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I am finding the book i am reading at the moment fascinating for many reasons. The book is Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs . This book is almost autobiographical in nature, but of a different kind. I have read autobiographies of the leaders from various fields in life but this one covers the events in a life of an Apple engineer (Ken Kocienda) and through that lens explains company's unique design philosophy. He covers his journey through the various projects including the first-ever soft keyboard design, creation of WebKit for composing webmail, building Safari browser from scratch and even shares difficult technical concepts with relatable analogies. The part that i intend to talk about in this blog is not the analogies Ken writes (i do want to write about it sometime), not the technologies but the phrase that he uses somewhere in the book: People matter more than programming Ken was disappointed at not been given the mana...

A couple of days back, I was on the way to Chai Point with my family members for a tea outing. On the way to Chai Point outlet, I noticed a car getting temporarily struck in the badly laid out man-hole (below). I along with my brother-in-law picked up a cement brick and put it in front of the manhole as an indicator to arriving traffic of a potential danger. Satisfied with our effort, we went to the outlet, had a good tea and snacks over some lively discussions. On our way back, we passed through the same man-hole only to note that the cement brick had fallen into the man-hole (possibly by a nudge from the ongoing traffic) and observed that a scooter almost losing balance when it unknowingly crossed over the man-hole. While one noble auto-rickshaw guy, sensing that the accident was waiting to happen, got down and put more cement bricks around it. I was mightily concerned with the state of affairs that day and decided to do something about it. While walking back to my home,  I wrote...

How do you go one to win 60% of cycling Gold medals on offer in Beijing Olympics in 2008 especially after having won just 1 Gold in last 110 years ? This is exactly what England team did in 2008 Olympics. A story narrated in the book- 'Atomic Habits' credits this transformation to one individual and to one performance philosophy. That individual is Dave Brailsford, the (then) performance director of England cycling team. And the performance philosophy that he introduced was 'aggregation of marginal gains'. As James Clear explains in his book- 'The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get an significant increase when you put them all together.' What did Dave and his team improve ? Here are some of the examples: 1. Bike seat was redesigned to make it comfortable. 2. Riders wore electrically heated overshots to maintain optimum muscle temperature. 3...

[Note:  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.] (Editing in progress, this a draft blog post) I was recently read ing this book  The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups and found the below mention interesting. Here's sharing the mention as is from the book: They took heart from "Selling Pickaxes During a Gold Rush," a blog post published a couple of months earlier, in February, by Chris Dixon, a seed investor who was based in New York City but well known and respected in Silicon Valley. During the California gold rush, some of the most successful business people—like Levi Strauss—didn't mine for gold themselves but did well selling supplies to those who did. Today, Dixon argues, entrepreneurs who use the latest technology face a similar choice they ca...

[Note:  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.] I find vision and mission statements of the organizations fascinating. What intrigues me more is how organizations embrace brevity to communicate what they do in a couple of sentences. In my recent Lean Start-up workshop in Citrix Patras office, one of the section was that of arriving at the vision statement for their ideas. Few of the characteristics of a good statement include:  Inspiring, Aspirational, Paints a Clear Picture, Desirable, Unique, Focused, Feasible, Easy to communicate. And here's an example of once such statement: “To land a man on moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade.” -  US President, John F Kennedy One search on the internet will reveal many inspiring statements but the core purpose of me writing this f...

This blog is in continuation to the  earlier blog  I wrote about my experience in being a mentor to emerging leaders in my organization. In my career time when i was leading large teams, i often cited the story of  Brian Fitzpatrick (Google) to my teams. This case  appeared in HBR  a few years ago but the nuances of it are still Take efforts to know what's happening around you relevant. Gist of his story- Brian joined Google as a Senior Software Engineer. Based on his interests and inclination, he became the champion for various end-user focused on initiatives. In his quest to better the end-user needs, he identified strategic gap in the organization. Precisely that gap was- Google wasn't doing good enough job in giving users better control of their personal data. He teamed-up with amicable and aligned individuals and led the project that took shape as  Google Takeout  that allowed users to export the captured user data from various Google Services (li...

