Move With The Flow, Learn To Let Go

We tend to cling to every object in our lives. We hold on to our profession, relationship or possession as if our entire world depends on them. We are so busy clinging to our own lives, that we have forgotten to live with the flow. We are afraid to move ahead, afraid to let go.
Life in essence is like an unobstructed, unrestrained, uncontrolled flow of a river. Life flows at its own pace and the ultimate source of all our pain and sufferings is our tendency to cling to and obstruct the flow. Professional life stagnates, relationships are broken, possessions are lost; all because we refused to let go when we were actually required to let things take their own course.
Why do we cling? We cling because change scares us; we cling because we are afraid to face the unknown, to face challenges; we cling because we feel secure if the status quo is maintained; we cling because we refuse to believe that life can never be static; because we refuse to accept the transience of everything; we believe that everything is in our hands. We do not have enough faith in life and that higher force which is omnipotent and omnipresent. In the chaos of existence, we have lost touch with our higher self. Most of us lead a life which is similar to that of a child who is lost in a crowd, separated from his guardians. He has nobody to place his faith on. He is afraid, insecure, suspicious about everyone and everything.
We live under the false illusion of having everything under our control. The spirit of getting things done becomes a problem when we continue to cling on even after we have exhorted all our efforts. We are overwhelmed by a sense of despair and disillusion when things move beyond our control. It is at this stage we need to learn to let go. Several times relationships are broken just because we tried too hard to make them work. We didn’t give the breathing space they required to grow. We didn’t let go and let them take their own course.
Professionally or personally, once all the efforts are made towards achieving a goal, we must learn to let go and let life take the best course. It might or might not be of one’s choice, but if we have faith, we will realise that it inevitably is the best course. We need to believe that forces above us are far better equipped to make judgments for us. We must learn to have faith in their judgment. Letting go, however, does not mean turning into a fatalist. One cannot sit idle in life and expect life to take care of itself. Karma, the fulfilment of one’s duties is the ultimate objective of all human existence and if we fail to fulfil our duties towards life, life inevitably fails us.
When God gives us dreams, He shares them with us. Whatever we consider our dreams, are actually His dreams and He gives us the capability to realise them. The part we are required to play is to ensure the optimum usage of the capabilities bestowed upon us. And once we have played our part with utmost honesty and effort, we need to let go, step aside and let God step in to fulfil our dreams. After all, they are His dreams, too.

Coping with Adverse Times

Different people measure success differently. While some may define success as the number of cars a person has, others see it simply as a steady job that pays the bills. Whatever the definition, most people shudder to think of themselves as a failure. Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the light bulb and 100 other inventions once said of his failures, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." To top that when he was a youngster, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. He was counseled to go into a field where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality.Bill Gates [Images], one of the most successful men of our times too went through tough times. In retrospect he says, "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney [Images] because he "lacked imagination and had no original ideas". The list of people who succeeded after failures is long. However, great success doesn't happen to everyone. Twenty-eight-year-old Hemant Sabnis says success eluded him for almost 10 years."I tried for many jobs but could not get any," recollects the engineering graduate. "I was absolutely fed up. I must have sent out thousands of applications. I even got selected for a few interviews. And then something would go wrong. Either my qualification was a problem; sometimes even my body language was a problem."He remembers the times when he was so down in the dumps that he refused to meet people. "I would avoid my friends. I stopped going out," he reminisces, "Nothing interested me. I had almost lost all faith in myself."What then salvaged this young man? His father's trust in him. "My father is retired. He had a lot of aspirations from my sister and me. I realised that I wasn't being able to fulfill his wishes. That hurt even more than not being able to land a job," he adds. Then came a time that seeing his son morose saddened the father. "He told me that it was okay if I did not have a job. He was more hurt that I was depressed. It was then that I decided to give it one more shot," he says.This time around the circumstances were the same but Hemant's outlook had changed. He was now more positive. "I decided to try a different approach at interviews. I read up on how to be more jovial and smiled through my interviews," he says. And after three tries he was successful. He now works as a junior engineer in an iron moldings factory in Kolhapur. "I know the path ahead of me now. I also know there are a lot of people like me out there. I want to tell them that they need to have faith in themselves first. Things will eventually fall in place," he smiles. When the going gets toughVikas Bhande* from Mumbai has a similar tale to tell. Vikas was born into a poor family where his mother, the sole breadwinner, was employed as a maid. He recollects days when they had little or no food. "For years my mother did people's dishes and scrubbed people's floors," says this spunky 25-year-old, "Her aim was to provide education for all three of us. My other siblings though didn't study too far."Vikas was always interested in studies. However, one incident changed the purpose of his entire life. That was in his fifth standard. "I failed my exam in the fifth standard," he recollects, "My brother and sister had already made it clear that they are not going to study. My mother was very upset. She had pinned her hopes on me and I had let her down."His mother cried that entire night and prayed to god. "I always thought my mother was strong. I had seen her smile through the toughest of situations," he remembers, "When I saw her cry like that, I realised I had disappointed her. I was ashamed of myself."That's when he decided to change the tide. "I studied very hard the next year and came third," he smiles. Since then there was no looking back.He studied diligently even through their tough times. "Trouble began when I reached higher classes and my expenses started mounting. When I passed my tenth my mother's employees decided to sponsor my education. That's how I completed my education," he recollects.While pursuing his own studies, Vikas realised he could supplement the family income by taking tuitions. "I started taking tuitions. I saved up and did a course in networking," he recollects, "Today I have my own little business where I look after networks of small companies. I have even hired two people."His mother stopped working when Vikas' tuitions were enough to cover family expenses. Today with her only daughter married and her two sons taking care of her needs, Vikas says she has little to complain of.Ask him how he did it? "After my first failure, I never had time to think or cry over my situation," he recollects, "I knew I had to get my mother out of other's homes. There was nothing else on my mind."Secret ingredientsThese two stories probably do not warrant a bravery award. Yet these two brave men teach you a lot about failure. Here are some life lessons to learn from them:Have faith in yourself and your abilities.Don't be too proud to ask for help.One door closes, but another door somewhere is opening. Be alert.Work towards improving yourself all the time. Never be complacent.If today is not going the way you want it to, don't fret. Tomorrow will be a brighter day.Set your own standards for failure and success. Be rigid about your limits on failure, but not about success.Bear in mind that neither success nor failure is everlasting. However, you can work towards making your success last longer.Work hard, smart and faithfully. You will never know when you will be recognised for your effort.Don't feel disheartened or sad, do something that energises you.Smile. It will obscure the darkness of failure and outshine the glory of success.*Names changed to protect privacy
Posted by P K Kothari at 6:54 AM

