Innovate??

Did you read the news today? Adidas is in talks to buy over Reebok for $3.8B and this would bring the race closer between Nike with annual revenue of $13B. The blue whale swallows the smaller fish and this is the law of nature. There is constant movement from perfect competition to oligopoly to monopoly and this happens when with the change in supply and demand. Growth can be either organic or inorganic, but for us it is always organic. We have seen big companies getting gluttonous and buying out smaller companies and when they reach the indigestion stage they start to vomit smaller companies. Doesn’t it sound disgusting? Well I didn’t want to make it sound that way.

There was another interesting article in the newspaper that caught my attention. Post office employees in India are struggling to keep their jobs. Government is trying their best to look at other areas to earn revenue for the postal department. Do you remember those days when Pigeons were used to carry messages from one place to another, but with the industrialization this slowly broke down. But people still wrote letters but they were hand delivered by humans.
Letters then had a lot of life in them and they conveyed gossip too. Don’t you remember the days when you wait outside the house for the postman to deliver the Christmas gift from Santa, a lovely letter for grandma informing her arrival, and anxious moments awaiting the promotion card from the school. From anxious moments to happy moments postman have delivered all kinds of news and been an integral part of our lives. Could you imagine a life without a postman in those days?

With the arrival of internet the habit of writing letters came down, and now with penetration of mobile culture and SMS the habit of writing letters is almost becoming extinct. But I have seen 50+ folks still using pen and paper as a means of communication. I still remember my transition to computers, I felt uneasy composing letter on MS word and I would feel my thoughts getting scattered without a pen and paper. Now I really can’t write on a piece of paper, and I prefer composing messages and then transferring them on to the paper. With the arrival of lot of private companies like Blue Dart, Fed Ex , UPS and the big piece of the pie is already gone. Our lives have become so machine dependent, and there would be a day when we would be slaves for the robots. Could you imagine a life without a computer today?

Today the postal industry is under severe pressure to innovate, cut back on staff and perform multiple functions at the same location. We can pay electricity, gas and telephone bills at the post office. They still accept deposits and pay more then savings account in the bank. Now the Government is seriously contemplating to start banking at the post office, and that should give them an opportunity to hang on to their jobs for a longer time.

Well the bottom line is to innovate or evaporate. I really can’t chalk out a solution for the postman and neither can I live without a computer. Hm….hmm… interesting huh? Let us start writing letters for a change or alteast take a print out and send them by mail to keep these post office going for some more years.