Who is Farhan Lalji?

Howard Lindzon has an interesting post on the future of hedge funds, in a nutshell he’s saying that technology is shaking things up, those who adapt and are transparent will survive and their reputations and credibility will improve helping them outlast the competition.

I think he’s bang on. And not just with regards to hedge funds, I think all industries are being shaken up by technology. Those that adapt and change will be the ones who thrive. And not just the investors in technology and tech companies, I mean all industries.

We’re using the internet more and more for research and having a good website that can be found (i.e. the company has done decent SEO work) can be the difference between acquisition and rejection. That’s today. Tomorrow being on twitter could be the difference between customer service in a hurry that is responsible for retention versus a costumer moving away from your service. I’m not saying everyone will be on twitter (although they should), I’m saying that technology is revolutionising the way we communicate and adaptation is necessary.

In a nutshell, it’s the same old story, adapt or die b*tches.

One of the things I’m discovering about Switzerland is that they force you to assimilate by offering you less of everything.

Examples:

• 95% of the gyms in Switzerland do not open before 9am. Which means working out in the AM is next to impossible
• All the retail stores are closed on Sunday and most are closed by 7pm. This means if you don’t get what you need at places like IKEA on a Saturday you’re waiting till next week, or the week after.

What ends up happening is you sleep longer but still get to work earlier. You enjoy your Sundays, taking long walks by the lake front and reading lots. Not bad things.

Having such tight restrictions on what and when you can do doesn’t impact your quality of life negatively. Having a 24 hour culture might be good for some, but having a 10 hour 6 days a week culture is pretty good for everyone longer term.

I received a notice some time ago to try the new Facebook. I tried it for a day, didn’t like it and kept on using the old version. I spoke to some other friends and no one is really digging the new design. Are you using it?

Seeing the notice “the new Facebook, try it now” at the top of my page is pretty useless I’ve tried it, didn’t like it, case closed. I don’t know why they’ve redesigned it in the first place. I guess they have to do something with all their investors’ money.

Think you should have a clear idea on why you’re undertaking a redesign and you should make sure the redesign is for a valid reason. Some redesigns are needed, to make more money, because there’s new technology, because the old design is looking really dated. Facebook looks like they’ve done the redesign to bury some of the not so nice applications – basically things that make money for other companies.

I’ve been using F’book less and less these days (in fact if the blog wasn’t reblogged on the platform not sure if I’d use it that much at all) and if they force the redesign on everyone I’m guessing that might be the final nail in my usage coffin.

The bee was raving yesterday about her new school and how it’s going to be for her managing 8 kids in her class and that the most she’ll ever have is 18. Once they get to over 18 in a form they split up the class.

A day later and once again I’m thinking about how something she does in school relates to business, specifically managing people. It makes me laugh when people judge success by how many people they manage, no one can give a large number of people the same attention that they could to a small number.

What’s the ideal number of people you can manage? I’m not sure, but as there are 5 days a week my guess is that no one should directly manage more then 4 people. There just isn’t enough time to really help, lead and develop more people – and still get on with your own job. So what happens when you hit four, have one of the team support and manage one of the others.

Of course this doesn’t work for every organisation and specific skill, perhaps it’s easier to manage more engineers then it is to manage analysts or whatever. But I think the overall principle holds, organisations need to have a cap on how many people report to other people, if not it opens the door for neglect.

The Bee has started a blog about our move and two posts in she’s definitely proven she’s the writer in the family – I can’t believe she’s written about how we’re using stolen cutlery! Crazy to think after a combined 14 years in London (my eight and her six) we’ll be leaving for the hills of Switzerland.

Eight and a half years ago I came to London with little more then a dollar (actually I came with about 50K CAD in debt, thanks OSAP) and a dream. Even though I’m really looking forward to leaving London, there are a lot of things I will miss, off the top of my head:

• The cool areas and discovering at least one new area every year
• The parks, Hyde, Regents, Primrose Hill, great for picnics, kite watching, and general “veg”- ing out when the weather allowed (which wasn’t often enough)
• Borough market and flower power brownies
• The free museums, especially when the budget was tight or friends were visiting (especially the Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, and The V&A)
• The people, Londoners are a special breed; it took me about 16 months before I really felt like one
• Great restaurants, forget whatever you’ve heard about English cuisine, the food is brilliant from the restaurants of big name chefs to the chains to the local cafes.
• The tech, biz and media communities - it may not be wall st or the valley but can’t think of another place that has so many diverse vibrant communities

The not going to miss list is much shorter – the weather. I’ve got the man flu right now and I’m sure it’s because the rain/sunshine mix is so unpredictable. London has two seasons rain and more rain.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel more at home here in London then I have anywhere else in the world. It’ll always have a special place in my life and one that I can’t see being taken.

My mom and dad were born in Tanzania to parents who had come from India. My mom travelled to India and then to Canada, my dad ended up in the same place but instead of India did a stop off in the UK to study. It was a tough journey. But I think if you ask them or their family and friends who made similar journeys I think they’d all be pretty positive about their experiences and decisions.

I left Canada over eight years ago and headed over to the UK and next week I’ll be heading to Switzerland. Switzerland wasn’t the first choice, but it came at a time when both me and the Bee felt like we needed a break from London.

Having just finished the last edition of Monocle and going through its liveable cities, I’m excited that I’m going to a country that has two cities in the top 25 - Zurich at number 4, and Geneva at 23. And even more excited about the possibilities of where we might go next. I’m glad I live in a time when travel is so accessible (if only we could make it greener), and where we can live at opposite ends of the world and still see people we love regularly.

I was inspired by Monocle and my thoughts on this subject to come up with a geography game and I’d love to get people’s responses. It’s based on the (who would you…) Eff, Marry, Kill game, but instead of FMK it’s VLB, where would you like to visit, live or blow up and build all over… Right now I would like to visit Zanzibar, live in Lausanne and build all over again most cities in North America and give them better public transport infrastructure. What about you?

UPDATE: The bee made a comment that “blow up” wasn’t the right way to think about places people live. Good point. Have changed this post to take this into consideration. Apologies.

Yahoo Ymail adds charing x

Originally uploaded by farhanlalji

We did this campaign for Ymail a couple of weeks ago here in the UK. It was pretty cool to see big Yahoo! ads in train stations. We actually do a lot of this kind of stuff through partners like Vodafone and others.

The question is how can you tell how effective an offline campaign really is? It’s totally not like network banner ads where you can measure clicks or click through rates, or SEM.

I love the brand aspect of off line campaigns and advertising. Think its great for awareness but when it comes to actual impact it’s so difficult to actually tell just what impact it had.

Any traditional marketers out there with any ideas?