Category: Management

Forbes has a story on the 20 most influential business books. My 5 picks: Competing for the Future, Innovator’s Dilemma, Crossing the Chasm, Good to Great, The Tipping Point.

Here. The print magazine (Asian edition) didnt seem to have the detailed profiles that they have on the website.

I may be wrong but none of the 25 people selected by Business Week has a blog. Maybe they should make that a mandatory criteria next week – I want to read what the individuals think of the future, not necessary an interpretation by a journalist (however good). That would surely start a blogging stampede and do a lot of good in the world in terms of transparency and ideas flow…which is just what we need. Integrity and Innovation.

By the way, the introductory para is an excellent of the wonderful and flowery hyperbole the business magazines are so good at: “In the span of just two years, e-business has morphed from capitalist cure-all to pure catastrophe. The dot-com collapse took down not only the majority of e-tailers but also a wide swath of software and hardware companies that catered to them. The ripples from that disaster had assumed tidal wave proportions by the time they hit the telecom business, where the Internet bubble fueled wild overexpansion.”

From Business 2.0: “Your brain is the ultimate example of a complex, decentralized organization. And because we (usually) behave coherently, smoothly integrating new circumstances as they arise, the brain is also the epitome of an adaptive organization, a learning organization, a shared-vision organization — in short, the ideal modern company.” The 5 secrets, according to the article:

1. Never try to micromanage a large, complex organization.
2. Don’t let bottom-up self-organization go wild.
3. The best way to control your subordinates is to just point them in the right direction.
4. Be careful listening to the voice of experience — that voice could be your own.
5. The organization can’t succeed without passion.

Writes Robert Lukcy in IEEE Spectrum:

Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane. Those can’t be real transistors and wires down there, can they? Watching the simulations on my computer monitor is like watching the movie on the airplane – an unreality wrapped in another unreality. I feel that I have lost touch with Edison’s world of electricity – a world of black Bakelite meters, whirring motors, acrid chemical smells, and heated conductors. I miss Heathkits and the smell of molten solder and burning insulation – the sensual aspects of engineering that have been replaced for many of us by the antiseptic, ubiquitous, and impersonal CRTs.

I have a deeper worry that math itself is slipping away into the wispy clouds of software that surround us. I walk down the aisles of laboratories, and I see engineers staring vacantly into monitors, their desks piled high with anachronistic paper detritus. Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder? Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations? Perhaps math in the future will be the exclusive province of a cult of priests that embeds its capability in shrink-wrapped, encrypted software.

I can’t believe that 20 years from now engineers will still stare into displays, run CAD tools, and archive their results in PowerPoint. But what will they do? My deepest fear is that the reality gap becomes so great that the best-selling software will be called Engineer-in-a-Box.

– Slashdot thread

Perhaps the best thing I learnt in my engineering is the ability to think differently – there are multiple ways to approach the same problem. If one does not work, then try another. Engineering instills in one discipline and logical thinking laced with a practicality, because at the end of the day one has to solve real-world problems.

I may not remember much of what I learnt within the classroom during by BTech and MS days, but I do know that I would not have been what I am had it not been for my learnings in the schools of Electrical Engineering at IIT and Columbia.

As I was writing this week’s Tech Talk series (a look back to the mid-1990s through magazine articles), I was struck by how some ideas which may have seemed out of place at that time can make a comeback later. The “teleputer” (Internet PC) idea which was still-born then maky actually make sense in the context of a LAN in emerging markets. This is what our thin client-thick server work is all about. The object-oriented programming and software components ideas are quite similar to the Web services ideas of today. I think its important for everyone to spend some time reading or thinking about ideas that failed in the past – just because they failed once does not mean they should be written off. It could also mean that they were ahead of their times. History has a lot to teach us, if we are willing to learn.

