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I recall a sequence in a Bollywood movie 'Bluffmaster'. It was between two actors: Abhishek Bachchan and Boman Irani. "Tumhe aise kitne din yaad hai Roy, Your first job, pehla suit, pehli salary? Jab tumne ek ladki ko pehli baar chooa, pehli baar chooma? Jab pehli baar tumhara dil dhadka. 30 saal ki Zindagi mein aise kitne din hain jo tumhe yaad hain - 1, 2, 3 , 5 , 10 , 15, 30… 30 din hain na? 30 saal ki zindagi aur bas 30 din... baaki ke dino ka kya hua Roy?" Source: http://hindimoviedialogues.blogspot.com/2009/04/bluffmaster-dialogues.html?m=1 In summary, what Boman was relaying to Abhishek Bachchan is that no matter how long we live, we manage to construct only a few moments that are truly memorable and worth living. The rest of life serves a purpose that's likely not indelible. The assertion made in this dialogue is not hard to validate. If, for a moment, you take a rare-view mirror glance at your own life, you can really count such moments on your finger tip...

We live in a consumption economy. The whole digital revolution seems to built on the premise to offer the contents (in the form of news, updates from friends, images, videos etc.) to us as effortlessly as possible. We now have smartphones that are 24x7 content broadcasting machines. As a result of this, human beings are always in content consumption mode. While access to information is good in one way (it has made us more aware) but largely it has also robbed conciseness from the day-to-day communication. The emails tend now to be longer, verbal updates muddled up and our white-boards more busier than they have ever been. One of the pieces of writing that recently inspired me was the blog-  Create less, Consume more  by Tanmay Vora. Sharing couple of pieces of advise from this blog: Consume mindfully by  having right set of filters  that help you decide if something will *really* add value and increase your ability to create.  When you consume mindfully, less is...

It has to be a special day when you get to moderate a session with two champion Olympians. I got this privilege last week when the former Olympians Viren Rasquinha (Former captain Indian Hockey team) and Neha Aggarwal (First Indian female Olympian for Table Tennis) visited my organization (Citrix). Left to Right: Viren Rasquinha, Anuj Magazine, Neha Aggarwal I have been personally supporting Olympic Gold Quest (OGQ) for a long time. OGQ's mission is to enable athletes to win Gold medals for India at Olympics. Citrix supports OGQ as well. After meeting with Viren and Neha, we had organized an employee interaction session with them. Till the last minute, I wasn't aware that I would be moderating the session so it was a sort of last minute plan. But eventually it turned out to be a good one. Some lively conversations and candid stories from their sporting careers kept the audience engaged, entertained and spellbound. Sports has this unique power that makes comprehension of lif...

Sharing more perspectives on the core career principles taking the sequence from  my previous blogs ( this and this )  forward: 5. Focus on managing relationships: There are a few skills that are as much force multipliers in your career as is managing relationships well. On this subject, I am reminded of my post at techwell.com , which i will reproduce here: While leadership and management are traditionally thought of top-down, there is a lesser-known aspect of leadership that's  referred to as "managing up."  Managing up allows you to positively influence the boss—or even the boss’s boss. Few people consider this aspect of leadership as a skill and therefore fail to make necessary connections with bosses. How do tech leaders manage upwards? In his book  Behind the Cloud , salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff talks about his relationship with Oracle CEO Larry Ellison during his tenure at Oracle. "I had many long conversations with my boss, Larry Ellison, about ...

Sharing more perspectives on the core career principles taking the sequence from my previous blog forward: 3. Embrace Intrapreneurship : Despite all the attention that entrepreneurs gets, it is arguably not possible for all of us to become one. There could be myriad of reasons for this but many of us consciously find our calling in working for the organizations. If an entrepreneur creates a vision, it's the employees who make it a reality. So this choice is absolutely fine and legitimate. Source:  https://christopherwaldner.com/defining-intrapreneurship/ Being an employee doesn't mean that you cannot exercise the traits that make an entrepreneur. In my career journey, I discovered that one can embrace those traits anytime at work and create a dent in the universe surrounding your organization. Simply put, Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. I am reminded for a story that I had narrated in one of my previous blo...

