Are you a young Professional?! Then, Go! Kiss this Book!!

I mean, you MUST go and read Subroto Bagchi's (Founder CEO of Mindtree) book - "GO KISS THE WORLD!!"

"Go Kiss the World" is what Subroto’s mother told him when she was on her deathbed. And that inspired him to write this book.

This autobiography has three parts.

1st Part talks about his childhood days, his first job as a clerk in Government of Orissa service and then his first private sector corporate job in DCM.

2nd Part is about his career with a few IT companies including a 10 year spell in Wipro.

3rd Part deals with the evolution of MindTree and he shares his views on management, leadership, life etc here.

The book contains lot of lessons for any professional or entrepreneur though it is subtitled as "Life Lessons for the Young Professional".

There is a description of an instance where he and his sales guy being crushed by a Fortune 500 US company during a presentation. The pain he experienced from that incident made him try harder when Mindtree was still a little start up...

Here are some inspiring quotes from the book visit:

• Passion is what passion does: Too many people know what is wrong with the world. Their knowledge and intensity do not matter. What matters is making a small but real difference. That is why the Mahatma said, "Be the change you want to see".

• To get, you must first give: We need to believe that there is more in it for everyone if everyone is involved and benefits. Leaders must develop a mindset of abundance, not scarcity, as they build their organizational vision.

• The marginal person is important: Trying to please your boss is not beneficial in the long run. If you are considerate towards your juniors you will be remembered for a lifetime.

• It's all in the mind: Everything we achieve begins in our mind.
  
  

• Connect with people: When a leader connects at the level of feelings, he can get his people to aspire to dizzying heights and create in them the will and ability to scale them.

• The key to happiness is not money: You can acquire any amount of material success you want, but do not expect that to be the source of your happiness. This does not mean you should give up the desire to earn, but in doing so, keep low expectations on its ability to give you happiness. Money is important in life but not the source of any lasting happiness.

• Life is constant negotiation: Such is the dynamic nature of the world that we need to face an emergent situation with an even temperament and look for the most beneficial outcome for all concerned, given the new set of circumstances. Leaders must look at things as they are, not as we wish they should have been.

• Real men say sorry: Great leaders are people who can quickly and genuinely say that they are sorry. By saying sorry, you do not become weak. You shorten the path from the head to the heart.

• In life, one must learn to forgive others and, sometimes oneself.
  
  

Happy reading and wish you get bosses like him in your corporate career rather than most of the superficial, self-absorbed, incorrigible, bloviators that you see around!

(Footnote: Most of the above statements/learnings are taken directly from the book)

Are you the 4th Idiot?

Last weekend, I watched the movie 3 idiots for the third time in two weeks. I always get fascinated by relating movies with real life and exploring relevant messages and lessons from them. When I saw 3 idiots the first time, I knew that I’m at it again! So I watched the movie again and again and here are some of the lessons and messages that could be applicable to a lot of us in academia…. (or...stay as you are and become the 4th idiot!).

1. Keep It Simple, Stupid!

Life is need base not want base. Our desires have no limits. Simplicity is way of life and our Indian culture highly stresses on simple living and high thinking, and this is the way of life: ‘Deepen your roots and broaden your vision’.

2. Follow Passionately and Reach the Heights of Excellence

When you follow your passion, you’ll surely become great in that profession. When your leisure pursuit becomes your profession and follow it with passion, you will be able to excel in the life. You derive pleasure from it and the outcome would be job satisfaction, love and joy..

3. Life Is Not Just Intelligence Management, But Emotion Management

Regular studies and memory skills are important and it helps you in leading a successful life. You’ll be able to survive even if you can make some mark in the path of the life. By artificial means you may be able to taste short-term success, but it cannot replace how skillfully you manage crisis situations.

4. Power of Words in Communication

Every word we use has certain impact and value in communication. One mistake in using a word or wrongly emphasizing wrongly or pausing at a wrong place in communication it creates undesirable effect. This is very well illustrated in this film.

5. Celebrate Life!

Don’t live a dead life. Life is for enjoying and celebrating every moment to the fullest. Sign of life is enthusiasm and happiness.