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish Steve Jobs

'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says
This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered 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 tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. 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 all set 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: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. 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 work out 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 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled 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 my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back 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 no personal 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 had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 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, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned 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 when you 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 you 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 cancer that 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 others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. 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 years before 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: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. 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.

Upgrade ur Skills S Bagchi

Upgrade yourself from the world of codingHow does one build a successful technical career? SUBROTO BAGCHI gives you the nine key factors.
THE other day, I met a bright young engineer in MindTree and asked him what his ambition was. He was very clear. “I want to be an architect”. My next question to him was, what does he read? He looked surprised and then replied that he does not read much outside what appears on a computer screen. My next question to him was whom all does he admire in MindTree among the three best architects? He named the predictable three. Then I told him what the fundamental gap was between him and the best three. It was about the ability to make intelligent conversation about any subject under the sun — a capability borne out of serious reading habits.The next thing I asked him to do was to poll these three on what were the six books they had read last. The result was amazing. The three named eighteen books in all — of which at least six were common. Ninety percent of the books had nothing to do with information technology. The exercise proves a key point — to be a great nerd, one has to have interests outside writing code. However, many engineers think that the path to a great technical career is about technical skills alone.Long back, Bell Labs conducted an interesting study - closely watching the common characteristics among a group of technical professionals who rose to the top. The exercise revealed nine key factors outside just technical competence that differentiated brilliant technical folks from the masses. The study was conducted by Robert Kelly of Carnegie Mellon and Janet Caplan of Williams College. As I see the Indian industry today, I think the study done at Bell Labs remains relevant in every detail. The Bell Labs engineers who did extremely well for themselves - as they progressed in their career, showed the following qualities that differentiated them from their peers: taking initiative, cognitive ability, networking, leadership, teamwork, followership, perspective, organisation savvy and show-and-tell capability. Let us look at each of these and see what lies underneath.Taking initiativeThis is about accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job. It is about volunteering for additional activities and promoting new ideas. None of these will jump out as apparent as a young engineer gets in to her first job. She will tend to think that her career progress is really dependent only on the ability to write code. The concept of initiative begins by looking for technical and other opportunities in the organisation and volunteering for them. The idea of volunteering is little understood — both by organisations and individuals. In the days to come, it will gain increasing prominence in our professional lives. Initiative is also about two other things — dealing constructively with criticism and planning for the future. The latter is a function of many things — a good starting point is to start mapping the environment, learning to understand how the future is unfolding and then stepping back to ask, how am I preparing myself?Cognitive abilitiesThe concept of cognitive development is about understanding the interplay of technology and trends in how they are getting deployed. It is also about recognising the business eco-system in which technology works. It is about situational understanding and consequence thinking. The importance of consequence thinking is very critical. It asks us to look beyond the immediate deliverable of a task and it is about asking who will be impacted by my work, what is the end state? People in our industry just think in terms of modules and seldom ask where is it going, who is my customer and more importantly - who is my customer’s customer? Cognition is a key faculty that determines how much we are able to read patterns, make sense of things. Refining cognitive skills helps us to go beyond stated needs of our customers to explore unstated needs.NetworkingWe tend to think of networking in a social sense. As one grows higher in life, we are often as powerful as is our network. Building a professional network requires us to step out of the comfort zone to look at whom can I learn from. Quite often, and more as one progresses in life, the learning has to come from unusual sources. At MindTree, we expose our people to social workers, architects, graphic designers, teachers, people who lead government organisations, leaders from client organisations. The interesting thing about benefiting from a network is that it works like a savings bank. I need to deposit in to it before I withdraw. We all have heard about how important internal and external knowledge communities are. Again, in MindTree, we encourage people to belong to 26 different knowledge communities that run on a non-project based agenda and are vehicles of learning. These create networking opportunities and open many doors.LeadershipNext to networking is development of leadership skills. Many technical