The Flywheel

Forgotten tastes

 

As I was reading this article in NY Times, a wave of nostalgia struck me. To taste the chaats of Chowpatty, the veggie food of Crystal or the rotis of Bade Khan's in Mumbai is, at this time, to be born again. Similarly, the spicy tastes of Andhra food in Nagarjuna's of Bangalore, the Gujarati thalis in the mom-and-pop restaurants of Indore, or the rustic Italian food in a mom-and-pop restaurant near Composante in Italy, or the Ile de Flottante in Paris remind one that there is more to life than the next customer or the next deal....

Social Networking Websites - Do they work? (An update)

I use LinkedIn as a networking website of choice. Sometime back, I posted a rant against networking websites primarily because I got burnt by accepting an invitation from a stranger just to increase my connections base. That post generated some thoughtful responses from some of you out there. This, combined with my own experience for the past few weeks made me reconsider the value and role that I can now expect LinkedIn to play in my life.

My first mistake is to expect that LinkedIn will make me a much better networker than I am in real life (or, in physical world). It is obvious now that this can never happen. LinkedIn is a tool; it can make me more efficient certainly, but not more effective. Obviously, as a tool, LinkedIn should remain in the background and help me make my work easier; it can and more importantly, should never do my work for me.

Social networking websites are just tools designed to make my networking more efficient. Probably they can make managing relationships with my existing network more effective, but they can never replace or subvert the rules that apply in the physical world. What I mean is, if in real world you will never refer or give your personal details to a stranger, why will you do that online?

Secondly, the size of network you can build is never an issue. Now, I am not an expert on social networking or the science of networks. In fact apart from a general interest in how networks function, I do not profess to any experience or knowledge on this topic. However, as an individual, I find it hard to accept there is a natural or universal limit on the number of connections I can effectively manage. If I have a lot of contacts in real world, there is nothing wrong with having them online too. In fact, my suspicion is most of us have bigger and higher quality networks offline than online.
For example, I studied in 3 universities and worked in 4 companies in the past 15 years. This in turn gives me a contact base of at least 300 people I know quite well. However, I have only 17 connections on LinkedIn, mostly because I am not sure if I want to invite all my contacts (since some them will not find it especially useful) and secondly, some of them are just not interested in networking or sites such as these. However, when it comes to accepting connections on LinkedIn, both my offline and online networks will have a role to play. From all my 300 connections, perhaps 30 could constitute my Inner Circle. It will be this Inner Circle which will determine if I will pass on a reference. But what if I want to build my network online?

For me, the ability to build an online network is defined by your profile/activities in real world. Now, I work in a country and industry, where technology does not play a significant role. So, the chances of me networking in real world with someone who is on LinkedIn or would be interested in joining LinkedIn are quite remote. So, as my offline network grows, my online network languishes.
Assuming I want to see a healthy, growing online network, what are the options I have? As Bren argued sometime back, the answer is blogs. Because of the specific character of my blog, I will attract interest only from people who are interested in the topics I find fascinating. LinkedIn, in spite of the endorsements feature, cannot provide this kind of filter. In addition, a blog gives sufficiently deep insight into my character without being intrusive or intimidating. Any visitor who wishes to make contact can do so through a variety of options, need not be under pressure to make something out of it and as the dialog progresses, both of us can decide whether it makes sense to connect or not.

Thirdly, Jeff explains it best. Do not connect with someone you do not know or is not referred by your trusted Inner Circle.

Personally, I got the best value from LinkedIn when I was able to find friends who dropped out of contact in the past 5 years. This alone is worth putting my profile out there on the website.

Where have all the great books gone?

I read a lot of books per month. For the past few months however, I realized that I am buying more old books than newly published books. By newly published, I mean books printed in the last 12 months or so. Take a look at my book list on this page; you will see that most of the books have been published in 80s. In one case, the book is published in 60s! The point is I find it increasingly difficult to get captivated by a newly published book. Case in point: I just bought Blink and Faster.  Yes, they are good books; well written, nicely argued and all; but, in one word, they are not unputdownable. After reading them for an hour or so, my dominant reaction was, hmm, that was interesting. There is nothing wrong with such a reaction, however, these days I pine for a book that can make me go wow!

On the other hand, consider a book like Guns of August.

So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates…

How can anyone resisit a book that starts this way?As Ms. Tuchman starts the narrative, you find yourself swept along with her into the thick of action. You know how the World War 1 was fought out, how it got mired in trenches; but, for the time you are reading the book, you suspend all prior knowledge and you are there with the actors and yet, above them, filled with a sense of confusion, dread and doom.

