People matter more than programming

I am finding the book i am reading at the moment fascinating for many reasons. The book is Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs.

This book is almost autobiographical in nature, but of a different kind. I have read autobiographies of the leaders from various fields in life but this one covers the events in a life of an Apple engineer (Ken Kocienda) and through that lens explains company's unique design philosophy. He covers his journey through the various projects including the first-ever soft keyboard design, creation of WebKit for composing webmail, building Safari browser from scratch and even shares difficult technical concepts with relatable analogies.

The part that i intend to talk about in this blog is not the analogies Ken writes (i do want to write about it sometime), not the technologies but the phrase that he uses somewhere in the book:

People matter more than programming

Ken was disappointed at not been given the managerial position after successfully delivering Safari browser project. Apparently, his colleague was favored over him. Though he moved on to a different project, the disappointment stayed with him. He appeared for interview with Google and eventually reached a stage where he was asked to confirm the offer. At this stage, he spoke with his Scott Forstall, who was the VP at that time. Infact, Scott himself reached out to him and understood what made him tick and assured that he wouldn't want Ken to leave. Though there wasn't any managerial positions open at that time, Scott figured out a new project (about making Web email work with Apple mail) that had visibility at the level of Steve Jobs. Ken hung on and delivered on the project.

During the execution of the project, he was faced with a typical technical issue where he wasn't able to place the cursor at the right place when the user chose to reply via HTML. On surface, this seemed like an easy problem but deep within, it had various nuances that needed to be taken care of. Feeling struck, he reached out to his old manager (who over-looked him for managerial position, but was still a friend). He suggested to seek guidance of 2 of the senior colleagues. Later, Ken explained the problem and brainstormed the solution with the suggested people. He was eventually able to clear his mind and fix the problem and deliver on the project.

Looking at these two distinct experiences, the situations could easily have gotten out of Ken's favor if they were approached with a binary mindset. Most technology decisions are binary, in the sense that there is a right solution and there isn't one. There are trade-offs but more often decisions tend to be this way. When it comes to people, there are far many variables at play least of which are motivations, emotions, personal situations, backgrounds, context under which they are operating.

Scott couldn't have given Ken his personal attention and Apple would have lost him to Google. With the busyness of Scott's schedule, he could have just said he was busy and chose not to meet Ken. Or he might have met and not shown enough empathy and follow up.

Don could have simply let his ego overtake himself (as Ken expressed displeasure on his decision to not give him managerial position) and given an half-hearted advice to Ken. Or Ken could have chosen to not listen to advice given by colleagues and shown vanity by thinking his skills were above anyone else.

None of these situations happened. It didn't happen because all the people involved in the situations showed exemplary emotional intelligence. They showed awareness of situation they were in, they showed empathy and showed maturity in not letting their egos overtake them.
These behaviors eventually helped solve the problems that were technical and that were deep but without them writing a single line of code.

Ken sums up these experiences beautifully when he says:

As a programmer and self-professed geek, possessed of typical geek programmer's communication skills, it was a revelation to me that both the setting and the solution to my hardest technical problem turned as much on the social side of my job it did on the software side.

Image source:
https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Selection-Inside-Apples-Process/dp/1250194466

You get what you ask for

A couple of days back, I was on the way to Chai Point with my family members for a tea outing. On the way to Chai Point outlet, I noticed a car getting temporarily struck in the badly laid out man-hole (below).

I along with my brother-in-law picked up a cement brick and put it in front of the manhole as an indicator to arriving traffic of a potential danger. Satisfied with our effort, we went to the outlet, had a good tea and snacks over some lively discussions.

On our way back, we passed through the same man-hole only to note that the cement brick had fallen into the man-hole (possibly by a nudge from the ongoing traffic) and observed that a scooter almost losing balance when it unknowingly crossed over the man-hole.

While one noble auto-rickshaw guy, sensing that the accident was waiting to happen, got down and put more cement bricks around it. I was mightily concerned with the state of affairs that day and decided to do something about it.

While walking back to my home,  I wrote the following message to a 'Traffic personnel/volunteers' WhatsApp group that I am a part of. I messaged the following after attaching the picture:

This one is opposite to Natural Ice cream parlor at Wipro signal. Quite dangerous as saw car getting struck and bike losing balance. This needs attention and some indicator for ongoing traffic to know.

After sending this, I quietly went home with my family, had dinner and slept off. I got up early next morning, went for my run. My usual post-run ritual is to go to a small tea shop closeby my house and sip my favorite lemon tea with honey. As i was walking back to home, I decided to take a short detour to see the man-hole. To my pleasant surprise, I saw a proper barricade had now being put ensuring that passing traffic now had enough heads-up for the traffic.

I was glad knowing that a mere act of asking someone who i thought was closest to providing the help really solved the problem, albeit temporarily.

