There is now a definite trend in which people are accessing products, news and brands via mobile apps rather than through websites. Part of the new strategy for companies is to figure out if they need to have their own app or share content space with others.
Some real game changers are Snapchat, Buzzfeed and independent sports update sites.
Another fascinating discussion we have is between User Experience workers and Graphic Design workers. Both claim to keep the end-user in mind with regards to functionality and aesthetics.
Indeed, in order to keep the user engagement we definitely need an enticing graphic story. By default, graphic designers keep the user in mind. Yet there are a few things they miss out on for creating the perfect experience for their hard work:
User Experience workers tend to collaborate and maximize the potential of the graphic designer by:
Without a doubt, a good UX team will know how to play around with graphic design concepts while keeping to the timelines.
A repeating concern in the market is the proliferation of software engineers calling themselves User Experience designers. Personally I have no issues, for it brings about a strong sense of programming ability to the user experience. But here are three core dangers of a UI person declaring themselves as a UX person:
UX masters are highly people-centric rather than product-centric. They tend to focus on behavior, interaction, functionality and aesthetics. They are not bound by programs, coding or rendering resources.
The biggest benefit is that the blueprints which come from such exercises are very rarely shifting and bring about breakthrough results, provided its done correctly.
Considering the new wave of marketers coming in, here are a few things that we will definitely be incorporating into their skill sets:
This is something that I know with the current level of experience that is needed.
A regular question that people ask is what is the difference between strategic marketing and regular marketing?
Actually strategic marketing IS regular marketing BUT it focuses on a particular area in it. This usually has to do with techniques in the birds eye view. It’s about keeping an eye on the different assets within marketing and how to organize them in order to maximize their potential.
A better distinction would be between Strategic Marketing & Tactical Marketing. Strategic marketing is usually involved with long-term goals, developing effective responses to changing market dynamics, defining segments and positioning. Problems are usually unstructured, and require data which is external and often speculative.
Tactical marketing is more concerned with short-term time frames, day-to-day activities and individual components of the marketing mix. This includes, advertising, sales promotions, media planning, content generation, etc) Problems are often repetitive and well structured with data-being internally generated.
A starter list of topics within the strategic marketing field are as follows:
The advantages of strategic planning are:
The challenges to successful planning are:
If you are a marketing exert in this age, you better get a good grip on strategic marketing in order to survive the changing dynamics of the field.
A medium that held a lot of promise just a decade ago, is now about to enter the commercial markets in a big way. People will be able to experience new locations, games and activities like never before.
And the number one contender leading the way for now is the Oculus.
But more than who are the main players in the market, I am more interested in how the economic and marketing landscape could change with this technology.
We will definitely see a rise in ‘immersion marketing’ where people enter virtual worlds of the brands and get to experience things in a whole new way.
We will see a lot of training and education projects coming up. We will see lots of architectural and design work happening in virtual reality.
We will see the rise of ‘digital assets’ where people have customized settings and walk-through.
We will be creating software services in which regular people can design their own virtual experiences.
We will see the rise of virtual Avatars.
We will see how city planning works and get live feeds from multiple points in the world.
In short, we will have a new and exciting way of engaging with the world around us in the digital dimension.
One of the usual arguments I have to pick with CEOs and COOs is how they wish their organizations to run. Is its sales-oriented or marketing-oriented? Is it product-based or consumer-research based?
Now the latest debate that we have is about the subtle difference in business-led marketing or marketing-led business?
Allow me to explain.
Marketing-led business, is when the core team around which all other units work is the marketing department. It is heavily focused on ‘Consumer is King’ theory.
Business-led marketing, is when the core solution of the business takes center stage and marketing is used to research, develop and back it up. This one is heavily focused on ‘Disrupting Markets”
The factors that come into play here are:
Personally, I have learnt to respect both forms of marketing styles as they both satisfy different needs of the industry. So choose your positioning and see how it works for you on a small scale and then adapt it into a bigger one later.
Amongst the wide variety of people I interact with, there is one general complaint that I always get to hear; that people don’t have manners. That people are losing their sense of etiquettes and sense of respect not just for others but for themselves. How often do you get to hear these statements about others?
