Who is Farhan Lalji?

I started this blog as I finished the MBA to document my transition from a graduate to a professional. Professional what? I’m not sure. Right now it’s a marketer working for Yahoo! Allow me to think out loud for a couple of minutes.

Last week I was listening to a great podcast from Stanford University’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. The particular podcast was on angel investing and had Ron Conway and Mike Maples discussing their experience. Something Mike Maples said really stuck with me, he basically said that we’re lucky enough to have a tremendous education behind us (he was talking about Stanford, but could equally apply to London Business School) so we have no excuse for not doing something your passionate about. I couldn’t agree more.

We had some close friends over for lunch the other day and amongst the great conversation we were discussing our jobs and what we’re doing. Some of us were still trying to figure out what we’re passionate about and some of us know what we’re passionate about and are working in those fields.

Either way, there’s no excuse for not being passionate about what you do. Because if you’re not it’s easy to do something else.

It might seem difficult, but as someone who fell in love with the internet (as sad as it might sound its true) and moved from studying health to doing web development to studying at LBS to working for Yahoo! I have to believe, with passion and commitment, that anything is possible.

A lot of the world doesn’t have that kind of flexibility. Most of the people of the world grow up not being able to make more then a dollar a day. As someone who has access to capital, education, and information I feel blessed and I totally agree with Mick Maples, there is no excuse for not doing what I’m passionate about.

Will I always be this passionate about online? Who knows, I’m not sure. But whatever I decide I’m passionate about I’m lucky enough to know that I have the education and the experience to transition into something else.

Both are banning disposable plastic bags! Whole foods has an initiative to get rid of disposable plastic bags by Earth Day 2008 and China is banning free plastic bags and moving to reusable cloth bags.  Good environmental and economic policy if you ask me.

I think this is very cool. As someone who hoards bags we can reuse, actually as someone married to someone who hoards reusable bags, I’m pretty excited about this step. Now let’s do something about Polystyrene!

So sang The Byrds.

Had a delightful dinner with Andy today – or are you going by Andrew these days? Mr T? Andy and I used to work together agency side and client side. We had an interesting conversation which ended with him saying, “sounds like a blog post”. So I felt the need to oblige.  Side note: damn you wrote a post first!

When Andrew and I worked client side, we were really innovative, for local government at least. Actually not just for local government, for the time. We developed an in house CMS, which I then used for my own blog – running on php and mysql. We started a few RSS feeds. We had content managers and editors. It was pretty impressive stuff for the turn of the century.

Then Andy went to work for an agency, and I went to work for an agency and then Andy and I joined the same agency. At the beginning we thought that all the really creative people must be working for agencies.

Quickly we realised that agency work can be stifling for creativity. We learnt that there are a lot of processes and you end up running a lot of the same gambit for different clients. Not because you can’t be creative, but because it’s hard to show the gains of creativity and because time spent being creative and thinking outside the box is time you’re not earning.

So who’s more creative? Is it in house staff, agency staff, or does being independent and contracting lead to more time and energy spent on being creative, which we tried as well?

My take is that things cycle and balance is consistently tipped in industries. Especially on a granular level, the grass is always greener. Either an agency or an in house team can be more creative and at the same time less creative. And we probably go through cycles where agencies are more creative then in house staff – probably when there’s less work going on and more time to focus on the work – and then in house teams can be more creative – probably when agencies are getting too much work, or there isn’t enough money to pay agencies so having a small super in house team makes sense.

Andy and I were client side when the bubble popped in the early part of this decade and I do believe money was tight so creative people were working client side. Working on one project which we could devote all of our time to meant that we could think laterally about what we could do and what would have an impact. Not to say that you can’t work on more than one project and still be innovative and give it the attention that it needs, but at some point you tip the scale and you end up giving less then you should.

Saw an interesting post on Silicon Alley Insider - a blog which reviews the business and technology scene on the East coast of the US - today which had an interview with Yale economist Robert Shiller.

In a nutshell Shiller said that the Manhattan real estate market would eventually follow the trends in the rest of the US and head down. As someone who sold a flat in London next year this made me think if the same is true in the UK?

Property prices in the UK have also dropped, but prices in London prices have increased, though not at the rates they increased at last year. Will they head down? Or is London immune to the drop in real estate prices as people think Manhattan might be?

My take is that eventually prices in London will have to drop, it’s too expensive for most people to buy in London and market principles would lead me to believe that more people will move out of London and as a result prices will drop.

But what do I know, I could be kicking myself in a year or two or I could be lying on a beach sipping tropical drinks or I could be doing both. Who knows?

Some University professor down in Brighton wants to ban using search engines and Wikipedia from her corner of Academia. Personally, I think it’s a rotten idea. In this age of information overload you need to be able to cut through and get a good understanding of an issue, event or person as easily as possible. Not to mention I have no idea how you enforce such a ban. After doing some searching I found out that the University professor is peddling a book called, get this “the University of Google”– surprise, surprise, this whole things smells of propaganda to me.

Personally I think access to information by searching and using tools like Wikipedia has revolutionized the way we gather information. Very quickly we can find out basic levels of information on a wider variety of topics.

