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This blog is in continuation to the earlier blog I wrote about my experience in being a mentor to emerging leaders in my organization. What experiences, roles, and opportunities have led you to the role you are in today at Citrix? There are obviously quite a few learnings in my journey along the way. But I would like to call out one of them I consider important, and then share a few others. When i applied for a move to internal off-beat role within my organization 2-3 years back, one of the things i was mulling about was how to present my resume. The conventional way of presenting resume is to highlight all the achievements and ensure that they get prominently heard and listed. One part of me wanted to be honest about my failures as well. It was a risky proposition, as the talk of failures is not a commonplace in many organizations, not more so when attempting to make move to new roles. I went ahead with my gut and drafted a 3 page resume. The first page talked about my experience. Th...

I recently got a privilege to be a mentor to emerging leaders in my organization (Citrix) as a part of 'Next Generation Leadership' program. It was a sort of 'limited time' mentor role (not sure why it was called mentor though) in which I, along with three accomplished peers of mine were a part of panel talk, with 35 plus emerging leaders in the audience. It was an interesting experience for me, before I start sharing about it I just want to say I quite grateful (to organizing team, L&D in this case) for opportunities like these coming my way. I surely do think there are far more capable people who can play such role better than me. In the next few blogs, I will attempt and recall my responses to a few questions that were asked of me in this panel talk. Here's the first one: What experiences, roles, and opportunities have led you to the role you are in today at Citrix? I consider business as a team sport so I would like to start with drawing an analogy from the...

I recently started sharing my scribbles on  How to come up with creative ideas . To reiterate, my idea in sharing these  is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested. On my road journey back from Patras to Athens, I started reading  the book- Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs One of the stories in this book caught my attention. Let me recreate the excerpt from the story below (with full credit to the author: Ken Kocienda) Throughout the development of the iPhone, we referred to the keyboard, often quite nervously, as a "science project." When we started developing our touchscreen operating system, we didn't know if typing on a small touch-sensitive sheet of glass was technologically feasible or a fool's errand. As commonplace as virtual keyboards have become, in those days, the norm for smartphones was the BlackBerry, with its built-in hardware key board, its plastic chicl...

Ideas without a compelling pitch presentation is like our lives without Google maps these days- nomadic, devoid of direction and lost. Unless you have bootstrapped your idea, you will invariably need to pitch your ideas effectively to raise capital. Even if you have bootstrapped your idea yourself, you will need to pitch your ideas effectively to the potential users and win their buy-in. In an ultra-competitive world like ours today, one can't afford to lose focus on skills that are force-multipliers. One such skill is pitching your ideas with impact. I came across these interesting train of tweets by Entrepreneur and VC, Sanjay Swamy. With due credit to him for the words that follow, i am sharing his words as is . In my role, I do lead various pitch mentoring sessions and will share my learnings in the upcoming blogs. Till then, enjoy Sanjay Swamy's words of wisdom. Watching entrepreneurs present their business plans these days - some traditional presentation skills seem to ...

(draft blog, editing in progress) I came across these interesting numbers regarding Gillette's razor blade industry dominance (US numbers): Razor blade industry: $3 billion Gilette's share: 60% Where as in India. Gillette's shares were only 22% in 2009. The India market potential was estimated to be 4 times that of the US. One of the reasons, Gillette was losing out in India was it's price point. They were charging around INR 100 (~USD 2) which was found to be higher for local markets. To crack the local market, the Gillette team carried out extensive research to design an ideal product for the target market. The basis of the research was not just to find must-have and nice-have features but to figure out for which features customers would be willing to pay. The result: Gillette was able to build a razor product for India market for INR 15 with replacement parts. Gillette was able to reduce the components from 25 to 4. (Source: Book- Monetizing Innovation: How Smart C...

Ash Barty won women's French open singles title yesterday. Seeing a new champion is always refreshing in a game like tennis that's dominated by top rankers. While Barty's victory was sweet, what i found inspiring in her story leading to the French open title is her decision to step away from tennis in 2014. The reason she stepped away was because she felt overwhelmed by all the pressures that came with playing tennis. As Barty said : “I never closed any doors, saying, ‘I’m never playing tennis again.’ For me, I needed time to step away, to live a normal life because this tennis life certainly isn’t normal. I think I needed time to grow as a person, to mature,” She took to Cricket and played to the level of Big Bash league before making a comeback again 3 years back. Her former cricket coach Andy Richards knew she was interested in Cricket and fed her 150 or so balls via the bowling machine. She missed just a few of those showing glimpse of her immense talent. On her return ...

In the last few months, I along with two of the talent colleagues from my organization have been experimenting with a concept that i call idea circles. In short, three of us meet regularly and have a free flowing discussion on the ideas and product problems needing solutions. The core measure for us for these discussions have been the number of invention disclosures/patent filing/new product features we can come up with. We are still in early days of our idea circles experimentation and I will later write in detail about how we function. This is simply one of the ways to generate ideas but moot question that i get asked often is- what is the secret sauce for idea generation that could be patented and productized ? There's obviously no one answer to this question but what i started doing was to keep track of sources of inspiration for the origination of ideas. The intent behind this exercise is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested. As a r...