people associate it with “management” and shy away from developing key leadership skills like communication, negotiation, influencing, inter-personal skills, business knowledge, building spokespersonship and so on. Take for instance negotiating as a skill. Imagine that you are an individual professional contributor. Why should you learn to negotiate? Tomorrow, your organisation becomes member of a standard body and you have to represent the organisation as a technical expert. You will find yourself needing to negotiate with powerful lobbies that represent a competing viewpoint or a rival standard. Unless you have honed your capability alongside your hacking skills, you will be at a complete loss. Yet, you do not discover your negotiating capability one fine morning. You need to work on it from an early stage. Negotiating for internal resources is becoming another critical need. You can choose to remain an individual professional contributor but from time to time, you have to create mind share in the organisation where resources are limited and claimants are many. Establishing thought leadership is another key requirement of growth and independent of whether I want to be a technical person or grow to be a manager, I need to develop as a leader who can influence others.TeamworkOur educational system does not teach us teamwork. If you ever tried to solve your test paper “collaboratively” - it was called copying. You and I spent all our school and college life fiercely competing to get the engineering school and seat of our choice. Then comes the workplace and you suddenly realise that it is not individual brilliance but collective competence that determines excellence. Collaboration is the most important part of our work life. Along with collaboration come issues of forming, norming, storming, performing stages of team life. Capability to create interdependencies, capability to encourage dialogue and dissension, knowledge sharing become critical to professional existence. All this is anti-thesis of what we learn in the formative years of life. Add to it, our social upbringing - our resource-starved system tells us to find ways and means to ensure self-preservation ahead of teamwork. In Japan, the country comes first, the company (read team) comes next and I come last. In India, it is the other way round.FollowershipThe best leaders are also great followers. We can be great leaders if we learn and imbibe the values of followership. Everywhere you go - there are courses that teach leadership.Nowhere you will find a business school teaching you followership. Yet, when solving complex problems in life, we have to embrace what is called “situational leadership”. I have to be comfortable being led by others, I must learn to trust leadership. Many people have issues reporting to a test lead as a developer, or being led by a business analyst or a user interface designer. In different parts of a project life cycle, people of varied competence must lead. I must be comfortable when some one else is under the strobe light. I must have the greatness to be led by people younger than I, people with a different background or a point of view. That is how I learn. PerspectiveThis is the hardest to explain. It begins with appreciating why I am doing what I am doing. Quite often, I find people having a very narrow view of their tasks; many do not see the criticality of their task vis-à-vis a larger goal. So, a tester in a project sees his job as testing code or a module designer's worldview begins and ends with the module. He does not appreciate the importance of writing meaningful documentation because he thinks it is not his job or does not realise that five years from now, another person will have to maintain it.I always tell people about the story of two people who were laying bricks. A passer by asked the first one as to what he was doing. He replied, “I am laying bricks”. He asked the second one. He replied, “I am building a temple”. This story explains what perspective is and how the resultant attitude and approach to work can be vastly different. Organisational savvyAs technical people grow up, they often feel unconnected to the larger organisation. Some people develop a knack of exploring it, finding spots of influence, tracking changes, creating networks and in the process they learn how to make the organization work for them. The organisation is not outside of me. If I know it well, I can get it to work for me when I want. Think of the difference between one project manager and another or one technical lead from another. One person always gets the resources she needs - the other one struggles. One person knows who is getting freed from which client engagement and ahead of time blocks the person. One person reacts to an organisational change and finds himself allocated to a new project as a fait accompli - another person is able to be there ahead of the opportunity. Larger the organisation, higher is the need to develop organisation savvy. It begins with questioning ones knowledge about the larger business dynamic, knowing who does what, tracking the work of other groups, knowing leaders outside of my own sphere and a host of other things. Importantly, it is also about tracking what the competitors of the organization are doing and keeping abreast of directional changes.Show and tellThis is the bane of most Indian software engineers. We all come from a mindset that says; if you know how to write code, why bother about honing communication skills? Recently, we asked a cross section of international clients on what they think is the number one area of improvement for Indian engineers? They replied in unison, it is communication. Show and tell is about oral and written communication. Some engineers look down upon the need for communication skills and associate it with people who make up for poor programming prowess. It is the greatest misconception. Think of the best chief technology officers of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Global Services or Sun. Their number one job is evangelizing.If they cannot forcefully present their technologies, nothing else will matter. So, every engineer must pay attention to improving the ability to present in front of people, develop the ability to ask questions and handle objections. In a sense, if you cannot sell the technology you create, it has no value. So, building salespersonship is a key requirement for technical excellence.The foregoing points are not relevant if you have already filed your first patent at the age of eighteen. Everyone else, please take note.

