Blog policy

From time to time, students submit "comments" for the blog that are not directly connected to the blog topics (perhaps they appear connected to them but not to me) and so I do not publish them. I request those folks to send me emails instead, so that I can respond to their questions and concerns. All the students at Indore and Ahmedabad have my Proton email ID.

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Linking things small and big

I *love* to see patterns and make connections between seemingly disparate things. It makes all the reading, thinking and education seem worthwhile. (Perhaps these patterns are sometimes illusory, but as long as they keep me smiling....)

This is today's example:

When I try to publish this blog, I often find it unresponsive. I used to think something was wrong with Proton's FTP server but at such times, I began to find that www.blogger.com was itself inaccessible. And that has nothing to do with Proton's FTP server.

So I checked further and found that at such times, even Gmail was often unavailable. But there was no corresponding online uproar. I don't think Gmail is down that often. So it was a local issue. But other sites (like the New York Times) were opening just fine.

Then I read in the Economist that Barack Obama is a proponent of keeping the Internet free of controls. For example, he does not want to let US ISPs reduce the bandwidth available to users to access data-heavy sites such as YouTube. Access should be uniform, he believes.

Then yesterday, I put two and two together - the problem I see is probably because Indian ISPs are limiting the bandwidth going to Gmail, Blogger and other Google sites because that is where much of the traffic is. When there is a bandwidth crunch, these must be the sites to become inoperational first. If India were to adopt what Obama proposes, this would not happen - all sites would slow down together.

Anyone know if this is true? It is an interesting theory.

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Hobbies and happiness

One of my favorite writers and guiding lights is the British philosopher/mathematician/writer/historian Bertrand Russell. He was such an amazing intellect that I will devote an entire post to him sometime. But here I am only concerned with one of his suggestions in "The Conquest of Happiness": to be happy, pick up a hobby.

Russell gives the example of a stamp collector who can get tremendous happiness and satisfaction from reviewing his collection from time to time. This is high quality happiness - it does not hurt anyone else, it does not depend on anyone else, it can be called up at any time.

I was reminded of this when I came upon my friend Vaibhav Gadodia's blog post on photographing a kingfisher (click here to read this and other interesting posts such as this one - you may even want to become a regular reader of Habitually Good). Vaibhav is a highly busy (and intelligent) technical person. Still he takes time out for his photography, which he started barely a year ago. The quality of his pictures has steadily increased and he posts the best ones on the web (click on the picture below to get to the Flickr photostream).



An interesting side effect is that he now has yet another thing to discuss with people he meets in the course of his work. So he does not appear as a one-dimensional techie to them. He is now even more successful at sales.

Do you have a hobby that you are proud of? What is it?

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Career planning as I see it

This week, I was asked some very interesting questions by a Times of India journalist about career planning. I wrote quite a bit in reply. Then I realized that the paper would probably only carry a few snippets, so I thought I could share the rest with my own students. It will be particularly appropriate for those who are going to be making their first career choices in the coming months.


On the importance of career planning:

The most important part of career planning is the vision part – knowing who you want to be, or at least knowing what you want to achieve. In my opinion, the more tactical part of knowing exactly how to get there is less important. And the purely operational part of knowing exactly when to get exactly where is even less important.

It may be useful to have short term goals, but it is far more important to have a long term vision to which you can guide your short term career decisions.

Each month, we take many decisions that influence our career paths. Most of these are quite reversible in the short term – next month you can take decisions differently and set your career in a different direction. There is a lot of flexibility – so there are literally millions of ways to get from point A today to point B twenty years down the road!

It is most important to know what the final goal is and to believe in it and visualize it, and you will get there. If you can dream and stick to your dreams and work hard for your dreams, you will most probably make them come true! It’s really that simple.


On whether career planning should be done early in life or after getting into a career:

I do think that the vision for the career should be created early in life. At that time, the mind is fresh and has the ability to dream big. As we get older and encounter more obstacles, most of us start to limit our dreams, even as our capabilities and strengths are actually increasing! This is one of the big paradoxes of life.

I must say I really like it when young people want to be the best in the world at something. It does not matter if that “something” is a small thing. Let me give you an example. Perhaps you want to be a chef. I would much prefer you want to be the best chef in even a smaller city, say, Dehradun, in perhaps a particular cuisine, say, Mediterranean cooking, rather than just wanting to be a cook. That’s the kind of vision and clarity that you can act on to guide your career choices. For me, defining a vision such as this is the most important part of career planning.

I sometimes find young people very obsessed with their job titles and pay scales from day 1 without having a vision. They are mistaken if they think they are planning their career well! They don’t even know where they want to be in 20 years, but they are very worried and conflicted about making the wrong decision tomorrow about which job to accept and at what pay scale. I don’t think that sort of approach to one’s career is very helpful. I would even call it “needless career worrying”.

In my book, it is better to know that you want to be the best Mediterranean chef in Dehradun and working towards that, rather than having no vision but worrying endlessly about whether you should join job A which is offering you a package of X or job B which is offering you a package of Y.


