Should we bail out the airlines?

On one hand, this isn't a normal downturn. 

But, on the other hand:
1. Airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow on stock buy backs, instead of a rainy day fund.  
2. If an airline goes bankrupt, it's not the end of the world. The planes and skilled employees are still there. Someone could buy their assets out of bankruptcy, and start a new airline tomorrow.
3. We bailed them out after 9/11, and they still (except for Southwest) went bankrupt.


© 2020 Praveen Puri

Great Quote on Productivity and Happiness

"Do whatever you can't stop thinking about." 
- Hrvoje Šimić @shime_sh hashtag#productivity hashtag#happiness

© 2020 Praveen Puri

My Experience With Carvana.com: Example of Market Disrupting Strategic Simplicity®

We just bought a 2016 Nissan Leaf (our first electric car) from Carvana.com, and the experience was great.

It shows that eCommerce can be powerful when done right, and the power to disrupt industries when you weaponize simplicity to deliver a streamlined, easy user experience.

It saved me so much time compared to going into a dealership.  It was like ordering off Amazon.  They automatically generate the contracts and you can electronically sign them in seconds.

They delivered the car to my door, and we had 7 days to try it out.  We ended up swapping the first one we bought for one with more more luxury features.  They came out and did the swap.

© 2020 Praveen Puri

My son's Story "Glorious"

My son Anshul wrote a great war story on Medium:

https://medium.com/@anshulpuri54/glorious-7dc73979b893


© 2020 Praveen Puri

How Streamlined is Your Business? Take The Strategic Simplicity® Test

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Market Simplicity - What big idea or theme do you want your product or service known for? What one thing do you want to focus your marketing on?

2. Decision Simplicity - How easy is it for prospects to decide and evaluate among your offerings? Is it easy for them to see the value of your products compared to those of competitors? Does your product portfolio overlap and cause confusion?

3. User Simplicity - Once a prospect decides to become a customer, how easy is it for them to buy, use your product, and take advantage of sales and servicing? Consider your employees to be (internal) customers: do you provide them with user simplicity to do their jobs?

4. Change Simplicity - Do you break change down into small chunks—micro projects, that you can iterate through? Do you apply analog vs digital thinking?

© 2020 Praveen Puri

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

This article is a good example of illustrating what I've been talking about for years:  Simple systems, especially software, are easy to run, support, and trouble shoot.

https://www.gkogan.co/blog/simple-systems/?fbclid=IwAR06TM1CwgMjz01zoyM_YIUNkfyRrhVNQ833Pd6CxshTKYRQ0KDMtORlnIM


© 2020 Praveen Puri

If I had to advise to my younger self

1. Spend less time/effort trying to please others. 

2. Instead of debating endlessly about stuff and playing it safe, make little bets by taking trial actions. If they don't fail, or you have some success, then iterate and scale up. #advice #successstrategies

© 2020 Praveen Puri