How Mckinsey does it and what we could learn from it ;)

 "McKinsey today is itself truly a global firm, with a non-American majority controlling its shareholder committee and the real possibility of electing a non-American as managing director in the near future."

I strongly believe in two things.

One, History repeats. At the least rhymes. Hence it is important to read history and learn a lot from it which helps to predict the future. Sort of like Machine learning but in a different sense.

Two, No one knows the future. Prediction is futile. So is planning. (Yet, I also annoy some folks with my super optimized planning running different options and scenarios)

As a result, one of my favorite thing is to read archives. Old articles, old books. What better way to time travel. (or Old Movies)

To give you a sense about articles, articles that wrote the obituary of Steve Jobs, Articles that praised the likes of Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried. HBR articles that talk about the might of Yahoo kind of ones are my favorites.

Well, one could argue, "Hindsight is 20/20" Journalists were writing what they say, it was the zeitgeist of the times. No one knew any better (well, thank you, exactly my point)

Neverthless, they are fun and helluva good reads and good intellectual exercises. 

Hence it is rare to read articles, that are balanced, nuanced and in general stand the test of time. (say except for few things here and there, things spoken in the article would be relevant even today)

https://fortune.com/article/how-mckinsey-does-it/ A fortune article on mckinsey written in 1993 is one such article which calls Russia, Eastern Europe, China and India as fledgling markets to Mckinsey. 

The opening lines of the post are from this article. If you haven't guessed it, in the election that happened in the next spring after this article was published, Rajat Gupta was elected as the MD. And yes, again, no where his name his mentioned in the article though it talks about the upcoming MD election and the front runners and favorites. 

One could also argue, the takeaway is not more about the good article but more about Mckinsey

Hello Instapaper, bye raindrop

Someone who knows me very well often tells me, "Hey you are like a machine! No feelings, nothing" At the same time the person also tells, "you are sentimental" I think, probably, more influenced by the "it is the best of times, it is the worst times" quote of Dickens.

Well, the reason I bring this up is, though I don't care about products getting killed and services getting shutdown, I am still reeling with sadness over the demise of Google Reader and Pocket.

(Also the algo change and as a result the user behavior on the platform. Twitter used to be a gold mine for me to discover and come across a lot of interesting articles)

I blame their demise to my digital addiction to Twitter, Insta and Youtube reels.

If only they had been around, I would have been spending more time reading rather than wasting time. 

Anyways, sometime back, I found raindrop.io as the alternate to Pocket. Even exported the pocket articles to Raindrop.

Somehow, never got to read the articles or use them. Nope, it is not that Twitter or Insta was the reason. 

I just felt the UI/UX was off. Just couldn't put a finger on it.

Thankfully, recently came across Instapaper. Interestingly, it is easy to add the articles. Easy on the eye and have been slowly back to reading. 

Oh and also they give 3 month free trial to premium if you export articles from Pocket.

How I wish, Mozilla had open sourced pocket which could be run locally.

Still I feel there are no discovery or recommendation services like the way Pocket did. 

AI Feature Ask

Though I very much like how the various LLM AI apps are outdoing each other with various new feaure launches, I wish they would make the following happen.

1. Ability to pin few of the following conversations.

I might have multiple conversations but few of them are the ones that I might go to often and would use it in a regular manner. It would be helpful to have this feature.

Teams has it, Whatsapp has it. 

Reason calling out that other apps have it is to drive home the point that it should not be that difficult to build it

2. Ability to respond to specific message

When I am having a long back and forth conversations in an app. There would be a need to go and refer one conversation or follow it up from there specifically. Though most of the apps remember context and pick up the cues instinctively, it would be good to have the ability to respond to one particular message and take it from there

3. Table of contents

There are times, a conversation is pretty long. Scrolling up and down and finding one particular thing becomes such a difficult thing. If there are long conversations, it would be good to create an automated table of contents sorta thing which helps in easier navigation.

