Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication when it comes to Corporate Communication

I recently drive a presentation for the work/project i am involved in executing. It was for an audience that did not have much inkling about the project.

To establish a connect with people, i tried and gave some analogies about the building block of the project i.e. the APIs. 

Wikipedia definition of API is:
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of subroutine definitions, communication protocols, and tools for building software. In general terms, it is a set of clearly defined methods of communication among various components.

For anyone unaware about APIs, the above definition can turn out to be quite overwhelming. So i resorted to giving analogies to explain the concept.  I picked these up from this thoughtful a16z podcast.

Analogies for describing an API:

#1. Door of the house. Software is the house and door is the one that gives you access to all that's inside.

#2. Say you are building a castle (analogous to software product) and the castle has different lego pieces of different colors and different shapes. Those are the different micro-services and how they actually and how they connect each other is via the 4 end points which are the APIs

#3. Software is a body and APIs are the veins that are moving information inside the body. They take information from different organs of the body and move all the information around.

My inference from this experience:
Everyone loves simplicity but for various reasons professionals tend to express things in a complicated way. Some of this complexity is thrust upon by organizational culture especially the ones that are inclined to give more respect to people who use heavy jargons. (Just a disclaimer: I have nothing personal against people who use heavy jargons, most of them are learned people for whom these jargons form second nature.)

One of the lessons i learned from a leader i admire was that upcoming leaders should align with corporate vocabulary. The words that form corporate vocabulary actually stems of what CEO and the leadership teams speak externally, with customers, with partners and with employees. So, if the source that forms corporate vocabulary, there are heavy jargons , TLAs (Three Letter Acronyms), the rest of organizations tend to follow the same.

I am reminded of this tweet from Vala Afsher about Elon Musk's dislike for acronyms.

The tendency to form own terms, jargons and acronyms slows down the communication in the organization and hence should be discouraged.

Organizations would do well to embrace Leonardo da Vinci's ageless lines when it comes to communication within the organization.

 "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." 

What are your strategies to uncomplexify communication ?

Notes from Leadership Summit: Great Leaders Take Risk

This one's really a blast from the past. I had attended a Leadership Summit back in 2010, which had a positive impact on me. I remember this conference for a couple of reasons.

First reason was obvious- various sessions at this conference were chaired was industry leaders including a few luminaries. In addition to the learnings i gathered, it was a sort of fan boy moment to hear them live.

A more inconspicuous reason was related to my note taking skills. I remember that I managed to note most of the stories and key points I gathered in this conference. It may sound like a routine thing to many and you may wonder why I feel proud about it. I have a perspective on this and I

wish to share it here.
I feel note-taking is one of the most underrated yet most effective skills. The fact that almost 9 years later I am reproducing my learnings via this blog is a reason enough to consider note taking as a serious skill. Without these notes, I may have had these learnings hidden at some corner of my mind but that wouldn't have helped me nor the readers- just because of sheer inability to reproduce them at the moment of need.

The session notes that I reproduce here from a session on risk taking. A cool thing about this panel session was that it was chaired by country heads of my current and the former organization.
Risk taking is an often talked about virtue and at the same time one of the least understood one too.

There are numerous examples about risk taking that one can learn about yet it is a concept that is hard to internalize with just reading theory. You got to take risks to truly understand what risk taking is all about.
Here are some nuggets from the session that I made note of. Hope you enjoy going through these as much as I did re-reading these again.

Great Leaders take Risk

Speakers:

Sridhar Jayanthi, Senior VP, Engineering & Managing Director, McAfee India

Rakesh Singh, VP, products and Managing Director, Citrix R&D India

My assessment notes:

·       This was again a panel discussion and quite enlightening of all.

·       This session was again not PPT driven and involved sharing of real life experiences around risk taking. This was moderated by Sridhar Jayanthi.

Key Takeaways:

·       Both panelists seem to agree that one of the biggest risk that a professional can take is deciding to start a Start-up operation.

·       In Start-ups, the major risks are around constraints and having to manage your new born business around those inevitable constraints.

·       In a Leadership team, Risk is a way of life.

·       There was a reference to the book- “Design of Business” in one of the discussions.

·       One striking quote- “If you don’t take risk, you are stagnant. And if you are stagnant, you are not going linear but falling back literally.”

