Analyze This - Vinod Chikkareddy

I was going through a friend's blog recently, and had a "hmm, sounds familiar" moment.

The line that got to me was - Instead of thinking "Is this the right thing to do" you start wondering "Is this what's expected".

In trying to work through layers of systems and processes, you sometimes tend to forget what you really need to do, and focus on what you think is expected of you. Worse, it starts to happen mechanically, unless you step back a bit.

It is funny, in a way, that the most successful(?) social arrangements are built on processes and collective adherence, and not on individual beliefs.

From Verlyn Klinkenborg, on NYTimes:

For the past week, I’ve been staying in northern Finland, just south of the Arctic Circle and a few kilometers shy of the restricted zone that marks the Russian border. This is the boreal forest, a place of almost surreal silence this time of year, when most of the birds have already migrated.

The first night I was here I stood in the middle of a bridge over a broad, slow-moving river that flows into Russia. It was dusk, a clear night, and I had come out to listen to nothing. There was no wind in the trees, not even the slightest breeze. The river below me was silent, and for the half-hour I stood there I heard not a sound.

I found myself checking, again and again, to see whether I had gone deaf. I popped my ears. I scuffed a shoe. I tossed a rock into an eddy along the river’s edge. I tapped the guard-rail with a knuckle. There was nothing wrong with my hearing. The human ear is not really meant for straining, and yet I was straining to hear. The silence felt more like an unnatural muffling of my senses than the porous stillness of the natural world, of which I was a part.

The next week I spent in and out of the forest, listening with my eyes, so to speak, and not my ears. It has been a cold, wet summer in Finland, a season filled with the sound of rain falling through the spruces and pines. All of the Finns I met grimaced when they talked about it, as if the summer had tasted like cold, weak coffee. But the past week has been dry, and every night there has been frost. The leaves are turning fast. A fog hangs above the river in the mornings, which only deepens the illusion of silence.

I say illusion because on my last night here, I went back to the bridge, again under a clear sky. There are long shadows even at midday this time of year, and dusk is still reluctant to give way to real darkness. As I stood there, I heard the faint, but quite audible roar of the rapids a half-mile downstream and around a great bend. Why had I not heard it that first night? The answer, I suppose, is that I was too busy not hearing the things I’m used to hearing, including the great roar that underlies the city’s quietest moments. It had taken a week to empty my ears, to expect to hear nothing and to find in that nothing something to hear after all.

A few years back, I was in a good discussion about how silence is what we really seek when we listen to music; about how music is structured silence. This article reminded me of that.

Well, crude has come down to $124, from $147, but even 124 is high.

Petrol prices continue to be at an all-time high. So, here you go.

20 tips from Shell, for fuel-efficient driving.

On humanity's eternal search for recognition and praise. Taken from an episode of M*A*S*H.

"God didn’t put us here for that pat on the back. He created us so he could be here himself. So that he could exist in the lives of those he created in his image."

Go thrive!

Larry Mann, in The Big Kahuna : We are like the dinosaurs when the climate changed. There is no longer any reason for us to roam the earth.

That reminded me of Al Gore.

Scott Adams speaks about a past mistake.

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/the-loser-decis.html

He smartly summarizes what to do with one's ego. :-)

It’s an objective fact that life often presents us with choices where the comfortable decision leads nowhere and one that threatens your ego has all the potential in the world.

You need a healthy ego to endure the abuse that comes with any sort of success. The trick is to think of your ego as your goofy best friend who lends moral support but doesn’t know shit.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22041046-5005961,00.html

ROGER Federer emulated the legendary Bjorn Borg when he captured his fifth successive Wimbledon title with a 7-6 (9/7), 4-6, 7-6 (7/3), 2-6, 6-2 win over Rafael Nadal in a thrilling final on Sunday.

It was a tough match. It was good to see that Nadal stretched him well, over almost 4 hours, unlike the limp way in which Federer handed Nadal the French Open last month.

Federer's 5th consecutive Wimbledon, 11th Grand Slam and 53rd straight win on grass.

At the D Conference this year, Steve Jobs made an interesting statement - If you want to hire bright and creative people, you can’t over rule them ... You can do that once or twice a year.

At the same conference, he also made another interesting statement during his much-hyped discussion with Bill Gates. When asked what he wished he could learn from Bill, he said it was Bill's (Microsoft's) ability to partner with other companies.

2 useful thoughts for the day.

