Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Software Stinks!

Software Stinks!


Remember that day when you are in a critical phase of delivery, No I didn’t mean delivering a baby. Something more critical, delivering the software. When everything goes as planned in the progress bar suddenly the dialog says memory reference error and the application crashes. I can only pity the guy who sees that! This last minute fiasco is relevant to most of the things that is done in life. But the agony here is that this fiasco is not handled with right balance. Instead the team or individual toils with a strange pessimism striking his keyboard hard and clicking his mouse left to right!

Many of us plan for success but don’t plan well to handle failures when faced unexpectedly. When the graph drools to the nadir we don’t want to plan to see it improving slowly but want it to sky rocket. Many a times we don’t want to explain the customer and take him to confidence but try to keep on to the dates and release the product full of defect. That’s when the customer looses confidence upon us and starts suspecting our capability.

Sam Walton said “There is only one boss-the customer. And he can fire everyone-from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else”

It is equally important that we predict our risks as we predict our strengths, to the customer. It’s important that he believes in us as a company more than as a service provider. Credibility is the key, delivery isn’t. When we fail to realize the nuances in the abstract level we end up losing the credibility and the customer forever.

Errors are acceptable but failure is not. When spotted as errors we should look at it with magnifying lens and try solving it. Otherwise the infinite pointers will just make us paranoid towards the end.

Disaster management becomes the key and demands a lot of maturity in handling. Blame game will just add to the commotion and derail association. It’s very important we Count the chickens before the hatch. This can make us breathe easy and keep us prepared for some risks upcoming.

It’s very much in our hands to prevent that Software from stinking!!.

The problem of Plenty

The problem of Plenty


Once I had a opportunity to meet the HOD of electrical department at the Indian institute of technology. He was the most revered and dynamic professor I have met until today in my life(Everyone of us in our life have one like him). I asked him why was the lecturer community in the country a crippled one. Always a lecturer in an engineering college is someone who failed to succeed in every level of his career and finally ended up becoming a lecturer out of desperation?

He had a beautiful explanation to it. He said that my observation was very correct when it comes to the numerous self financing colleges all over the country, but not to institutes like IIT’s. He had two interesting conclusions to this.

1) A professor at IIT or any other top ranked university in the world is respected because of his continuous reach to update his knowledge and almost synchronously share with his student community. Alongside he inspires each one of his students to innovate. This explanation of his was to support the student community and prod at the teaching community at various colleges who don’t aim to enrich their knowledge.

2) On the contrary the second reasoning of his was to say that the enumerable educational institutions that have opened up in this country have encouraged everyone who is jobless to turn to a lecturer.

I wanted to draw a line of parallelism (the two reasoning’s) to the IT industry. If the institutions where driven by lecturers, the IT industry was driven by Managers.

As this industry has started to grow in size, the quality of the input in the form of both entry level employees and managers is declining. The managers are rarely inspiring in their attitude. And the heights, every employee feels his manager does not deserve the position. There is always a stint of envy that looms over the mind of the subordinate over his manager.

On the contrary rarely can we find a case where a student feels envied of his lecturer’s position and fame. The student always admires his knowledge. There is a feeling of immense gratitude and respect that flows when the student thinks of his revered lecturer. But the same is not reflected in the manager – employee relationship.

I think this is one issue that needs to be thrown enough light on and researched. In many Indian IT companies this problem is imminent. Do we want the admired Indian IT companies to become like those numerous engineering colleges in our country?

This is what I call in India- The problem of plenty….

Why Wait for a developed India Till 2020?

Why Wait for a developed India Till 2020

“Once upon a time there lived a Dog who was well nourished and was a pet in an opulent family. The Dog one fine day decided to go out and see the world and sufferings that other dogs faced. When he set out he saw the starved puny dogs which never got anything to eat. He struggled for three days without any food, until finally he saw a dry bone lying in the road. With great expectations he started biting it. A minute later blood started to ooze apparently out of the bone and the dog happily started drinking the blood believing that it was coming out of the bone. Just then another dog reached out to this dog and said ‘hey stupid the blood you taste is coming out of your body and you are harming yourself. But this Dog was unfettered and continued to believe that the blood was from the bone and said ‘don’t fool me. I know the blood comes from the bone and the more I bite the more blood flows out’”

This story reminds me of the country India which once starved for funds and ultimately went on to inevitably liberalise biting the bone and started to seamlessly grow and extracting every dollar (Blood) it can amass and continuously striving to increase its dollar reserve. Asia today alarmingly is holding 80% of the dollar reserves that the world outside US holds. But Alas all the money is reinvested at Uncle Sam’s reserves. This is one ubiquitous topic about which every economist writes but no one can suggest a realistic measure or policy that can Gag US hegemony.

To trace the source of Dollars and to detect the need for dollars will solve this puzzle. The source of dollars to the Asian countries has been Technology and the need for dollars is to feed our automobiles. The Source cannot be blocked but the need can be diluted so that the source (dollars) becomes less attractive. If there wasn’t a need for a substance called OIL countries like China and India would have become self sufficient 10 years ago. The Oil Pool Deficit has been growing steadfast thus impacting the growth of all countries around the world. If there can be a solution to this then Abdul Kalam’s Dream of making India a developed country can be reached before 2020.

