What 16months of stay at Antarctica taught me?
It's been twenty years since I went to the magnificent seventh continent (which, ironically, became the first continent that I visited, apart from Asia, where I was born and grew up). I just have to close my eye for a few seconds, and I am still able to teleport myself back to majestic and pristine Antarctica, and the Indian station Maitriwhich was my home for 16 months during 1993-95.
Is your talent adorning the restroom?
On my recent visit to a wonderful new luxury hotel in town, I found it very interesting that an artist's work was commissioned right outside the restroom.
It seemed, at least to me, that the only reason that painter, or rather her talent, was of any particular importance to the hotel designers was if she could paint something that fitted the small wall that welcomed people to the restroom.
Why do you pay people? No, really?
I think the only reason why we (must) pay people is so they bring ideas to the workplace. New, big, fresh, stolen, borrowed, bold, controversial, unscientific, unproven, risky, weak, potential gamechangers, disruptor of status quo, creative, ridiculous, audacious (big hairy audacious is even better), slayer of mindless bureaucracy, harbingers of about anything will do as long as they bring something to the workplace, as opposed to just being a plug-and-play part in the giant corporate machinery whose daily activities are pretty much pre-decided as per the giant process manual.
Four things I learnt as a volunteer…
I have been a passionate volunteer since last 20+ years. During this time, I have had wonderful opportunities of volunteering with global organizations such as IEEE, ACM, PMI and various Agile community groups like AgileIndia, while also had opportunities to volunteer with small, but not unimportant, causes, such as my apartment association and my community social. Why, I even volunteered to spend 16 months in icy continent of Antarctica — something no one in their right senses would ever do! (and here is the TEDx talk I delivered on it.)
While some experiences lasted longer (and better) than others, all of them left me with invaluable learnings. In this blog post, I call out my favorite learnings:
Week 1 of my Lean Consulting Startup
TL;DR: I started my consulting startup earlier this week after seven years of groundwork in a Lean Startup fashion. Here's the story that led to week one.
Get me 200 rejections and let’s talk…
If the only reason you 'think' is so that you could think along what others are thinking, you might as well not think at all! Life is too precious to be lived in 'more of same' format.
Three questions every program manager must ask
Suppose you are the new program manager assigned to a program. How would you go about finding your way inside the complex maze of a program, its stakeholders, sponsors, component teams and various vendors?
Hard work is killing people. Literally!
Burnout is a serious issue for several countries, industries and people, even if we don't acknowledge in as many words. In our industry, where heroism, cowboy programming and all-nighters are considered cool and an integral part of the software subculture, there has been a (really) small effort to address work-life balance.
Let’s free up agile teams…
Why are we so parochial in software industry about not recognizing the bigger economic sense rather than limiting ourselves to a singular idea that collocated teams are the best option?
How do you design agile feedback?
Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle - without a proper, honest and timely feedback, there is no ‘adapt’ step in the inspect-adapt cycle. However designing a proper feedback instrument for a human-human interaction, like a training program, is a totally different thing because it entails imprecise measurements that are often influenced by people’s mental models, skills and experiences, and not to mention - their calendars! Needless to say, these feedbacks could mean anything to different people on different days.