How This Tiger Got Its Roar

IT WAS THE KIND OF CALL THAT makes a young man grow up fast. On Aug. 11, 1966, Azim H. Premji was a senior at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., studying for finals after summer school. When the phone rang, his mother was on the line from India with devastating news: His father, M.H. Premji, had died of a heart attack at the age of 51. The younger Premji quickly booked a flight and left for the funeral, expecting to be back at Stanford in time for the fall semester. Instead, his father's death marked a fateful change of direction for the 21-year-old. Rather than pursuing his dream of bringing aid to the developing world as a policymaker at the World Bank, he found himself thrust into the nitty-gritty details of saving a failing company in a backwater economy.Fortunately, entrepreneurship runs in his blood. Premji's grandfather was founder of one of the largest rice-trading companies in India. Then, in 1945, M.H. Premji launched a cooking oil company called Western India Vegetable Products. But when the young Azim Premji arrived home he found the operation in shambles. And to his dismay, he discovered that his father had selected him to run it, a duty he felt he couldn't shirk. "It's like being thrown into a swimming pool," says Premji, who finally got his Stanford degree six years ago. "To avoid drowning, you learn to swim quickly."Since his plunge into the deep end of commerce, Premji built the company, later renamed Wipro Ltd. (WIT ), into one of India's tech services powerhouses. Today the business provides software programming, engineering design, and back-office services for more than 500 of the world's largest corporations. One of the keys to Wipro's early success was its ability to tap into India's vast pool of young technology graduates willing to work for wages as much as 80% lower than those in the West. But labor arbitrage is only part of the story. Wipro and other leading Indian tech outfits have learned to deliver first-quality work, top-notch customer service, super-efficient human resources, and, increasingly, technology innovation. Once considered unschooled upstarts, Wipro and its Indian counterparts have become innovators in doing business in a networked world.When Premji took over his father's business it was anything but global. It had about 350 employees, mostly in and around Bombay, and just $3 million in revenues. The company was publicly traded, and not long after Premji assumed control he faced shareholders for the first time at the annual meeting. Premji, who was self-conscious about his age, had grown a mustache in an effort to add some gravitas. But restless investors weren't impressed. One stood up to complain about the stock's lousy performance and demanded that Premji sell the company. "'There's no way a twit like you can run it,"' Premji recalls him saying. "More than anything else, that made me determined to prove him wrong," says Premji.It was time for a crash course in capitalism. Premji had never taken a business class, nor had his father taught him anything about running the company. So he visited a professor at a leading management school in Bombay and asked him to recommend some textbooks. He bought a pile of them, and over the next year he stayed up late into the night reading every one. From his readings he learned business basics and systematically built a company based on modern principles and practices. Those early years taught him the necessity of continuous improvement. "You were constantly questing for excellence," he says.The company's mainstay was buying peanuts from farmers and crushing them to produce shortening and edible cakes. The key employees were the buyers, who would evaluate a farmer's harvest by tasting the peanuts to make an estimate of the oil they contained and then set a price. Premji improved that system by asking farmers to send in samples that the company could dry and weigh to calculate the oil content. He transformed what had been an art into a precise business process, and he established Wipro's practice of routinely measuring every aspect of its business.PREMJI ALSO took an uncompromising stand on ethics. In the late 1960s and early '70s corruption was rampant in India, with government officials demanding handouts, customers asking for kickbacks, and farmers bribing clerks to tamper with weighing machines. Premji decided that his company had to be held to a higher standard, which he believed would ultimately enhance its stature with customers and employees.Once the cooking oil business was back on track, Premji broadened his horizons. He had no grand vision of what Wipro could become, but he saw opportunities and didn't want to miss out on them. He diversified, first into soaps and beauty products, then venturing even farther afield by manufacturing hydraulic components for construction equipment. The next step: computers. After the Indian government passed new rules in the late 1970s that required foreign companies to operate through Indian-owned affiliates, IBM (IBM ) pulled the plug on its operations. "When IBM left, it created a vacuum," says Premji. "So we decided to zero in on info tech. "Premji and his lieutenants knew nothing about computers, but that didn't stop them from trying to make them. They rented a 4,000-square-foot office in Bangalore, home to several of India's top technical and management colleges, and decided to build a minicomputer that would sell for far less than an IBM mainframe but do similar work. Within a year, Wipro shipped its first one. It later got into the PC business and quickly became the leading computer company in India.But the good times weren't to last. In the early 1990s, India liberalized its economy. With rules relaxed, including the local-partner requirement, the world's top tech companies flooded into the country. Wipro faced a crisis. Premji believed there was no way the outfit could beat Compaq, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), and IBM in the PC business. The big brands had huge sales and vast research and development budgets, allowing them to underprice and outengineer Wipro and the other home-grown Indian PC outfits.What Wipro did next set the stage for its emergence as a tech services powerhouse. The rescue plan was to sell engineering expertise to the world's top technology companies. "We saw that while the door was open for others to come into India, it was also open for us to go out. So we decided to become a global company," says Sridhar Mitta, Wipro's longtime chief technology officer, who later left to found e4e Inc., a rival tech services company. The first aim was designing software for telecom gear, but Wipro quickly followed with hardware and chip design. Its leaders saw they could set up similar operations and sell their services to a wide range of Western corporations -- not