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I recently came across this intriguing piece by Paddy Upton, former coach of Indian cricket team. The article was titled "What do we mean when we say a cricketer is mentally tough?", where he breaks many myths about the subjective topic of mental toughness. One of the incidents that he recalls in the article that really caught my attention was Paddy Upton's dealing with Gautam Gambhir. Gautam was a former Indian Cricket team opener. He won the 'International Cricketer of the Year' award in 2009. He was the top scorer in the finals of last 2 world cup wins, in 2007 (T20) and in 2011 (ODI), which is an unparalleled feat. Despite these towering achievements, Paddy called Gautam as one of the most negative persons he ever worked with. How can a sports person who won top laurels be called as negative ? Paddy cites scenes where Gautam would be self-critical even after scoring a century or contributing highly. In most of the situations, he would find flaws in himself li...

This post is in continuation to my post on ' My Talk on Innovation '. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization. The Andy Grove story: I think i read this story a while back in Andy Grove's book:  Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company  and i have quoted this quite a few times. Let me do it one more time here: Years ago, the original product of Intel was D-RAM which is basically memory for computers and they had just started to invent the micro-processor. They had a real business problem, the Japanese were killing them in the D-RAM market, just destroying their market share. So Andy Grove and Robert Noyce were at the office late one night and they were talking to each other. Andy says to Robert: Wow we got a problem! Robert says we sure do. Andy asks- If Board says we would get the new guys to solve this problem, what would the new guys do. Ro...

This post is in continuation to my post on ' My Talk on Innovation '. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization. My Story: In my final year of engineering, I appeared in SSB (Services Selection Board) exam for entry into Indian Air Force short service commission. Having cleared the written exam, I had to appear in the next phase of exam in India's holy city of Varanasi. The next phase of evaluation spanned over couple of days. One of them was an exam that tested one's physical abilities with a series of courses like jumping from a heighted platform, grabbing the rope and coming down, monkey crossing the rope etc. One such exercise was climbing a 12ft wall in one go. I was probably among the first ones to have a go at it. I took a long run up and tried to grip one of the grippable portion of the wall and then use the momentum to push myself up. I could reach considerable height but failed t...

This post is in continuation to my post on ' My Talk on Innovation '. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization. My Story: Earlier in the day, I had a short twitter conversation with Gaurav Mittal . Gaurav was an ex-employee of my current organization (Citrix). My memory of him at Citrix was one of years back. I recall him demoing an interesting technology. It was a wearable device that one could wear on the knuckles and it would assist you with feedback while walking. The device was meant for visually impaired people who could leverage this to make their lives easier. What was demoed was still a prototype with a lot of wires and circuits dangling on the sides. If i recall correctly, Gaurav worked with the team that was chartered with life cycle maintenance of the products. And he took up the development of this wearable gadget as a side-project. Fast forward 5-6 years, Gaurav is now the Founder a...

Years ago, I had my first brush with corporate social service (with McAfee). A day after we had been to an orphanage to celebrate the festival of Diwali with my colleagues, I recall asking my friend- "Why do we have so less participation in these events ?". We were only a handful of people who visited the orphanage and if the smiles and kids' energy was any yardstick to go by, we clearly managed to make a small but surely a positive difference. My friend, Hariharan Srinivasan ,  who had been organizing these events for long, listened intently to my question and answered in one phrase- " It's all about priority ". This phrase somehow stayed with me all this while. This week, I was a part of another corporate community service event where we teamed up to fix potholes in and around the office area. I was personally attached to this event because I led the first of such initiative 3-4 years back at my organization (Citrix) and part of the road that we fixed, sti...

Earlier today, I was reading the book-  You Only Have To Be Right Once: The Unprecedented Rise of the Instant Tech Billionaires . I randomly stumbled upon the story of  Aaron Levie , CEO of Box, the enterprise cloud company. What caught my attention while reading Aaron's story was the below paragraph: "His high school classmates were more enraptured. While he obsessed over the business models underpinning this new thing called the Internet, his buddy Jeff Queisser, who lived four houses down would haul over his twenty-pound Dell tower and CRT monitor for all-night coding sleepovers. Some fifteen startups ensued. There was an Internet kiosk for hotels and malls, a Web portal for real estate, and "Zizap." which Levie described as a "really slow, pay-to-play search engine." They all failed, though Levie considers that word too binary: "Failure? I wouldn't put it that way. They didn't take off, sure, but I got something out of every one."...

This post is in continuation to my post on ' My Talk on Innovation '. As i promised, i am double-clicking on some aspects that i shared in my talk to awesome internship batch at my organization. I narrated the story from my first job. I started working in an organization known as 'Quark Media House Pvt. Ltd.'. It was a publishing software product company, relatively lesser known in Indian tech scene that was dominated by by Indian services companies at that phase. Quark, at that stage, was ahead of Adobe in the publishing software segment. I was 4-5 months into my first job when i received this email from Country Head (that was broadcasted to all the employees) sharing an opportunity to work on a side-project. The stated project was for Punjab Government tourism sector in which they needed help in building touch screen interface for their upcoming website. The idea behind this project was to provide touch-screen kiosks to the tourists at various prime places. To set the...

I recently got an opportunity to talk to a talented batch of interns on the subject of innovation. My focus on this talk was essentially on the mindset that makes innovators. It was based on something that i have observed while working closely with innovation teams in the last couple of years. I couldn't get a chance to prepare a shiny powerpoint. Having less time at hand was a factor, but for most part it was intentional to talk literally face-to-face and not 'through the PPT'. I relied on an mind-map created a few hours before the talk.  In the hindsight, it turned out to be my tribute to Tony Buzan, the father of mind-map, who sadly passed away a few days back . I share my mind-map and the key points i shared during this talk as below. In the upcoming blogs, I will double-click on some of the stories i shared during this talk. Mindset of an Innovator: 1. Innovators show-up more often than everyone else. 2. Innovators nurture side projects. 3. Innovators know when to stop...