While Scientists have been working to make non-conventional energy sources an alternative, it seems a viable solution only on a longer run and requires huge investments. Also the efficiency of such energy sources is very negligible when compared to oil. This leaves an indelible dent on the Economies which Struggle to sustain their GDP Growth but a bigger chunk of this fortified growth goes to the OPEC. It is high time that we Indians think audaciously about this. Why audaciously because we can never expect a General Motors in India to spend millions of Dollars in research on Fuel cells.

If we could find a solution for this who knows one day technology will become the Driver of the world just like OIL and Indian currency would be the most sought after. And there will be a day when 1rupee=50 US$.

The world will be behind India.

Lead ERR Ship

Lead ERR Ship

Every century or epoch of time see certain words take strategic focus and research. Manufacturing was the buzzword in the mid 20th century and towards the end of the 20th century globalisation was the byword of almost every other individual. Similarly the start of 21st century has seen much of focus on two famous words, Quality and human skills collectively called the Soft skills.

Human skills in itself is getting a new dimension almost everyday a new behavioral aspect getting added in the corporate compendium. I wonder how the vishwamitra and the jesus Christ lived in the A.D’s without having analysed even traces of these behavioral traits.

Among all soft skills leadership adorns itself as the most basic and essential quality to be possessed by a person who wishes to be most successful in his life. On past experiences and learning’s leadership is one quality that does not associate itself with being academic. By academic I mean being stead forth in education. Almost all successful leaders who stand as embodiments of success in the corporate arena have failed miserably in their initial schooling. But on further insights they all have enough reasoning and maturity to learn from mistakes. Hence Lead ERR Ship is to learn from mistakes or errors. And to make mistakes or errors you need to take risks. And risks you take should be prefixed by an interesting word ‘calculated’. To take calculated risks you should reason out yourself on the future. The reasoning should come from one’s gut feeling and artifacts of success painted by people who have been successful. Today leadership as any other sift skill is mistook in a very decentralised sense. Every manager who tries to just co-ordinate a team of 10 without any efforts or adding value through innovation is considered a leader. A key term to be associated with every leader is innovation. If a person leads a rut he can never become a leader. This misnomer of being a traditional leader without risking needs to be cleared. To be succinct a person who tries to achieve excellence of a few dollars through process or product improvement is a leader as against a person who tries to stay insulated from experimentation and keeps reeling on the same income.

To conclude leadership should be broken down to three important constituents. Learning from errors, reasoning out from your insights, learning from outside and gutsy to take risks, but calculated risks and …….. on a lighter note fail during your school :).

Can one define Idealism?

Can one define Idealism?

I always believed idealism is achieved on a relative measure, meaning we role model ourselves against someone and aim at achieving idealism benchmarking ourselves against him. That Him most often than not happens to be someone in our close ambit. And in most probabilities our dad. He has, on a revisit defined his idealism from someone else. But although we egoistically defend our thoughts and opinions derived out of our so called idealism this idealism actually is a selfishness that flows in our brain, that we have to defend someone we trusted so much and made him our idol, forgetting to question our self on the act we performed. And on delving more into it we have actually thrusted our views which are more self centered to our outlook on so many around us.

This is a paradox… we start to believe in our definition of idealism but when we get doubts of whether our definition is right we egoistically defend our thoughts and stick to our definition irrespective of the guilt and differences in our mind. Have we achieved idealism here?

Idealism is something that is always unreachable. We fail to understand that we lack the maturity to realize so many things which are complicated. We form a conception and satiate our self that we have achieved perfection. Some feel to be simple and modest is being ideal but in some other person’s purview he thinks I am not ideal when I don’t spend and live to what I earn. But rarely are people seen in the bridge. Either people are on this side of the bank or the other side. So it’s the fight between the conservative principle of living and the opulent way of living that will give a definitive definition to idealism.

Let us now explore both conservatism and opulence…

Opulence to me is inflation. It might be ideal to you on a short term or long term. Short term if your income will not be steady and reliable and long term if you have a very reliable hoarding of wealth which will last until your death. But if you continually spend you rise your living style almost everyday and it slowly inflates in multiples. If you spent 100 rupees today to live an opulent life then when 100 days from now you need 1000 rupees a day to enrich your opulent living. But remember anything that goes up has to come down. Inflation as an economic term affects on a long term. You have your Son coming who will not have even 10 rupees a day to spend.

Here you definitely were ideal (in your own definition) until your death but if the son of an opulent raja begs for his day’s living…. Have we achieved idealism here?

The other way of living in Conservative living. Conservative is a word in itself which is very ambiguous. It is a word which is confining the individual of desires. Irrespective of the measure of money an individual possesses if he believes he should live by his principles he is conservative. Conservative people are the ones who are most ridiculed and mocked at. For the Son father seems a conservative if he saves beyond his requirements. But he is guilty of his past opinions about his father when his father hands over a cheque of 5 lakhs when the son is on a dire need. He starts to think what effort it would have taken of me to have saved 5 lakhs in spite of having earned so much every month. His allen solly shirts and levis jeans which he loved more than his dad add to his guilt. Have he achieved idealism here? Or did his father ? . I believe neither did his father achieve because unless he effected to change the lifestyle of his son his 5 lakhs will be forgotten in a span of months.

That’s why I said Idealism flows. Both in the negative and positive way……