Steve Jobs is notorious famous for his quirky management style. Fortune magazine famously called him "one of Silicon Valley's leading egomaniacs". So when this guy speaks about other "bright" people and about "partnership", you listen; he speaks from long experience.

This article on CNN Money speaks of a set of people who got into the business of owning web domains. My favorite in the list is Garry Chernoff, who earlier was a "hospital electrician, and he now lives on a 10-acre lakefront spread in British Columbia".

If you really desire to make it big, you can. There is no dearth, for the right kind of seeker.

Li Ka Shing, one of the world's richest people, is a name known to fewer people than one would expect. Astute followers of Indian business would have seen him mentioned recently, during the Vodafone acquisition of Hutch. Newspapers referred to him by his nickname - "Superman".

I was reading through his mini-bio on wikipedia. Li seems to have had a very competitive and ambitious spirit. He started his career by aiming to overtake his uncle, in terms of wealth. Later on in life, Li established a real estate company called Cheung Kong, with one stated aim being to take on Jardine Matheson, the then top real estate company of HK.

Which brings us to the topic of this post.

A goal Li Ka Shing announced when establishing Cheung Kong was to become bigger and more profitable than Jardine Matheson in real estate development. Jardines was founded in 1832 by two Scottish merchants William Jardine and James Matheson. They profited greatly by selling opium to local Chinese, which they sourced cheaply from Bengal and sold at exorbitant prices. The excess cash was used to buy land, construct offices and warehouses, deal drugs, export tea, and operate as a shipping insurance agent. In 1872, Jardines withdrew from the opium trade and diversified into sugar refining, textiles, property development and tramways. By going legitimate, the company became the biggest landlord in the territory's Central business district and transformed the barren island (Hong Kong) into a major international business center.

And that is how, my friends, I say that India enabled the creation of Hong Kong. :-)

Another take on that eternal question ..

To paraphrase economist Thomas Sowell, Life is all about the allocation of limited resources that have alternative uses.

Interesting. I remember someone used the same statement to explain what management is. Well, when thoughts get generic enough, you can apply them everywhere.

I moderate the IIM group on orkut; mostly helping avoid junk profiles.

Over the last few days, I saw a huge spurt of registrations. And a lot of them were genuine profiles. Which reminded me that the IIM admissions activity had finally kicked off. Knowing the gruelling schedule on campus, even a week's day's delay is tough. Thank God for the judiciary .. ;-)

There were some other trends too.

A good number of people with an armed forces background are looking at IIMs. That is great news! IIMs are full of engineering grads (like yours truly!) with a very algorithmic view of life. Women, exchange students, commerce grads, CAs etc have been doing their bit to improve the diversity on campus. If this trend of people joining from the armed forces is really true, it adds some much-needed diversity to the campus population. Also, most of the campus junta is in dire need of some grooming assistance, which I feel these folks can readily help with. :-)

Going purely by the user location data on orkut, it looks like metros/cosmos still rule when it comes to CAT success. I hardly see people from say, Belgaum or Digboi, who have made it. Programmatic CAT preparation (aided by coaching institutes), coupled with a large local network of highly ambitious minds, still seems to be a key catalyst for success.

Smart people are everywhere. It is a pity if the IIM entry process favors large cities. I wonder what one can do to break this trend of "large-city success". Maybe some kind of digital setup that levels the playing field ..

The trend of hiring people without work-ex seems to continue. I have come to believe that a management degree without [at least a year of] prior work does not add much value. But who's to say? The market is booming, and everyone lands more than one job.

Congrats to all those who have made it. Your problems have just begun. >:-)

Guy Kawasaki's blog - 2 blocks snipped ..
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/guykawasaki/Gypm/~3/101811192/the_effort_effe.html

Here’s some food for thought: perhaps this explains the inexorable march toward mediocrity of many (temporarily) great companies. Let’s say a startup is hot. It ships something great, and it achieves success. Thus, it’s able to attract the best, brightest, and most talented. These people have been told they’re the best since childhood. Indeed, being hired by the hot company is “proof” that they are the A and A+ players; in fact, the company is so hot that it can out-recruit Google and Microsoft.

Unfortunately, they develop a fixed mindset that they’re the most talented, and they think that continued success is a right. Problems arise because pure talent only works as long as the going is easy. Furthermore, they don’t take risks because failure would harm their image of being the best, brightest, and most talented. When they do fail, they deny it or attribute it to anything but their shortcomings.