Blast from the past: Tales of clearance

  With the today's twitter war on accusations by an importer, was reminded off the two tales I heard quite sometime ago...

I was staying in a bachelor mansion kinda place... (Kinda cause it wasn't a mansion mansion per se. Stories about this place is for another day.)

One person who was staying there with us was a customs clearing agent. One day, he had left a huge wad of substantial cash lying around unattended and was sleeping. (To be fair, amongst us, he always carried a huge amount of cash) (I always thought he was the highest earner as well, only later I realized he carried a lot of cash but not earned as much)

One of our other mansion mate chided him for leaving the money that way. The agent man responded, no big deal even if i lose, no one cares. it is all money that anyways, "he gives away" Intrigued me, ended up asking lot of naive questions about what he does how he does.

In simple words, he said, his job was to get the imported goods out of port at the earliest. Money was the best way to get it out. He also explained no one bothered as all the businessmen were focused was to get the goods out of the port at the earliest. More the inventory lied in the port, more the loss.(Then, little did i knew about the cash conversion cycle, inventory turn around and all that but that day, i learnt, faster they got the goods out, it is good for business) He also told me the money spent to get the goods out was literally nothing in a big scheme of things and the money was marginal. He also said the money "spent" to clear the goods was always reasonable as the people never wanted to kill the golden goose.

After hearing about all of it, The naive innocent me asked him a  follow up question: "How did people react to the Indian movie?" (Not the Indian 2, you can have a fair estimate of my age but you would be wrong) Was any one scared, worried? did anyone change?

He laughed and went on to tell me another story. 

One clerk got rich enough to buy a car in a super short time frame. He asked me to guess the quantum of the "scheme" It was one of the toughest case study question, I have come across. Later he revealed, the person was actually selling a form that was supposed to be given free for a single digit value. No one was aware that form was actually free or didn't give a damn as the amount was miniscule. Yet the numbers were so huge for the person to buy a car!!!

Amongst us was also a guy who worked for a large industrial house, who was supposedly known for their squeaky clean image. The industrial house guy was in finance and had to regularly deal with external government offices, clearing lot of approvals, papers, taxes and what not...

 The cynical me (Yeah am naive as well as cynical; go figure) turned to him and asked him, what about this firm? are they really clean or is it all made up stories, and I have never seen you carrying cash as this fellow?

He smiled and said, he doesn't carry cash cause they don't pay and the stories are true. I was like how do you get the work done? Is it because you are too big and powerful? do you deal with different level. 

He said, we flat out refuse. we make it clear, we will follow rules, if the officer wants to delay they could delay.

As a result, people knew they will follow rules and papers move. every now and then there will be a new officer who will try something funny with them. Either they will be patient or the new officer will be schooled by other colleagues that the tactics doesn't work for them.

Humanizing your AI created content!

 In the world of AI, you know what is worse than AI Snake Oil Peddling,

Clickbait articles with the above misleading headline which goes on to offer solutions like the following to humanize AI created content

1) Telling AI to write like Human

2) Using a AI Humanizer. Well apparently there are AI tools which will make your AI generated content more human like...

3) Don't use AI (I am not kidding, the author did recommend this, if you don't want your content to sound like AI, don't use AI)

Good Bye Pocket! Hello Raindrop!

If you have been someone like me, who is a voracious reader, information junkie and hard pressed for time, Pocket was a god send. Whenever you come across an interesting article, you can just save it to pocket, read it at leisure, refer it at any point of time. More than that, the recommendations based on the reading was spot on. If I have been sharing interesting articles, now you know where they came from. Beyond all of that, it also saved articles from sites that were behind paywalls. 

It was one of the app, that I used a lot and has helped a lot. So naturally I did really feel bad and upset when I read the news Pocket would be shut down. (The last time I felt this bad was Google shut down the reader.) I also felt bad, I didn't see so many people feeling bad about the shut down and writing ode to Pocket. I hardly saw only one post. (Well, that sort of explains the shut down)

Well, we are humans, we move on, life moves on. We start wondering, what next? what is the alternative?

