in their abilities and the fact that you trusted them will go a long way, guaranteeing success for your team. So have faith in your team, push the team to go faster, brainstorm and commit faster, fail faster and watch the transformation.

Remember "Data is King but Speed is the Emperor".

Be Afraid of Your Customers

Be afraid of your customers. Be afraid every day that they may decide to take their business somewhere else and leave you hanging. This mindset will challenge all of us specially the ones in the retail sector to ensure that we go out there everyday to provide our customers an experience which is nothing less than exceptional. Never think about aiming for a short term gain that will jeopardize your long term vision or goal however lucrative it may seem.

Formula for Success

Work like a startup, Deliver like a startup (Agility), and offer nothing less than a Ritzy customer experience

Object Detection APIs will change the future of camera apps

Google launches tensorflow object detection api. This can help stir a new trend in photo apps where the apps can be then used to remove detected items from a photo and may be even replace an object with a different object. Think #SNAPCHAT AR ads, and enhance them to allow objects from your own photos replace those in another pictures. Potentially in the future, this can be moved to videos when combined with Google cloud Video Intelligence API. Take it one step further and let computers build your marketing ads on the fly and publish with human intervention.

https://research.googleblog.com/2017/06/supercharge-your-computer-vision-models.html

AI for self-optimizing E-Commerce Experiences

Aritificial Intelligence (AI) in E-Commerce can be used to personalize, influence and guide customer shopping behavior to items, products and services that they actually will buy or are indeed looking for. This would make use of "in-the-moment" personalized recommendations based on a user's actions on the website in near realtime vs relying upon prevalent recommendation strategies based on historical data such customer who saw item A bought item B.

AI can also be used to revolutionize A/B testing where instead of human beings defining, building, optimizing and then determining the experience winner, machine learning can be leveraged to run multiple A/B tests simultaneously and then run different combinations of all the experiences, followed by the best possible combination, selecting the winning customer experience that ensures highest conversion rates. An E-Commerce giant planning to change the look and feel of their site can take all the different designs across say their home, promotional, product and cart pages and have the AI based A/B testing engine run all the different combinations. AI based A/B testing can even self optimize the winning combination to test potential increase in conversion rates. Let's use machine learning to drive E-Commerce. #RiseOfBots #RiseOfMachines

Some work being done in this space by Sentient Technologies

http://www.sentient.ai/ascend/