What is your cross-cultural quotient ?
This mail is doing its customary rounds on the net, and not for a wrong reason! Though there are obvious pitfalls of stereotyping people, it also serves as a handy learning guide, even a field manual, when the similarities are generic in nature, and far outweigh the minute differences that might make an individual unique and different from others, but not dramatically different from other fellow tribesmen. The fact is we are all different, and success at workplace is also impacted by our ability to recognize, appreciate, respect and work through such cross-cultural differences. In today’s increasingly globalized world, this serves as a good starting point to recognize that there are people different from us, and a team’s success is impacted by mutual understanding of such differences. These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in...
How are Ethics and Excellence related ?
A friend sent a nice story: A gentleman was once visiting a temple under construction. In the temple premises, he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. Suddenly he saw, just a few meters away, another identical idol was lying. Surprised, he asked the sculptor, “Do you need two statutes of the same idol?”. “No”, said the sculptor, “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage”. The gentleman examined the sculpture. No apparent damage was visible. “Where is the damage?” asked the gentleman. “There is a scratch on the nose of the idol” replied the sculptor. “Where are you going to keep the idol?” asked the Gentleman. The sculptor replied that it will be installed on a pillar 20 feet high. “When the idol will be 20 feet away from the eyes...
Toyota’s Wisdom for Tomorrow’s Managers
 I just completed first draft of this paper for business review magazine of a city college of business administration. If it gets selected for publication, you will get to read the full paper on this site :). Here is the abstract: Toyota’s pioneering work in automobile production systems continues to be among the most profound and radical departure from conventional thinking since the times of Henry Ford, and has led to unprecedented cost efficiencies and quality improvements for them. For long, it was thought to be a Japanese expertise – one that could not be duplicated by non-Japanese people, or outside Japan. However, subsequent to Womack and Jones’ pioneering works, “The Machine that Changed the World†and “Lean Thinkingâ€, it has not only been adopted outside Japan, its universal principles are also finding huge acceptance in other sectors...
Is Scrum serving your Software Development, or the other way round ?
There was a question on the group Scrum Practitioners on LinkedIn if “…implementing Scrum as a whole should be our goal or would you use aspects of the Scrum methodology to realise an agile culture change ?†Looking at the disproportionately large number (with an increasing trend) of posts on popular mailing lists on Scrum and Agile software development, I am alarmed that most energy and thought is being spent on figuring out “how Agile you are”, how should the user stories be worded, and whether one uses planning poker or not ? I mean…does it really matter whether you use ‘deal hours’ or ‘story points’ whatever that means ? If your team members are not speaking out ‘impediments’ in daily scrum…come on…that was the case in good old days also…expecting that Scrumifying the process will make everyone speak...
I’ve learnt that…
…the most important and worthwhile races in life - the ones that are worth every drop of sweat and every ounce of blood, have no finish line !
Don’t believe in yourself if you want to succeed !
I look at life in a slightly unconventional manner. While most people might laugh at the title of this article, I am fairly comfortable with it. Let me tell you what I mean and why. I believe we human beings have some kind of narrowband and broadband combi-filters in our brains which work this way: the narrowband filter programs the brain to achieve lower than where it is set, while the broadband filter programs the brain to achieve more than where it is set. We don’t know where the threshold is when something moves from broadband to narrowband filter or vice versa. However, it is logical to assume it takes far more effort to move from narrowband to broadband than to slip down the other way. Further, if you train your mind to achieve less than narrowband threshold, you...