Bhavya Chowdhury Number of words: 59 Keeping order amid Taobao’s virtual alleyways are Alibaba’s client service managers, the xiaoer. Thousands of xiaoer mediate any disputes that arise between customers and merchants. These referees, young employees averaging twenty-seven years old, work long hours, often sending messages to vendors late at night. Excerpted from page 6 of ‘Alibaba: The … Read more
Number of words: 106 Unlike Amazon, Alibaba’s consumer websites Taobao and Tmall carry no inventory. They serve as platforms for other merchants to sell their wares. Taobao consists of nine million storefronts run by small traders or individuals. Attracted by the site’s huge user base, these “micro merchants” choose to set up their stalls on … Read more
Number of words: 222 One of the biggest mistakes I have made during my career was coining the term profit centre, around 1945. The truth is that inside the business, there are only cost centres. The only profit centre is a customer whose check hasn’t bounced. We know literally nothing about the outside, and yet, … Read more
Number of words: 209 Though incompatible, the global economy and total war are both children of this century. The strategic goal in traditional warfare, in Clausewitz’s famous phrase, was “to destroy the enemy’s fighting forces.” War was to be waged against the enemy’s soldiers. It was not supposed to be waged against enemy civilians and … Read more
Number of words: 45 I have often advised managers that a 20 – 1 salary ratio is the limit beyond which they cannot go if they don’t want resentment and falling morale to hit their companies. Excerpted from Page 103 of ‘Managing in the Next Society’ by Peter Drucker
Number of words: 450 Then in 1829, came the railroad, a product truly without precedent, and it and it forever change economy, society and politics. In retrospect it is difficult to imagine why the invention of the railroad took so long. Rails to move carts had been around in coal mines for a very long … Read more
Number of words: 250 By the year 1000 the West that is, Europe north of the Mediterranean and west of Greece, orthodoxy had become a startlingly new and distinct civilization and society, much letter dubbed feudalism. At its core was the world’s first, and all but invincible, fighting machine: the heavily armored knight fighting on … Read more
Number of words: 369 Like capitalism, Dataism too began as a neutral scientific theory, but is now mutating into a religion that claims to determine right and wrong. The supreme value of this new religion is ‘information flow’. If life is the movement of information, and if we think that life is good, it follows … Read more
Number of words: 352 In the process, Dataism inverts the traditional pyramid of learning. Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with … Read more
Number of words: 144 The bats live in a world of echoes. Just as in the human world every object has a characteristic shape and colour, so in the bat world every object has its echo-pattern. A bat can tell the difference between a tasty moth species and a poisonous moth species by the different … Read more
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