The stories of your palm

When I see those palms of yours, I see each line telling a story - fate, heart, money. Much like the flowers of a garland. Each distinct but together. Each a different story but of one person.

I Love You

So sweetheart, this is the point when I am supposed to say "I love you" and you are supposed to burst out tears of happiness and say "I love you too", but none of that is happening tonight cos I am too drunk to do stupid things :)

The future of India

A few weeks back,on the eve of Independence day, I was sitting in an auto near Thane station, waiting for the signal to turn green. At that time, a car sped by in the opposite direction, and a small tri-colour plastic flag fell out of the car's window. The flag glided in the air for a few seconds and gently landed in a small puddle of water. A street urchin selling flags in the signal saw this and dashed off towards the flag, leaving his wares in the corner of the road. He was helped by the traffic constable, who whistled for the cars to stop and give way to the kid. The little one lifted the flag, wiped away the muddy water from it, folded it neatly and kept it in his pocket. He again darted off, this time towards his ware and the next whistle from the constable let the cars continue. The future of India rests securely in such children and constables who stop their daily life for a few seconds to save a plastic flag.

How to evaluate discount offers

A post I wrote for the Saledekho blog on evaluating discount offers by focusing on Need, Cost, Discount amount, Location and Duration.

The cell that defines you

With so much options in the Indian cell-phone market these days, what should a buyer do. The buyer should FLOCUS (Features, Looks, Offers, Cost and USage). Read the complete article that I wrote for Saledekho.

Start-up names

For the last couple of weeks I have been stumbling upon websites (mostly those of start-ups) whose names I just can't spell when I hear it for the first time. Examples: here and here. I am sure that these start-ups are run by smart folks and that they will create amazing stuff and make substantial money out of it. I am also sure that if I ask these guys why they name their website this way, I will get an answer which will not be as outrageous as their URLs. Still, I feel that I should list down the criteria that I would consider when naming a company:

• It should be pronounceable

When I tell someone on the phone/skype "go to blah blah", I don't want to spell out my URL. It should be simple and evident. Good example of that is dropbox and a really bad example is kyazoonga.

• The domain should be available

If you are creating say an online marketplace for books, don't even bother to look for domains like bookbazaar, because, it would have already been taken or squatted.

• It should not be very long

Long URLs always have their own set of problems. Not being able to remember the URL is just one of them.

• It should be self explanatory

I would like to minimize the time and website real-estate spent in explaining the use of the website. Towards that end, a meaningful URL would go a long way. Example: Blogger. You blog in Blogger. Simple. Another good example is moneycontrol and tinyurl.

The droplet and the world

When you look at a droplet of water hanging on to a window sill, you see the world staring back at you in reflection. A realization dawns. The world is so small that it is completely reflected in the droplet and the droplet is so large that is encompasses the world. This realization is the beginning of an awakening. An awakening to the fact that size is irrelevant. Size doesn't matter. What matters is only the thought. The thought of the droplet and the world.

Management by Crisis

Management by crisis is the idea of addressing a problem only when it becomes a crisis. Typical symptoms in the IT industry include:

• You keep getting crisis all the time (most obvious one)
• Everyday is like trench warfare - answering stink mails, having icy conference calls with customers, having meetings to decide on strategies before calls, etc

• Everyone works hard all the time and yet the customer is not happy
• A bomb greets you everyday in office. While leaving you get the satisfaction of difusing it. Next day there is another one to greet you

• projects seem to be 
  perennially in  critical stage

• Wrong people get appreciated
• People who handle escalations smoothly get appreciated, but,the ones who ensure escalations never come up in the first place get ignored

• Schedules go for a toss because of "urgent" issues
• Classic example : Initial plan of monthly movement to production gets replaced by daily production patches to fix "critical" bugs

Somethings leadership lessons to learn from IPL 3

• The end does not justify the means
• Great brand, more crowd & interest, more money. Everyone was happy except for the people who cared about the way it was done.

• You can only make a limited number of enemies
• Try to make partnerships and grow rather than bulldozing
• Don't take anybody for granted - everyone has a value and a nuisance value

• "Knowing people" will not bail you out when you screw-up

• Failure is always an orphan and instead of parents, it has a fall guy

• Being patient and sitting quiet to fight another day is most times better than going down all guns blazing
• Shashi Tharoor's response Vs Lalit Modi's response

Introspection time

This month end, I will finish one year since graduating from Great Lakes. So, time to look back and jot down (in no particular order) some of the things I learnt in B-School and the year after that:

• When under strong emotion, don't take a decision
• Be it anger, frustration, elation... wait till you cool down and then think about what you want to do

• Change the changeable and accept the unchangeable
• Makes life simple and helps you stop wasting time on meaningless pursuits

• While manufacturing/running something, if you are making a loss for each unit produced, then aggressive expansion will only increase your losses
• For example, Reliance Retail will make profit only if each of it's store makes profit. It will not make profit be opening 1000 outlets in one year. 
• This is very useful in analyzing companies that talk about expansion & capturing market share without talking about profits and sales figures (Example: Airline Companies). 

• Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the result of other people's thinking
• Read the whole speech here. Very inspiring stuff.

• Don't let your dreams be high-jacked by the incompetence of the people around you
• Many times, we don't get to choose our surroundings, and end up being surrounded by demotivated and lazy people. However, that shouldn't make us give up on our dreams.
• It takes lots of effort and hard work to get the habit of being an achiever and only a few slack-offs to lose it.

