SunWords

Management, Strategy, Sunny's Signal For the longest time, Mumbai’s dabbawallas performed one of the great daily miracles of urban life. Every morning, thousands of home-cooked lunches were collected from kitchens across the city, sorted, transported by bicycle and train, re-sorted, and delivered to office workers with astonishing reliability. Then, hours later, the empty tiffin boxes made the whole journey home again.

Life & Society, Success, Sunny's Signal More or less. Mrs B used that term recently when explaining that things never work out perfectly well. Never. All that we can expect from life is that it’s more or less OK. There or thereabouts. In the round. Give or take. By and large. On the whole. All things considered. On balance. So-so. For the most part. In the main. In the ballpark. Near enough. English is littered with these terms and phrases. So are other languages: Comme ci, comme ça. Más o menos. Maa maa.

Customer Care, Sunny's Signal, Technology After visiting the UK recently, I conclude this: if there’s one thing this kingdom is united in these days, it’s delivering poor customer experience. Yes, CX@UK really sucks, and for a simple reason. The humans have been removed from it. Wherever you look, the machine is displacing the person. Staffed tills are mostly gone, replaced by self-checkout scanners. In the biggest and formerly best stores, you will be hard-pressed to find a helpful person.

Life & Society, Success, Sunny's Signal A respected friend told me how, even late in life, he invests in learning programmes to teach him new things and help him keep up with an ever-changing world. Why does he bother? He is a Senior Counsel, with a long list of achievements behind him.

Life & Society, Strategy, Success, Sunny's Signal We human beings seem to have a chronic addition bias. When something is wrong, our instinct is to add: more words, more meetings, more analysis, more features, more possessions, more interventions, more emotion, more money, more effort. We rarely ask whether the intelligent move is subtraction. Shakespeare recommended brevity as the soul of wit. But being brief is just one manifestation of the problem.

It’s quite distressing to realize, later in life, how many things I may have been fundamentally wrong about. So many fondly held notions can turn out to be the hallucinations of a younger and more naïve self. Recent months and years have brutally disabused me of so many concepts and presumptions. The list is long and alarming. Let me share a few. I once believed that there was an inherent morality present in every human, a higher nature, a compassionate essence.

Customer Care, Leadership, Sunny's Signal I heard a comedian riff on the term “inconvenience regretted” on YouTube the other day. It got me worked up too. Why do brands do this? Bland, banal, insincere messages to customers when they mess up. Oh, did we “inconvenience” you? “Regretted.” In passive voice, too! Regretted by whom? The customer rep who has to deal with you? The particular department that messed up? The CEO? The board of directors? The universe? The unspoken truth?

Strategy, Sunny's Signal, Technology, Uncategorized Artificial intelligence has now escaped the chat and is in the building. AI agents are being deployed by companies racing not to be left behind. An agent does not merely answer a question. Give it a goal, and it plans the steps, uses tools, acts, and adjusts as it goes. A chatbot tells you how; an agent can go ahead and do it. That autonomy can have unintended consequences.

Strip away the shirts, flags and national anthems from this World Cup, and you might have struggled to identify who is playing. Nearly every team seemed to line up in some version of the same tactical playbook. Four at the back, three when in possession. A holding midfielder dropping deep. Full-backs pushing forward or “inverting” into midfield. Wingers cutting inside. A lone striker, or none. Everyone pressing, counter-pressing, building from the back, trying to overload the half-spaces.

A stitch in time… Actions speak louder… Don’t count your chickens… Where there’s smoke… You can, I’m sure, complete all those sentences. You even know that they are proverbs, andcan explain exactly what they mean. Isn’t that remarkable? Across generations and much of the English-speaking world, people know these sayings and treat them as inherited wisdom. Here in East Africa we have our own: Haraka haraka haina baraka and bandu bandu humaliza gogo, to name just a couple. But wait.