Continue reading Ideas Come Back

From HBS Working Knowledge:

1. Use e-mail only when it’s the most efficient channel for your need.

2. Never print your e-mail.

3. Send nothing over e-mail that must be error-free.

4. Never delete names from your address book.

5. Never forward chain e-mail.

6. Never send e-mail when you’re furious or exhausted.

7. Don’t pass on rumor or innuendo about real people.

8. Nor should you do so about companies you work for or may work for one day.

9. Never substitute e-mail for a necessary face-to-face meeting.

10. Remember this hierarchy: first the meeting, then the phone call, then the voice mail, then the e-mail.

11. Your e-mail is hackable and retrievable, and it can be used against you. Use only when absolutely necessary.

From an article in FastCompany on The Art of Multitasking come tips on managing time:

1. One size does not fit all. Cingular Wireless CEO Stephen Carter handles almost every incoming email in real time; Sun Microsystems EVP Marissa Peterson checks email just twice a day. When it comes to multitasking, no single solution works for everyone. Pick the tactic that’s best for you.

2. Paper piles only grow. When you get a paper report or memo, deal with it, then file it or hand it off. Piles of paper make for more work.

3. Heading to a meeting? Go unplugged. When you meet with someone, you’re using a nonrenewable resource: your time. Don’t let cell-phone or pager interruptions waste it.

4. The next killer business app? Instant messaging. IM is faster than email and just as inclusive. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. Think of it as the online equivalent of an elevator conversation.

5. Delegate: It’s the ultimate time-saver. Investing in frequent communications with your staff — lunch meetings, daily emails — yields big dividends. Your staff members can’t lighten your load if they’re out of the loop.

6. Working in hard-to-reach territories? Voice-mail it. Voice mail is more dependable than email and better for keeping globe-trotting executives emotionally connected with the home team.

Writes Economist: “The missing factor in the growth equation is often thought to be the addition of new knowledge gleaned from scientific discovery and technological progress – in short, innovation. In this scheme of things, innovation accounts for any growth that cannot be explained by increases in capital and labour. And though the return on investment may decline as capital is added to the economy, any deceleration in growth is more than offset by the leveraging effects of innovation. That explains why rates of return have stayed high in rich countries, and why poorer countries have not caught up.”

The six winners of the Innovation Awards:

– Bioscience: Leroy Hood (University of Washington) for the automated DNA fluorescence sequencer
– Computing: James Gosling (Sun) for Java
– Energy/environment: Rinaldo Rinolfi (Fiat) for the common rail injection system
– Nanotechnology: Stephen Fodor (Affymax Technologies) for the GeneChip
– Telecoms: Irwin jacobs (Qualcomm) for CDMA
– “No Boundaries”: Shuji Nakamura

Continue reading Economist Innovation Awards

An interesting article in Fortune on how Semel is working to turn things around at Yahoo. For many, Yahoo was our first experience of the Internet. Its a company which could have done so much more, had it not lost its way in between. Yahoo is now pinning its hopes in broadband, especially its partnership with telco SBC.

Reading about what Yahoo and SBC will do gives some interesting ideas for our digital dashboard: “SBC will mail customers who order DSL service a purple-and-blue box containing a modem and a CD-ROM with Yahoo’s web software. In about 30 minutes, users will be up and running with a browser that looks like the love child of MyYahoo and Internet Explorer. Once signed on, the experience is all Yahoo. Users can check their e-mail through Yahoo Mail and customize every inch of their screen with special Yahoo content. One corner of the screen will house a user’s three most recent messages, another a personalized news feed, another sports scores of favorite teams, another a radio station playing music the user likes. The system learns too. The more you listen to the radio, the more it knows what sort of songs you like. If you click on sports news a lot, Yahoo will feed more team reports to the front page.”

Continue reading Yahoo’s Challenges

Marc Andressen: “Half the job of an entrepreneur is telling the market what it wants. The other half is listening to what it wants. Nobody ever asked for a Mac or a Web browser. Once you do the product, then you have to listen. The market told Microsoft we dont want tools, we want an operating system. It told Intel we dont want memory chips, we want a microprocessor.”