·       Take risk to grow people and help them take your place.

o   One such risk story was narrated by Sridhar Jayanthi. In one of his previous organizations, they I think hired a person (who was a construction worker) to take care of cleaning/housekeeping stuff. This guy had not even completed his schooling but was quite passionate. One of the tasks that he was involved in doing was collect the printouts near the printer and ensuring that the place was clean. One of the things, he observed was that during every Friday, there were many printouts (around 100s) that were fired and the printer invariably used to give problems in printing the jobs on Fridays. This guy was a keen observer and he could figure out the problem and not only fixed it but suggested a very productive way of doing the routine job that not anyone else could think of.  Foreseeing his talent, One of the bosses there spotted him and took a risk of training this guy on programming languages and computing stuff. This person picked up the stuff quite steadily and started contributing a role of Engineer very soon. Within few years, he scaled himself as a Manager of Development and by the time Sridhar left the organization, he had scaled up as a Director of Development.

o   An Amazing story of a construction worker who turned out to be an immense success in technology areas. This happened primarily because some took a risk with him and considered him suitable for a technical role.

·       Building Risk culture requires-

o   Risk Enablers

o   People who are grounded having Inner peace.

§  Rakesh Singh narrated a story of founder of Runners High, Dr. Rajat Chauhan, who showed tremendous guts to leave the job (after a successful higher education in US) to do something he found more meaningful for life i.e. become a running coach. It takes great deal of peace with inner self to do something you really want to do especially when going against the tide.

o   Sense of humors

§  Rakesh Singh again illustrated an example of a Pakistan cricket player- Shahid Afridi. During the recent Test cricket series with Australia, he was faced with barrage of lightning fast bouncer deliveries in an over from Mitchell Johnson. One after the other, he was faced with balls that just whizz past his head, ears, nose etc. and he was all clueless about what was happening. After few such balls, in an unusual gesture, he took off his helmet and just laughed out loudly with mouth wide open (without worrying about millions who were seeing him) to calm his nerves. The lesser mortals who have succumbed to pressure but here was a rather unorthodox action to deal with adversities. What better way than to just laugh off the problems and face what coming next.

·       Create a risk environment in the organization-

o   What you rewards and how you handle failure determines the risk taking appetite of the organization.

o   There was a talk of organization which used to reward the Best failure. How many organizations do that ?

·       How can Managers become risk takers ?

o   First and foremost- One got to be a risk taker.

o   A lot of times success and failures in career is because of what opportunity one picks up. Great leaders grab the opportunity when they find it.

o   Get buy-in from the people. What people say about you and way they perceive you is important.

o    Be genuine and be visible-

§  People should be high skilled communicators.

§  Don’t be arrogant or boastful but be visible and market yourself and your achievement in a right manner.

§  Quiet achievers are very hard to find in an organization.

Images source/credits:

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Little nuggets from an inspirational book 'Steal like an artist'

We all read and consume contents from various sources. In our reading pursuit, we often come across words that we find effortless to construe and feel an eternal connect that's sometimes hard to explain and assign adjectives to.
I recently had such experience when reading Austin Kleon's book- 'Steal like an artist'. I went through the book like a breeze and resonated sublimely with the core of who I am. Now, I don't claim to be anything like the publically renowned creative folks and cases referred to in the book but I can claim to have mind of own in this regard with my way of dealing with all things creative. And that's very much like in the spirit of creativity.
I don't like writing book reviews and that's for a reason. If my years of working in management/leadership roles have taught me something, it is this- To be effective as a leader, one must learn to suspend judgement and inculcate the habit of looking at things as they are. Mastering this skill is hard but this is something that has helped me in numerous ways (may be a blog on this later) in avoiding potential problems.

I somehow took this skill of suspending judgment in case of reading books too. And never liked reviewing books. Of course, depending upon stage of my life and state of mind, some of the books i read were relevant, some less so.

'Steal like an artist' definitely had an lasting impact on me, some thoughts resonated fully, some challenged me. I would be pursuing a few ideas and possibly write about them separately. In this blog, i just wanted to share the nuggets from this book that i shared as tweets (getting reasonable attention on social media). Hope you like these:


On working with people better than you:

If you ever find that you're the most talented person in the room, you need to find another room.

On having a hobby:

It's so important to have a hobby. A hobby is something creative that's just for you. You don't try to make money or get famous off it, you just do it because it makes you happy. A hobby is something that gives but doesn't take.- Scott Tomlinson

On importance of being bored:

I get some of my best ideas when I'm bored, which is why I never take my shirts to the cleaners. I love ironing my shirts. it's so boring, I almost always get good ideas. If you're out of ideas, wash the dishes. Take a really long walk.

Procrastination isn't always a bad trait:

The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.

On source of ideas:

We don't know where we get our ideas from. What we do know is that we do not get them from our laptops. - John Cleese

On the importance of unread library:

Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.

On being prepared before asking questions:

Don't ask a question before you Google it. You'll either find the answer or you'll come up with a better question.