Use Wikipedia a lot? Do this test, type in en on your browser, click the down arrow and check out the things you’ve looked up recently. My list includes Tao, Albert Einstein, Pete Newell, Petra and Ubuntu, that’s a eastern philosophy, and African philosophy, a genius in physics and a genius in basketball and a location I visited on holiday recently.

The web, and in particular helped me get a basic understanding of these diverse subjects and that’s not a bad thing.  Had I been doing an academic paper on Taoism, or the theory of relativity or whatever else, Wikipedia and search engines would be a starting point not a reference at the end.  After a superficial understanding I can ask the right questions and dig deeper into a subject - that’s what I believe any sensible student of the world would do.

Society and information in society have changed as a result of the internet, as a result of having so much information at our fingertips. What students really need is more courses on how to differentiate the signal from the noise and where to go to get deeper understandings of the subjects they are researching.

Three things I’m thinking about today:

1. It’s kind of crazy that if you build an exceptional brand that gets engrained into people, it’s hard for a competitor to overtake you, no matter how much better the experience is.
Inspiration: the fact that Mapquest still dominates the US mapping market

2. Investment into public transport is only half the battle against climate change and carbon emissions, people need to stop seeing cars as status symbols and more as big polluters.
Inspiration: the new Tata nano and the fact that so many Indians are going to enter as car owners.

3. Standard of living doesn’t equal quality of life, it seems like the more we have the less time we have to enjoy it.
Inspiration (joint):
a) this story I heard about a fisherman who meets a capitalist, and the capitalist says “Why you should sell your fish”
and the fisherman says “Why?”
Capitalist says “Because then you’ll have lots of money and you can build a company selling fish.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “Because you can make lots of money.”
Fisherman says “But why would I want that?”
Capitalist says “So then you can retire.”
Fisherman says “But what would I do then?”
Capitalist says “I don’t know… fish?”
b)The story of stuff, it’s a bit long - 20 mins plus a bit of loading time - but definitely worth watching.

As regular readers and friends may know the wife and I spent 7 days by the Red Sea just after Christmas and over New Years. The holiday was a veg out, lie by the beach, get some rays time holiday and we did just that.

The bad – although the hotel promised wifi the connection was slower then dial up in 1995, pretty much non existent. The food was kind of iffy, the weather was up and down (between 19 – 25 degrees Celsius, when it was down we avoided the pool and wore a t shirt), and the hotel was full of Russians (who for some reason butted in line / refused to queue, were loud and wore the most audacious outfits) and Speedo’s – one of my favourite pics is of a man wearing a Speedo with a t-shirt that said illegal missing an l so it read ilegal. New Years Eve was a bit of a nightmare which included a British singer who had a mullet, wore a leather vest and sang Barry White, Lionel Richie and Hot Chocolate! The last point should probably go into a category called the down right weird!

The good – we relaxed, the food was decent enough that neither of us got sick, I had a lot of desserts and barely any vegetables – although the wife would say that was very bad. The weather for 5 out of 7 days was just right; I was able to swim in the pool and the ocean. And we met some interesting people and had some interesting conversations.

The great – Petra was beautiful, we took some amazing pictures there and felt like we had traveled back in time, our guide was amazing with three degrees under his belt we gave us theology and archeological insights. The people are unbelievably friendly across the region. And the entire time I felt amazed to be around the foundation of the religions of Abraham.

Were we to go back we probably would avoid the package holiday crowd and stick to our usual tactics of booking things separately and figuring stuff out as we go along. Never the less, we relaxed, enjoyed ourselves and took some great pictures!

Happy New Year! A week off the grid in Egypt and I’m back bigger (5 desserts a day will do that to you), browner (yes as brown as I already was it is possible for me to get darker), and better (read a good book, that will do it for you). But more on Egypt later, I’ll wait till the pictures are up.Like a lot of other people I’ve made resolutions, if I write them here I feel like it’s more likely I’ll stick to them.

1. Read more. Started off the year in a good way, finished a book on holiday and have two on the go right now. After I felt shamed by N and H about their reading over the year I’m aiming to get through 40 good books this year. If you have any suggestions let me know!
2. Better the body, mind and soul. I know that sounds cliché but I’ve gotten doughier then I would have liked over the past two years. Want to get back into 1998 physical shape; I was pretty, so pretty then. And balance is going to be my theme for the year so if I improve the body, the mind and soul must follow – more cliché, I know sorry, I blame the Tao of Physics.
3. Multi task less. That might sound a bit daft, but this year I want to focus and enjoy every moment without stressing about the other 203,230 things I have to do. When I’m writing for the blog, I’m writing for the blog. When I’m at home chilling, I’m chilling. When I’m working, I’m focused on working. This is more of a trial then a resolution; I want to see if by being focused I’m better or worse.
4. Talk to my friends on the phone more. I’ve been terrible at keeping in touch with people. Relying on those that have skype, msn, and who email me, rather then the ones I really want to stay in touch with.
5. Blog more, 8 posts a month at a minimum. Hopefully I’ll continue the trend of having semi-interesting things to say.