In continuation with my  last post , I am sharing the key points of my conversation with Ashok Thiruvengadam for the SmartBites series. In the last blog, i did write about how visual thinking helps in being more aware, and live in the moment and also beings in brevity in communication that is much needed these days. Here are a few more areas where visual thinking has helped me. 3. Being more intentional about listening: Some time back, I had organized a session on Quantum Computing in my organization. Quantum Computing is not a routine topic to comprehend and explain. My colleague, Maha did a wonderful job breaking down the basics of the subject and making it understandable for the audience. I sat down during this session with my digital sketchpad (Lenovo laptop) and stylus pen. And started to 'draw' the session being imparted as the session went on. This experience of live sketchnoting was an eye-opener for me. It was more of a lesson in active listening that no book or ...

In continuation with my  last post,  I am sharing the key points of my conversation with Ashok Thiruvengadam for the SmartBites series. [Ashok] As an avid visual thinker who uses SketchNotes to communicate, please tell us the importance of visual thinking and how it can help us understand/think better, and influence people? [Anuj] Let me sharing 3-4 perspectives on this one: Visual thinking helps you be more aware, be present in the moment: Not so long ago, I had a post-dinner rare ice-cream with my family. In the ice-cream shop, there was an interesting menu (on a big board) which represented the whole list of ice-creams on offer in a sort of story form. The whole menu board was divided into different sections depicting each season and each section listed the ice creams on offer for the said season. Not only that, it had cool graphics representing each sections and the ice-cream names were called out in a very interesting set of fonts. The visual thinker in me was quite ...

In continuation with my last post, I am sharing the key points of my conversation with  Ashok Thiruvengadam for the SmartBites series. [Ashok] Creativity and lateral thinking are seen as very important traits for all, certainly for QA too. What are non-QA skills that are essential a QA person to working smartly?  [Anuj] Broadly speaking, I would like to think of these skills being divided in these 2 categories: 1. Elementary skills 2. Timeless skills I believe that these are so important to the overall success and hence deserve this categorization. When were are born as a human beings, which are the first few skills that we learn ? We announce our arrival to the world by speaking our first word/sentence, so that's verbal communication as a skill. Somewhere down the line, we learn how to hold the pen and scribbling on the paper, so that's drawing/doodling as a skill. We learn to write alphabets in our chosen language, so that's  written communication  as a ski...

A couple of weeks back, a dear friend of mine  Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software) reached out to record a video on the theme of   “Creativity, Visual thinking ..” to inspire QA to “Think better. Test rapidly”.  He recently launched a new initiative called as SMART QA.  The theme of Smart QA ( smartqa.stagsoftware.com ) is to explore the various dimensions of smartness so that we leapfrog into the new age of software development, to accomplish more with less by exploiting our intellect along with technology.  The first part of this video conversation was released a few days back and I am sharing it here. I will be writing a bit more on this conversation in the upcoming blog-posts. Would appreciate you taking time to go through this and sharing your feedback. LinkedIn Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6522829855485190144 Facebook Post:

As Merriam-Webster dictionary defines: In physics, resilience is the ability of an elastic material (such as rubber or animal tissue) to absorb energy (such as from a blow) and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape.  For human beings, resilience is   an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune  or change. Not so long ago at work, i found myself and team around me in a sort of difficult situation. The project that we were working on went off-track primarily for non-technical reasons. While it's too early to do a post-mortem and give you a prescription to deal with similar issues now (may be later!), I would focus a bit more on the myriad of reactions it generated within the team.  Some team members got into fault finding mode, some tried to over-analyze the situation, some tried to find reasons why we were in the situation we were in, some blamed the 'forces' tried to detail the project, some tried to work through the way forward, ...

Had an interesting interaction on Twitter earlier this week. I got this question a couple of days back. Having taken-up running more than a decade back and continued doing so with the passion of a beginner, i felt compelled to share my perspectives and learnings. Kshitiz Anand ‏   @kshitiz   Apr 8 More Did a 5K run this morning after a long time. Need to improve timings though. Now the key is to go from 5k to 10k. Any tips and guidance? #fitness #running My Response: 1. Increase distance gradually. Say 1 km a week. 2. Listen to your body and adapt to the situation. 3. At any moment, Focus on next step, not the finish line. 4. It's ok to mix walk and run. 5. Find the rhythm that works for you physically and mentally and stick to it. 6. Forgot to add one last, but important tip- Don't worry too much about timings as long as you reach finish line without injury and strong. Speed may or (more often) may not help achieve the mind-body rhythm. It's a run, not a (ra...

I recall my early association with the sport of Cricket was when i followws Cricket world cup for the first time. The year was 1987. It was a special world cup given that India were the defending champions for the first time and the tournament was being hosted outside England for the first time, with India being one of the hosts. Recently, I reminisced about one of the memories from that world cup. It was the world cup finals being hosted at Eden Gardens in Kolkata. England were chasing the score set by Australia. At one stage, England looked all set and cruising towards victory. With 2 or so wickets down for a healthy score and their captain, Mike Gatting was on crease. While facing left-arm spin from Allan Border, Mike attempted a reverse sweep shot. In 1987, cricket wasn't as commercialized as it is currently. I remember this world-cup was played in traditional white clothes (probably the last one in non-colored clothing) and also recall one of the sponsors of India's capt...