World after 20 years?

I am a regular viewer of the TED Talks on their YouTube channel. I came across this highly charged talk where the speaker said something that struck me deeply -

'If you want to know how the world will be 20 years from now, ask the kindergarten teachers'.

You can catch the entire talk here:

Saffron XML, Hindu Coding!

'Election PR management and marketing' has to be a huge market in India. Every time a major election comes calling we see extremely innovative campaigns from various parties, some of them like the modi masks, phone with Vajpayee's messages, VCD propaganda by the BJP, youtube campaigns etc. Most of these campaigns have targetted the general public and might have had varying dgrees of success.
But, what do you feel when you are in the w3c schools website (w3c schools is the world's largest free e-learning site on web technologies and a pioneer in building most of the latest web protocols) and suddenly you see a banner urging you to vote for the BJP? I can see that the BJP has done some clever market segmentation and strategically placed the 'LK Advani for PM' campaign in one of the most popular technology sites on the web. But I found it extremely intrusive and out of place.
'Context' is very important for our mind to form an impression about a campaign. An out and out political campaign is not something I expect to see in a pure technology blog. Moreover, I cannot associate the image of 'internet technology, web2.0' etc with a party like BJP. For me the word 'internet and the world wide web' throws up images of freedom, creativity, expression, collaboration, a world without boundaries and discrimination etc. and on the other hand the term 'BJP' brings to my mind images in complete contadiction to the earlier term - 'religious fanaticism', 'fear', 'discrimination and non-tolerance', 'hatred', 'me put in a jail and being watched and dictated all the time', 'control', 'idea paralysis'.
When your brain receives contradictory images and signals - it should go into a state of confusion and denial. That's exactly what happened to me after I saw that extremely brash and intrusive BJP campaign on a w3c schools page. Sample these images and think whether the w3c campaign by the BJP will ever appeal to you:

Enticement of Hindu religious sentiments through the Rath Yatra and the destruction of Babri Masjid catapulted BJP from a party that had merely 2 seats in the lok sabha in 1984 to 119 seats in 1991.
























Though the main party has toned down on it's 'Hindutva' propaganda after it started backfiring in recent times, the fact remains that BJP is part of a saffron conglomorate deeply rooted in the idea of a Hindu nation with labyrinths of radical, violent and armed idealogues.

And there you go - Advani featured on the w3c schools website. Sorry Mr. aspiring PM - I can't associate you with anything progressive, leave alone a 'western' website that advocates free learning and creativity.
Reposition yourself as a tolerant, forward looking, inclusive party that does not breed religious animosity and may be then this campaign might work. But, that is a long drawn out process and till then you should be rethinking your web campaign strategy.

