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In one of the Innovation demos i was a part of a particular idea team started their pitch. Roughly speaking their idea was about enabling the remote access across various networked Mac software (there were more nitti-gritties that spelled uniqueness of this invention which can't be shared due to Intellectual Property reasons). They started their pitch with a PPT with an usual agenda slide. The last item in the agenda slide was 'Demo'. The presenter (say John) did a great job to complete the pitch on time and now it was the time for demo. John paused for a bit and said- 'There's no separate demo. The presentation you saw was the live demo'. What he meant was that the presentation he was showcasing for last 5 minutes, was actually running on a remote system with John having keyboard-mouse control. This was one of the outstanding things i heard while going through a demo pitch. It sent a clear and crisp message to judges that the team wasn't selling a concept t...

While we all were busy reading a storm of content in our social media feeds last week, one of the simple, yet extraordinary tweets might have not gotten as much attention as it should have. Here's the tweet that i am talking about. Source: https://twitter.com/ericsyuan/status/1132102775490265089 To put things in context, Eric S Yuan is the CEO of Zoom.us, the video conferencing company. It's market cap at the time this tweet was sent is close to $20B. I find the response that Eric gave to a user extra-ordinary at many levels. 1. Most visibly, it's shows Eric's strong desire to go extra-mile to delight the user. Among the fundamentals that are responsible for the success of an organization, customer centricity is top of the list. Many say it, only a few do it. 2. As a CEO, to be able to go out in public and tell that he is willing to roll up his sleeves and do the work to make user happy, is almost a culture-defining moment. I firmly believe that the organization or team...

How Porsche built Cayenne: Let's move the clock back to 1990s. Porsche wasn’t doing that well. Annual sales were 1/3rd of what they were in 1980s. The arrival of a new CEO brought in cost and process discipline. As a result, cost fell and sales rose. The CEO knew that cost control alone wouldn't win the future for them. He put a big bet to build a new SUV. Skeptics said that customers wouldn't have the brand association as Porsche was known for speed and engineering and that it was not a family car made for loading groceries. Porsche adopted an outside-in approach for building Cayenne. If the customers were not willing to pay for what they wanted in Porsche’s SUV, they would walk away from Cayenne. The result was running extensive analyses and validation cycles to gauge not only customers’ appetite for SUV but also their willingness to pay the price. They ensured that every single feature stood trial before the customer. At every turn, they removed the features customers d...

I had a privilege of listening live to Erik Weihenmayer during the recently concluded Citrix Synergy event. Erik is the first BLIND person to climb Mount Everest. He is also among 150 people who have successfully climbed Seven Summits, the highest peaks in 7 continents only BLIND person to do so. He came on to stage with his dog who peacefully sat while he weaved magic with his words. He was articulate, fluid and super clear in his thought process. His intensity was high and it only grew as his talk proceeded. I could see his eyes moist while he narrated the stories of his and the differently-abled persons like him, who achieved feats that average full bodied people consider as impossible. I have to admit that I left his session earlier than the finish time. It was less due to the fact that I had a meeting bordering on the close time but more to do with the fact that I got more than what I thought I would in an hour that I spent. In short, I found my emotional and mental cups overflow...

I spent most of the last week at Citrix Synergy in Atlanta. Synergy is one of the primer conferences on end-user computing. With the conference happening at a massive venue at Georgia World Congress building and 5000 plus people attending, I got to interact with many customers, partners and colleagues. One of my colleague who captured everyone's attention was Manbinder Singh. Manbinder is a Senior technologist at Citrix's. He had a few expert sessions at Synergy and he pulled them off well with his technical acumen. For me, one of the highlights was how Manbinder pulled off a great presence at the event. Rather than me starting to put in words, let me start by sharing this video from his session. Let me dissect what you saw in this video in what I call a simple playbook for effective conference presence. Key principles in building effective conference presence: 1. Be as interesting (to others) as you can be. 2. Bring your own uniqueness to the fore. 3. Be at ease, comfortable c...