Man-hole area after the barricade was put

This experience was a good reminder for me on several fronts. Like many of us in urban cities, I have also been guilty of ignoring the problems that I see around me and not doing what I could possibly do to contribute to solving them.  In such situations, all that is needed is to ask a question- "Who can help me solve this problem?" "Is there anyone in the circles that I am part of?".

Most of the times the help is just a message away but we tend to not take that step thinking laxly that "It's not my problem anyway."

All that is needed is just type in a message and ask. One of the unwritten rules of life truly is "One gets what one asks for".

Do you agree ? What's been your experience ?

How 'aggregation of marginal gains' philosophy helps achieving compound gains in sports, and in software development ?

How do you go one to win 60% of cycling Gold medals on offer in Beijing Olympics in 2008 especially after having won just 1 Gold in last 110 years ?

This is exactly what England team did in 2008 Olympics. A story narrated in the book- 'Atomic Habits' credits this transformation to one individual and to one performance philosophy.

That individual is Dave Brailsford, the (then) performance director of England cycling team. And the performance philosophy that he introduced was 'aggregation of marginal gains'.

As James Clear explains in his book-

'The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1 percent, you will get an significant increase when you put them all together.'

What did Dave and his team improve ? Here are some of the examples:

1. Bike seat was redesigned to make it comfortable.
2. Riders wore electrically heated overshots to maintain optimum muscle temperature.
3. For better grips, rubbed alcohol on the tires.
4. Hired a surgeon to teach players a way to wash their hands so they reduce chances of catching cold.
5. Tested different types of massage gels for muscle recovery.

Image source: http://www.blog.400contacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/compoundposter.jpg

This poster quite summarizes the concept of 'aggregation of marginal gains'. If you find a way to improve 1% of parts that make your field, aggregation of gains by end of the year would be staggering. Conversely, if your improvements are underwhelming, the gains are way under.

Incidentally, I was also reading Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs and one of the stories that established an equivalent of 'aggregation of marginal gains' philosophy in the field of software.

Ken Kocienda (author of the said book) was a part of the team that was tasked to build new browser by Apple (later called as 'Safari'). Of all things that Steve Jobs wanted in the new browser, the top-most in the list was performance. Jobs wanted the browser performance to be top-notch. One of the things that Ken was tasked to build was a tool that would assess the performance of browser against all the established parameters. This tool, that came to be known as PLT, Page Load Test was run everytime the code was changed and the new features were added.

PLT became a sort of conditioning coach for the software. It was almost a mandate to run PLT and ensure that no new change is degrading the software performance. Incrementally, every change was measured. Though it was quite difficult, given the complexity of software architecture, to ensure that every change improved the performance. Slowly but surely they reached their goal.

This method, Ken Kocienda doesn't call it in as many words as following 'aggregation of marginal gains' but in principle it was the same. They figured out  a way to measure tiniest of performance degradation and that eventually led to big gains in the end.

Do you relate to these examples ? Please do share any more examples on these lines.

Images source:
http://www.blog.400contacts.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/compoundposter.jpg
https://www.amazon.in/Atomic-Habits-James-Clear/dp/1847941834

How to come up with creative ideas: Build tools that mine gold rather than mining gold yourself

[Note: I recently started sharing my scribbles on How to come up with creative ideas. To reiterate, my idea in sharing these is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested.]

(Editing in progress, this a draft blog post)

I was recently reading this book The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups and found the below mention interesting. Here's sharing the mention as is from the book:

They took heart from "Selling Pickaxes During a Gold Rush," a blog post published a couple of months earlier, in February, by Chris Dixon, a seed investor who was based in New York City but well known and respected in Silicon Valley. During the California gold rush, some of the most successful business people—like Levi Strauss—didn't mine for gold themselves but did well selling supplies to those who did. Today, Dixon argues, entrepreneurs who use the latest technology face a similar choice they can sell to consumers-what Dixon calls "mining for gold"-or they can sell the software tools that other developers would use to create the consumer product that is, "selling pickaxes." Dixon mentioned that Y-Combinator's most successful "exit" to date was Heroku, the company that sold cloud-related services to other software companies, the dig!

 I hadn't heard of California Gold Rush story before I read this book and learned a bit more about this phase in history from wikipedia. As wikipedia states:

The California Gold Rush (1848–1855) began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California.^[1] The news of gold brought approximately 300,000 people to California from the rest of the United States and abroad.^[2] The sudden influx of gold into the money supply reinvigorated the American economy, and the sudden population increase allowed California to go rapidly to statehood.

The story concluded that more than half of gold miners eventually made modest profit. But one of the biggest gains came with the birth of Levi Strauss, who started selling denims in 1853.