In the Career Stories Panel Discussion at my organization last week , I was asked this question: "a couple of weeks back you mentioned about some core career principles that have worked for you" I thought it would be apt to articulate some of the principles I shared. Before I delve into the principles, it bears stating explicitly these principles are mostly a work of recollection based on the key phases/events of my career. Of course, I do have a  benefit of hindsight in sharing these but I do sincerely hope these helps you in navigating your career.  I will try and answer this in multi-part blogs. Below is the part-1 on this subject. 1. Learning ability vs Learning agility: When i started my career, I was told by my early managers, team leads that your growth in IT industry is directly proportional to your ability to quick learn and grasp new concepts. I recall we used to get measured on how quickly were we able to learning a new technology, or a work item and deliver on the...

Why do you write ? This was one of the questions put forward by the moderator during the  career stories panel discussion recently. To be honest, I didn't anticipate this question being asked. I did respond to it then but felt like I should elaborate on it by means of this blog. My reasons to write have evolved over the years. This blog has been in existence for more than 10 years now. I recall that when I started I was doing my bit towards sharing the experience I was gaining. At that time, it was focused mostly for sharing perspectives on software engineering. As I grew in my thinking, so did the list of topics I wrote about. I have to be honest in sharing that I didn't stop during this time to ponder 'Why do i really write ?'. Though the frequency of my blogs remained inconsistent, I did develop a sort of internal clock which periodically nudged me to consider writing. These internal nudges greatly contributed to the continuity of these blogs and my other writing end...

"Learning from failure is one thing, but how do I handle myself when i am experiencing failure ?" This was one of the questions put forward by one of the curious participants at the career stories panel discussion yesterday . I believe it is a very practical question as we are all used to doing retrospectives and extracting learnings from a failure event but often tend to ignore the aspect of handling ourselves when the failure is happening. Just providing a couple of perspectives (including the one i shared during the session + result of some additional thinking I did on the topic). #1. Build a defense mechanism against the effects of failure: Failure will happen when we try something new. This is almost as certain as sunset happening after sunrise. There's absolutely no debate here. But what happens when we encounter a failure ? Failures tend to demoralize us, put us on the backfoot, make us lose self-belief a bit, shakes our self-confidence and possibly impacts our cr...

It's an honour when you are invited to be among the panel on sharing your career stories. I recently got to experience this feeling when i was a part of such panel in my organization. Career stories panel discussion The panel comprised of an diverse mix of people in terms of experience, functions, gender and career paths. Apart from me, the panel members were Krishna Priya (Sr Cloud Ops Engineer), Subramanian Krishnan (Principal Software Engineer), Gagandeep Kaur (Senior Customer Success Manager), Komal Bharadwaj (Principal Product Manager), Neeraj Sharma (Services Relationship Manager) I went into the panel with two goals in mind: 1. To share whatever I could, to the best of my ability. 2. To learn from the fellow panelists everything I could, to the best of my ability. The session had the live audience in the room and the audience attending live via a webinar. In the end, it proved out to be quite an engaging session. How did i know it was an engaging one ? Firstly, while be...

In an interview after becoming Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella admitted that  the company made a big mistake , "If anything, one big mistake we made in our past was to think of the PC (personal computer) as the hub for everything for all time to come. And today, of course, the high volume device is the six-inch phone. I acknowledge that." This is quite an admission from the CEO of a company that during its heyday led the technology trends. It also raises the question: Is it possible for companies to always stay ahead of technological shifts? John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco, when discussing his experience, he said that  one of the key things he attributes his success to  is staying ahead of technology shifts. Chambers says that if the shift was seen early enough, they developed the technology in-house. If not, then they looked to acquire other companies. The last way, which Chambers referred to as  spin-in , was when group of engineers and developers were ass...

Though it got over just a month or so back, Cricket World cup 2019 seem like such a distant memory. Ashes series between England and Australia is grabbing all the attention these days. Going beyond the results, which often makes up for headlines, there are these seemingly small moments that make sport interesting, and memorable. Once such moment is captured in the video that i share here. Video source:  https://twitter.com/amitranjan/status/1162590921529024512 What Steve Smith is seen here do is making a trivial job of leaving the ball interesting. For those that have followed this sport, the act of leaving the ball helps a player to set his eyes in, but is also considered one of the boring aspect of the game.  There's nothing really to comment about, to be excited about by seeing the batsman leaving the ball. Not till Steve Smith came up with distinct ways to leave the ball and added a bit of spice to this aspect of the game.  What can us professionals learn from this ac...

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...