I am attending Citrix Synergy at Atlanta this week. The below tweet by Citrix CEO made me think of something. David Henshall is a seasoned public speaker. I admire him for his ability to bring a certain effortlessness in the way he communicates on the stage. The lucid way he crafts his message certifies his authenticity. He is known to give forward looking speeches. Only time he looks backwards is when he thanks the team for all the efforts and outcomes. This speaks of his empathetic nature.   Keynote rehearsals are in full swing this morning. Excited to show everyone what we’ve been working on tomorrow at the kickoff of #CitrixSynergy 2019! pic.twitter.com/sKEEnH5q1F — David J Henshall (@DavidJHenshall) May 20, 2019 Having seen him at All Hands, employee meetings and several other forums, I always got the sense that public speaking came so naturally to him, almost as if it's his second nature. So when i heard the word 'Keynote rehersals', it really made me wonder- no matt...

I was reading the book 'Why I stopped wearing my socks'. This book outlines Alok Kejriwal's journey as an entrepreneur. This blog is inspired by the of the stories in the book. During the early phases of evolution of Alok's company- Contest2win.com, he was speaking with a lot of venture capitalists. One of them was eVenture. At one of the meetings, eVenture's representative Neeraj Bhargava asked Aolk a couple of questions before giving a go ahead for further funding: 1. Asked for more clarity on business model (they weren't charging their clients any money then) 2. Asked for the credentials of his team (he didn't have anyone from pedigreed Ivy league institutes). While Alok gathered composure and answered as well as he could, Neeraj dropped another tough exercise on Alok as he asked him to list his top 10 clients along with their numbers so that he could call them and check their credibility. Alok narrates this incident in the book and mentions that he had t...

Last month, I had the privilege of being interviewed by a dear friend of mine Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software). Ashok had reached out to record a video on the theme of  “Creativity, Visual thinking, Careers ..” to inspire QA to “Think better. Test rapidly”. He has 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. In the last few weeks, I worked to write the responses i shared in this interview by means of a few blogposts. I am sharing the consolidated list below: 1.  What are the non-functional skills that are essential for working smartly ? 2. 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 influenc...

This is in continuation of my  last post  on conversation with a dear friend of mine Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software). Ashok had reached out to record a video on the theme of  “ Reinventing yourself in these changing times ” [Ashok]  What is the role of human intellect in QA? Is it still required? [Anuj] I would like to answer this with an analogy. There is often a certain kind of mystique associated with playing chess in it's correlation with intellect. People often consider those playing chess as the one having abundance of wisdom. There's a book written by Chess legend Gary Kasparov called as Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins . In a particular portion in this book, he captures his journey as a chess player in relation to the advances in technology. Unlike most of his fellow chess players, he was one of this first (I think he was the first!) Chess players to play a computer at the public stage. I think ...

This is in continuation of my  last post  on conversation with a dear friend of mine Ashok Thiruvengadam (founder and CEO of Stag Software). Ashok had reached out to record a video on the theme of  “ Reinventing yourself in these changing times ” [Ashok]  How important is the skill of reinventing yourself? [Anuj]  I would like to start with mentioning a book that had a profound impact on me- The Medici Effect. Medicis were the family from Florence, Italy (in 17th century maybe) who we're credited to have brought together the professionals from various fields like Architects, Engineers, Town Planners, Doctors, Writers and many more. They helped form this community of progressive people with divergent views. Interestingly, the resultant amalgamation of ideas brought forward by this community is credited to have formed the genesis of a phase in history called as Renaissance. The moot point here is that if we allow the different fields to intersect, the magic happen...

A few days back, I had written a quick summary of a podcast between Pankaj Mishra and Nandan Nilekani. When I reflect on the podcast, I get amazed by the clarity of thinking and Nandan's openness in sharing the sort of playbook that made him so successful. In this blog of mine I rarely share just the dump of other sources as my choice in writing has always been to share my interpretation of the world around me. But in this case, i would make an exception and share some more stuff that i liked about this podcast. Disclaimer: Full credit of below text goes to Pankaj Mishra and his podcast . Scaling as a basis of goal setting Scale cannot be am after thought. Think about scale from Day-1.Start by saying- What will work at scale? Thinking about scale in the beginning is more important than trying some pilot. We shouldn't confuse execution sequencing with scale thinking. You think scale because it opens up your mind to thinking how to do it . Planning and building to scale requires...