Let’s say you are a marketing manager with a portfolio of 15 brands across three categories.

Revenues are under pressure. You are thinking of what you should do.

Say you have three choice

(a) add a few more brands
(b) kill a few brands
(c) do nothing (yes, this is always a choice)

What would you do?

My guess is, that if we surveyed 100 brand managers, option (a) would have the highest percentage. Agree?

But maybe killing a few brands and concentrating all the investment in the rest is the best course of action. But a scary one.

The same happens when we see processes not being followed or we want better quality to be produced by a team. The instinctive reaction is to increase the oversight, increase the number of forms to be filled, and increase the number of things that need to be measured and reported. But is that always the best thing?

This story will throw some light on this phenomenon and talk about how we need to build our subtracting muscles and subdue our urge to add.


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Has something like this ever happened to you?

You bought something. Say a new car.

And then you ended up purchasing all sorts of additional things to go inside it. A new car charger for your cell phone, an extra umbrella, a first aid kit, and even a flashlight.

You owned your previous car for nearly 7 years and at no point did you feel that any of the previously mentioned items were worth purchasing. And yet, after getting your shiny new car, you found yourself falling into a consumption spiral.

Has this ever happened to you?

Well, it probably has and there is a name for it - The Diderot Effect.

Today’s story talks about the origin of that term and what we can do to avoid it.

Listen on.


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Imagine you are the first officer in the cockpit of a flight. The ATC has been highlighting some storm clouds in the flight path your plane is taking. It seems that the pilot hasn’t paid any attention to the warning and is flying straight towards the storm. You decide to say something.

What do you choose to say:-

A. “That dark cloud at twenty-five miles looks mean.”
Or
B. “Which direction would you like to deviate?”
Or
C. “Turn thirty degrees right.”

Option C is direct and unambiguous, Option A is called “Highly mitigated speech”

What you choose to say or not say could decide between life and death. Listen on!

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Let’s imagine you are in an unfortunate situation where there is a medical emergency. Someone in the family needs help. You have never faced this situation earlier. You ask around and you are advised that the best solution lies in a land far far away. You have the resources to take the family member to that far away land. What would you do?

In a recent lecture, Anand Mahindra narrates what he did and the lessons he learnt.

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Many years ago, a tourist in London, let’s call him Peter, needed to travel from Covent Garden to Leicester Square. He opened the London Underground Map he carried in his pocket and saw that Leicester Square was one stop away.

The map he was looking at was created in the early 1930s by an electrical engineer called Harry Beck. Harry Beck had taken an extremely complicated map and made it simple. One element of simplicity was that the stations were shown equidistance on the map.

Peter went down the escalator to the Covent Garden station, rode the subway for what seemed to be a very short time and then took the lift up at Leicester Square.

In reality, these two stations are among the closest in the entire London Underground system, separated by a mere 260 meters (about 850 feet). It would have taken Peter a shorter time to walk between the two stations than to take the Tube, considering the time spent going down to the platform and waiting for a train.

This incident humorously highlights the practical limitations of schematic maps but we still use them because the pluses far outweigh these drawbacks.

Here is the story about how the new London Underground Map was born and became the template for all subway maps in the world.

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It’s 1995. The stadium is full. It is a World Cup final. The oppressors are playing their fiercest competitor. In walks the man who is the most recognisable face among the oppressed. This man had come out of a 27-year prison sentence. As he walks in, the crowd is shocked….why?

To know more listen to this absolute gem of a story on leadership.

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Back in the early 1980s, I remember excitedly waiting for each episode of The Friendly Neighbourhood Spiderman. I could sing every line from “Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can…….”. My favourite is “In the chill of night, at the scene of a crime, like a streak of light he arrives just in time”.

Those joys of mine would never have happened if the creator of Spiderman, Stan Lee, gave up on his idea.

Neither would I ever learn a line that continues to be one of my favourite mottos - “With great power comes great responsibility”

To know the benefits on never giving up, listen to this story.
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It’s early 1940s, the world war was at it’s height. The Allied forces were losing ships that came from the US carrying food and ammunition.

The Germans had a code machine called the Enigma. This code was considered unbreakable. The code allowed the German submarines to sneak in a sink ships. Enter Alan Turing….. phir kya hua? (That’s Hindi for - “What happened next”?) Listen to the story…..

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