Earlier in the month of June, I was struggling to meet my marathon running schedule. For starters, the plan that I follow requires me to run four times a week with a long run usually on weekends and modest distance runs during the weekdays. This plan works on the premise to increase the mileage gradually over 14 weeks and then tapering down practice before the actual marathon. The issue I was facing after reaching the week 6 was that it was becoming hard for me to pull myself up, encourage myself and go for run. It wasn't really the motivation issue as I was getting up early without fail. It's not quite uncommon for runners to be in this situation for various reasons. I will come to root cause of my situation in a bit and in the meantime shifting your attention to the ongoing Cricket World Cup. If you are following the ongoing Cricket World cup, like me you might also be astonished at the consistency of Rohit Sharma, the opener from Indian cricket team. Rohit managed to score 5...

For the last few days, I have been writing about the things that I recall from my talk 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 a great experience for me overall and humbling one for sure. These are the occasions you feel lucky to have been chosen to talk when you know that there are more able people in the organization. I am thankful to the L&D team leaders to have given me this opportunity. In this blog, I am summarizing the access to the key messages from this talk that I blogged about in detail. Career paths exists as a guidelines, not as mandates Key Idea : One of my beliefs have been that senior and leadership roles are open ended in nature. What I mean by this is, these roles are n...

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 did you find to be most challenging as you moved from middle management to senior management leadership ? (This is the Part-2 of the question i started answering here and here ) One of the VPs I worked with a few years back told me something that stayed with me. He said that after one reaches Director level or equivalent in the organization, the role should focus a lot more on managing upwards. By managing upwards, he meant not only immediate boss but also boss's boss and all other influencing people in the organization. He certainly did not mean that managing your team is demeaning or less important. By the time one reaches senior management level, one already have managers reporting into you who takes care of managing the teams. I had picked-up some of the nuances of managing upwards from R.Gopalakrishnan's book- What the CEO Really W...

[Note:  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.] One of the stories that fascinated me early in my career was that of acquisition of one of the first web email service- Hotmail. Sabeer Bhatia, who was one of the co-founders of Hotmail, became a sort of Tech celebrity after the acquisition announcement by Microsoft. If my memory serves me right, it was a deal worth $400 million, which was quite a figure in early part of this century. I got to relive this story again while reading the book- Before You Start Up: How to Prepare to Make Your Startup Dream a Reality Here's an excerpt of the story reproduced from the book (full credit to author Pankaj Goyal) The first product of Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith, cofounders of Hotmail, was not a web-based email system. It was a web-based personal directory, called JavaS...

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 did you find to be most challenging as you moved from middle management to senior management leadership ? (This is the Part-2 of the question i started answering here ) In the last blog on the same topic, I highlighted the importance of learning to love ambiguity as one of the challenging aspects for move to senior management roles. I have also observed that in transition from middle management to senior management roles, there are a few more fundamental aspects that change. In any growth situation, there are two variables that change: Volume and Complexity. Simply put, as we move upwards in the proverbial career ladder, we are expected to handle more work in the same amount of time, possibly without or without more personnel help. This is the Volume aspect. When I moved to Director level role from the first time, I led the large enginee...

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 did you find to be most challenging as you moved from middle management to senior management leadership ? (I will answer this question in next few blogs, this is the first part) In one of the sporting events organized by Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ), I got an chance to meet Geet Sethi (9 time world champion in Billiards/Snooker). Practicing for a sport like Billiards can be quite repetitive in nature where players practice for hours. One of the conversations I recall with him was a story about his formative years that I read in his book- Success vs Joy. He says that in his early years when he was still learning the nuts and bolts of the sport, one of the things that kept him going amidst hours and hours of practicing same short was a sound. Yes, a sound. He says that he loved the sound of a perfect shot when the cue hit at the right spot of...