A to B: How to Move from Adversity to Breakthrough With Powerful Storytelling

By Hersh Bhardwaj

Adversity comes in all shapes and sizes. Why do many people and organizations succumb to adverse situations and only a few rise above them? In A to B, Hersh Bhardwaj uses the power of storytelling to move from adversity to breakthrough. Combining the ancient wisdom of 1001 Arabian nights and popular psychology, the book provides a roadmap to turnaround any situation. How does Scheherazade, the Arabian princess survive for 1001 nights by telling captivating stories to Shahryar, the ruthless king? Knowing fully well that the earlier queens haven't survived a single night, why did she volunteer to spend one night with the King? How did she maintain her calm in the face of adversity? And most importantly, how did she manage to not only survive, but also cured the King of his euphoria and lived happily ever after? The book answers these and many other questions as it unravels the complex path from A to B.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Release date: Mar 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9789353024529

Hersh Bhardwaj

Hersh Bhardwaj is an alumnus of the University of Liverpool, UK and holds a masters degree in literature and criticism. Starting off as a digital marketer in 2007 with a Welsh startup, Hersh now focuses on content production in multiple mediums. An aspiring filmmaker and a passionate musician, Hersh lives in India, with his wife, two kids, and a litter of stray pups. He writes regularly on Medium and Tengo.in.

Book preview

Introduction

The year 2008 has a significant role in the creation of this book. It was in September 2008 when I left the United Kingdom after spending six years studying and working all over England and Wales. It was only weeks before the first great recession of the twenty-first century would hit Europe unannounced. My company fired several employees and the news reached me before I could unpack the travel bags in my hometown back in India. Some of the most seemingly indispensable executives, including the managing director (MD), were shown the door in due course. That shocked me. This was not an isolated case of job loss and professional uncertainty in Europe. Several countries fell to their knees over the next few months, begging to be saved by the European Union. I am not even going to discuss the giant salvage of General Motors in the United States.

What was worse was the fact that economists didn’t know what would stop the domino effect; some predicted a double-dip would resurface in the next four to five years. The prediction did come true in 2013 and the resultant impact on the Big Apple was so big that the entire government was shut down for days.

But 2008 was significant to understand a lot of whys and wherefores of the recession.

Traditional businesses were going out due to lack of credit, rising costs and a sudden drop in customers. On the other hand, the buying mood of every kind of customer – from a high-street shopper to the government buyer – was unstable and uncertain, to say the least. Even little money started to mean more. Crude oil barrel prices were rising. One could guess where the superpowers of the world were heading next in search of answers. The Middle East was one such destination. (In the coming months, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen saw civil riots, and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) forces started to set up bases in these oil-rich nations.)

What did all this mean to a marketing entrepreneur like me? I had been working on online technologies and, slowly but surely, was drifting towards a world that was being increasingly controlled by Google et al.

The One Billionth Website

The year 2008 marked a surge in new online businesses of all kinds. Evidently, an entrepreneurial evolution was underway.

The web followed Moore’s Law from 2008, and the total number of websites doubled every couple of years months thereafter, hitting the one-billion mark in September 2014 according to Netcraft. By 2018, there were 1.3 billion websites and 3.8 billion internet users globally – the world now practically lived online.

Back in 2008, people had already started to get an inkling that an extra or even a full-time income from the internet was becoming a reality for two reasons. Firstly, the ‘traditional’ way of earning wages was no longer working for a lot of people. Secondly, the internet had been growing steadily in the previous decade, making it the only silver lining in the recession-hit world. The ‘world-wide web’ cannot murderously collapse like the corporate giants Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock.

‘Work from home’, ‘Fire your boss’, ‘Make money online’ became the most searched-for phrases online. A new generation of online entrepreneurs was working its way out of adversities to create breakthroughs.

People at both ends of the spectrum – consumers as well as entrepreneurs/businesses – jumped right in to leverage the power of the internet. Those who had only sold on eBay and Amazon occasionally until then, set up their own online stores. Businesses with online stores opened multiple web-channels and got talking on Twitter and Facebook. The frenzy took everyone in. People teaching others about making money off the internet became an industry of its own with its gurus, linchpins and scammers.

Doing business online seemed easier – barriers to entry were low, there was less risk, no stock to manage, no running around for credit, a level-playing field, highly scalable, and the exit strategy didn’t necessarily need a bankruptcy clause. To top it all, outsourcing still held true and the ‘Third World’ labour force quickly trained itself for online assignments. A good idea can be executed faster than ever. These were good times! Or were they?

‘Doing business online’ was one area where there were no academically trained professionals. Even the world’s largest universities did not have full-time courses in preparing professionals for this. Most professionals were self-taught. We did not have Philip Kotlers and Michael Porters. Even modern management gurus, such as Peter Drucker, seemed ancient when you talked about e-business. One list¹ of the top 30 internet millionaires has only 4 entries from 2001–12. This suggests that the industry is only 20 years in making. But the pace at which it is changing makes it tricky for people to document theories.

