I was invited to do a presentation to students at my alma mater (SVCE, Pennalur). The occasion was a day long event today organized by ECE department's Alumni Association & IEEE Chapter. I decided against a technical topic for fear of boring the students, instead I made a talk on "Entrepreneurship for Engineers". Following what "George Bernard Shaw" said "I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation", I started by quoting myself  “There has never been a better time in Indian History for becoming an Entrepreneur”.

I tried my best to make the session very lively and at the end when I counted only few heads where sleeping out of nearly 100 students in the hall. And in the 90 minutes I heard no "Boos" or "Whistles" which itself I think was an achievement in itself. Download - Entrepreneurship for Engineers v2.0.pdf (292.67 KB)

In the evening I presented one more session. This time it was at Vishwak for our weekly Friday sessions organized by our team members as a forum to share knowledge and best practices. Here again I went against a technical topic as I didn't have the time in advance to prepare on any of the latest or upcoming topics, and if I presented on any of the existing technologies then my team knows more than me . The topic I talked was on "Presentation Skills" on which I have earlier posted a detailed 7 page post here and as a way of demonstration I did the talk without any presentation aids (No PowerPoint and no Projector).

Few months back I was interviewed by DataQuest magazine (a popular IT Industry Magazine in India) reporter, on our Mobile and Portal Initiatives at Vishwak. The interview got published in their April Issue. Interactions with Press is an interesting oppurtunity but at the same time a stressful one. It is an oppurtunity for good marketing and publicity, but it is stressful because you can't afford to have your tongue slip even a bit. Having said that if you play it too cautious and textbook fashion, then the reporter gets bored and you are un interesting as a news item. So you got to walk a fine line, for this I admire the industry stelwards who keep meeting press everyday.

A brief from the Interview: TNC Venkata Rangan, CMD, Vishwak says, "Primarily we are into portal management. We provide solutions to both desktop and mobile environments. Our portal framework is a valuable tool that provides a single point access to information resources and services."

Read the full article - DataQuest Online, Print Copy (PDF format)

Today's Economic Times - Corporate Dossier supplement carried an interesting piece. It was about "When hard decisions need to be taken, Corporate India has one solution - fly in an expatriate".

There are two possible impressions you may feel after reading the article. First one may be that "Why should we need foreigners to tell us what to do, Indian Managers and CEOs are equally capable", but if you read the article carefully it says "one solution is to have expatriates", it doesn't say it is the only way. Second which I thought was that "expatriates don't have the cultural baggage (not always bad in my opinion) Indian Managers will have to carry with an Indian team, because the team expects CEO to relate and understand them closer. This is not expected from an expatriate, as the news an expatriate is being appointed as a CEO itself signals (certainly wrong impression to carry) tough decisions are in coming. In India there seems to be too much personal emotions attached in everyday workplace - our work life balance is not always maintained distinctly".

On the same issue, we need to remember that India Inc.  cannot be different than what other market and countries are doing worldwide. Remember, we are in a Globalized (flat) world. You don't need to compromise your core values and ethos, but at the same you will need to be smart and sensitive with prevailing conditions or get killed. And death happens faster in today's corporate world than ever before. 

As far as the above quote concerned is concerned, as a CEO myself I couldn't have said it any better. You face it everyday with your team members not speaking up opennly, they are unnecessarily courteous and shy for all the wrong reasons.

On a more general note all these issues are not new, but for India - it is, because in living memory India hasn't seen the consistent growth rate that is seeing for the last few years. We have to pay some price for this economic boom market. The other countries including Asian Tigers have gone through this before, but India is going through it now.

Please leave your thoughts in the comments below - do you agree with the above or not?    

Others do read my blogs, I mean it. One of my aquaintance in a software company abroad had read my Interview given to FriendsOfSVCE few years back. In that I have talked about how important it is for people in your team to have right Attitude.

My aquaintance (for privacy sake let us call him Kannan) is facing a situation now and he called me today to help him with suggestions on how to handle it.  Kannan is having a Junior Associate report to him and this associate (incidentally from a different culture) is having serious attitude issues, according to my Kannan. Kannan's question to me is how important Attitude in the overall job responsibility or in other words how bad should a bad attitude be to declare a person unfit for a job and what qualifies for a bad attitude.

