Ankur Sharma

David Hickey , the famous american art and cultural critic, once wrote a brilliant essay in his book Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy . It's called " Romancing the Looky-Loos ". The essay was published in 1997 and basically talks about various different kind of audiences in music. A  recent post  by Seth Godin reminded me of the essay and "looky-loos". It was a term invented by Dave's father, a musician, for a particular audience who had come to the performance only to consume or as Dave Hickey says in his essay, "nonparticipants....They paid their dollar at the door, but they contributed nothing to the occasion - afforded no confirmation or denial that you could work with or around or against." Being a participant is different. It is as if your presence matters - you matter. Being a participant means, you give feedback. Being a looky-loo means you consume/absorb and go away. Groundswell has taught us that a wholesome c

Enabler OR Disabler? When I started working, my first job was with a services based organization and process was the Queen there. I had just started and somehow started developing this misconception (like many others around me) that processes are bad. The reality was, in fact, that the organization was able to put food on my table because of these processes only. You see, in any service based organisation, you need matrices to tell current and prospective clients that how your organization is executing projects and if it is justified to hire and pay freshers like me. These processes help you with those metrices and since they are employed industry-wide, they help clients too, to do comparative studies of useful parameters like quality and productivity. Its only when I went to start working with an acquired product organization of another organization, where processes are loosely implemented (not always though), I came to appreciate their holistic importance. And f