One-Billionth Mobile Device Entity: 2008, the Birth of Android

The year 2008 marked the priming of the web and the launch of the first ever Android smartphone (22 October 2008, HTC Dream). It’s no coincidence that two of the biggest change makers – Apple-iPhone (2007) and Android (2008) – launched within twelve months of each other. The next few years would be significant. In 2013, 1 billion devices were running Android, the number growing at a pace of 1.5 million every month, and expected to reach 2.87 trillion by 2020².

An even more interesting event occurred in 2015 – Apple announced the sale of their billionth mobile device with Apple IOS. The world that had taken a few decades to assemble at the web using PCs and laptops took a leap to handheld mobile devices that marked the beginning of a new era. The web provided a medium, a move away from brick and mortar, but the ‘mobile device’ was the tool needed to leverage its true potential. If the PC made the web accessible to every household, mobile devices made it accessible to each individual at all times right in their pockets.

The actual smartphone revolution was initiated by Google’s Android mobile platform. But the reason Apple’s feat is also remarkable is because their billionth sale proved their long-standing branding success. Android, with all due respect, was promoted world-over by all the major mobile phone makers. Apple did it all alone. We’ll discuss this in detail in the first chapter.

Apple’s and Android’s success also has a lot to do with their sleepy competitors who belonged to the PC generation. Not to forget that the debt-ridden and cash-crunched world needed a fresh dose of ideas and innovation.

The Scope of This Book

The questions are manifold. How can the old and traditional way of doing business leverage upon the new and dynamic ‘information-age’ to pave the way for the future?

How did the adversities of the first part of the twenty-first century push innovative entrepreneurs to create breakthroughs for their generation?

What happens when a twenty-year-old information-age bleeds into the centuries-old traditional way of doing business?.

How does one identify and master the strategies fit for the technology-driven ‘information-age’? How do you communicate with your target audience when there is so much noise and it’s being amplified every second?

Most importantly, do we need new tools and a new language to communicate with the new century?

Have we got enough data to understand trends and patterns? Do we require a different set of tools and formulas to master new-age businesses? Can we find a lowest common denominator between the two?

Yes, we can. And the answer is in the name: ‘information-age’. The web, along with most modern businesses, is information-driven. Information is simply a type of communication, and technology makes information far more accessible than what it was in, let’s say, 1995.

Hence, the key strategy to doing well in today’s era is mastering how the new mediums of information are managed. But how to make sense of the horde of data coming to us in random form from all directions at once? How to discern pattern in chaos? How to find a method in madness?

The rules are the same as they were when Coke first launched a sweet, dark syrup at a private party decades ago. Coke and Apple illustrate that the lowest common denominator in terms of strategy is indeed the art of mastering the branding and processing of communication with the changing times. I will often refer to Coke and Apple as these are two successful brands that were founded in the ‘old era’ of pamphlets and billboards but went on to create revolutionary ideas in the new age of smartphones and VR-driven 3D-holographics.

How do we reach out to our customers amongst the cacophony of noises? How do we find the next reader for your book? The next visitor for your website or your next app user?

It’s when we face such challenges that threaten our survival that we alternate between two modes of behaviour – face the challenge head-on and fight OR run away as far away as we can. The period between 2000–01 has already seen a ‘bubble burst’ — we didn’t know what to do with the newfound ‘information tools’. It was a choice between fight or flight. Most businesses simply crumbled and opted to exit (flight).

This book brings to you a time-tested plan of building a coherent narrative towards a carefully chosen effect. It intends to show that the game plan adopted by an ancient Arabian princess to survive centuries ago is still as effective in the modern world as it was then. The same strategy that was used by her to save her life from a ravenous king still works to create wonders for the world’s most successful brands.

The book hopes to tap gently on the premise that in order to tackle the new modes of communication, the old and tested strategies work as well as ever. A smartphone’s primary purpose is still to get the message across.

Throughout the book, I will use an ancient Arabian parable to lay down some fundamental rules of communication that hold true in the ‘information-age’. It must be stressed that these rules have never been more important in the history of mankind than they are now. If you were a shoe-seller at the turn of the last century, you didn’t have to compete with hundreds of shoe-sellers all within ten seconds of a Google search by your customer.

Nothing about you or your brand can stay hidden now. Your weakest competitor has as much of a chance of being found as you do. But you still have the power to create your own narrative. That’s what this book will help you understand.

How to Read This Book

Imagine visiting your favourite restaurant and being served your favourite dish with the following words: ‘Please close your eyes and feel the distinct taste of the clove-sauce mixed in black pepper and see how the spicy sauce infuses with the yellow and red bell pepper that has been shallow-fried in clarified yellow butter.’

With the power of suggestion, you are bound to taste all the flavours that the chef wants you to. Having a ‘How to read this’ section at the start of the book is similar to the approach taken by the chef to invoke intended feelings. But hey, the book is about how Scheherazade, the Arabian princess, did this successfully with the king who, as if in a trance, kept pardoning her night after night. So, yes, there is an intended way this book should be read.

Please read it cover to cover. It’s a complete narrative and all parts, small and big, fit in smoothly to create a symphony. Once finished, you might find the need to flip through specific chapters. It’s not a ‘read and forget’ book. It’s written to ruffle some feathers, awaken some dormant thoughts, infuse some weight in your ideas and help you think strategically. Its goal is to make you think about your