To be honest, I was too tempted to ask one of the LLMs to help me build a chrome plugin or an app that would let me save the articles directly to Google Notebook LM, you know to be more AI powered and so on. After dabbling a bit on that, better sense prevailed and asked the LLMs for a replacement and alternatives.

After looking at Raindrop.io and Notion Clipper, I settled for Raindrop. 

If you just want to save links and read later, Raindrop is the one to go with. If you are someone, who want to save the articles, highlight and want the content, and have already been using Notion, then Notion Clipper is the way to go.

Oh by the way, If you have been a power user like me in Pocket, and have saved a lot of articles, then Pocket lets you to export the links. Not the entire content of the links. 

Once you export the links and download them, you could import in Raindrop and get to all those articles you are yet to read.

By the way, I had 10,000 unread articles and 9000 read articles in archive

N.B

Only humans were involved in writing of the post :) :)

One thing, even AI can't do....

Somewhere in the Ministry of the Indian Government, an AI service provider's salesperson was passionately selling the power of AI.

“Saar, it can do this, it can do that,” he said with conviction.

To the politician and the bureaucrat, it all sounded eerily familiar—like the lofty promises heard during election campaigns.

But this time, when they tested and questioned it, the AI wasn't just smoke and mirrors. It wasn’t a pre-recorded demo, nor was it cleverly disguised vaporware. Heck, it wasn’t even a staged live demo—it was real-time stuff.

Impressed, the politician and bureaucrat decided to throw the ultimate challenge.

“Can it fix all the issues in our EPFO site?” they asked.

And just like that, the salesperson vanished—much like a genie who disappears the moment you ask for the one wish that’s just a bit too difficult.

What I want from AI: Personalized Recap, So far

AI has been everywhere lately, claiming it can do all sorts of things.

Well, if there’s one thing I really want (okay, I actually want a lot of things), it’s this:

You’ve been watching a series on Netflix—or any other streaming platform. Maybe even a movie. You stopped midway, or after a few episodes, or perhaps after a season or two.

Now you’re coming back to it. All you want is a recap of what’s happened so far.

Think about it: a customized, personalized recap based on your viewing progress.

How hard can it really be for built-in AI to do this?

Come on, streaming apps—rather than focusing so much on what to show me next, how about reminding me what I’ve already seen?

Paradox of AI

“A good fiction will blend a lot of reality and facts into its narration and storyline. The blend would be so fine, it would be difficult for one to differentiate fact from fiction.”

A famous Tamil writer made this remark while commenting on the popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

If one were to paraphrase, the current state of AI is just like that. It’s extremely good at certain things. It’s also extremely not so good at certain others. The challenge lies in figuring out when it’s good—and when it’s not.

Some time back, my dad wasn’t well, and I had to take him to the doctor at night. An ECG was recommended. It was taking some time to meet the doctor, so I uploaded the ECG. Voila! I had the results and a detailed reading almost instantly.

Recently, my uncle had to visit the doctor alone and came back with an X-ray. Since none of us had accompanied him, we wanted better insight into the diagnosis. I uploaded the X-ray, provided some context about him, and again—boom. It gave all the details and even asked, “Would you like me to explain this in simple terms for family members?”

Immediately, my aunt asked: “What will happen in the future? Will any of us even have jobs?”

Now, let’s switch to a different example.

I often give the New York Times Connections Puzzle to the leading AI models. It has 16 words, and the task is to group them into four correct clusters of four related words. In a sense, it’s a very simple puzzle. (Well, not that simple—at least to me—since I only have a 40% win rate.)

Nowadays, I regularly feed these puzzles to AI, and to my surprise, the win rate is often worse than mine. To be fair, the way humans solve it is quite different from how AI tackles it. But still, ideally, you’d expect AI to crack it easily.

So, it can decode an ECG, analyze an X-ray… but fails consistently at a Connections puzzle?