• Be sincere, not just serious

• Networking is useful only when you are competent
• No amount of "knowing people" can land you a job/raise/change unless you are competent and deserving.

• Separate out the symptom from the problem
• 90 hour work week is the symptom. Fear to delegate is the problem.

• You need very few things to live a contended life. The rest are wants

• To understand a company look at it's cash flow
• Though I use both twitter and dropbox, still, as an investor I would put my money in dropbox which acquires customers and makes money rather that twitter which just acquires customers.
• Also, I might get good returns faster in Airtel or Idea Cellular where money keeps moving rather than in Tata Communications which has great assets, but, slow money churning.

• And of course the most important and oft repeated one.. There is no substitute for hard work

Some productivity improvement tips

Its a nice 4-day weekend, and I just didn't feel like wasting it. So, thought of writing a post on things that I do in office to improve productivity.

• Listing and prioritizing 

I always have about 20 activities pending and time for 10 of them. So, till I put up a structure to delegate and get work done from others, I like to keep a "to-do" list (day-wise) with the most important and urgent activity on top. This not only helps me remember things, but, also helps me in estimating completion time for all activities.

• Being in the flow

Some of the activities I do, requires me to have tremendous concentration and so I like to be in a flow when I am doing it. The biggest obstacles to this are e-mails and chat pings. So, I normally put a schedule to check my e-mail (maybe once every hour) and respond to pings only if it is urgent or important. 

• Maintaining a proper office timing

I like to reach office before most people arrive (to get some work done productively) and leave at a specific time. This limitation on the time spent in office forces me to respect that time and makes me push myself to achieve more in that limited time. This also helps me maintain some sanity in the work-life balance front :)

• Pushing yourself to achieve more

Which brings me to the next point of raising the bar. If I feel that I can do x activities in one day, then I set myself a target of doing 20-30% more. This is of course with the implicit assumption of not compromising on quality.

• Enjoying what you are doing

I am a strong believer of the theory that the greatest employee incentive is giving work that the employee enjoys. Though there is always some necessity to do boring/routine/mundane work, but, on the whole if the work is not enjoyable, then the productivity automatically goes down. Then the problem is not about productivity & efficiency, but, about the work itself.

What other companies should learn from Apple and Google

Those two seem to have got everything perfectly correct.....happy customers, great cash flow, great brands, pretty decent future, etc. So what do they do differently?

• Understand what the customer wants, before the customer understands it
• This is similar to the idea generally conveyed, when people talk about visionary product, market research, being ahead of the market, being ahead of the technology curve, etc
• This comes by taking a long hard look at how people behave and use products.. thats it

• Provide what the customer wants in a no-nonsense manner
• Google.com does not have a help link for a very important reason... it is not needed
• Ensure that using your new product does not require the customer to climb a steep learning curve

• Tell a consistent and simple story for the product
• Remember those Mac Vs PC ads.... Mac is cool, Mac is simple.. that is the story

• Great product does not guarantee great money
• Even great products have to be marketed correctly, priced correctly , sold correctly and phased out correctly

• Deliver on your promises
• Classic example of how not to do it is Windows Vista... delayed launch, stripped away features, and a bad product too
• In the current environment, when you delay a launch, you not only lose market share, buzz, etc but also the WOW effect. Your prized features end up being common when you eventually release.

5 Visible symptoms of bad project management in IT

I think there are many, but, the below 5 are the easiest to recognise:

1. Politically correct team meetings
The whole team claps for the "best employee of the month", everybody agrees to work harder for the customer and to improve the customer satisfaction index.

• No open thread-bare discussion happens on the last escalation/schedule slippage/fire fighting.
• No meeting agenda
• Team goals are not clear
• No action items with responsibility, accountability & deadlines (esp. a strong NO to follow-ups)

2. Huge gap between estimation and execution
Classic example of this would be:

• Why did 3 guys slog it out in the weekend? 
• Because we had some "production issues" and next version release in the week. 
• Wasn't this known when the project started? 
• How many times has this happened before and what did we learn from it? 
• How are we ensuring that this doesn't happen again?

3. "Perennial resource constraint" because wrong people are doing the wrong job


4. Inability to distinguish between good and bad developers

• Number of hours billed & lines of code typed become indicators of capability
• The best and the laggards are treated equally. 
• No chance given to either to improve further. 
• This often leads to the good ones leaving when the first opportunity is available.

5. Religious adherence to processes and templates at the expense of..... well everything else

•  The whole work stops when we have a time-sheet/audit report/"process enhancement document" to fill.
• Good leadership requires a healthy disregard for processes that are bureaucratic & the ones that don't achieve the goals of the organisation in the correct manner.

Are these happening in your team?

Two years of laziness

I realised a few days back that I haven't written anything on my blog for a little more than two years. Twitter and laziness are to be blamed for that :) BTW: you can follow my tweets here.

Facing the typical problem of not knowing what to write, I started thinking about what all has happened in my life since the last blog. Here it goes:

•  Completed a MBA from Great Lakes

• Went through the recession while in school, not knowing where life was headed (easily the most harrowing time of life) -- learnings from that experience in a different blog soon

• Went through some more roller-coaster rides in life

• Made some great friends in Great Lakes (alliteration unintended)

• Moved from Hyderabad to Mumbai

• Got introduced to the world of ERPs

• Started thinking along the lines of "what is the calling in my life" :)

• Decided (today) that I will write atleast one story and one blog post every week

So, till the next post... bye.