On the importance of career planning during the early days of one's career:

I think the best planning for one’s career is finding out what skills (and in fact even temperament) one needs to cultivate in order to be successful in one’s final goal. I like to invoke Sri Sri Ravishankar’s advice made in another context (on how to achieve happiness): “Fake it until you make it!” That is, visualize yourself at your final goal and imagine how you will have to act for that and what you will have to know, and start to become that way. This is an ongoing task and the sooner you start, the better.

At the same time, young people should not be too obsessed with what job title and package they are getting in which year of their career.


On how career planning helps advance a career:

Most importantly, career planning helps set a goal. That is 75% of the importance of effective career planning, in my opinion. The remaining 25% is that it helps define how to get to that goal, so that the goal can be achieved in a robust and efficient way.


On the role of organizations in career planning:

The organization can play three roles – to inspire, to counsel, and to train.

Inspiration here consists of showing what is possible. Typically, the most senior people of the organization can inspire dreams in the younger employees. For example, Subroto Bagchi inspires the people at MindTree, just as Vikram Sehgal inspires the people at Nagarro.

The counseling helps assess the intrinsic aptitude, strengths, priorities and preferences of the employee and tries to fit these to potential career paths in the company. At Nagarro, we have an initiative called Best Fit Mapping through which we “show the mirror” to employees so that they can understand their own personality types and figure out which career paths suit them.

The training helps fill the holes in the employee’s portfolio of skills and capabilities in order to perform well in the career paths he or she chooses. We focus a lot on this at Nagarro, and have launched our own Nagarro University initiative to make sure that the training aspect matches the career planning.

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The New York Times, and post-modern capitalism?

The obituary page of the Economist last week covered the demise of William Safire, a playful connoisseur of the English language who was a columnist at the New York Times. His discussions of the origins and nuanced meanings of English words and phrases was representative of the relatively cerebral nature of the New York Times, a news daily that I am addicted to. To me, the NYT is just as enjoyable to read - even if you are not a New Yorker and you skip the city-centric news - as the Economist. The great columnists at the newspaper include Paul Krugman, whose columns I had been reading religiously (and greedily) for several years before he recently won the Nobel Prize for Economics. When I am not travelling, I read the NYT online (www.nytimes.com allows free access - for now) and when I am on the "road", I pick up free airport lounge copies of the International Herald Tribune, which relies on the NYT for content.

But I am not writing about the NYT because of Safire's death, but because of an article there about how private equity companies have allegedly sucked the blood out of established companies like Simmons and then spat out the remains. The title of the article is "Profit for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soared" but the title of the accompanying video is better - "FLIPPED: How dealmakers can win while their companies lose" - and the HTML title of the page is best - "At Simmons, Bought, Drained and Sold, then Sent to Bankruptcy".

While I realize that the article may be one-sided, it presents a chilling perspecive of private equity's single-minded focus on profit, even if it means exploiting the gullibility or credulity of financial institutions along the way. In some ways, it is the mirror image of the housing loan collateralization scandal.

One of the prime examples cited is that of the machinations at Simmons of the highly prestigious Thomas H Lee Partners private equity firm of Boston. (William Safire would not have liked the passive voice used in this last sentence!) Now I know a couple of current and former managing directors at THLee who had invested in one of my startups, SupplyChainge Inc. The THL link was through my co-founder John Thorbeck (incidentally, ex-CEO of the Rockport shoe company, ex-President of Bass of Phillips Van Heusen and the first VP Marketing of Timberland!) The THLee folks conducted themselves as SupplyChainge investors with grace and dignity. Yet I have seen enough of other rapacious investors with a God-complex to be able to imagine the worst.

In some ways, such purely financial investors play an important role. As the Economist points out, investors who get very much involved with the operational details of the business may tend to be too risk-averse, as banks are in Europe in their relations with businesses. At the same time, purely numbers-driven financial investors may be dangerous.

I have no issue with the money these investors make from time to time; they also lose large sums of money from time to time. And they work very hard.

I am not so troubled that they have no sense of history (e.g. shuttering a 133 year old company such as Simmons) - capitalism involves creative destruction after all. One person's romantic cry for preservation of a historical company is another's protectionism.

I am somewhat troubled that such investors cannot afford to worry about individual human suffering, when many people are suddenly laid off, for example.

But I am most disturbed that the opacities, inefficiencies and buddy-buddy nature of the financial system are probably often exploited without much fear or shame. Capitalism typically applauds anyone who can make money, regardless of the means employed as long as he can get away with it and not go to jail! It's become a bit like local politics in India.

Perhaps we will evolve a new "post-modern" capitalism. How do you propose we do it? Please offer ideas that will AUTOMATICALLY make a SYSTEMATIC change. If we get a lot of good ideas, perhaps we can try to write an essay for the New York Times, a left leaning intellectual paper and perhaps the best place in the world to publish them!

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On advertising - creative, memorable and effective, or not!

One of the lessons that the Proton students remember well is what Rosen Sharma said - an entrepreneur needs to REALLY understand her customers. The same is true in advertising.

A lot of expensive advertisements, though, may be creative but are not memorable, and even if memorable are not effective.