6. Out of the box thinking

Sheer need puts you under pressure and compels you to invent something or to come out with some innovation. In this movie, Aamir Khan, makes use of the vacuum pump at the last moment and demonstrates this principle.

7. Learning Is Very Simple

You learn every moment and this is very simple. Those who teach might fail; but Learners seldom fail. Learning is simple; it’s never a complicated or difficult phenomenon.

8. Leadership Styles

The Dean of the institute in 3 idiots is characterized with a very distinctive leadership style. He follows his own ideology, principles, belief systems and values, and therefore he leads the entire institute in that manner. Institutional leadership is all about this. In the present scenario, many institutes are entangled in Square thinking. What we need is, perhaps a Spherical thinking.

9. Love is Beyond the Dimensions and Scope of Time or Space

Love is the universal truth. It is not time bound or space bound. Love is boundary free, time free and space free as was in the many cases from the mythology – Laila and Majnu, Meera and Krishna, etc.

10. Learning should be Pleasurable

The present system of education that we follow is creating and accumulating stress on students’ mind. Regulatory systems and University framework are necessary but can these be at the cost of the life?

...there could be some more lessons that are not addressed above... those who find any..are welcome to add 'em to this blog...

Global Village With Just 100 People

These are some starking facts that I stumbled upon while browsing for something else. Thought I should share this with all!

"If we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

• The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from male, 49 would be female


• 82 would be the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific


• 51 would benon-white; 18 white


• 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian


• 80 would live in substandard housing


• 67 would be unable to read


• 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation


• 33 would be without access to a safe water supply


• 39 would lack access to improved sanitation


• 24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)


• 7 people would have access to the Internet


• 1 would have a college education


• 1 would have HIV 2 would be near birth; 1 near death


• 5 would control 32% of the entire world’s wealth; all 5 would be US citizens


• 33 would be receiving—and attempting to live on—only 3% of the income of “the village”


• 7 people would have access to the Internet"

If you take a look at the world from this condensed perspective,the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes evident. Think of it!

If you woke up this morning with more health than sickness,you are luckier than the million that will not survive this week.

If there is a meal in your refrigerator, if you are dressed and have got shoes, if you have a bed and a roof above your head, you are better off, than 75% of people in this world.

This is our World!
And we are able to make changes!
Hasten to do good works!
Think of it!

Someone has told once:
"Work like you don't need money,
Love like you've never been hurt,
Dance like nobody's watching,
Sing like nobody's listening,
Be surprised, like you were born yesterday,
Tell the truth and you don't have to remember anything,
Live like it's Heaven on Earth".

Footnotes on the above statistics:
The original version of the STATE OF THE VILLAGE REPORT by Donella H. Meadows was published in 1990 as "Who lives in the Global Village?" and updated in 2005.

The initial report was based on a village of 1000. David Copeland, a surveyor and environmental activist, revised the report to reflect a village of 100, and distributed 50,000 copies of a Value Earth poster at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

Sources: Research for many of the facts for this 2005 update was done by Donella H. Meadows’ think tank: the Sustainability Institute. (See www.odt.org/pop.htm for further details.) The rest come from a variety of sources including David Smith’s children’s book: If the World Were a Village, the CIA World Factbook 2001 (age, birth, death, internet), 2001 World Development Indicators, World Bank (HIV), Adherents 2001 (religion) Bread for the World (malnourishment), United Nations Population Fund (food security) The Global Supply and Sanitation Assessment 2000 Report (improved water, improved sanitation)With so many new reports and constantly changing statistics, please view the above presentation as general and not meant to be totally accurate. It is more for the purpose of fostering understanding, so that we might better dialogue and understand the different cultures of our world.

IF YOU DON'T QUIT, YOU'LL MAKE IT !!!

Continuing from the "GBE-Night before exam" session, there's one GOLDEN RULE for writing GBE Exam.... and that's - YOU MUST ANSWER / ATTEMPT ALL THE 6 QUESTIONS. Please don't leave/quit any question for whatever reason - be it lack of time or not having sufficient points, etc. You have to attempt all the 6 questions, which would help you to get at least "some" marks for the attempted one. ...and ALWAYS STICK WITH THE "RUBBER BAND TECHNIQUE" that we discussed today, while answering.. So, the bottomline is "IF YOU DON'T QUIT, YOU'LL MAKE IT !"