Or check out The Discoverers. Reading this book is like visiting your childhood home after a long time, wandering through the rooms and stumbling into some delightful treasures here and there. Some would say, for the topic that is handled by the book, it was all wrong; no pictures, no maps, no illustrations; yet, for all these shortcomings, it remains the single best book I have read on history of scientific knowledge.

My point is, all these books are published way back. The Discoverers was published in 1983 and if I remember right, Guns of August was published in 1962 or thereabouts. Where are the great books of today? If I were to ask you this question, can you come up with an answer in 10 seconds or less?

I wonder a lot about this; maybe I am a sucker for the grand sweep, for big subjects and that is why books like Blink or Faster fail to hold me till I finish the book. I love Malcolm Gladwell's articles in New Yorker. They are informative, entertaining and thought provoking; but, do I want to read a 200 page article from him? I am not so sure. Probably one reason is the number of books published per year have increased significantly. In addition, the number of small publishers has also increased, leading to the situation where everybody can find an outlet for their book idea as long as the idea is good and saleable. In such a case, we will get more and more books which dig deep into a specific topic. While this will lead to proliferation and democratization of books, it also means that books with big ideas might get lost. I don’t know. All I know is that I have not found a single book for the past 12 months that really enthralled me. That is disturbing.

Ring the bells...

Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
--Leonard Cohen

WOW!

Ha t tip to Adam.

Must Have: Mercora

I downloaded mercora, a cool P2P music tool that allows me to convert my music library into a radio station and makes me a DJ!. The software is free. Free as in, no cost, no adware, no spyware. On top of that, the size is only 2 MB. As I write this, I have 1 listener on my radio right now! Leaving aside the hyperbole, this can possibly become the music version of a blog!
Get it!

Flickr - Do you want customers?

This is kind of an open letter to Flickr.

I started using Flickr a few days back. Within a few hours, I was really hooked. The functionality was good, learning curve was not at all steep and the promise of posting photos through email, mobile and blogging was irresistable. However, the space and bandwidth provided for free users was too little. I have about 300 pictures of my daughter and I would like nothing more than showing off how lucky a dad I am! So I decided to upgrade.

Now, 5 years after ecommerce started, you would have thought it should be a walk in the park right? Well, I got news for you. Especially, if you live in one of the smaller countries of the world. I live in a small country in central Europe. Flickr and their ecommerce provider Paypal think this country does not exist. They do not recognize this country and therefore, if I live in this country, I cannot pay online. The only possible option is that I go to bank, draw an international pay order to Ludicorp for $42, mail it by Fedex or DHL to Canada, wait for a week or so till it gets there; wait for another week till it gets processed and then pray everything is fine and my account is activated.

Ludicrous. No thank you.

What's your management style?

Mike Smock has an interesting post on why it is necessary to keep secrets. The post flies in face of currently accepted wisdom about being open and transparent;  however, the  argument is entirely correct and valid.
Taking his argument further, I strongly believe in command and control management. Since past 6 years I have seen too many people to think that being open, transparent and empathic will do wonders for the team. My experience is that a lot of people are only too willing to give up the responsibility of decision making to someone else. They wait for someone to come along and tell them what to do, how to do and check upon them every day if the job is done as per specs. I have seen many people shy away from taking decisions because of fear; fear of facing the consequences. Only people who are grounded in reality can make good decisions. Unfortunately, a lot of people live in a dream world where they hold court. All good things happen because of them and all bad things happen because someone else screwed up. That is, they are too busy playing the victim instead of making things happen. They do not pay attention to the reality of the situation or to the decision context. Psychologists call this FAE (Fundamental Attribution Error). A more elegant perspective is the concept of Shih from Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Shih is the power inherent in a configuration & timing of action. In English, this means that power of shih comes from deep insight into each element of task at hand, how they interact with each other and with the environment and when we need to deploy each of them to gain the maximum result with least effort.

A person who has Shih is always grounded and aware of the context in which he or she is operating. Leadership requires this shih above all else. Consequently, I believe that the fundamental requirement of a leadership role is to define reality for the rest of organization. However, this tendency to avoid reality and not be context sensitive, makes a lot of them unsuitable for leadership roles.

What does this have to do with management style? If a lot of people are unable or not willing to step up and take charge, the only style that can work is command and control. That is why, I micromanage every new member of my team for at least 3 months. During this 3 months, as I gain more insight into the person’s work ethic and intensity level, I introduce the soft elements of leadership in stages tailored to each person’s character and abilities. This is where the core values of a company come into play. I look at the first 3 months of a new person’s job in my company as a time to introduce our core values. As the person internalizes these core values, I can ease back with the knowledge that the person can use the core values as a decision guide in crunch situations.