A good (bad?) example was the front page advertisement for Yahoo in the Hindustan Times, the Times of India and other leading dailies earlier this week. which looked like this:


This campaign is managed by Ogilvy and Mather, and they should know what they are doing. But from my (target customer?) perspective, I saw the great Yahoo logo and trademark color totally disregarded. I did not even read the copy, I must confess.

If I had a choice, I think I would instead have the logo splashed all over the front page, with the message following in smaller font below. A sort of "Yahoo is back" message.Now there are many reasons why this could have been done the way it was. a) This is part of a global campaign and maybe they have decided to give the old logo a rest (although India does not seem to be too tired of it). b) Maybe there is a longer term strategy. But by itself it was hardly memorable and definitely not effective as far as I was concerned.

If you talk about Indian TV advertising, I'm surprised by how creative it is. Perhaps it is only because the Indian TV advertising industry is still young and booming, but the average quality of ideas appears to be perhaps superior to that in other parts of the world. But that does not translate necessarily to memorable advertising. An advertisement may gain your fixed attention, but will you remember it the next day?

Even more importantly, do you remember the product with which the advertisement was associated?

A very memorable series of television ads for me is the one with the brash little boy saying things lie, "Do pahiyon ki baat hai, aa jaayenge!" (to the man in the car as he waits on his bicycle). But I don't remember which washing powder it extolled. Perhaps I am not the target customer. Still, I remember a lot of memorable television advertisements where I don't remember which product they sold. I love to point it out to people who are watching TV with me - just after the ad is over, I ask, "Now a quiz: which product was that ad for?" Mostly people don't remember.

In these cases, it seems that the advertising agency got carried away with its creativity and the client company had to pay for it (literally and metaphorically)!

Even if the ad is memorable, does it add a certain attractiveness to the product? Is it truly effective? Of course, that depends on the number of times you see the advertisement or other advertisements of the same product. For example, I have built a respect for the LG brand mainly by watching tons of advertisements in various countries though I don't remember any single one. Perhaps the Yahoo! campaign is meant to be the same way.

All said and done, the general idea - know your customer (or the customer's customer) - is highly applicable here. It's worthwhile being paranoid and continuously worry that you don't know your customer enough!

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A theory of destiny

A lot of students ask me, "What kind of a job should I take? What type of company should I join?" In answer, I put forward my theory of destiny.

The theory goes like this: Barring major accidents, you will probably find that you can achieve almost any destiny that you imagine for yourself. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you don't achieve it, it will most probably be because you stopped imagining!

Now I say "barring major accidents" because one may encounter certain major irreversible blows which may throw you off track. This is a probabilistic theory, because life is probabilistic. One could have been born in an utterly poor family (most of you have been very lucky). One could be suffering from tremendous ill health (most of you are not). Or one could be crossing the road and be hit by a truck (and most of you haven't been).

But set these major accidents aside and understand what I really mean. I mean that there are thousands of decisions you take each day. The effects of most of these are fairly reversible, so nothing major is lost. As a result, you have literally MILLIONS of ways to get from point A to point B in your life. So if you are today at point A and you see point B clearly, you will most probably get there or close to that, even if today you appear to be headed in the wrong direction.

Think of it like this - you walk a few steps every day. If you know where you want to go, you can go around an obstacle. Life is normally long (barring accidents!)

"Sense of history"... I don't know where I read this phrase - perhaps it was a Tolstoy or Dostoevsky novel - but I really liked it. You need to look beyond today and have a sense of history. You have to see how history plays out in the lives of people, especially in the lives of great people. Then you will learn patience.

I had earlier shared a video of Steve Jobs who talked of how he spent a long while studying fonts, because his school was very good at that sort of stuff. He turned even that into a huge positive advantage for Apple. Gandhiji lived in South Africa as a barrister. He turned that into a part of his story! Nelson Mandela spent many frustrating long years in jail. He used that to become one of the consciences of the 20th century! Looking back, it all looks planned. But these people had a sense of history and a clarity of mission that kept them moving towards their destiny, regardless of the days and months and years of obstacles.

So I urge you - do not worry too much about the economic slowdown and what job you will get next year and what package you will get "in hand". Instead know WHERE YOU WANT TO BE in 5 years, in 10 years, in 30 years. Suddenly everything will become clear.

I was a researcher at Harvard when my future mentor Prof. Ramachandran "Jai" Jaikumar said, "I need someone to help me but I can't pay much..." I jumped and said, "I don't care, I want to do this!" There was no office, no help with the work visa, no career path - nothing. Yet I was electrified by the opportunity. So Jai asked, "Why?" I said, basically, "My goal is to make a big positive impact and for that I don't need a career path, I need to learn." I remember that he laughed and said, "That's great! Unfortunately far too many people are so carefully and scrupulously trying to look out for themselves that they end up achieving very little!!"

So as Protons, see the opportunities, don't see the negatives. Focus on improving yourself and don't worry about the reward.

Karmayevaadhikaar aste
Maa phaleshu kadachana
Maa karm phal hetu bhu
Maa te sangato akarmani!

That's the theory of destiny in a nutshell!

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