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....
What can fire tragedies teach project managers?
Today evening, we lost at least 9 innocent lives in the fire at Carlton Towers, Bangalore, and many more are still battling for life. All these were office-goers who worked an honest living and were part of the burgeoning IT industry. While details will be out in next few days, preliminary reports, live tweets from some of the people stuck in the building, and eye witnesse accounts all suggest that these most of these lives could have been saved. I write this blog post to offer my tribute to those lives that we lost, and want to share my anguish by means of lessons that we project management can (and must) learn and hopefully avoid such tragidies in everyday project, and in homes and workplaces where we work and our families live. Emergencies can strike anytime This was otherwise a perfectly...
IT industry at cross-roads: Top three priorities for IT companies in years ahead
This was the theme of IIMB-NASSCOM Leadership Summit 2010 where I had opportunity to share my views as a panelist. It was a great evening where we panelists got to share our thoughts, and also learn from each other and from the enthusiastic participants, essentially students of PGSEM and PGP and other courses of IIMB. In this blog, I will share some of my personal reflections that I shared at the summit. One thing about predicting future is while short-term predictions tend to be conservative, the long-term predictions tend to be optimistic. So, while we still don’t have personal flying machine, fuel cells, foldable LCDs or many of the several James Bond gizmos, it is also a fact that short-term bandwidth requirements, mobile handeset adoption, and even the longevity of recently conclused recession have all been proven wrong and how! The...
What can we learn from CAT’s failures ?
 (This plog post is contributed by Lt Col (Retd) Rahul Kumar, Managing Director of Srijan Consulting, Bangalore. In this post, he analyses recent failure of the Common Admission Test (CAT) conducted by the premier B-schools of India, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), and raises key questions on how one should have done adequate planning, thorough testing, backup planning and then some more! You can write to him at [email protected]) The Business Management Gurus had a PLAN – to go online for CAT. And do I hear that this was all that was required? PLANNING was ZERO!  Like this:Like Loading......
Congress Passes Resolution to Establish Computer Science as a National Priority
Just got this in my mail inbox: ACM Bulletin Service Today’s Topic: Congress Passes Resolution to Establish Computer Science Education as a National Priority October 22, 2009 Like this:Like Loading......
Where is the shark in your cubicle ?
A friend sent this story sometime back: The Japanese have a great liking for fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So, to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring back the fish. The longer it took them to bring back the fish, the staler they grew. The fish were not fresh and the Japanese did not like the taste. To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of frozen fish. The...
Dumb and Dumber
A young boy enters a barber shop and the barber whispers to his customer,”This is the dumbest kid in the world. Watch while I prove it to you.” The barber puts a dollar in one hand and 25 cents in the other, then calls the boy over and asks, “Which do you want, son?”  The boy takes 25 cents and leaves. “What did I tell you?” said the barber. “That kid never learns!” Later, when the customer leaves, he sees the same young boy coming out of the ice cream store. “Hey son, may I ask you a question? Why did you take 25 cents instead of the dollar?” Like this:Like Loading......
Solution to Bangalore’s Traffic problems ?
We Bangaloreans love our city, its greenery and reasonably well-maintained gardens, its great weather, its wonderful people who are mostly peace-loving and gentle in nature, its attitude (“swalpa adjust maadi“), its food (simply too good !), its openness and warmth towards non-Kannadigas (thanks for making us a part of your culture), its intellectual capital and its generally understated elegance anchored by universal middle-class values like simplicity, respect, hard work and honesty. We also love its IT industry like a rare vintage wine, and its newfound romance with its vibrant enterpreunership eco-system that continues to attract best of the talent from all over India to its doors. Of course, we don’t love its roads…and we simply love to criticize its perennial and ever mounting traffic woes. After living in Bangalore for last 14 years, and paying all my taxes to...
My favorites from “The HP Way”
Books continue to be my biggest source of wisdom - they are the true time machines. You can travel back in time as the author takes you on a journey to the distant past and helps you form a mental picture of the unique circumstances that led to them taking a certain decision. Unless one truly understands the context, one can’t really distill the knowledge from those stories and convert it into timeless wisdom. I especially like reading books a couple years after their release - gives the story enough credibility (or otherwise) because there is enough experiential data to validate the thoughts and ideas proposed in the book. Sometimes, it also brings out ‘timelessness’ of ideas - and helps you understand things that continue to withstand the tests of time, while in some cases, you find why the idea that...
Change yourself, not the mirror
Change is painful, especially when you have to change yourself. However, in reality all change is really about - changing yourself ! When people ignore this simple and timeless truth, they start accumulating a lot of ‘rigidity’ - growing at the rate of one day at a time, until that years-of-accumulated-and-hardened-behavior becomes a Frankenstein’s monster and an inseparable and indistinguishable part of themselves ! So much so, that they don’t even see that as the problem. I read somewhere that it takes an average of 21 days for a practice to become habit. I think the same must be true for negative change - i.e., refusal to adapt to changes around us. And in, perhaps, as little as 21 days, we just fortify ourselves against the impending and growing change around us. When that happens, another fantastic thing happens....