just technology companies but also banks, manufacturers, and retailers.Were the giants of Western capitalism ready to hire a tiny, no-name Indian outfit to perform important brainwork? Not very quickly. So Premji decided Wipro needed to do something to boost its credibility. The solution: Focus on quality. In 1995, Wipro received certification from the International Organization for Standardization for manufacturing quality. Then it adopted the programming standards of Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute. In later years, Wipro was quick to implement Motorola Inc.'s (MOT ) Six Sigma quality program. And today it's busy applying Toyota Motor Corp.'s (TM ) lean manufacturing techniques to its software programming and business-process outsourcing operations worldwide.Practically every move Wipro made turned into an uphill battle. Subroto Bagchi, the longtime Wipro executive who is now chief operating officer at MindTree Consulting, remembers what it was like to gain a foothold in Silicon Valley. He moved his wife and two daughters to a two-bedroom apartment in Cupertino and set up an office in the dining room. He bought a PC and a fax machine at Price Club using a friend's credit card and immediately began churning out proposals as quickly as his fingers could type. His children would be watching cartoons in the next room, but when they heard the phone ring, they knew to put the TV volume on mute so Dad could pick up the telephone receiver and say: "Wipro Technologies."As the company's first salespeople spread out across the U.S. in search of customers, they were like nomads. They got leads from technical people -- often other Indians -- who they knew in companies such as Intel, Seagate, and Sun Microsystems (SUNW ). Arriving in a new city, they'd camp out in a cheap motel and thumb through the telephone book looking for potential customers. "Nobody had heard of us," says Sudip Banerjee, president of Wipro's Enterprise Solutions business unit. "We'd make dozens of phone calls. Nobody would return them."Wipro's big breakthrough came with General Electric Co. (GE ) In 1990 the two companies had set up a joint venture, Wipro GE Medical Systems, to make and sell medical equipment in India. So GE was familiar with Wipro when it decided to shift some of its software development to the country. The entire Wipro management team, including Premji, pitched in to woo the Americans. "It was a large piece of business and gave us credibility," says Banerjee.Twice in a little more than a decade, Wipro spotted fundamental shifts in the business environment and then scrambled to create new businesses. Today the company is doubling down on its bet on engineering services, which already represent 35% of its $2.4 billion in revenues. In the past 12 months it has spent $100 million to purchase three engineering design firms in the U.S. and Europe. "We're able to evaluate opportunities at the right time and put together an act to make a commercial success of it," says Premji.One of Premji's most important accomplishments has been creating a sinewy management culture that thrives even under intense competitive pressure. He established two core principles that are instrumental in building the character of his leadership team. The first is rare among India's family-controlled companies: The chairman is not king. While Premji owns a controlling stake in Wipro, he shares authority and responsibility with his subordinates. The second key principle: Premji believes in a zero-politics culture. At Wipro, backstabbing, playing favorites, and kissing up to the boss -- tactics that sap much of American executives' energy -- simply don't work. Open and honest disagreements are not only tolerated, but also required -- of everyone.THE CHAIRMAN'S STYLE ISN'T just to encourage his lieutenants to debate one another: Premji insists that they debate him as well -- or even take him to task for his decisions or actions. "The man takes frontal criticism, and it's celebrated. You can openly disagree with him," says Bagchi, the former Wipro executive who launched Wipro's U.S. business from his dining room table. He recalls a time in the early 1990s when he was in charge of the company's quality initiatives and Premji had asked him to also handle office-building projects. When Bagchi was slow to get something done, Premji called him at home one afternoon as he was having tea with his mother. Bagchi resented Premji piling more on his plate. "'What do I have to do with real estate?' I told him: 'Don't expect me to do your clerical jobs for you!' I actually screamed at him over the phone," Bagchi recalls. Bagchi's mother was appalled at the outburst and, after the call ended, lectured him about showing proper respect to the boss.The maternal tongue-lashing made Bagchi worry that he might have crossed the line. Would Premji be furious with him? Yet back in the office a couple of hours later, he ran into Premji in the hallway, and the chairman didn't even mention the episode. By Premji's rules of conduct, Bagchi's reaction had been just fine. Bagchi was supposed to let him know exactly what he felt. "He would tell us: 'My job is to push you. When you reach your limit you need to push back,"' recalls Bagchi.For Premji, openness is more than a personal style. It's a strategy. "I find that people excel when they're provided a fair, free, and apolitical environment," he says. "At Wipro we strive to provide an open culture that encourages diversity of opinions. An organizational ability to encourage and harness diversity of thought is a significant competitive advantage."Playing the game of business according to Premji's rules has worked well for Wipro. It's expanding revenues consistently at some 30% annually, while the overall tech services industry is expanding at about 5% per year. Meanwhile, operating margins in its tech business top 20% -- more than twice the level of large Western services outfits.Think of Wipro's success as a wake-up call for Americans who are complacent about the future of their companies or their job security. With its work ethic and intense drive to win, Wipro is a reminder of the America of 100 years ago. "Are we hungry enough?" asks Nicholas M. Donofrio, executive vice-president for innovation and technology at IBM. Donofrio's father was an Italian immigrant who worked three jobs to support his family in the gritty factory town of Beacon, N.Y. Now, Donofrio questions whether Americans still possess that kind of drive. "If we amble along and take our time, the Indians and Chinese will close the gap and perhaps even surpass us. You can see the passion in their eyes. They're people on a mission."The challenge is the same for American individuals and companies: If they mean to succeed in a world of borderless commerce, they will learn to be as relentlessly self-improving as Premji and Wipro.