I found this story extraordinary. While most people came to California to mine for Gold and get rich quick, the likes of Levi Strauss built an adjacent business by catering to the needs of Gold miners. Likewise, there were quite a few other businesses that thrived during this phase.

Like Chris Dixon mentions in his original article- "In online video, YouTube is often thought of as the big winner; however, to date, more money has been made by online video by infrastructure suppliers like Akamai."

Coming to our core topic of idea generation, this story does provide a conclusive path forward. While a lot of founders ride on technology waves and build meaningful businesses, there's a lot of scope of idea generation around the adjacent opportunities the new technology waves or businesses creates.

Quite a few examples on this:
Just a few minutes ago, I ordered a food item leveraging the services of Dunzo that provides delivery services. The rise of ecommerce providers resulted in emergence of delivery services being a separate category altogether.
The emergence of moving workloads and software to cloud gave rise to trend of continuous delivery. The tools like Jenkins fit the need to automate most of the build and release process.

When ideating about your next venture, think:
1. What technology areas or businesses are thriving around you ?
2. What do these technology areas or businesses need to survive or thrive ?
3. Can you provide the gap that you found in #2 ?

The crux of this post is Build tools that mine gold rather than mining gold yourself.

Image source:
https://www.amazon.in/Launch-Pad-Combinator-Exclusive-Startups/dp/0670923494/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2949SHF756U70&keywords=the+launch+pad&qid=1559998965&s=gateway&sprefix=the+launch+%2Caps%2C352&sr=8-2

How to come up with creative ideas: Follow the mission statement and ask questions

[Note: I recently started sharing my scribbles on How to come up with creative ideas. To reiterate, my idea in sharing these is to look back at this list for my own inspiration and for those who are interested.]

I find vision and mission statements of the organizations fascinating. What intrigues me more is how organizations embrace brevity to communicate what they do in a couple of sentences.

In my recent Lean Start-up workshop in Citrix Patras office, one of the section was that of arriving at the vision statement for their ideas.

Few of the characteristics of a good statement include: Inspiring, Aspirational, Paints a Clear Picture, Desirable, Unique, Focused, Feasible, Easy to communicate.

And here's an example of once such statement:
“To land a man on moon and return him safely to earth before the end of the decade.” -  US President, John F Kennedy

One search on the internet will reveal many inspiring statements but the core purpose of me writing this far is not to re-emphasize the importance of vision statements. But really to explore a different dimension regarding these statements.

Source: Twitter (if you are the one who took this pic, let me know
and i will extend the credits)

In one of the recent ideation conversation with the team, I brought forward this statement encompassing (sort of) mission statement for Citrix Workspace. We started looking at this statement from our own perspectives and then following-up with a question, for example:

1. For a Workspace to be considered as an experience (than just a software), what should happen ? What is the current state ?
2. What are my current painpoints at work that I can expect a digital workspace to solve ?
3. What is an adaptive workspace ? What capabilities does it currently have ? What else can add value ?

This exercise led us to quite a few ideas, some of which eventually were patentable (not mentioning here due to confidentiality reasons).

The core point is that a mere statement of a product citing it's direction can result in unimaginable ideas if we keep active questioning and curiosity on.

Do try this technique and share your thoughts.

My Talk to Emerging Leaders: Embrace Situational Awareness

This blog is in continuation to the earlier blog I wrote about my experience in being a mentor to emerging leaders in my organization.


In my career time when i was leading large teams, i often cited the story of Brian Fitzpatrick (Google) to my teams. This case appeared in HBR a few years ago but the nuances of it are still

Take efforts to know what's
happening around you

relevant. Gist of his story- Brian joined Google as a Senior Software Engineer. Based on his interests and inclination, he became the champion for various end-user focused on initiatives. In his quest to better the end-user needs, he identified strategic gap in the organization. Precisely that gap was- Google wasn't doing good enough job in giving users better control of their personal data. He teamed-up with amicable and aligned individuals and led the project that took shape as Google Takeout that allowed users to export the captured user data from various Google Services (like Gmail, Blogger, Calendar, Chrome, Photos etc.). So much was the impact of this project that the then CEO Eric Schmidt started highlighting Takeout to regulators and customers to build a strong case for Google's non-monopolistic practices and focus on user's privacy.

There was another story that caught my attention recently. Beau Jessup, a 16 year old, went along with her Dad to China (who was on a business trip). During the trip, they met Dad's business colleague who asked Beau to suggest an English name for her daughter. Beau took that request seriously since naming a child is an important event in one's life, something that stays for rest of their lives. She asked the family various characteristics they wanted their kid to have and suggested an apt name. Upon returning, Beau did some research to figure out that there wasn't any organized business (a gap!) that helped Chinese families name their kid in English language. She found an unmet need, while all Chinese babies were given traditional Chinese names at birth, there was a growing demand to name kids in English language too. So far, she has helped name 670,000 babies.