Herein lies the rub.

If you give AI enough sample puzzles along with the correct solutions and then ask it to generate new puzzles, it can churn out hundreds of them in no time. But even then, there’s no guarantee it would be able to solve new ones correctly 100% of the time.

So, where and how should one use AI?

Let me walk through another example.

I was once tasked with writing a report on the evolution of a domain/industry: its origins, development, current state, challenges, and future trends. (I’m very familiar with the domain and could speak about it without much prep.)

My traditional workflow would have looked like this:

1. Understand the problem.
2. Do a deep Google search.
3. Find and read at least 10–15 relevant reports or sources.
4. Highlight important points, copy-paste excerpts, consolidate notes.
5. Build a point of view.
6. Draft the narrative and create a document.

This would usually take 2–3 days and might even need two people, depending on complexity. The final report would be 5–20 pages long.

Now, with LLMs:

1. I think more deeply about the problem statement.
2. I write a good prompt, provide relevant context, and use a few prompt hacks.
3. Within 2–3 minutes, I get a 10-page draft.

I usually run the same prompt across 2–3 LLMs and get multiple versions. I then feed them all back into an LLM and ask it to consolidate.

Now, in less than 30 minutes, I’ve reached the “consolidated draft” stage.

All that’s left to do is read through it, check for hallucinations, customize the tone and structure as needed, and send it off. If I want to do a really good job, it takes just 2–3 hours. At most, 4–6 hours.

That’s the productivity gain.

Now, if you reflect on this, here are some key takeaways

1. You need to write a good prompt.
   It’s garbage in, garbage out. Writing a good prompt is easier said than done. Beyond prompt hacks, you need to really understand the problem, the workflow, and the expected output.
   You can’t automate something you don’t understand. You can’t use AI effectively if you don’t know what you want—or if you can’t instruct the AI clearly.
2. It can boost productivity like crazy.
   But again, only if you know what you’re doing and what you want.
3. Watch out for hallucinations.
   Unless you know the content cold, you might not realize where the AI has gone off the rails. Sniffing out those hallucinations requires real subject matter expertise.
4. Long story short:
   AI is a great mimicking engine.
   It is not a substitute for original thinking.
   (One could argue it helps in idea generation or acts as a sparring partner for brainstorming—and yes, it does. But even then, you won’t get the best out of it unless you know how to evaluate and refine the options. It aids thinking; it doesn’t think on its own—yet.)

As one leader put it: “It can generate 90% of an investment prospectus.”

But the crux—and the criticality—lies in the remaining 10%.

And that’s where the human element remains irreplaceable.

So, to answer my aunt:

Yes, humans will still have their jobs—at least for now.

P.S.

These days, after I write a post like this, I feed it into AI, ask it to fix grammar, smoothen the flow, and polish it while keeping the tone intact.

One of my editor friends—the kind who fixes your grammatical errors on WhatsApp—recently told me:

“Your writing has become more polished lately.”

I don’t think the writing would be this clean without AI’s help.

Why I write or Why one should write

A few months back, I was at an event where I was telling someone about my desire to write a few children's books. They asked me, "Why?"

I replied, "I just want to, and also because I just can."

Every now and then, I get asked, "Why do you write? How do you write? How do you find time?"

Finding time is not a big deal. In fact, I can read fast, think fast, and write fast. The real challenge is finding the mindset to write—the inner peace. It's about evolving to a stage where I can get into a state of flow to write, and being consistent in writing. Not writing six posts a day and disappearing for six years!

Ideally, I should be writing more. I also believe, I am unfair to myself by not writing more.

Coming to the question of why I write:

I love to write. I love to think, and I love to share with the world how I think.

Deep inside, I also think there's a little bit of ego when people actually spend time and invest time in reading what you've written, especially when it strikes a chord with them. The ability to connect with someone through your words and to get a minute or so of their precious time.

Well, it is a high that one could get addicted to.