There's an incident narrated in the book- The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups about Paul Graham (the founder of YCombinator) and his peers assessing the start up applications for entry into the 2011 cohort. There was a team of founders that Paul found promising but he didn't find their idea promising. A line in the conversation that went between the panel of judges got me thinking. Before I share what I thought, here is the line: "We're just not enthusiastic about the idea, appends Livingston. "Well, it's Altair BASIC," repeats Graham. It's a starting point. Basically, Jessica Livingston wasn't impressed with the idea but Paul defended by saying the words stated above. Paul used Altair BASIC as a metaphor for the starting point. Altair BASIC was Microsoft's first product. As per Wikipedia: Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS...

Why do organizations need Innovation Programs ? It's a very broad question and my intention in this blogpost is to share just one perspective around it. A short sentence answer to this question would be 'beating inertia'. BlackBerry (from RIM) used to be prominent mobile devices for Enterprises in early 2000s (or around that time). I recall one of the key differentiating features it had was encrypted messaging. In those days, it used to be almost a sign of progression to be owning one of BlackBerrys. However, it wasn't just messaging that end-users liked, it had it's own fan-base for it's physical keyboard. The keyboard was ergonomically designed and one of the best (yet) that i have used in mobile devices. My father recently brought a Blackberry just for ease of use physical keyboards provides. The team at Blackberry obviously had developed expertise in the physical keyboards. And when the whole world started moving towards soft-keyboards with Nokias and Appl...

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. Image source:  I currently work for Citrix. Citrix was found 3 decades ago, in 1989. To put things in perspective, the year 1989 was when internet was still a university project, Windows was as old as v2.1, Dotcom bust was way too far, mobile revolution hasn't happened yet, social media didn't exist. For a company to have seen through the transitions so drastic, it must know the art of reinvention. It's just the testimony to all the right reasons that lead to longevity of the organization. On the other side of spectrum, we have examples like Nokia smart phones that within a short period of time fell from being a market leader to being almost extinct when Apple came into scene. Facebook's  acquisition   of WhatsApp received attention because of the huge sum involved, and ...

Some insights from a thoughtful course on Innovation via Coursera 1. Manual typewriter: First patent: 1714. First major commercialization: 1878 2. Automobile: First patent: 1860. First major commercialization: 1902 3. VCRs: First patent: 1950. First major commercialization: 1972 Not an exhaustive list of examples, but still some of the inferences: 1. There is almost always a lag between first time a patent is filed to it's commercialization. 2. The time lag between first patent filing and to it's commercialization seem to be decreasing as the time progress. Even though the lag between invention and commercialization seem to be reduce, the fact is that the lag still exists. One of my hypothesis about the reason of this lag is that the inventions that were a result of individual brilliance took a long time to commercialize than the inventions that were formed by a group of individuals. I would love to research a bit on this in coming time and (hopefully) prove this hypothesis rig...

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. In the corporate folklore, there are very few stories that are as pronounced as that of how Apple started. A lot has already been written about so I would safely q uote parts of  Wikipedia  as a quick refresher: Apple Computer Company was founded on April 1, 1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne.The company's first product is the Apple I, a computer designed and hand-built entirely by Wozniak, Apple Computer, Inc. was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who had left and sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 only twelve days after having co-founded Apple. I would simply pass off the last sentence in the above excerpt by calling Ronald Wayne as plain unlucky. But this post is not really about Wayne. It is about something that emanat...

For all the bashing that social media gets for being addictive, sometimes nasty and often worthless, there are moments, infact quite a few of them, where you end up learning a perspective that can alter the way you approach your days.  I firmly believe that when you encounter such moments of enlightenment, the first though you should do is to assimilate and share. Knowledge not shared is indeed the knowledge wasted. This post is dedicated to one such sharing. Today, I came across this short tweet storm  by Andrew Hoag. Let me re-iterate the tweets (with due credit and permissions to Andrew).  1/ As a CEO, it is incredibly difficult to measure your own progress. Behind every summit lies another, taller peak that feels more urgent, never giving enough time to look at how far you’ve come. 2/ The buck stops with you, which gives you nearly infinite things to worry about, and can occupy all of your mental energy. 3/ A hack I have recently developed to counterbalance this is t...

In 1997, Eric Yuan joined a video conference start-up Webex as an engineer. Webex went public in 2000 and was eventually acquired by Cisco. Yuan was given an opportunity to lead Webex engineering group in Cisco. Over a period of time, Eric grew unhappy because he believed that the product sucked because of the following reasons: 1. Each time users logged on to a Webex conference, the company’s systems would have to identify which version of the product (iPhone, Android, PC or Mac) to run, which slowed things down.  2. Too many people on the line would strain the connection, leading to choppy audio and video. 3. And the service lacked modern features like screen-sharing for mobile. Eric tried to convince Cisco decision makers to consider making the changes to make Webex more useful and desirable but couldn't manage to do it. As a result, he decided to move on from Cisco and later found Zoom.us.  Zoom recently raised its IPO, price of $36 per share, valuing the company at $...