Managing in difficult times

The author is COO and president (US operations), MindTree Consulting
Peter Drucker is the most-read author on modern management theory. Drucker, an ageing California-based immigrant, is regarded as a philosopher with depth, simplicity and an uncanny ability to anticipate future. Peter Senge, a professor at MIT, is acclaimed as a thinker with high impact. His seminal work, The Fifth Discipline, brought into focus the importance of systems theory to modern-day managers. I remain in awe of both men as much as I am surprised how few Indians are aware of both the Peters.Some time back, I came across a video conversation between Peter Drucker and Peter Senge. The two Peters talked about managing in difficult times. In this instalment of Arbor Mentis, I am going to talk about four important lines of thought that touched me. Drucker, who talked in most part, highlighted the concepts of planned abandonment, need to focus on opportunities, preserving values and learning from non-profit organisations. The concept of planned abandonment deals with 'letting go'. It is a difficult thing for many designers and architects of products, services, or even business models. According to him, you have to move on when things look 80% complete. Similarly, you need to destroy your own creation when everything is looking just perfect. Creative people and technologists become so attached to their creation that it becomes their life. In time, it becomes a deadly embrace. The next concept is about focussing on the opportunity, not on the problem. An example Drucker gives is how a mediocre orchestra like the Chicago Philharmonic became world class in the hands of a new conductor. Drucker went to check the man out. When asked how he managed to uplift the standard, he said that the gap between the excellent people in any organisation, and those who are average is always constant. So the trick is to raise the level of the top performers, and, automatically, the overall performance level moves up. Peter Senge gives his own example of how every teacher has a problem student who is disinterested in the class. The teacher often makes it his or her personal challenge to reform this one student. Inordinate amount of finite energy is focussed on the problem student at the cost of the more attentive ones. The trick is to recognise where the natural flow of energy is, and go with it.Next, Drucker talks about values. But first we must understand that most of the time, we are really dealing with the challenges of growth. However, growth of any kind is inherently destructive. It happens because of the tension between centripetal forces of continuity and centrifugal forces of change. The secret, according to Drucker, is in emulating nature. Nature found out early on that the way to create vast amounts of change is to find out a core of constant values, and keep spinning around it. For example, nature created animals on the principle of polar symmetry. Physically, we are all symmetric at the poles. Once nature found out about the power of polar symmetry, it kept that as a constant value and created a two-legged animal, a four-legged animal and even a centipede around it. The number of times a heart beats in a human being and a salamander is constant. Keeping that value as constant, nature has been able to create endless variations of life forms around it. In an organisation's context, the polar symmetry or the heartbeat is the value system. Once we get that right, it is possible to grow without getting destroyed. Finally, Drucker talks about learning from non-profit organisations. It is about volunteerism. The industrial and post-industrial workplaces use a number of monetary instruments to motivate employees. Stock options and bonuses work only in good times; they backfire in bad. The key is to learn from voluntary organisations, where people give their best even without any of these. Drucker is convinced that 'for profit' organisations have more to learn from 'not for profit' organisations than the other way round.

The raw material mindset

The raw material mindset
India has the golden chance to present itself as designer of monuments, not supplier of granite
Subroto Bagchi
The author is COO and president (US operations), MindTree Consulting
It happened to me many years back on a visit to Washington, DC, home to the most-visited monument in the US, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: "A place to remember those who served during a turbulent time in US history... a place for the nation to heal its wounds." The memorial lists 58,226 names, in the order they died or were reported missing. At the end of all those names, there is a line that says: "This granite was imported from Bangalore, India."We have been a nation that supplied to the world raw materials, rather than finished products - granites, rather than the monument's design. The world discovered us for spices in the 1st century A.D. Since then, we have been spice-sellers to the world. Meanwhile, McCormick dominates the bottled spice business, and has pride of place in supermarkets. While we export spices, who leads the food business? The best chefs keep coming from Italy.After spices, it was the turn of Indian silk. The world discovered that one in similar antiquity - with the advent of the Silk Route. For centuries we bred silkworms and spun silk, but who calls the shots on the ramp? Versace, Giorgio Armani, Chanel, Yves St Laurent. Then came software services. For decades, most Indian companies have focussed on supplying grey matter that is equivalent to quarried granite and raw silk. This behaviour is driven by a desire to live off the land, to do what has the least risk and low value-add. Not stopping there, the whole pharmaceutical industry came up on the strength of the bulk drug business. As a nation, we need to break that mould. Proponents of continuity would argue that the raw material mindset was critical to establish our presence in the world market and that now we will automatically go up the value chain. By itself, that assumption is severely flawed.Yves Doz is a world-renowned professor at INSEAD, France. He explains that by doing something well, you do not automatically graduate to the next level. He argues that there are three layers of value someone can add, and each of the three require a different mindset. The lowest layer of value-add is the technical, adaptive layer. Raw granite, frozen shrimp, cotton bales and manpower: all fall into this category. You have least risk, least value-add, and lowest margins and highest susceptibility here.Then comes the experiential layer. Here, you do not play on your ability to intermediate between the access to raw material and the end user of it. You 'step into the shoes' of the customer, and create valuable products and services. Confronted with the challenge of introducing a new car in Europe, Nissan flew in its car designers to Frankfurt. They rented different makes of cars and drove 2,500 km all over the continent to get a sense of what it takes to be a motorist in Europe. Then they went back to design a car for Europe. It is not about a car. It is about stepping into the shoes of a motorist to experientially feel the need.At the highest level is what Doz calls the existential layer. This is where Sony or Mercedes Benz, or Swatch operates. They not only know how to get into the shoes of the customer, but as Doz says, "they creep into the mind of the customer." When a teenager in the Bronx or Mumbai or Tokyo walks with a sway in his step after putting on a pair of earphones, Sony knows what is going on in his mind and works backward from there to create products and services. Each layer we talked about is separated from the other by a glass ceiling. If these layers represent the so-called value chain, the conclusion is that you do not go up the value chain. You decide where you want to be on the value chain, and perch yourself there.India is on the cusp of interesting new times. It appears that finally the butterfly will emerge from the cocoon. In that emergence, we have the golden opportunity to present ourselves as designers of monuments, not suppliers of granite. I sense that the break from the past is coming from very unusual new directions. More about that next time.

