Mail Ordered Intellect

The management education has given me an insight into what we fear most - commoditization. How important is personal branding in this era of knowledge commoditization. First of all "what the c**p am I talkin about", is a question all the readers would be thinking about. It is a story of Ben Franklin - He created an idea, we burnt fuel, we commoditized it, his idea is worth 15 cents a unit today or 5 rupees in India. The Wright brothers wanted to fly so did many legends, we made Duralumin, we optimized it, we made it lean, we made southwest and air-deccan, we commoditized it, it costs few tens of dollars or hundreds of rupees a mile.

What have we come to today. Consulting! My time costs a few dollars an hour!! Esoterically ideas needed transformation and we were paid to make things from concepts. Now we are paid to create concepts. It was a natural progression which we cannot question. However the difficulty here is I cannot think radically as Newtons and Einsteins and No consulting organization want a Hawkins or an Edison, we want ideas manufactured out of a factory. So the human mind space is commoditized.

Though its sounds like Doomsday, the remarkable flipside to this commoditization of thought is the amount of outlets of creativity we have today. When products got customized we had brands, Coke is not just Cola it is a representative philosophy of joy, as they would claim. It is a differentiator for a undifferentiated product. See the other end of spectrum, human thought is ununiform, distinct and does not suffer from the imminent transition of intelligence graphed to a product lifecycle. Thank God!!

We have got blogs, youtube and instruments that are more powerful than what we could have imagined to tap into the imagination of mankind. The joy of life is in sharing thoughts. We cannot put our minds within cubical boxes and package them to earn dollars. It is so essential to come out write, liberate and imagine. If it all turns out to be - do the gig and get paid, we are just commodities. It is therefore imperative that we dont lose enterprise to Focus and creativity to commodity. It is a difficult thing to do or happen but it is definitely a thought worth enough to stop and spend a moment for. George Orwell would not be happy that there is no doomsday. But Flower power rules pants down. Let us worship Google for a moment :-0

If you dont have a favorite song, a taste for literature, a flair for sports - but earn lots of money, you have become the brain in a Fedex Box to be delivered for billions of dollars for which you got paid like peanuts. It is time to wake up and Listen to your fave music and dont you ever become comfortably d(n)umb!