Treating freshers in an IT project: The Outlier perspective

I am a strong believer in the power of human potential and creativity - I believe that it's more important to have the right people than the right process, moreover the only true asset and competitive advantage of an IT organisation is the accrued knowledge and attitude of it's workforce. How do we build an organisation where knowledge and professional excellence is valued more important than anything else? In this post, I would like to focus on the starting tier of every organisation - the fresh recruits from college and their utilisation strategies.
Almost every top Indian IT organisation that I know of, has excellent induction and training facilities for new recruits. The training facilities of TCS, Infosys and Satyam are world class and caters to it's workforce from across the globe. Every new recruit to these companies will have to go through and qualify a two to three month long induction course. The recruits are given intensive training on fundamentals of computer science, software engineering (considering that they could be from backgrounds as varied as Civil or Textile engineering), communication skills, business etiquette and are made to specialise in one technology (popular options include Java, .NET, Mainframes, Oracle Apps and SAP). All is well the training ends - now after the training the recruits will be allocated to projects (not necessarily in the technology they specialised in!) and the less fortunate among them will have to occupy the famed 'bench' ('Bench' is one of the most despicable and demeaning words in the IT industry for me - it brings forth images of a poultry farm where cattle is fed and kept without doing any physical work in the hope that buyers will come in the future. Talent rots on bench and these PCMMI Level 5 organisations virtually have no 'bench management' policies in place. This deserves a separate post).
The primary focus of this post is to discuss how fresher's are utilised in a project and the pivotal role played by the first project in launching the career of an IT professional.
Training and a live project are two completely different ball games and it has been my experience that one learns more in a project than any long and intensive training course. There are potentially two ways in which you can utilise them - be cautious about their abilities, not load any complex and difficult tasks on them, give them further process training, let them shadow with experienced resources (let them 'feel, see and learn'!) and allocate the easiest (and in turn the most trivial and mundane) task. The other more radical way of handling them is to 'throw them in the lion's den' - give challenges to them from the first day, include them in solving difficult problems, ask them to work on technologies that they have not been trained on and stretch them beyond their limit. Which strategy works best?
Common wisdom and experience has shown that the freshers like tender flowers need to be handled with care and thus the first approach is the most suitable when it comes to utilising raw talent. But, this is a defeatist approach. If the organisation aims at building people with an attitude to take up any technical challenge, people who will not wilt under pressure and people who will solve problems - they will need to look at adopting approach two to groom the freshers.
The capacity to learn and mould one's mind is the maximum when one starts his/her career and the role played by the first project in harnessing the potential of an individual is immense. Malcom Gladwell in one of his talks mentions about an experiment done in a US school. The school used to segregate a class based on the intelligence of students and used to have different batches for different groups of students. The school did an interesting exercise when they put some average performing students in the high IQ batch and gave them the same intensive training. To their surprise, they found that the average performing students were scoring as well as the high IQ students once they received the same coaching. This principle is written all over Galdwell's new book Outlier which I reviewed in the previous post. My argument for a strategy to utilise fresher's in an IT project is drawn from the same line. Putting up challenges and difficult problems in front of an eager mind all charged up to prove him/herself is the best way to groom an individual. The confidence and never say die attitude that this bestows on the individuals will remain with them forever.
There is another point to it - the incremental advantage that knowledge and experience gives an individual. Let's do a thought exercise of two fresher's 'A' and 'B' who come from the same college and who got the same training - utilised in entirely different ways in a project. 'A' is not given any meaningful work and is assigned to monitor a system and report any issues with the same, he is also asked to write up documents for the development done by his senior team mates. 'B' on the other hand is asked to develop a piece of a critical interface with a third party vendor. In turn, he has to learn a technology that he has no exposure to and meet a strict deadline. Unarguably the learning and experience of 'B' is much greater than that of 'A' and by the end of the project. The initial headstart that 'B' has got will put him exponentially above 'A'. Managers would prefer 'B' to 'A' for his 'skills', 'attitude' and 'experience' in the next assignment and this trend will continue - 'B' enjoying incremental advantage over his counterpart simply due to the better exposure and utilisation he got in the first project. Interestingly, the book McKinsey Way(find the entire PDF version of the book here) which talks about the consulting strategies of McKinsey emphasizes the importance of giving tough and customer facing assignments to fresh recruits.
I am convinced that it's not just necessary having excellent induction programs for freshers, but its paramount that the grooming is continued atleast in the first project of each fresher and that organisation will be able to reap rich dividends in the future.

Malcom Gladwell's Latest: Outliers

There are some books you buy after flipping through the pages a hundred times, weighing the cost and benefit attached to buying it before making the decision to pay the buck, but there are other books that you can just pick from the shelf and know that it will be worth your money. Malcom Gladwell's book fall in the latter category.
Gladwell has a knack of drawing uncommon conclusions from seemingly trivial data (like this talk titled 'What we can learn fromm Spaghetti sauce'). Though not as prolific as his previous books, Outlier has the signature Gladwell class. The book does a clean job in analysing the secret behind genius and successful men and is built on the premise that success is more a factor of hardwork (or meaningful work as he terms it) and cultural factors than mere individual talent. He profiles icons like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, the Beatles, Mozart etc. to drive in the point how passionate and selfless hardwork, practice and timing(Gladwell analyses the birth years of Gates, Paul Allen and Jobs and the three of them were born in 1955!) contributes to success more than genius. I particularly liked the section where Gladwell analyses why students from East Asia do exceedingly well in academics in comparison to those from US or Europe, especially in math (Chapter titled Rice Paddies and Math tests). He puts the credit on rice farming - he argues that rice farming is one of the mot riskiest, labour intensive and sapping forms of agriculture and typically rice farming cultures have a tradition of hard work ingrained in them. It's a true gem when he goes on to compare the proverbs of different cultures and establishes the pivotal role played by culture in forming the innate qualities of an individual. (He compares Russian and Chinese proverbs. The Russian proverb says 'If God does not bring it, the Earth will not give it', while the Chinese one says 'No food without blood and sweat').
Gladwell's writing style is simple and terse, that all his books make a light and fast reading! So, the next time you are at a bookstore and happen to see Outlier staring at you, you shouldn't think twice before taking it home! It's an interesting read with a very important message - work harder for your success!
Here's the author himself talking about his book