On Creativity:

Creativity is Subtraction. In the end, creativity isn't just the things we choose to put in, it's the things we choose to leave out. Choose wisely. And have fun.

On constraints vs creativity:

It seems contradictory, but when it comes to creative work, limitations mean freedom. Don't make excuses for not working- make things with the time, space, and materials you have, right now. The right constraints can lead to your very best work.

On getting comfortable being ignored:

Ironically, really good work often appears to be effortless. People won’t see the years of toil & sweat that went into it. Not everybody will get it. People will misinterpret you &; what you do. So get comfortable with being ignored - the trick is to be too busy doing your work to care.

On how to best respond to complains:

Complain about the way other people make software by making software- Andre Torrez

Image source:

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/71yg3JyYa9L.jpg

Of Embracing Constraints and Driving Innovation

Not so long ago, I was speaking with one of the talented engineers (lets call him John) who was involved in a high visibility project as a part of Innovation Program that i was leading. His team had done extremely well to be selected among 5 ideas out of 100+ submissions that came in from diverse set of employees. His had made impeccable, convincing pitch presentations about his idea during the evaluation rounds.

The way this innovation program worked was that the selected employees usually get certain percentage of their time to work on the project. What i have experienced is, even with a strong

management support, the selected teams has to spend far more time than what is allocated to realize the potential of their idea. While not really an ideal situation but that's how most corporate innovation programs function. One could call it a stretch for the participating employees but what good has ever been achieved by staying within the confines of one's comfort zone.

So what John was asking me was that he finds it extremely difficult to manage the innovation project and the regular work he has and the fact that he only has limited time at hand to be making a meaningful contribution. I had a long conversation with him to understand what the root-cause of his condition was. Could it be misalignment with manager ? Could it be an issue with managing time ? Could it be that the theme of innovation project being totally different from his core work ? Could it just be an issue with not being able to multi-task ?

As i delved deeper, i figured out that the core cause leading to the effect he has facing was quite different. To cut the story short, he was finding it very difficult to deal with situation of extreme constraint. The constraint that he was faced with was lack of time. And my analysis of this situation suggested that rather than embracing constraints, he just chose to conflict with the constraints put forward by prevailing situation. And this conflict was stressing him out.

In this insightful article, Ash Maurya makes a compelling point when he says-

We all hustle, struggle, and fight to acquire more resources for our projects. But ironically, when we have these resources in excess, we don’t become efficient. We become wasteful.

At the heart of Lean Start-up approach, that became a sort of gold standard for building successful start-ups, lies a theory which when put into practice teaches us how best to respond to an ultimate constraint of our life. Time.
Start-ups need to find that elusive product-market fit before they run out of time or money or both. 

The of the main reason the Lean Start-up approach became popular was because it taught its followers how to deal with constraints a start-up face. Many facets of Lean Start-up approach like iterating quickly, validating the idea, collecting data before making decisions and going through the build-measure-learn cycle ensured better preparation against the constraints.

In the book 'Disrupt Yourself' that i was reading recently, i found this profound mention:

In 2007, Entrepreneur magazine compiled a list of the five hundred fastest-growing companies in the United States. I was intrigued by the various ways these companies had funded their growth, rather than taking outside cash. Only 28 percent had access to bank loans/lines of credit, 18 percent were funded by private investors, and 3.5 percent received funding from VCs: as many as 72 percent of these successful businesses were pulling themselves up by their boot straps. I believe these companies were successful not in spite of, but because of, their constraints.

And also the book introduces you to this successful case of Pluralsight, which i reproduce below:

A prototype for bootstrapping is Pluralsight, an online training library for developers and information technology professionals. In 2004, Aaron Skonnard and three software developer colleagues launched Pluralsight on a shoestring budget of $20,000. Growth needed to be funded through cash flow, so they were highly incentivized to get the business model right. By 2007, they had grown the company to $2.5 million in revenue. After they pivoted from classroom to online training in 2008 and demand exploded, Pluralsight finally took in outside money in 2012, raising $27.5 million to fund future growth. In 2014, they generated revenue of $60+ million, and CEO Skonnard was recognized as an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year.

There is a common theme emerging from these examples:
1. Constraints are not really the enemy of progress and if dealt with well, can be the cause of progress. Lack of finesse in managing constraints can well be damaging to the project in a short term, and to the business in a longer run.

2. Bootstraping (get into or out of a situation using existing resources) is painful in a short term, but successful in a long run. Short-term discomfort should be embraced in favor of long term gains.

3. Constraints comes in many flavors but mostly wrapped under the covers of knowledge, time and money. Much like less time at hand can improve our focus, less knowledge can be our license to think differently than our incumbents. 

