technology – Praveen's Blog

When I was around seven or eight, there was a retailer who was in his early twenties and owned a electronic equipments store. Due due family disputes, he had just parted ways with his older brother who was in the same business for more than a decade . When he started his own store, he was young, had no idea of building a business and all he knew was, how the connections worked on a circuit board. Everyone in our neighbourhood thought he will not survive for more than a year or two without his older brother’s support and eventually he’ll go back to his brother.

However after a few months, his business started to grow. From just fixing things, he started to sell electronic products in his store and after few more months he became a major distributor of some of the products such as tubelights, bulbs, fans, geysers and many more and after a few years he started to take huge contracts from some of the real estate builders in an around our neighbourhood and fifteen years later, he became a major player in south Bangalore electronic equipments sales and had a annual revenue of more than sixty crore Rupees. Whereas his older brother, who had started around a decade earlier had wound up his shop and returned to his hometown.

The reason I remembered Ram Nivas (his real name) for this blog is because whenever I thought about him and his brother, I thought Ram was maybe more passionate, better with people, had better business acumen. But something I have realised after so many years that actually was the reason for this great trajectory is, Ram was better strategically. When he started his own business, he chose a neighbourhood which was growing and still developing. He chose the area where he saw a lot of vacant land and he knew there will be a lot of construction happening soon, which would mean that there will be a lot of demand for his services.

Richard Rumelt (considered as one of the best thinkers on the topic) in his book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy writes, The first step of making strategy real is figuring out the big ‘aha’ to gain sustainable competitive advantage—in other words, a significant, meaningful insight about how to win.
And that “aha” moment for Ram was to rent a shop in the area where there was hardly anything at that moment but will soon start developing.

In today’s world, most of the organisations have made it a sort of mandate to have a vision and a mission for themselves which is important too, but the problem arises when the organisation and its managers confuse strategy to having a fancy vision and mission statements. A good strategy simply put is, Coherent set of actions designed to achieve a specific goal by leveraging strengths and tackling critical challenges. And a bad one is, Fluffy statements, wishful thinking, vague goals, or long lists of unconnected initiatives.

A good strategy has 3 components,

Coherent Actions – A sequence of moves that align.
Diagnosis – Identify the real challenge.
Guiding Policy – A chosen approach to tackle it.

If organisation A’s mission is to become the market leader (based on customer count) at delivering personalised gifts,
Coherent Actions – Every action of every employee of that organisation should be focused towards accomplishing that task. It would mean every effort, every project, every KPI of that organisation and its employees should be aligned towards achieving that objective.
Diagnosis – Organisation A has to figure out where it is leaking money or loosing its prospects. Could it be, the cost of its products, the quality or maybe their marketing team is not able to market the products appropriately.
Guiding Policy – It has to know the market trends and what the market demands are. Could it be something that the prospects follow on social media, a viral TV series or a song. In simpler terms, constantly doing market research and being on top of any recent trends.

A case study that peaked my interest and inspired me to share the learnings with you all is from the book I mentioned earlier, Richard Rumelt’s “Good Strategy/Bad Strategy” where he breaks down and explains Sam Walton’s strategy with Walmart,

In the 1960s, most big retailers focused on cities and large suburbs, believing rural towns lacked the population to sustain profitable stores. Walton spotted a different truth: these communities were underserved yet had the same appetite for low prices and quality products as city shoppers. The real challenge wasn’t demand—it was figuring out how to serve these customers efficiently at scale.

Instead of chasing urban markets like its competitors Sears or Kmart, Walton committed to small-town dominance. His strategic mantra was Everyday Low Prices (EDLP), not periodic big sales. This single-minded focus meant every operational decision had to align with cost leadership and accessibility.

Walton’s success didn’t come from ambition alone; it came from coordinated, tangible steps that reinforced his guiding policy:

Opened stores in clusters around distribution centres to minimise transport costs.
Built a centralised logistics system rather than relying on wholesalers.
Used computer inventory systems and satellite communications before competitors caught on.
Fostered a “save money for the customer” mindset across all employees

Good strategy almost always looks this simple and obvious, discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with them. Walton didn’t just dream about being the biggest retailer, he designed a system to make it inevitable.

“A good strategy includes a set of coherent actions. It is about action, about doing something.”

From a single rural store, this clarity of purpose and alignment of execution propelled Walmart into a global retail leader it is today.

“At the core, strategy is about focus, and most complex organizations don’t focus their resources. Instead, they pursue multiple goals at once, not concentrating enough resources to achieve a breakthrough in any of them.” _{Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy}

Now the exact opposite case, a “bad strategy” is of Big Bazaar losing the plot in Indian retail

Once the crown jewel of Future Group, Big Bazaar was India’s answer to Walmart in the early 2000s. It blended the feel of an Indian marketplace with the scale of a supermarket, quickly becoming a household name. But by the late 2010s, cracks in its strategy became too deep to fix—culminating in a collapse accelerated by debt, competition, and the pandemic.

E-commerce and organised competitors like Reliance Retail and DMart were building ultra-efficient, low-cost supply chains.
Customers were moving towards either high-discount formats (DMart) or convenience-focused online shopping (Amazon, Flipkart, JioMart).
Instead of recognizing operational inefficiency and pricing uncompetitiveness as the core problems, Big Bazaar doubled down on store expansion, assuming brand familiarity would keep footfall strong.

Big Bazaar tried to be all things to all customers – discount store, fashion destination, grocery bazaar, electronics seller – without achieving excellence in any one area.

As Rumelt warns:

“When you fail to choose, you try to accommodate conflicting demands and end up with a muddle.”