The death of credibility - The Satyam effect

I worked for Satyam for 24 months. I was not overtly proud of the 'brand' during my association with the organisation because there was nothing that really stood out (except for the Knowledge Management practices of the company - they were excellent) and captured my loyalty. What happened with the firm is greatly disturbing and a lot of media space has already been spent on dissecting and sensationalising the Raju brothers and their adventures with 53,000 employees and lakhs of shareholders. For me, what has happened in Satyam is not an aberration at all, contrary to the opinion of a number of analysts. Unfortunately, ours is a country ridden with underhand dealings, corruption, unethical practices in almost all spheres including education and healthcare and why wouldn't strains of that virus be present in the IT industry also? The Satyam fiasco is the Black Swan of the Indian IT industry - a similar expose tomorrow will just validate the existence of the black swan. Moreover, Ramalinga Raju is not a technologist, he comes from the gruesome construction and textile industries and is it any aberration that he swindled money to where his heart really was?
But what this entire episode has done to me is to dispel the myth of credibility. How could an entire system - stuffed with the best minds and organisations of the world have a collective failure? How could one of the best auditing firms in the world(which only recruits from select IIMs in the country!), high profile directors including deans of reputed business schools, independent stock analysts and investment bankers(yes, the reputed i-bankers!) who spend all their time analysing the 'fundamentals' of a company, international standards organisations (Satyam even won an award for Corporate Governance!!), national regulators and top managers fail to figure out the tricks of one crooked mind? Not for a month, not for a year, but for seven long years! How come their above average intelligence, world class processes, diverse experience, ivy league business school education and years of research failed to detect this fraud? And what credibility can I attach to their words and advices in the future?
Credibility plays an extremely important role in a number of decisions that we make. Brands are entirely built on the foundation of credibility, perceptions, judgements and stereotypes are formed based on credibility, our choices are influenced greatly by it. Why do the best companies recruit only from IIMs and IITs? Why would you pay a premium to buy a branded shirt? Why do we even trade 'respect' based on credibility? Why are even marriages based on the credibility of families and the lineage? Why are even votes cast on the 'credibility' of political families?
We attach a 'credibility value' to each of these symbols or brands and the market value of each commodity, service or individual is to a large extent decided just by this credibility index! Our minds are tuned to think that an IITian 'ought' to be better than a local college grad, that management consultants from the big four 'ought' give more insights than a normal employee of the organisation, that a movie that has won numerous awards 'ought' to be better than one that even didn't get nominated and the list goes on.
We put the brand and the 'perceived' value of a product, service or an individual above the 'actual' value that it delivers and thereby inflates the price attached to it (as well as the risk involved in the investment). But for me, it's an error of judgment, an error too costly to be entertained, an error that can change our perceptions, prejudices and way we look at things. Everytime I've taken an interview, I've found myself forming perceptions about the candidate based on his college and organisations he/she has worked with, we all see the market and analysts forming blind perceptions about organisations based on the numbers it brings out, I've seen people deciding marriages simply because the family lineage is good.
And that is exactly what Ramalinga Raju took advantage of. He knew that the markets blindly looked at 'credibility value' of an organisation to decide the stock price. This meant having a board stuffed with 'reputed' individuals, bringing out stunning numbers, increasing the workforce, creating flashy offices and even investing in corporate social responsibility initiatives. The markets were hoodwinked by such a think curtain of credibility and Raju pulled off his tricks.
It's an extremely interesting subject because it not only influences share prices of companies, but more importantly our personal relationships and day to day decisions. We need to train our mind to see through the chimera created by the credibility value that we attach to objects and individuals and perceive their true worth.