“Students today don’t know how to give respect to their teachers”
“Children don’t know how to give respect to their elders”
“Women backbite a lot!”
“Men don’t know when to keep their mouths closed”
“That is not the kind of language we use around here”
“You will never find her smiling”
“It is very hard to keep a good conversation going with him”
“Look at him! Is this the way to sit in front of the boss?”
Now, as parents, teachers, leaders and social workers, we need to ask ourselves these questions: what good is it giving skills to people who don’t know how to behave like decent people? What good will it do in order to make families, groups or organizations that are highly skilled but low on morals? Are we making machines or are we investing in humans? Are we making sure that the next generation is more polished than the last one?
Probably everyone instinctively knows the answers to these questions, followed by a feeling of what can we do about it? Parents need to go out and earn for the kids so they don’t have the time to sit down and teach them the finer details of manners. Teacher need to cover their course materials so don’t have the time to tell students how to behave and become better people. Leaders need to focus on budgets, infrastructure, and cash flows so they don’t get the amount of time they need to develop their followers.
As teachers, trainers and HR professionals; we consider these to come under the ambient of Personality Development or Personal Grooming. We call it soft skills or personal investment. Because of this approach or this attitude, we do not consider it a high priority to invest initial time or good effort into developing these. We do consider them vital, but not important enough to take out time. As heads of organizations, we expect whoever works for us AT LEAST knows the required manners that we follow, or worse, we expect them to adapt their mannerisms according to the surrounds.
I would like to bring some important points to bear here.
It is all about respect
Personality development focuses on respecting others by respecting ourselves first. That means a person needs to understand and believe that they are unique human beings individually with our own strengths and weaknesses. Therefore we need to be tolerant and patient, the core benchmarks of a well-groomed person. Only the most patient and tolerant will be the most well-respected one.
Change starts at home
You probably notice the bad manners in others because it is not in you yourselves. But what if you have the same bad manners yet you don’t follow it yourself? Manners are one thing that really is decided by the leader. If the leader, parent or teacher has a high sense of mannerism and personal self-respect, their followers, children and students will also adopt that. But the leader needs to periodically make sure people are adopting it and are vigilant for positive changes and appreciate it.
Also leaders should not preach what they don’t practice. This is especially true in terms of being honest. Quite a few heads of organizations and parents would like their people and children to be honest to them, but they would not like to be honest themselves.
The amount of respect that people give to women at home is mimicked by the children in their own lives when they go out. The way we treat our business partners and vendors in front of our juniors, they will treat them with the same respect away from us.
It takes effort and time to change behavior
If we are to make serious adjustments to someone’s behavior, we need to understand and respect the fact that different people develop different habits at their own individual pace. We cannot hurry change. But we can certainly change it. This is especially true for the coming generations. As an example, in one person’s house, nobody likes to read a lot or write, and the person is making the effort of taking personal time out and does it at the cost of ridicule at home. This he can keep on doing.
When the person is married and has kids, his kids will naturally be born in the environment of regular reading and writing so they will adapt the new behavior from the environment and won’t find it hard. A whole family has now developed a highly cultured behavior just because of one person’s persistent effort to change.
What can we do about it?
Begin by analyzing ourselves. In the morning or before sleeping note on purpose what good manners do we have and appreciate. What makes us angry, as that also shows the values we hold dear. We can look at people who we considered well-groomed and try to pick out the habits they have of how they talk, how they walk, how they sit or how they handle situations. We can go to finishing schools or join personality development programs.
These investments help us to understand how much we can improve and slowly and gradually we can make the effort to change ourselves to become better every day or every month or every year. This way, people who look up to us for guidance or help will appreciate the respect that we have for ourselves and give it to us as well.
Remember, a well-groomed person is a patient and tolerant person. I cannot emphasize this point enough. I hope this helps us all rise together as better humans.
Doctors save lives; teachers save souls.