Day trading on the job front

The lure of lucrative jobs at a very young age today is akin to the attitude of day traders during the Internet boom
CONVERSATION in an elevator: two engineers in their mid-20s exchanging notes. "How much did you ask?" "Eighty-five," comes the reply. The job interview has obviously taken place on company time. So what? The two engineers are oblivious to the fact that the elevator is a public place and that they are not alone. The casual, almost cynical, transaction reminds me of day traders during the Internet boom.Day trading, for the uninitiated, is buying and selling stocks in order to make a gain, in one day. It requires the intuition and the risk-taking abilities of a gambler. It is not about tomorrow, it is not about anything you would remotely call long term. The Internet arrived. And day trading shifted from the floor of the stock exchange to the virtual world. Many sensible professionals learnt about ways to make money without leaving the suburbs - all you needed was a PC and a modem. People quit their jobs and got on to day trading. Then the world stopped. Billions of dollars of losses later, the day-trading folk - flower children of the late 1990s - are still picking up the pieces.It is ironic, however, that the lesson is lost on many other people. The workplace is not a gambling den. To some, the most critical issue is to know who is getting how much money and where. There is no view of tomorrow and what the real wager in the game is. The initial years of a career are akin to the years spent in internship by a young surgeon. Inherent talent or skill does not matter. Real learning comes by watching senior doctors at work, learning to pick up signals while doing the rounds holding on to someone's coat-tails, and sharpening one's knowledge, skill and attitude. More importantly, these are the years when one learns to learn.But where is the time to learn to learn? I meet 20-something people who are convinced that they are ready to become the chief of finance or marketing or human resource of their organisations. They cannot wait and must get there before a 'batchmate' does. Telling them to ease up is like preaching celibacy to a teenager.Recently, I met one such give-me-the-chief's-job-or-I-will-go-elsewhere youngster. He just could not wait. I have a very simple thing to say to his kind. Think of nature. By the time you enter your teens, you have the ability to procreate. But society has realised that the ability to procreate and to parent are two different things. That is why even though at 12 you are physically ready to be a dad, you wait till you are 30. To the youngster I met, only functional knowledge mattered. That is like the ability to procreate, not the ability to take up parenting.On another occasion I was speaking to a competent professional who had just changed jobs to join MindTree. I asked him what his motivation was in stepping out of his earlier organisation. "Peer pressure," he replied. The last time I had known people talking about peer pressure was in the context of smoking or drinking. Here was an otherwise sensible, full-grown human being, educated in the best of institutions with a good job on hand. Yet, he walked out because all his friends who had joined the organisation with him were gone.One makes a job change for substantive reasons - each job change can be a snake-and-ladder game. It is not just about the job title and salary you get. In the early years, it is critical who you work with, how much headroom there is to learn and contribute, how competent the environment is to provide tough feedback, so that you are ready for larger challenges.Another group of young engineers I met at an industry event asked me if it is true that staying in one place for long makes you lose your worth. The answer lies in observing the track record of people who have made an impact during their lifetime. Seldom will you see that they have been mindless job-hoppers. They certainly haven't made job changes of the day trading or the peer-pressure kind. People at the top are invariably the ones who have made two, at best, three changes in their entire career.