Very difficult questions to answer. Attitude is not a data point and it cannot be measured and expressed in numbers - you cannot say this job role expects an attitude of 75% and the person in question is scoring only 62%. It is subjective, relative and also vary between cultures - especially in this case it is a multi-culture team, where each member is from a different culture/ethnic backgrounds.

American Hertiage Dictionary defines "Attitude" quite nicely:

• A state of mind or a feeling; disposition: had a positive attitude about work
• An arrogant or hostile state of mind or disposition

Software and Design Jobs are all made in the "Mind" of the individual. So it is important that the person doing the job is in a right state of Mind for him to perform well and to the extend demanded by the job responsibility. That is why companies pour tons of money into having a good HR, work environment, etc. A negative attitude certainly affects performance, but the tricky thing is how can you measure them and convince your superiors/peers/legal that it is bad and qualifies for a change/fix.

When you face a situtation like this:

• Have no doubt, it is your job responsibility as a manager to handle these issues. It is not something you are alone in doing it out of your loyalty
• You will never get people who match your requirements/measure 100%. Accept people for their strengths, but don't compromise on the job qualification bar
• You need to have made it clear (communicate) to the Associate that you are not happy with their behaviour/attitude. One of the points I hear in Exit interviews is that people say they didn't know you are unhappy with them and they cannot read your mind on your expectations
• Give the other person few chances to correct the issue in question
• Then talk to your manager - they will have more experience than you in handling situations like this (or) talk to your Office HR Manager. Ensure your manager is in your side for your planned course of action - whatever it is
• Document things. Especially since in USA, things can get messy with Legal actions. What you said over a coffee table don't count on your side, but can count for the other party
• Start laying down the work items that you are expecting the associate to do, the time line to complete it and send it as an email or Intranet work item. Be realistic, don't be pre-judiced to make him fail in the timelines set. Doing the list, the associate will know that you are serious on what you are saying and that if he is smart that you are trying to prepare proofs for your case. This itself might fix the problem, if not you can use it for your case. Have your manager/his manager endorse this list. Ask for regular reports on the progress. The minute you are clear that his job is suffering because of the attitude your assessment is validated.
• Lastly, once you have done all this, take a decision and be firm with that. Read my first point again.

Finally I told Kannan "As an Engineer you don't feel afraid writing the most critical piece of code, so why have doubts while you are facing management issues. Face it with the same courage. Plan well and Things will work out well".

Today I was invited to present on "A Case Study - on my experiences as being an Entrepreneur". The event was Computer Society of India's National Symposium on PREPARING IT PROFESSIONALS FOR 2010- A ROAD MAP. The event was featured in "The Hindu" Education Plus supplement dated 26, March 2007 (Hi-Res).

I enjoyed presenting in this, especially to see the enthuism and the energy with students.

You can read the references notes I used for the talk here - PPTX Format, PDF Format. It is not very detailed as I didn't project it as a slideshow.

In this connection, I remembered an Interview of me done around 2003 by Pallavi Aravind Narasimhan from Friendsofsvce (One of Alumni Associations of my college). Most of it is relevant, but remember it was four years back!

Today I was asked to give a quote on what I look for in fresh graduates, here is what I said:

“I am excited whenever I get an opportunity to work with graduates from campus. They come unpolluted & bring the much needed fresh air in to work places. So when it comes to selection, I am very unassuming and I look for the basics – Thirst for experimenting with technology, Open Mind to Learn and spoken language skills” - Venkatarangan TNC

After reading this I realized myself that at times I do make some sense

This story is one of my all time favourites. Many times when we design a software, many scope creeps and feature creeps continue un-checked. At one stage, the whole project collapses because we loose sight of the core problem we were set to solve in the first place. The following story from Arabian Nights illustrates this very well.

The Bedouin was sleeping in his tent and his camel lay outside. After a while the camel came to the tent and said its nose was cold.

"Put it inside the tent then, and it will be warm", said the Bedouin.

"Master, my neck is cold", the camel soon said.

"Put it in the tent", said the good Arab.

Then: "Master, my body is cold", said the camel.

"Put it in the tent then", said the Bedouin.

"My tail is cold", said the camel.

"Alright, alright, put it inside", said the master.

So the camel settled in the tent. After a while, it spoke up. "Master, there is no room enough for both of us. Can you go out and leave the tent to me?"

There is a similar, slightly more profound Indian Folk story, but that's for a different day