You are the guy who'll decide where to go

These are some of my fav quotes , I am reorganising my blogs, and have moved some of the posts that were on the other two blogs to this one.

"Try Not. Do or do not. There is no try"
-- Yoda, Star Wars

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
-- Douglas Adams

"Waiting is a trap. There will always be reasons to wait. The truth is, there are only two things in life, reasons and results, and reasons simply don't count."--Dr. Robert Anthony"

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing."--Abraham Lincoln

Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.
--Ralph Marston

There is just one life for each of us: our own. --Euripides

You have brains in your head.You have feet in your shoes.You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.You're on your own.And you know what you know.You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
--Dr. Seuss

Fair Raise

A few days back, I had my annual performance appraisal due and was wondering what is happening all around me- some employees are getting much more than I am and some are still languishing.

In last one year, I had received one raise without an appraisal, even without asking for it. Must say it was a real pleasant surprise – it came in an email in month of June & was with effect from October last year. I reckon I got this raise to ensure that this October’s appraisal does not look too high in percentage terms.

but then am I getting, what I deserve?

What is the cost of replacing me?As a business guy I believe every one should get equal to the cost of replacing him/her. If one is not becoming more expensive to replace, he / she should not expect a raise. The business that does not follow this rule will loose out in the market place.

Some of the real hard working & intelligent people are not getting as lesser than what people with lower capability are, because market dynamics, their skill set is in abundance today, and hence cost of replacing them is low.

Since whatever I remember from the HR stuff that I studied during my MBA was not sufficient to carry out a scientific / empirical analysis, I thought of evolving one. Here is what I evolved (Probably this will come in handy incase I need to fight for higher raise or maybe later at a more responsible position) :

Here we go,

Following parameters that need to be taken into account at the time of determining a raise:

1. Competence/ expertise in area of operation - This factor denotes conceptual clarity and is important for the knowledge driven industry where the success of business is a function of depth/ breadth of knowledge. Hence an industry which has scarcity of skilled people i.e. a an industry which has not reached a significant level of maturity, this factor has to be given high weightage. In a mature industry the competence of employee A vs. that of employee B would not be very disparate (one employee would be at 8 and the other at 8.5 in a scale of 1 to 10) . eg of subsegment of industry where this is important - IT Security.

2. Total Number of years of Experience - This factor denotes the maturity of the employee and is important where there is a client relationship engagement. Even if the experience is not from the same industry, a mature person can handle client engagements better than a new joinee. The weightage for this factor is, therefore dependent on the role.

3. Number of years in the same company / same department - This factor denotes the contextual familiarity. A person who has spent three years in the same company/ same department is likely to know a lot about the context / customer behavior/ limitations & capability of organization - hence is likely to make a better judgment / commitment to client.

4. Dependability: This factor denotes quality of work as well as passion. If you have to still vet a document / excel before sending it to client OR if you have to keep on reminding some one of deadlines - he is not dependable. Also it denotes commitment to organisation / to your work. If you understand that although there has been a demand from the customer for a deliverable at a very short notice, a dependable employee will understand the situation and deliver - even if by stretching himself to work late at night. Of course such dependability tests can not happen very often. This factor is very important for profiles that have bursty workload, ie there will be times when there is lot of work to be done at a short notice.

5. Potential : This factor denotes the ability to proactively learn new technologies/ drive new initiatives/ spot new markets or opportunities and exploit these to impact business in a significantly positive manner.

6. Certificates/ Qualification / Pedigree : These need to be given due respect as these represent latent knowledge that can be a significant use to the organization at some point of time.

7. Team Player : If all above are factors are present in good amount but the employee is not a team player, there are chances that the organization will not meet its objective. This factor is is not so important in roles that depend on individual brilliance more than the team output (eg consultant) , but can not be ignored in any case.

These seven factors need to be given weightage depending upon the nature of organization/department ( ie what business you are in, which of these attributes are critical to your business success).

The various employees than rated ( not ranked) on a scale of 1 to 10. The rating to be multiplied by the weightage of the factor ( ie if factor 1 is given a weightage of 12% then multiply the rating of employee by 0.12 to arrive at the weighted rating) Sum total of these weighted ratings across various parameters gives a measure of individual's worth to your department / organisation's success.

This has to be the basis of determining the raise.

I worked out an excel sheet to operationalise this process ( snapshot below)

There will be times when there will be a need to tweak this model.

The deviation from Ideal raise can be used to bring the salaries closer to market rate. This raise now has to be compared with the market rate to tweak it further. eg of a scenarios that would need tweaking: If some one has a high market rate, and raise as per your calculations is far below the market rate - but you still need him for a project ( eg the employee is not a team player/ not dependable however has the certifications that are needed for this project) - you can give him a tactical short term ONE TIME Bonus related to this project milestone and not increase his salary. This one time bonus will ensure that the employee is not leave you till the end of the project, and give you a time to find / groom a more suitable employee. There is also a possibility that the skill set that is having a very high market rate right now may not be as hot, six month down the line ( ie when your project ends) and hence you will be not only saving some amount but also being fair to your workforce. This one time Bonus related to project will also ensure that you as an employer will not be stranded with employee E kind of scenarios where the employee is getting more than the then market rate.

Stop and THINK

Stop and THINK
Here is Pooh Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it. ---AA Milne, Winnie the Pooh

Days , weeks and months passby... and no time to step aside and think. Maybe its not lack of time, but lack of a reason. Maybe I have got used to the bumpy way of coming downstairs.