Big Bazaar’s actions often contradicted each other:

Excessive Diversification – Launched sub-brands like FBB (fashion), Food Bazaar (grocery), and eZone (electronics) without building scale advantage in any category.
Operational Inefficiencies – Complex supply chains, high rental costs, and poor inventory management meant they couldn’t compete on price with DMart.
Delayed Digital Pivot – Launched online initiatives too late, and they lacked integration with store operations.
Debt-Fueled Expansion – Opened large-format stores in expensive locations without ensuring profitability.

The Inevitable Downfall :

By the late 2010s:

DMart offered lower prices.
Amazon/Flipkart offered unmatched convenience.
Reliance Retail aggressively captured urban and semi-urban markets.
Big Bazaar was stuck in the middle, with neither the cheapest prices nor the best experience.
The debt burden worsened, COVID-19 slashed footfalls, and in 2022, the brand’s assets were acquired by Reliance Industries.

Bad strategy is long on ambition and short on focus. Big Bazaar wanted to be everywhere for everyone, but ended up being nowhere for anyone.

To Summarise,

A good strategy is a clear, focused plan that identifies the real challenge, sets a guiding policy, and drives a set of coherent actions to overcome it. A bad strategy is vague, full of ambition without focus, ignores key problems, and scatters effort across unaligned initiatives.
In business, success comes from diagnosing the real issues, making deliberate choices, and aligning every action to reinforce those choices, turning intent into impactful results.

PS – If you are wondering what Ram Nivas is upto these days, he has moved on to become a major property builder, owns several rental properties and lives a content life with his wife and 2 daughters.

Be Great!
Praveen.

There was a caveman who lived in a forest all by himself. He was leading a decent life and was content with whatever he had and whatever he could find to eat. Until one day, an explorer came by his cave and showed him a mobile phone. The caveman was initially scared then astonished and then started using it and eventually he started loving it. He watched videos on how he could cut tress efficiently, videos on how he could hunt better and he even learnt the concept of preserving food for the rainy days and finally returned the phone to the explorer as they said their goodbyes.

The caveman started doing the things the way he had learnt from the videos. The days passed and turned into week, the weeks became months and eventually months became years. After around thirty years, the same explorer was going through the same exact forest. Suddenly he heard a yell from the distance, when the explorer looked around he was surprised to see the same caveman running towards him and when they finally met, the caveman started thanking the explorer for saving his life. The explorer confused, asked the caveman how he could have saved the caveman’s life when they did not even meet for thirty years.

The caveman explained, before he met the explorer all he could do was live on a daily basis. He would hunt everyday, eat what he could hunt and sleep with an empty stomach on the days he could not. But after watching the videos thirty years earlier, he started to hunt better, he started to use wood and fire to his advantage, he started to store food better which he could use in rainy days and because of all this, he started to live a healthy life and his lifespan increased. His forefathers had not learnt the skills he learnt and due to harsh weather, hunger and illness their average lifespan was only only around thirty years, whereas he is now forty seven and still strong to live another twenty odd years easily. Had he not watched the videos he could have still learnt them from his experience or experiments however it would have taken years or even generations to learn them.

The story is my imaginary creation but the relevance and the moral of it is real and timeless. This is how we all are, this is how the human kind has progressed. One thing that sets us apart from all the other creatures is our ability to learn and implement those learnings quickly.

In today’s fast paced and ever changing world all of us are busy, busy with our jobs, busy with our scholastic work, busy with our daily chores and somewhere between all these, we have let go our ability to keep learning consciously, some think they have learnt everything there is to learn or worse yet, some think only they know all the right things and everyone else is in some way inferior or less experienced than them.

The capacity to learn is a gift, the ability to learn is a skill, the willingness to learn is a choice. _{Brian Herbert}

Learning can happen in different forms like reading, reflecting, observing, experiencing, listening, watching and the list can go on but the point is, we have to continuously keep learning no matter who we are, what we do or what stage of our lives we are in and we have to use the best effective means to do it.
If I am someone who spends a lot of time watching videos which don’t serve me in any way, I can start spending at least 10% of that time watching some quality videos on the new skill I always wanted to acquire. If I am someone who is thinking of taking up something which can help me get in good shape and I don’t like the idea of going to the gym everyday, I can enrol in a sport training which I like and still achieve my objective while also acquiring a new skill.

Some things can be learnt only through experiences and this statement while true, has been used by many of us to avoid learning anything at all. We resist learning through books or people. You tell them to pick up a book or a biography or watch a documentary and they say they rather deal with life themselves and learn that way. The truth is, while the statement itself is true and life teaches us a lot of lessons in its on way, the idea to pick up a book or watch a documentary is to learn from the other individual and his mistakes to do the things that must be done and avoid the things to be avoided. Let’s say, I read Steve Jobs’s biography I would not only do a crash course on how to become great in whatever I am trying to build but also I will learn what one must not do to be a good leader. If I listen to a podcast where the guest is Naval Ravikant or Ryan Holiday, I will not only learn the philosophical view of life but also will learn the effective ways to manage time, energy and get better at relationships.

Information is everywhere but its meaning is created by the observer that interprets it. Meaning is relative and there is no objective, over-arching meaning.” _{Naval Ravikant}

A lot of times, it also takes courage to challenge what we have already learnt. In his best selling book “Think Again” Adam Grant writes “We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.”

Finally, let us get back to our caveman (who was patiently waiting until now)

He could have remained scared and could have chosen not to learn new skills but to his credit, he did.
He could have chosen to do the things the way he and his ancestors always did, but he changed and changed for better.
He could have chosen to stick to his outdated learnings, but fortunately he challenged them and got new perspective on the things he had been doing for long.
He could have chosen to die young like all his ancestors, but he chose to live healthier and longer than all of them.

Be Great!
Praveen.

Tag: technology

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference That Decides Success

The Power of Learning: Lessons from a Caveman