Human Spirit Knows no bound S.Bagchi

LATHA was born to a truck-driver in a slum in Bangalore. She was born with a form of cerebral palsy that took away her ability to stand on two legs. Life delivered her as a cripple. In the eyes of society, she was doubly burdensome - girl children are considered burdens anyway, but she was also handicapped.Her parents gave her away to a missionary. Latha was raised at a convent away from her family. The missionaries realised the nature of her handicap and enrolled her at the school of the Spastic Society of Karnataka. We discovered her there when we were launching MindTree Consulting in 1999. We were looking for a visual identity for the organisation and decided to try working with children who had cerebral palsy.In a unique experiment, a week-long exercise was conducted with 10 children. They were briefed about the company's mission, vision, values and DNA. Our DNA was settled as Imagination, Action and Joy. She was one of the 10 children who were asked to render the concept of Imagination, Action and Joy into MindTree's visual identity. Latha, who was in the class-10 level of non-formal education at the school, did not make it with her design, but she won our hearts with her enthusiastic smile. We asked her to come and intern with us. We wanted to see if someone like her could run the front office of a consulting organisation. And over the last five years, she has grown up to fully take charge of our front office.When Latha joined us, she had just come from the doubly protected environment of the convent and the school. Though she was studying for her class-10 level non-formal exam, she talked like a small child and had a poor attention span. But we refused to sympathise. We believed that she had to learn her work, and if she challenged herself, she could scale. She did.As soon as she started with a stipend of Rs 5,000 a month, her long-lost family rediscovered her. She wasn't a handicapped person anymore. Her economic viability made her very wanted. They persuaded her to leave the convent, and come to live with them. They even tried marrying her off. And Latha was clearly not in a position to take her own decisions. We were also in a quandary: do we intervene or do we not? Were these her personal issues even though their outcome could hurt a shared goal of proving that a person like Latha could become part of the so-called mainstream? Were we selfish about nurturing that goal? These were not easy issues. Latha and the organisation worked their way through these challenges. Eventually, she emerged a winner.Today, Latha has a respectable place in society. She earns well and is even on MindTree's stock option plan. She comes to work as regularly as the sunrise. She knows her work and does it very professionally. Not stopping at that, she has trained two students from her school - both are earning members of society today. One of them is Lavesh who was a complete introvert. Many people with cerebral palsy are like that. Being part of a social system that focuses on the disability of an individual ahead of anything else, they tend to withdraw. It is both a defence mechanism and an inevitable trap.Months after coming into contact with people at MindTree, Lavesh has largely forgotten his past. He is not what his appearance or manner of speech is, he is what he knows and what he does. One day, when Lavesh was managing the front office, a visitor came looking for Abraham Moses, our administration manager. Moses was caught up with other work and, quite unlike his normal self, came to meet the visitor late. Lavesh chastised Moses and told him that while keeping a visitor waiting might be OK for Moses, it wasn't OK for him. Moses gracefully apologised, and was let off.One Latha has shown the way to one Lavesh, and to 1,300 other MindTree minds. Like Lavesh and Latha, we all have some disability or the other - some are pronounced, some are not. Latha has taught us that we are not our disability. We are our dream.

Making Sense of Difficult times

The day the world changed forever
Sept 8,2001: MindTree Consulting presented business plan to Board forecasting 100% growth YOY
Sept 11, 2001: WTC is hit by terrorists
Events next 48 hours:
Locate 2 employees
Call all hands meeting
Decision to contribute 1 days wage to an identified disaster victim


Next Steps
Company takes 10% salary cut – Directors take 10% cut on 1999 base
Decision taken to renegotiate every contract
Leadership huddles on bottom 5%
Indian managers decide not to let go, take additional cut
In US 5 non-performing high cost resources let go
Business unusual – plan is no longer valid. Focus on cost and hold on to revenue
Top Management starts over activating the communication engine
Middle Management fades
Continuous exposure to difficult news
Information dissemination replaces dialogue
Facts versus hope – what do people need?
The fallibility of Institutions & Leadership
The Government fails to protect – WTC to Anthrax
The economy crawls
There are lay-offs and closures – Scient, Viant, Cambridge Technology Partners…….
The Stock Market caves in – people lose nest egg. Heroes turn out to be involved in insider trading
Stock options look wimpy
The Priest becomes a pedophile
Big business becomes big hoax – Accenture, Enron, Qwest….
Leaders like Jack Welch – between company paid toilet paper to septuagenarian flings
What we learnt…..


Tough decisions, however appropriate, leave residual toxicity
People develop the survivor syndrome – information discounting becomes a form of survival
"Sense Making" emerges as a key leadership priority
Residual Toxicity
Many management decisions are like antibiotics. More quick acting they are, more is the residual toxicity
Every decision must be weighed for downstream implications and detoxification must accompany the decision
Decisional rules must be explained before publishing decisions
Recipient of radio activity must be clothed against radiation. A manager asked to take a tough call, must be told to temper toughness and not to conclude, it is the way to go
Leaders must look for toxicity residues. Silence and compliance do not mean absence of toxicity
Certain traces will only heal with time. Some problems can not be solved, they can only be survived
The Survivor Syndrome
Most people are Path dependent – when paths blur, there is emotional insecurity
When people see the fallibility of institutions and leaders, they can conclude that no one really can help
When I need help, only a stronger and more capable being can help me. When everyone looks vulnerable, I am really all by myself
When people around us lose, there is an invisible mourning within us
People mentally shrink and start discounting the environment as a form of defense
We run the danger of emerging as less than human beings when all becomes well

Sense Making

In externally and internally difficult times, "sense making" becomes a major leadership priority
Sense making is about system thinking. It is the ability to rise above a causal interpretation of events – you relate to larger body of knowledge and look at continuities
It involves wisdom, detachment and dialogue – it is about understanding emotional issues and not just rational linkages
Leaders must help others to do their own sense making
Apparent and the obvious cease to be appropriate
Leaders must suspend instant gratification and not try to influence every outcome

Values, humility & high availability

Values are the polar symmetry of an organization. Value centric organizations will be able to better navigate difficult times
Leaders must have humility and the sense of continuity of a farmer to be able to cross the chasm
Leaders must be available and engaged – Mayor Guiliani was available and engaged
We must know that only if we sweat in peace, we do not bleed in war