Bottomline is that I feel leadership comes after management. Not before. Management style, by necessity has to be command and control till the team member is ready to live the values of your company.

Clumping & Bridging - A self scan of most visited blogs

I posted quite a long note yesterday on turnarounds. After seeing that I got precisely zero visitors on my blog, I remarked to someone that what I write must be very specific and must be interesting only to a very small set of people. But then as I was visiting some of my favourite blogs, something struck me. Actually, these are 2 questions:

1. Out of the people who visit, read and comment on any given blog, how many are bloggers?
2. If, as I suspect, most of them are bloggers, what is the central theme of their blog?

I believe the answers to above two questions would be very instructive. For one thing, I don't think only bloggers visit blogs like Boing Boing or InstaPundit. But when it comes to specific topics like business, economics etc. does anyone have a reader base which is widely spread in terms of interests? Or do you have a reader base most of which is fellow bloggers talking about the same topic but with a different perspective? On top of that, when it comes to blogs focusing on business or some other specific, narrow interests, can we expect a lot of readers who do not blog?

My blog does not get a lot of visitors; in fact on a good day, I get about 10 unique visitors. So I cannot do this experiment myself. Instead, I scanned my bookmarks folder for the blogs I visit regularly. And lo and behold, majority of the blogs I visit are business blogs or work blogs. Out of the 24 regular blogs that I visit, 18 are business blogs, 2 are economics, 3 are news analysis and current affairs and only 1 on history! Talk about clumping or clustering of bloggers!

On the other side, I do visit 3 blogs which have nothing to do with my work or personal life, but are nevertheless of interest to me. I think this is where I play the bridging role however weak it may be.

If you leave aside the point that I have a strong bias to complain about this, how valid are my conclusions? If all the various groups of bloggers are clustering together based on their blogging topic, how does a good, new (ahem!) blog gets found and disseminated? I am interested in hearing more about your experiences in finding a new blog that has a unique, relevant take on a topic that is not central to your blog. If you did run into such a blog and watched it grow in readership, how was it done?

My opinion is this where bridges play a critical role. If you think of each special topic as an island, then we need bridges or ferry men who can lead people across and give them the opportunity to see new, wondrous places in the world. Have any of you played such a role? If so, what was your experience? How much of my conclusions or hypothesis are justifiable based on your experience?

Redesign

This is the result of some redesign by my wife. Obviously she believes that I suck when it comes to figuring out aesthetics and friendliness of colours and layout. As it usually happens, she started by saying she will remove just that tiny little offending piece of border….

Difficult Books

Ever started a highly recommended book that you just could not finish because the book is so boring or difficult to grasp?

I love to read. Usually, I read 3–5 books simultaneously, switching from one to another as my fancy dictates. I find that by reading multiple books at the same time, I sometimes get fresh and different perspective on each book. But sometimes, I run into a book thats like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. It tantalises, coyly promises blinding insights and a quantum leap in synthesizing all my interests only to lead me into a maze. A maze that I find increasingly difficult to navigate because the topic is treated very densely. I keep reading thinking if I can labour a bit more, read a bit more seriously, the treasures buried deep inside will be mine! But alas, I never quite make it and then it sits there on the shelf, mocking me, calling me and teasing me. In my opinion, one of the worst sights to a voracious reader is a book started and left unfinished. I have at least 5 such books on my shelf now. I will only mention 3 that really bother me whenever I reach for my bookshelf:

1. Emperor’s New Mind. I bought this book about 18 months back. Perhaps, one should never buy a book that is more than 1 year old to read for the first time. Some concepts in the book were familiar to me and some were totally alien. The worst part were the sections of symbolic logic used for proving some point (I no longer remember now) about Turning Machines. I seriously doubt if I will ever be able to finish it.

Difficulty Scale: 9/10 & Interest to Finish: 4/10

2. The Order of Things. In my opinion, Michel Foucault is the most elusive of writers. I feel like Captain Ahab chasing the Moby Dick of M. Foucault while reading this book. He infuriates me by his elusiveness and entices me by the sheer breadth and ambition of his writing. I suspect finishing this will turn out to be one my life’s projects.

Difficulty Scale: 9/10 & Interest to Finish: 7/10

3. A Perfect Spy. Call me a low-brow, but I prefer Jason Bourne to Magnus Pym. When I read a thriller, I want to be thrilled, not educated or illuminated. The travails of Mr. Pym and his family bore me.

Difficulty Scale: 7/10 & Interest to Finish: 3/10

So there you have it. My all-time Bottom 3 books that haunt me, tease me and frustrate me.