I wrote this article up just so that I meet a John in near-future, I can effectively show the light at the end of tunnel.

What are your secrets of dealing with constraints ?

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Things I Learned From Intuit Fasal Story

As few days back, i wrote about a 16 year old India shooter Saurabh Chaudhary's achievement at winning the world cup gold. Saurabh overcame daunting constraints to emerge victorious at the world stage. In every walk of life, we face constraints that seemingly come in the way of our success. How we think about these constraints eventually becomes a difference between success or half-success or failure.

Recently reading the book- 'Disrupt Yourself', I came across this riveting story recently on how the

product Intuit Fasal came to life.

Intuit's VP of Product Development was given a mandate to change the life of 1.2 billion Indians. Unlike many other initiatives of such magnitude, this project didn't get laden with resources.
Despite the open ended nature of the project driven by a grand vision, it had to start somewhere.
Intuit got three engineers of the job and gave them the directive to 'figure something out'.

As they started chatting with farmers, they figured out that farmers had an information access problem. They were mostly growing perishable food and were mostly at the mercy of mandi (Indian farm market place) owners and had to agree to the price they were quoting. While making the decision pertaining to selling their produce, they didn't have access to the prices being offered by other mandis and also didn't have any knowledge of changes in prices. Due to this, farmers were selling the stuff orders of magnitude lower than what they should have got.

So what did the engineers do, after they had qualified the problem? They didn't go and start coding the solution. They rather adopted a low cost, highly iterative approach by manually seeking the prices and texting it to the farmers on their mobile.
They eventually came with up an easy-to-use, text message-based platform that uses complex matching algorithms to help the farmers get the best prices.
Fasal has more than two million active users in India who enjoy a 20 percent increase in their bottom line.

Embracing Constraints:
I started this article with a mention of constraints and how our attitude towards them plays a part in

determining the eventual outcome. Intuit Fasal's story is a great case in driving innovation in midst constraints. Working in organizations, the constraints can come in different shapes and sizes. They can be in different forms- be it knowledge based constraints, time based or money based. In case of Fasal, the VP of Product Development offered minuscule resources for an outrageous vision.
Alternate approach could have been for them to put in large budgets in anticipation of the results.
But the scarcity of resources helped them create a sense of urgency and likely drove the engineers to maximize on the most important, non-perishable resource, time.







Shunning Analysis Paralysis:
As wikipedia defines:
Analysis paralysis describes a moment where over-analyzing or over-thinking a situation can cause it to become 'paralyzed', meaning that no action was taken therefore a solution is not reached.

One unintended consequence of having too many resources is that it leads to tendency of spending resources on over-planning i.e. to cover all the bases before taking action. The team at Inuit Fasal realized that only way they could achieve progress was to hit the ground running and reach out the rural areas to identify problems causing significant pain to the citizens.
Quite often, the lure of arriving at a perfect solution keeps us locked in the meeting rooms far away from the ground realities of the situation.

Low Fidelity Prototype:
Intuit Fasal team didn't in product development till they qualified the magnitude and relevance of problem they were looking to solve. They followed judicious approach to product development and actually didn't even start building the solution in a big-bang way till they qualified their approaches to solution.
The invested in what is termed as low fidelity prototype. As defined in this interesting design blog:

Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototyping is a quick and easy way to translate high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artifacts. The first and most important role of lo-fi prototypes is to check and test functionality rather than the visual appearance of the product.

Intuit Fasal's team first prototype was a manual text based system where they sent the market rate based info to farmers after manually matching the type of crop. They invested in a solution only after qualifying that it really solved the identified problem.

What did you learn from this inspiring story ?

Story source:
Book: Disrupt Yourself
YouTube Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuMpnWxblVY

Image source:
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*xwAg16Mhmj2NRPmmhNGjBQ.png
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How to find your distinctive strength ?

I am currently reading the book- 'Disrupt Yourself' by Whitney Johnson. The book is based on the application of Clay Christensen's world renowned theory of disruptive innovation for managing

individual careers.

One specific aspect of disruption it talks about is playing to one's distinctive strengths. Marcus Buckingham's books and body of knowledge covers the notion of strength based thinking in-depth. Too be honest, earlier in my career, i didn't quite believe in the concept of playing to one's strengths, or not to overly focus on eliminating weaknesses. The main reason i argued with myself was that human beings are among the most malleable species around and they have infinite capacity to mold themselves. I see multiple examples of this playing around me. Recently, i was reading a book on Ripley's Believe it or not and some stories of the participants really amazed me. It was not just the act that was described. The common thread in many stories was the fact that people practiced deliberately and became better at their act.