And this is the beginning of the end.

The real comedy will be when scientists discover an alien world on the moon, space travel gets subsidized, and people still refuse to go because they've already seen it all, on sci-fi movies.

"Oh, the moonling? Nah, I've already seen him on TV."

When people hypothesized about brain in a vat, little did they realize that a computer and an internet connection would satisfy all the relevant requirements. The day of the Matrix grows closer.

Well. That, supposedly, was Hemingway's shortest story. All of 6 words. A very deep 6 words, if you ask me. What happened to the baby? Why were the shoes never worn? And why are they for sale? Many questions. I doubt I could write such 6 words.

So Wired asked popular sci-fi writers to write a story, in no more than 6 words. Arthur Clarke had an 11-word response "God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist." Personally, I think it could've been said in just 3 words "Cancel Program GENESIS". Brevity.

Some other 'stories' that I liked -

Internet "wakes up?" Ridicu - no carrier.
- Charles Stross

Epitaph: Foolish humans, never escaped Earth.
- Vernor Vinge

The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly.
- Orson Scott Card

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Singularity postponed. Datum missing. Query Godoogle?
- David Brin

He read his obituary with confusion.
- Steven Meretzky

Parallel universe. Bush, destitute, joins army.
- Steven Meretzky

To save humankind he died again.
- Ben Bova

As kids, I guess there were some fairly common drawing assignments one got in school - nature scenes, parks, national flag ..

So drawing the Indian flag was kind of an interesting job for me.



You had to get the heights of the 3 horizontal color bars proportional (it was tough back then). You had to get a nice-looking blue circle in the middle (without using a compass, or even a rupee coin). And then the toughest part - the 24 radiating spokes with a common center. I remember sweating a lot on this, till I happened to see the Sri Lankan flag.



And then, life was beautiful again. My sympathies went out to the Lankan kids.

_____

My 'flag'ging memories were revived recently when I saw this. The Epica awards are very prestigious in the advertising world, and the print awards for 2005 were won by Grande Reportagem, a Portuguese news magazine that is recognised for its investigative reports and excellent photo-journalism. Their "Meet the World" campaign used flags of several nations very creatively, to bring up issues relating to that country.

From the above link -

China – the dominant red background of the Chinese flag is used to symbolise the proportion of 14 year-old child workers in China, while the smaller yellow stars represent 14 year-old children in school.

USA – the red stripes represent those in favour of the war in Iraq, the white stripes represent those who are against it and the blue area of the flag are those who don’t know where Iraq is.

The campaign encompasses eight fundamental themes. In addition to child labour and the war in Iraq, other subjects addressed the distribution of wealth in Brazil, child mortality in Burkina Faso, drug trafficing in Columbia, the abuse of woman in Somalia, the spread of infectious diseases in Angola and energy wastage in the European Union.

Do check out the flags at the link new link. Very instructive.

Scott Adams speaks about Affirmations, as a technique that makes things happen. Briefly put -

The idea behind affirmations is that you simply write down your goals 15 times a day and somehow, as if by magic, coincidences start to build until you achieve your objective against all odds.

But I would guess the biggest confusion here is that one doesn't know what one's affirmations should be.

If God were to grant you 3 wishes, would you really know what to ask for?

Here is an interesting post on Knocking the exuberance out of employees.

"There's a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players)."

[...]

"Too many people fall into the my robot is better than your robot trap... and knock the exuberance out of their horse. What you're left with is a well-trained robot, not a curious, playful, mentally and emotionally balanced living creature."

The post also has a great list of reasons on "Why Robots Are the Best Employees". :-)

Here is an article that challenges popular perceptions about China. It references a few other articles, notably this WSJ article (subsc reqd).

Western views of an authoritarian central government in China that controls all activity in the country help to reinforce the misconception that there is a single China. There is no doubt that the central government is authoritarian, but it is easy to overstate the control it exercises throughout the country.

China’s leaders are caught in a trap as they cast around for ways to rein in investment. The old administrative methods – ordering state banks to stop lending, restricting land sales, halting government approvals for major projects – aren’t working as well as before, partly because local governments are defying Beijing.

Much of the economic growth of the country has been triggered by intense competition across municipal and provincial governments to attract private investment.

It is no longer (if it ever was) sufficient for companies to have a “China strategy” – they need to define a Shanghai strategy, Shenzhen strategy, etc.

Dilbert tries to discover the better one ..