Technology and my Passion: Sukumar Rajagopal as a Digital Storyteller

Every few years, I invite readers and colleagues to contribute guest columns in the series Technology and my Hobby/Passion. Over a hundred contributed in the last decade on their birding, charities, cooking, music, sports and every other passion, and how it keeps evolving with technology. Click here and scroll down to read them all.

This time it is Sukumar Rajagopal who has over three decades of experience in the IT services industry. He co-founded a Digital transformation & behavior transformation enabler startup called Tiny Magiq in 2015. Prior to that he had a 19-year career at Cognizant, where he served as Senior Vice President, Global Chief Information Officer & Global Head of Innovation.  In his 8-year stint as a CXO at Cognizant he led award-winning transformation programs in IT, Innovation Culture and Delivery Management.

He is very active on social media, is a fitness enthusiast and avid traveler He researches the Indus Valley Civilization in his spare time. Sukumar received lifetime recognition for his work in IT through the 2014 Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders program. Sukumar was rated by Huffington Post as one of the Top 100 Social CIOs in 2014 & 2013.

Here he writes about his three-minute video reviews of leading non-fiction books:

Tsundoku

Over my career as a mentor and as someone who is very curious about human behaviour, I have observed that people buy plenty of non-fiction books but rarely finish reading them. The reasons are many.  The Japanese have a beautiful word to describe this phenomenon - Tsundoku - the pile of books you’ve bought but are still unread. Can this problem ever be solved?

I have been lucky to have been reading books ever since I can remember, likely since I was 6. What I read has evolved, of course. After I joined the workforce at 21, my reading gradually turned to, then completely focused on non-fiction books. I marvel at the economics of books. For $ 20 each of us can benefit from years or even decades of the author's research. Is there any other investment that has a better ROI? Consequently, I strongly believe it is very important that people read more non-fiction for the mounds of knowledge and insights (Vinnie's note as author of 7 books: No, I did not pay Sukumar to say that) 

But how do we convince people to read more non-fiction?

The Guaranteed-to-be-finished Book

At first, I thought I would write a book that I could guarantee would be read end to end.. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t generate workable ideas to guarantee that result. Also, humbly, I acknowledged the world already has too many unread books, and it did not need yet another. Was there another way to convey key knowledge and insights contained in the books to people? I started to research how people have tried to do a "Reader's Digest" type of knowledge transfer.

Book Reviews & Book Summaries

That led me to book reviews (I have done a few book reviews myself on my blog) and book summaries. Book Summaries are excellent at giving a succinct version of the book that one can consume in 15 to 20 min.

However I found 3 gaps in both book reviews & book summaries (we call these Performance Undersupply at Tiny Magiq): 

1. None of the book reviews or summaries talked about how the writer applied the book concepts and personally benefited 

2. A vast majority of book reviews were in text form. Today’s social media audience and the algorithms of FB & Linkedin prioritize videos Yet, there are only a few video based reviews on YouTube. And they had the same issue of not showing how the concept was applied by the reviewer. 

3. The reviews (text & video) & summaries were themselves too time-consuming. A book summary that takes 15-20 min to consume is too long in the today's attention-starved world dominated by micro-format social media.

The TMT (Three Minute Thursdays) Series is Born

I decided to tackle all the 3 performance undersupplies -  I would pick one book every 2 weeks and talk about one or two insights from it and also talk about how I applied them in the form of a video. I also decided that I would do the video review in just 3 minutes to solve the attention span issue.

With this broad structure in mind,  I decided on Facebook Live as the platform. On Mar 15, 2018 (exactly 2 years ago) I did my 3 minute review of Mark Manson’s best seller - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****  To my surprise that video logged nearly 6,500 page views. That encouraged me that there was an appetite for this format

Bloopers  & OBS (Open Broadcast Studio) to the Rescue

For the next episode I picked Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast & Slow. While narrating I made a blooper. I found that it was hard for me to remember my lines.  In the 3rd episode on Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan I wrote down my lines and read them out aloud. I got feedback from the audience that they didn’t like that. 

At that point one of my friends, Mahesh Venkateswaran, suggested that I record the videos since I was not taking live audience questions on Facebook Live. That was liberating. After that I started recording the episodes and posting them. Of course, I still had to memorize my lines. 

That made me do some research and I landed on the brilliant OBS open source software.  Using OBS over a period of time I learnt how to incorporate PowerPoint slides into the video.  Here is a 4 min video that explains how to incorporate power point slides into your video recording using OBS. 

Launch on LinkedIn & The Green Screen

With my increased confidence I also posted the 11th episode on Clayton Christensen’s Innovation Dilemma on LinkedIn. That more than quadrupled my page views. That was also a signal for me to shift emphasis to the LinkedIn audience.

Meanwhile my cofounder, Kumaran Anandan was showing off his videos with special effects using a green screen and he recommended that I get one too. I got myself a green screen for $50 and now the videos look even better.Here is a short video that explains how green screens can help make the videos dramatically better.   

200,000+ Page Views

I track Pageviews diligently. Hurray! The series has hit over 200,000 page views 98% of which are from LinkedIn and FB.  A series for which I don’t do any marketing besides posting on FB, LinkedIn and YouTube, hitting 200,000 page views is a good signal that people like this way of imbibing knowledge.  I also get a lot of in-person comments from people that they like and benefit from the series. 

Though I started with the intention of helping people, the biggest beneficiary of this series has actually been yours truly:

1. I get speaker requests from many organizations as a result of this series.
2. I’ve learnt from the many mistakes I made in this series on how to communicate complex things succinctly.
3. I have also discovered new concepts in the process of preparing for an episode. These new concepts have had a dramatic impact on our firm Tiny Magiq’s Digital Transformation & Behavior Transformation business. 
4. I have learnt how to create short videos which is very important in the world of Digital Storytelling. This is a skill that I did not have when I started 2 years ago.

I am grateful to all the people that view the video series and for their encouraging comments and support. Special thanks to Vinnie for giving me the opportunity to celebrate this milestone on his uber-popular blog.

Comments

[Sukumar Rajagopal]

Thnx a lot Vinnie for giving me an opportunity to write on your popular blog. Congrats on the 15th anniversary of your blog. You are an inspiration.

[Dhivakar]

Excellent blog and very interesting on tsundoku.

Thanks for sharing the learning