To the best of my knowledge, after a lot of thought and arguments; after a lot of research and hypothesis, after a considerable experimentation and experience, I can safely say that the two noblest professions on Earth are doctors and teachers. For what can be more noble than saving lives and reducing pain of people who you do not know via blood relations but by simply the fact that they are humans. That is what doctors do. And what can be more noble than enhancing the character of men and women every day, to inculcate values and effective skills that can make us all together the best of all created creations, generations upon generations till the Last Hour. That is what teachers do.
Prophet Muhammad told us that in order to gain knowledge we should go as far as we can for it even if it’s all the way to China. He guided us to become nomads that move from one tent of knowledge to the next; we should become the persistent beggars of wisdom that falls into our always hungry minds and most importantly, we intend to walk down a path whose very steps mean we are praying in every moment and in every breath. That is the path of the teacher, that we hope someday leads us to become a timeless, ageless sage.
With time I have developed considerable skills ranging from sports to debates, from linguistics to marketing, from ultra fast reading to creating works of art. But nothing fires me up more than teaching. The ability to lead the hearts and minds of students gently and with care in order to give them the gift of wisdom, the notes of knowledge and the practice of skills is the ultimate high. I’m a businessman by profession yet a teacher by passion. Every minute of teaching brings me pleasure, satisfaction and the wholesomeness of being connected to a Greater Being.
So what am I supposed to do of this burning desire. How do I unleash this Phoenix of blessings. I believe I can start at home first. What better place to begin than the people with whom I grew up within. My people of Karachi. My people of Pakistan.
The ability to teach takes on many forms. My vision for our people actually comes down to this:
• That every student learns how they learn best and then dip into the limitless Multiverse of knowledge. Every student increases their learning potential by 400%
• That every parent knows how to take responsibility of creating the best possible opportunities for their families to become lifelong learners
• That every teacher learns how to create the ultimate learning environment, that they see a bubble around themselves, that whoever walks into it, learns something from them
• That every organization learns how to adapt to the fast changing world in a balanced and moderate manner to give rise to good human beings
• That collectively as a nation of humans we rise above the levels of animals, far above the levels of devils and cross the levels of Angels
If all 8 billion people on the planet align themselves to walk the path of knowledge and make finding wisdom their true currency, then indeed we will rise as one mind and one body. We will rise as one thought and one emotion. We will rise as Humanity, the Ultimate of Creations. For we truly do not know of our full potential as yet. But we can take our first firm steps towards this end.
The leading nations of the industrial revolution, were not the ones with the most resources, but the ones with machine tools. These were nations that made machines to make better machines and they were always ahead of the technological curve.
So in the Age of Information, within the streams of the Knowledge Revolution, where the most economic wealth resides with the nation with the most intellectual capital, the machine tools amongst them are the ones that can replicate knowledge in better forms for other knowledge workers. In short, teachers…the machine tools of humanity. How glorious is our Prophet that he foresaw the future value of knowledge and told us all to go and travel far and wide to gather it. True value is now indeed in what recedes in our minds than in our bank accounts. And I believe, in order to improve the economic conditions of our families, communities and societies, we need to invest in our teachers, trainers and coaches. A new era is upon us. I’m taking my humble steps in it and I hope others follow it too. Not out of need or accident, but out of purpose and passion.
I envision raising a nation of 180 million teachers by 2030 if not earlier. These teachers are not bound by the boundaries of countries. They can be anywhere. I wouldn’t mind that all of them be the people of my country Pakistan first. But then again I wish to add value to all humans in general, so why limit this nation to a particular geographic location?
In 180 million teachers, I see teachers, lecturers, coaches, trainers, principles and counselors who all are passionate about teaching and the art of learning and helping others to learn. In 180 million teachers, I include the students who learnt so well from their teachers that they taught two more people. In 180 million teachers, I include businessmen, philanthropists, politicians, diplomats, educationists, technocrats and professionals all of whom appreciate the potential of creating and investing in learning societies and share the vision of rising as one tolerant body of humans all over the planet. I wish to see every parent appreciate the uniqueness of their children and of themselves, and grow as families up to their true potential.
