Raising your Digital Quotient

With the pace of change in the world accelerating around us, it can be hard to remember that the digital revolution is still in its early days. Massive changes have come about since the packet-switch network and the microprocessor were invented, nearly 50 years ago. A look at the rising rate of discovery in fundamental R&D and in practical engineering leaves little doubt that more upheaval is on the way.

For incumbent companies, the stakes continue to rise. From 1965 to 2012, the “topple rate,” at which they lose their leadership positions, increased by almost 40 percent1 as digital technology ramped up competition, disrupted industries, and forced businesses to clarify their strategies, develop new capabilities, and transform their cultures. Yet the opportunity is also plain. McKinsey research shows that companies have lofty ambitions: they expect digital initiatives to deliver annual growth and cost efficiencies of 5 to 10 percent or more in the next three to five years.

To gain a more precise understanding of the digitization challenge facing business today, McKinsey has been conducting an in-depth diagnostic survey of 150 companies around the world. By evaluating 18 practices related to digital strategy, capabilities, and culture, we have developed a single, simple metric for the digital maturity of a company—what might be called its Digital Quotient, or DQ. This survey reveals a wide range of digital performance in today’s big corporations.

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The meat of the matter

Regional differences and meat-eating in India

We’ve put out some interesting stuff on India’s consumption habits over the last few days based on new National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data. First, we did a story on the turnaround in India’s Public Distribution System. Then we looked at how class determines what we eat and drink. And finally, we did a really cool visualisation of what consumption looks like if you are rich or poor.

There are two parts of food habits that we find people always have a lot of interest in: regional differences, and meat-eating. We’ve decided to put the two together here to give you an idea how meat preferences change by state. All the visualisation for this post has been done by Vivekanandan M.

The NSSO uses a recall period of seven days for meat as against 30 days for milk and 365 days for items like wheat and rice. What this means is that the respondent is asked whether he or she consumed a particular meat in the last even days, what quantity of it, and at what price. So it’s conceivable that meat consumption is underestimated by the NSSO. I haven’t eaten meat in the last week, for example, but I probably will this weekend.

The Hindu-CNN IBN State of The Nation survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in 2006 had found that 60% of Indians are non-vegetarians, and it is only among upper castes – Brahmins in particular – that vegetarianism dominates.

That disclaimer out of the way, the proportion of Indians who’d eaten meat in the week preceding the survey was quite low; just 26.5% of households in rural India and 21% in urban India reported consuming fish in the preceding week, and fish is India’s favourite meat (I use the term meat loosely to mean all “animal protein”). Chicken comes a close second, and mutton and beef a distant third and fourth.

So how do things pan out across the country? The data here is for monthly per capita consumption - the amount consumed by a person in a month.

Read the news report from The hindu

Arranging a marriage: how India does it

New numbers shed light on what the typical Indian marriage looks like

I wrote last week on inter-caste marriage and how just five per cent of women in the National Council for Applied Economic Research’s (NCAER) pan-India survey said that theirs had been an inter-caste marriage. The numbers got me thinking about arranged marriage which is another facet of marriage in India that we have very little data on.

The same round of the NCAER (2011-12), which I have advance access to, asked women if they knew their husbands before marriage. Around 18 per cent said that they did. The proportion is slightly higher for younger women and for those with more education. It's highest in Himachal Pradesh (56%), the northeastern States (50%) and Kerala (40%).

Read the news report from The Hindu