Dilbert

This is how I am feeling right now. I am working on a project that we all know will not come to us.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

I had recd this in a forwarded e-mail, found it worth keeping and sharing.

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005 Text of Commencement address by Steve Jobs

This is the prepared text of the address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computerand of Pixar Animation Studios, who spoke at Commencement at StanfordUniversity, on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.

I never graduated from college.

Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.

Today I want to tellyou three stories from my life.

That's it. No bigdeal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit.

So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born.

My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was allset for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.

So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"

They said: "Ofcourse."

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from highschool. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college.

But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.

I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.

So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all workout OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5c deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one goodmeal a week at the Hare Krishna temple.

I loved it.

And much of what Istumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.

Let me give you one example : Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in mylife.

But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all cameback to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.

It was the first computer with beautiful typography.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that nopersonal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.

Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards.

So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma,whatever.

This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky I found what I loved to do early in life.

Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple hadgrown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over4000 employees.

We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30.

And then I got fired.

How can you get fired from a company you started?

Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well.

But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out.

When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him.

So at 30 I was out.

And very publicly out.

What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone,and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months.

I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley.

But something slowly began to dawn on me: I still loved what I did.

The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.

I had been rejected, but I was still in love.

And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.

The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.

Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, ToyStory, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.

In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.

It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith.

I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle.

As with all matters of the heart, you'll know whenyou find it.

And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on.

So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

Remembering that your are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.

I didn't even know what a pancreas was.

The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancerthat is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months.

It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.

It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day.

Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.

I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept : No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own innervoice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing,so it was all made with typewriters, scissors,and polaroid cameras.

It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 yearsbefore Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "StayHungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.

StayHungry. Stay Foolish.

And I have always wished that for myself.

And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Blogs - Ultimate Marketing Tool

I was wondering on how to recover the password for my homepage hosted on rediff homepages - only to discover after couple of hours that there is no way. They seem to have deleted my profile form the homepages database (they are not recognising my username for password recovery) , however I cant create a new id with the old username .. Fianlly decided to go for a new geocities homepage . The only thing that I dislike about geocities is that they take 1/3rd of the width of the page - and makes it very very obvious in a loud voice that this is a free homepage - appears as if they are saying since you cant pay for the homepage take this 2/3 portion my ad.

Anyway even after uploading my content on the website I am not happy - the java script wont run - looks like something to do with the space sharing that i am doing with geocities banner.
On the other hand blogs are very very user friendly - atleast so far they are. I see that they are fullfilling the true need for homepage.

I understand that in order to keep these servers up it costs money - and there has tobe a business case for them to keep it as user friendly as it is today. Well the solution is here :

The blog sites will have to find a way to target the customers in a very subtle way- to keep their business running. Instead of asking a member to put an ad on his website , they can ask a blog writer to review a product - someone whose blog is read more often / is networked. A review is going to carry more weight rather than an advertisement.
This review kind of a mechanism can gain credebility only of there is a body - blog publisher himself that will randomly give the product to be reviewd to a number of participents (not disclosed) form the manufacturer/ marketerer for a fee. Each blogger has to review any one product every quarter in order to remain active /publish his blog.

This way actually the core purpose of marketing will egt served.
Marketing is not supposed to be selling a substandard product by blatantly brainwashing the consumers, but a process which covers entire lifecycle starting from conceptulisation to improvement based on customer feedback. Bloggers can review comment on the product even before the formal launch and these can act as an input for the manufacturer.

This will bring down the cost of marketing to some extent - provided proper segmenting and targeting is done - you give your product for review only to the appropriate blogs / forums /bloggers froma particular part of the world / bloggers from a particular background only. These bloggers are likely to have blog views with like mineded bloggers only - the people whose representative profile has been targeted for reviewing the product.

Even the payment can be based on the number of views actually realised.

This actually helps everyone - gives the Blog publisher a way to make his business viable, gives a mechanism to do it ( forcing everyone to review a product) , bloggers reviewing are happy - because they dont have to pay for publishing their blog , and they dont have to put on stupid ads on their websites. bloggers reading are happy becausethey are sure that there was a fair mechanism and the blogger they are reading the review from has not been paid for reviewing this product. Company selling inferior quality products or companies that have been surviving on might will be the only ones who will hate this. As their model of brainwashing of consumers done by buying adspace/ airtime will not work here. Infact the consumer forums / governing bodies would also be hasppy as this empowering the consumer.

Thats all for today.

Alice in Wonderland

The story goes something like this...
Alice reaches a fork in the road, and asks the Cheshire Cat sitting on a tree,
`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.
`I don't much care where--' said Alice.
`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.
`--so long as I get SOMEWHERE,' Alice added as an explanation.
`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'

In your life, you will certainly reach SOMEWHERE if you keep walking.
And you will reach somewhere further if you walk further ...and so on..

What is the reason for your journey ?
Is it a destination? A destination or The destination ? Or Milestones to be crossed ?
Is there a purpose to you walking and slogging - what is it ?

More fundamental Question : Is there an end to the journey?

What is more important for you - the journey or the destination?

As I see, the desitinations do change and the journey becomes endless.
You spend the only currency you have - ie  time - which is irreversible, on this journey called life.
To me it appears, the journey matters more than the milestones crossed.

In that case Is'nt Journey a Destination?