The extremely long-term benefits of my project Rise Humanity are as follows:
• A tolerant society: when everyone is a student, and everyone is a teacher to someone, we will actually feel the pain of death of someone. We will actually feel the loss of a good mind and soul and will stop ourselves from taking violent actions
• People enjoy learning: The art of learning becomes a pleasure and past time for people. Everyone will be talking about their latest learning projects with joy and everyone will be helping others learn better
• Abundance: A nation of humans, geared towards building the character and knowledge of unique people will be a nation of abundance. Its pretty hard to explain right now. But give it some thought and you will understand. All I can share is this: The more I learn, the more I feel the less I know. It’s quite humbling.
• A world without boundaries: If we can appreciate our individuality and learn to adapt and work together, national boundaries won’t matter much. Neither would language or culture. The Macro culture of learning will guide all.
• Every day of our lives we will find out the true meaning of life. We all know it, but it is too simple and too obvious to believe at times. Once you are on the path of learning, it simply manifests itself.
I am dedicating myself to this project. And I look forward to meeting the wonderful, beautiful souls that I will meet along the way. I wish to help as many people towards this aim and invite others to join in. My own little army of mischief-makers. I believe it is a wonderful love, it is a beautiful form of life to live and the best form of prayer. I am thankful to my parents and teachers who have made me what I am today. I do this also to make them proud.
May God Bless us all with his Guidance and Mercy
I remember that during my debating years, one particular topic always carried heat. All forms of topic that tried to pit men vs women, or to establish gender superiority at some level of the other. The debates never came to conclusions and they were always personal. It was never a chicken and egg situation; it was always a recipe for disaster.
As an English humorous speaker, there was always enough material to draw up on, but I know (and secretly all the teachers knew too) that there could never be conclusive positions (unless quoted out of the Quran or a speaker taking a very egotistical stand coming from personal experience).
The debates would always roam around these good old themes…..men are natural-born cheaters and can never commit…women are natural-born politicians and think via emotions…..God made man first for a reason….but it took the creation of a woman to complete. Humanity as a whole. Men are bastards, women are bitches. Men cheat, women are vengeful. There is more pressure on women on our society than on men. Men make better leaders, women make excellent managers. We are better than them, they are not. They will never be able to do anything without us (but just to make the impact softer let’s just say….we complement each other). Blah, blah, blah.
Insane aren’t we? The most seasoned amongst us know a deep dark truth about gender wars…..it’s a never-ending debate, whose very participation is to cause rifts, never to bring them closer. Ever. That’s the beauty and “fun” of the topic anyways.
I personally have a rule now (after much yap, hurt feelings and shattered egos) NEVER to debate on the following topics, as they only lead to further problems:
1) Why did God create us? If he cared for us truly why make us feel pain and make some of us destined for eternal Hell
2) Gender Wars? Who is better in some regards, men or women
3) East or West? Who has a superior culture
4) Nationalism
In the first topic, I have learnt it is a matter of the unseen, and all I know is that we are created to pray to the one True God. To go on and find out WHY we were created and destined the way we are, will only make us go nuts. With no conclusion let’s just stop right there and not think more. We can see how all the great philosophers have died in trying to answer that, even amongst Muslims.
In the second topic, we are simple asking for trouble. No side can “win” this one. Ever. The day we understand this is the day we will actually try to make peace amongst the gender divide. The very act of taking a position is to cause a divide. We literally focus on building walls and not enough bridges.
In the third one, Let people realize that there is no East or West, just advancements in human culture over time. There is no superior East culture, nor superior West culture, nor North or South. As time goes by, we are all moving towards becoming a singular mind and a singular heart as one humanity. Think about it, the physical reference point is just that, a reference point. Not a position of authority.
In the final one, nationalism, the very thought of defining cultures by artificial boundaries is just plain immature. The time is not far when nations will be reference points of only where you were born, not of whom you are as a culture or family.
As far as gender bias is concerned, I admit myself first that I am guilty of it. In fact I made a reputation out of it. But I know I am wrong in that. I constantly seek to improve my understanding of both sides and seek to take the moderate middle path. I hope for Divine Guidance on it. I really am trying to understand. I hope you learn it too. For now, just learn to avoid such debates at all costs. By their very nature, they are designed for trouble.
Hamza Awan 