With time, experience and knowledge, i have softened my stance on not just playing to one's strength but i still believe that we as humans are extremely capable of dealing with our weakness only if we are willing to set our focus to changing anything within us. In a larger scheme of things, it's more about where we want to set our priorities.

It was this context that really made me read through the chapter in the book 'Disrupt Yourself' with interest. The part that i liked was the analogies used by author to drive home the point e.g. sharing the story below:

"Think about the cuddly little koala, sleeping up to twenty hours a day. One might have serious

doubts about its ability to survive. However, the koala can
do something that almost no other animal can: it use eucalyptus leaves, which have minimal nutritional and caloric value, as a food source.'

Nature has it's powerful ways of ensuring that the each of the species were born with unique strengths and these strengths make them survive and differentiate themselves from the rest of the us.

Then's there a mention about Charles Darwin's experiment on finches:

When Darwin gathered numerous specimens of these birds. He analyzed these and presented to a ornithologist. At first these seem like similar specimens but careful analysis revealed that each one

was an evolved species of finches. In their evolution, most distinctive part was their unique beak structure that allowed it to exploit different types of food.

In summary, our strengths evolve with time and with practice. This is quite common in the world of sports. Quite often the sporting talent is identified in the early ages but the ones that make their mark eventually are the ones that hone their talent with hardwork, sweat and putting in hours of practice. One's strength isn't really a constant and with a dose of effort and with time, it can evolve into something significant.

So how can one find their distinctive strength ? The book offers some advise that resonated with me. It shares the advise in form of questions and that allows you to do some soul searching to find the answers:

1. What skills have helped you survive ?
2. What makes you feel strong ?
3. What exasperates you about others ?
4. What made you different as a child ?
5. What compliments do you shrug off ?
6. What are your hard won skills ?

I found these questions eye opening as they allow you to look at the word 'strength' not in unidimensional sense but genuinely opens up different avenues to articulate your strengths to yourself.

How would you answer these questions for yourself ? or you have better ways to find your strengths. Please share by commenting.

Images source:
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#KoalaStory #FinchesStory #Darwin #Strengths #PowerofQuestions

What's Your Excuse Today ?

Saurabh Chaudhary is 16 year old, but he is quite unlike teenagers in his tender age group. He recently won a gold medal in 10m air pistol in the  shooting world cup held in Feb 2019.

 Saurabh not just won in senior category (being a teenager!) but shattered world record by an unbelievable margin. His reaction post winning got everyone talking in awe. He simply remained calm sans any emotions, truly presenting a sight of a man possessed- someone who has his eyes set on something big in life.

The point of my post is not only to celebrate incredible victory of his but also to drive home a point that occurred to me on seeing the side tweet.

The picture in this tweet shows the shooting range at Saurabh's home. Apparently, it was a cowshed that was converted into a shooting range with almost minimalist equipment.

I am not an expert at knowing all the nuances of the sport of shooting. But having read Abhinav Bindra's biography and through my association with OGQ and listening to stories, i do understand that equipment, conditions plays a big part in training for this sport. Any sub-par equipment can be a contrast between a Gold medal and 20th place in the medal table.

In such a thoroughly competitive sport, Saurabh winning at the highest levels with minimal facilities during his formative year is simply superlative. Of course, he now has access to the best of equipment and the coaches but that doesn't take away anything from his humble beginnings and how he rose.

I am also reminded of the message in this tweet from Vala Afshar. The message in it is profound and the way it is expressed nothing but touching.

'Some people would love to have your bad days"


When kids of Saurabh's age, living in big cities would have demanded greater facilities or used lack of facilities as an excuse for not training hard enough, Saurabh chose to do the opposite. He embraced his constraints and even turned his constraints into his strength. While others complained of a rainy day, Saurabh was busy figuring how to make best use of the moment at hand and find ways to take that small step towards eventual expertise.

Whitney Johnson in her book 'Disrupt Yourself' says:
"Whether we create or impose constraints, having a plan for how to make constraints work for you- asking not 'Why did this happen to me?' but 'How did this happen to help me?'- is the difference between bracing yourself for a lesser version of you, and moving at a breakneck speed up your personal learning curve."

Champions are not made in a day, it takes a toil, dealing with acute moments of despair, hopelessness, dealing with unimaginable constraints to emerge as one- much like the sacrifices a piece of coal goes through before becoming a diamond.

Saurabh Chaudhary, What an inspiration! Take a bow, Champion!

So, What's your excuse today- for not doing what you ought to be doing ?

Tweet source:
https://twitter.com/mihirsv/status/1099908190072983552
https://twitter.com/ValaAfshar/status/946096069212913665