The lesson for all of us from these stories ta that: Gap opportunities often surface unannounced and people are able to take notice of these gaps are the ones who are most aware of context and the situations. Attending exec meetings is one way, other ways to be situationally aware is to dedicate time on your calendar to decipher what is happening in your organization, and in the industry. It helps to be intentional about listening and suspend judgement when hearing the problems. What i have experienced is that having a pen and paper improves listening. The mere act of writing something down tends to open our minds to opportunities that may otherwise seem out of reach.

Image source:
https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/business-management-and-growth-17/64/876-512.png

Rohit Sharma and the art of living in day-tight compartments

Earlier in the month of June, I was struggling to meet my marathon running schedule. For starters, the plan that I follow requires me to run four times a week with a long run usually on weekends and modest distance runs during the weekdays. This plan works on the premise to increase the mileage gradually over 14 weeks and then tapering down practice before the actual marathon. The issue I was facing after reaching the week 6 was that it was becoming hard for me to pull myself up, encourage myself and go for run. It wasn't really the motivation issue as I was getting up early without fail. It's not quite uncommon for runners to be in this situation for various reasons. I will come to root cause of my situation in a bit and in the meantime shifting your attention to the ongoing Cricket World Cup.

If you are following the ongoing Cricket World cup, like me you might also be astonished at the consistency of Rohit Sharma, the opener from Indian cricket team. Rohit managed to score 5 centuries in 7 matches (highest in a single world cup) and most importantly won man of the match award 4 times.

I quite loved this video from ESPN Cricinfo, hence sharing here (with full credit to ESPN Cricinfo and the creator).

Rohit was an underdog in 2011 World cup but he rose to being ahead of everyone, and on the verge of creating history in 2019 World cup.

So what really changed for Rohit. I tried to decipher the answer to this question by observing what he said in his recent interviews.

Here is what Rohit said prior to the world cup

Look, there's a balance one has to draw between the kind of desperation that exists within you and the calmness you seek, if you've got to keep playing this game at the highest level. Both are important but who you are as a person, that basic desire inside you to remain who you are - that doesn't change. Shouldn't, rather. A certain bit of desperation helps build that hunger; the appetite. On the other hand, composure always keeps you grounded.

Here's what he said after scoring his 4th century (i think against Bangladesh):

I scored only 1 century and that is today. I don't think about yesterday and take the game starting today! I only think about today.

Here's what he said after scoring his 5th century:

I come out thinking I have not played any ODIs or scored any hundreds. That is the challenge as a sportsperson. I know if I play well all these things (records) will come along the way. My job is to keep my head straight and get my team to the finishing line.

These lines from his recent interviews highlights the zen like mindset that Rohit Sharma is in. Let me paraphrase a bit of what I learned from this mindset:

1. Rohit has mastered the art of detaching himself not only from results but also from what has happened in the past (even what happened yesterday on the field).
2. Whether he scored a century or a much lesser score, he is not letting result of past matches impact him.
3. He is taking life at field one day at a time.
4. He is fully present in the moment and hence seeing the ball clearly and planning his strokes.

Seeing this play-out I got reminded of two learnings I have had early in my life.

The first being- Dale Carnegie popularized this concept of living in day-tight compartments. It means that we only think about and focus on the current day. In a compartment, the walls on the left and the right side are closed, meaning we cannot see or go through them.

Second is a phrase that i recall from Geet Sethi's  book 'Success vs Joy' where he says, concentration is simply remaining in the present. Very simply put, hence a very effective definition of focus.

Rohit Sharma's mindset right from the start of this world cup is that of not going beyond himself, and immersing in the current moment. That helped him build a sort of equanimity, that elusive trait of maintaining calm and composure irrespective of whether he succeeds or fails. He found a way to live in day-tight compartment, not worrying about what will happen tomorrow and care much less about what happened yesterday. He is simply in the moment and enjoying being there, in that zone.

Back to my challenges of sticking to marathon schedule. I digged deep and found out that it was because I was getting ahead of myself even before I had stepped on the running track. I had weekly target of mileage to be met and what was happening was that I was letting this target dominate my mind and losing the joy a given moment brings in. If you know that you are chasing 50 Km of run in a week and you allow that thought to dominate your mind, then it becomes exceedingly hard to enjoy running.
Learning from Rohit Sharma's mindset, I tried to inculcate the habit of not being desperate to complete weekly target, stay in the moment, and once the daily run is done just forget about it. And start the next day from 0 km mark.
How did I do this ? By simply raising my awareness and choosing to not come in my own way.

Was it easy to follow this ? Certainly not, but it helped me meet my running target for the last 2 weeks while enjoying almost every run.

Do you think such mindset can be applied in organization's context ? Is it really possible live in a day-tight compartment while doing your work ?

Do share your thoughts.