GOOD LUCK!
SMILE WHILE YOU LEARN!!

The Night Before Exam!

Global Business Environment (GBE) is considered to be a much dreaded subject in the 3rd semester of MBA exam by many students pursuing MBA program in M.G. University. Though at MACFAST, we have discussed all the aspects related to the syllabus (and much beyond it!!), we will have a special session on how to approach GBE subject with an examination point of view on 21-Apr-2010 at 9 a.m. to 10 a.m. This session titled "How to smile through the GBE exam" will focus on specific tips on scoring good marks...so easily and comfortably... so that you could go to sleep on the eve of GBE exam with a smile and get up next day and write the exam with a smile on your face..!!!

More about it ...on 21st morning!

See you all there!!!

Go to the ants, sluggard!

When King Solomon urged his hearers to "go to the ant, thou sluggard; Consider her ways, and be wise" (Prov. 6:6), he couldn't have foreseen that modern managers would eagerly take his advice. Maybe that ancient wise man was truly wise in this way, too - that by studying the ants, we not only learn about the nature of industriousness, but that we might learn something more about planning, organising, communicating, working together as a team, disclipline and many other aspects of strategic management process that can tell us not only about ants but arguably about the most interesting species in nature - Homo Sapiens, sitting in corporate glasshouses and framing strategies, on how to effectively implement them.

The other day, we discuused in the "Strategic Management" class about the various learnings related to management from observing ants!

The out come of the discussion was amazing! Some of the interesting observations made by my guys were:

1. Ants Never quit !!

If ants are headed somewhere and you try to stop them, they'll look for another way. They'll climb over, they'll climb below, they'll climb around.They keep looking for alternate ways, if they are faced with obstacles.

2. Ants are good planners!

They are not so naive to think that summer will last forever. They think about winter and store thduring the summer.

3. Ants look for opportunities!

During winter, they don't continue to stay in the ant hill. They are out, in the very first warm day. If it turns cold again, they'll dive back down, but then they come out the nextwarm day.

4. They are great problem solvers!

Ants have an amazing ability to communicate with each other and work together to accomplish complex tasks. They are brilliant builders, and are excellent at solving problems by using their strengths. Very often we find them carrying heavier staff than their own weight and see them cross over any barriers or problems coming in their way.

5. Espirit de corps!

Many times we could see other ants joining the one who's finding it difficult to move something on its own. The struggling one might communicate to others to help him out and soon we find a lot of his "friends and colleagues" joining hands, without any dirty politics or egoistic self-centerdness!

6. The art of war!

They knew many of the strategies of war, much before Sun Tzu published his works as "The Art of War", and implement them successfully. It has often been said that a single ant is fairly useless, and will die very quickly, but together, a whole colony acts like a single creature, with remarkable intelligence and understanding. The warrior ants have such enormous tools on their limbs which they use for fighting, that they can't actually feed themselves.

7. Perseverence!

They relentlessly make attempts to carry seemingnly impossible objects, until they succeed at last. We should learn this perhaps, at least, when we follow our dreams!!

8. Great communicators with a goal oriented approach!

If a big gap is created, forcing ants to try to cross it to reach food, it is fascinating to watch how they investigate the problem, how they communicate with each other to get a group together, and how they manage to bridge the gap. This could be by bringing resources to build a bridge, or even using each other to make a bridge. It has been seen in the wild that sometimes hundreds of ants bond together to create a bridge out of their own bodies in order to cross a gap or ridge, such as a stream. This is a feat rarely seen in nature, with so many separate creatures of any species, all working together to achieve a shared goal. "The collective behavior that emerges from a group of social insects, such as ants, can be called 'swarm intelligence'. Swarm intelligence consists of the self-organization of many individuals that work collectively to find the best solution for a difficult problem".

9. Discipline is a way of life!

In no anthill, you may find any waste praticles thrown or left unattended! All the inside compartments in the colony will be spic and span!

...there were, infact, more than 20 points that we discussed in the class about ants and the lessons we learn from them, but these are some of the best ones...! More lessons and contributions are welcome from all! As they say, "there's no end for learning".