The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig

Great ideas, specific articulations of them and the books which present them transcend genres. The Halo Effect by Phil Rosenzweig who is a professor of strategy and international management at IMD, Switzerland will most probably, be always found in the business section of the bookstores around the world. It just shouldn’t shouldn’t be so as it is a book which is as genre crossing as any, which should be read by many more than the people who would browse that section and is one which will surely be judged as one of the most important business books ever written. Read full story »

Through Netaland to Tiger Riders – Some (more) truths from Satyam II

The Satyam episode is over, and well too. The government and the populace couldn’t have hoped for a better ending, with the farce of needing to ‘nationalize’ Satyam if no bidder other than some carcass eating Private Equity funds turned up to take it over thankfully avoided. Barring some class action lawsuits or some past acquisitions that Satyam made blowing up on Tech Mahindra, Satyam has moved away from the front pages – except for when we hear about Raju’s sentence. And the pace of our judicial process ensures that the Ramalinga Raju episode will drag on for much longer. It also seems that the government appointed directors are on their way out after doing a sterling job.

So, as good a time for the second and final part of the post-mortem. Read full story »

Wolfram Alpha

Last week, a brilliant web service has been released which has found its niche by redefining the rules a bit and hence maybe able to thrive as a much needed complement to Google. Wolfram Alpha is not quite a search engine, at least in the way that we have come to understand the term and in that may lie the roots to its success in the realm which has eluded others.

Wolframalfa calls itself a computational search engine and the first thing to understand about it is that it does not do phrase searches of weighed and huge database like search engines. So keying in a phrase hoping to find a document hit for it somewhere on the net would not succeed in it. The best parallel is what was attempted to do by one of the oldest ’search engines’ in the web, Ask Jeeves (same as today’s ask?) which attempted to do natural language processing on the questions which were put into it. Read full story »

From the Professors to The Sidekicks – Some Truths from Satyam I

So what happened at Satyam? This will be a two part series trying to bring in some perspective – now that the big picture has by and large emerged and the media cacophony has died down, its a good time to try to make some sense out of the sordid Satyam scandal. Rather than the chronology of events, looking at the people who played the lead roles in the plot perhaps more enlightening and indeed, more interesting. Read full story »

On Leadership

Once, an assumption was that any leader was an industrial manager. He had to assemble a bunch of specialists, show them the ‘vision’, tell them what they have to do and then ‘manage them by objectives’.

Find the numbers. Show and use carrots and sticks on the ‘worker’.

…..my argument is – this is incorrect . Read the rest of the essay to find whether you agree. Read full story »

Why Ubiquity Will Not Become Ubiquitous

One of my friends is an architect. No,not a technology architect but a real one, the sort who builds buildings. During work most of her time is spent with Autocad. Outside work she spends most of her time sketching or drawing – either using Photoshop or on real paper.
Another friend ,a former colleague in Oracle, … Read full story »

Worse is better. Always. In everything. All the time.

” Big-bang, long winded epic plans to create anything are always trumped by smaller, incremental, self-correcting, attempts. ”
That was my attempt to summarise one of the seminal papers in software making – Richard P. Gabriel’s ‘Worse is Better‘.
Gabriel coined the tongue in cheek catchy phrase to explain why the ‘worse’ C and Unix won. And … Read full story »

Blog Camp Kerala 2008 – Reviewing the Unconference

I had initially decided not to attend Blog Camp Kerala [BlogCamp Kerala] 2008.
I should admit that I was prejudiced.
“There we go”, I thought, “another place where nerdy, techie guys are gonna meet, talk about wordpress plugins/Apple’s coolness/ jihad against proprietary software/making more money by gaming google…. Yawn…. Tell me something new.”
Sure as hell, I wasn’t … Read full story »

Powerpointless

He had prepared for weeks. 
The audience included ’senior management’ – two middle aged men who would rather be anywhere else than spend their uber important time listening to a ‘kid’ speak. One of them had a smirk when coming in to the conference room, like sayin’ – ‘you are gonna say something which is important … Read full story »

MSM and Technology

Some time ago, one of my friends got a job offer from Adobe. Recently another friend got an offer from Autodesk.
One of the reasons for their job changes was that they wanted to do ‘good work’. At least that is what they told me.
Neither took the job.
I was surprised. Mostly because they ended up taking … Read full story »