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I recently moderated a panel talk at a unique conference with Academia and Industry leaders as a key Unicon . The focus of this conference was enabling collaboration between industry and universities and do justice to the role this partnership has as an imperative for disruptive leadership. This blog is dedicated to give a bit of a glimpse into this panel talk and some thoughts that emerged from speaking with some amazing people in this conference- Setting the context: I wanted to start by bringing forward 3 points about this exciting and relevant panel discussion. Few years back, I used to encourage my team to be well-versed with dealing with change, and staying ahead of it. In today's times, the narrative has evolved from being just change to that of "transformation", which is orders of magnitude higher degree than change. Bringing change is rather easy, but bringing in transformation requires a large scale of innovation.  Most progressive organizations cannot innovate...

We (at my organization) recently hosted a technology meet-up at my organization. The meet-up was focused on the topic- " Build Multi-platform Conversational Bots & Using Google API.AI ".  The topic of this meet-up took me back to the memory-lane and here is the synopsis of some points that i shared at the start- During the early days of my career, I remember one of the conversations I had with an expert of different kind. Those days our perspectives around jobs was not as broad as it is now. We used to think of jobs in major categories- “Dev”, “Test” and “Management”. So when I came across this person who was an expert at “Human Computer Interaction”, I was intrigued. I gathered all the courage to approach him during his India visit and spoke at length about what he did. It was an educational conversation (obvious as I remember it till date) that gave me newer perspective around how (then) offbeat professions add value to the overall process of building software. Human–co...

I recently had my Julius Yego moment. In case you aren’t aware Julius Yego is a Kenyan track and field athlete who competes in the javelin throw. At the 2015 World Championships he won the gold medal with a throw of 92.72m, becoming the first Kenyan to win a World Championships gold medal in a field event. He won silver at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. It’s a real big deal winning a gold at worlds and silver at Olympics, more so if you are first one from your country (known for champion long-distance running athletes). But Yego’s claim to fame isn’t just that. He is also nick-named as “Mr. YouTube” because he learned how to throw by watching YouTube videos. Wait, can one really become a world champion by simply self-training using new learning methods? Apparently, yes as is evident from Julius Yego’s success. Now, why did I start with this story? In the past, I have been invited as a panellist quite a few times for a panel discussions. Apart from the fun and honour assoc...

It’s not often that a continuing CEO writes a book about his or her experiences. Memoirs are usually written after the end of one’s tenure and are more often as a reflection of what has gone by. Well, Satya Nadella, like he has done in his career, chose to do the unconventional. At the outset, it is fair to say that Nadella’s “Hit Refresh” is not a memoir. While some portions of the book talk about his evolution, but this book (atleast till the point I have read) seem more about an ongoing story of transformation, it is about Nadella’s passion to put empathy at the center of everything he considers meaningful. While I am not yet done reading the book, the writer in me just couldn’t stop but sharing some reflections I had from the book so far. And here they go. #1 Honesty of endeavor: If there is one thing that stands out for me so far in this book is the honestly and frankness with which Satya has shared his experiences. He goes beyond his comfort zone and responsibly touches even some...

Google recently entered a cooperation agreement with HTC according to which it is buying a team of HTC (working primarily on Pixel phones) for $1.1 billion. There are a few points that should be understood before we delve into the reasons of this agreement. Firstly, it is a cooperation agreement and not an acquisition. This means that HTC will continue to function and retain its brand sans the division (called as “Powered by HTC”) and people that will move to Google. Secondly, as a part of this agreement, Google also retains non-exclusive rights for some of HTC’s Intellectual property. To make it clearer, a  Non-Exclusive Licence  grants to the licensee the right to use the Intellectual Property (IP), but on a non-exclusive basis. That means that HTC can still exploit the same IP and it can also allow other licensees to exploit the same IP. Thirdly, the meaning of term ‘acquihired’. As per Wikipedia , Acqui-hiring or Acq-hiring or a talent acquisition, is t...