Microsoft layoffs

The gloomy economy has started taking its toll at all possible corners, the newspapers are full of the stories of jobcuts, reduction in costs , companies winding down their businesses, increase in unemployment rates, decrease in consumer spending etc. What started in last parts of 2007 as a correction of overhot economic engine has spread its horror tentacles across the globe. 

These are the times when only the fittest , meanest and leanest survive, Companies have been laying off in thousands to adhere to the "survival of the fittest" paradigm (charles darwin would definitely be psyched up against all of us to have made his concept a cheap cliche) as nobody has a clue on how long the recession, a word which was unuttered earlier due to psychological reasons, would last and when the economy would start kicking again.

Interesting twist has been the layoff's by Microsoft today which was around the Zune Music player division and could spread across other divisions too , to the tune of 5000 employees.  Traditionally MS has been very cash rich quoting the reason that they need to protect employee interests etc etc. But when the push comes to shove, Gates (Should we say balmer?) has resorted to traditional means of saving costs, without trying any innovations. 

I think next in the line must be larry ellison or Steve Jobs and while corporate giants are busy shedding their extraweights, lets sit and watch or alternatively we can focus on obama's antics for atleast next couple of months to keep our spirits high.

Linked(in) Life

I have been active in linkedin for quite sometime and as a part of spending less effort spending time looking for information, configured the feedreader (awesome rss aggregator) for linkedin and accidentally found that linkedin support rss feeds for the famous (infamous as i discovered later) Q&A section. With the comfort that feedreader provides to see the whole range of questions, i started subscribing and analysing several sections.

There were whole range of questions people were  asking . A few of them were

a) Who can help me building an access database?

b) How can i Help?

c) Are we expecting much from sales managers today?

d) What is the difference between business plan and feasibility study?

You can spend reading these hilarious questions and have a nice time and you dont need to look out for funny articles to relax your mood.

While linkedin looks very professional from outside, the more naive part of linkedin was a bit realistic and interesting to observe. I raised a few questions to test waters and for questions seeking information, there were not much answers and for controversial questions, people were piling (okay, a bit of a poetic exagerration) to answer.  Entangled in the question ocean, i ended up answering a few (was fun) to ensure my enlightment is shared across fellow human beings.

I am sure the questions are not going to slowdown now, (only economy is supposed to slowdown) when people are struggling hard to see a glimpse of hope and hear a sound of comfort from others. Lets keep asking questions, i dont think there are much answers around and atleast lets fill the world with questions...

No more resolutions - Resolution for 2009

Wow, 2009 seems to have a bright and colourful start, India accusing pakistan (and vice versa), Israel bombarding Gaza strip, India's 4th largest IT company Satyam (sanskrit word for 'truth') admitting financial fraud to the tune to more than 1Billon dollars, Obama hinting about a 1 Trillion dollar deficit in the budget , which would amount for more than 90% of countries budget put together. 

As usual people have taken resolutions to quit smoking, consume lesser alcohol,reduce calories, save more money, have stabler relationships and by this time , most of it would have been broken.

Resolutions are an interesting part of human life, they are born out of commitments to ourselves or to somebody to move towards something good. But unfortunately resolutions are taken out of compulsive reasons like pleasing the girlfriend, newyear eve etc and lose their meaning after the charm of girlfriend decreases or after the hangover of dec31/jan1 wanes away.

I took a simpler resolution couple of years back and still sticking to that , it is quite easy to follow and i feel good sticking to it. The resolution is "No more resolutions".

This year is going to be quite interesting , historic and painful to be precise. As philosopher seneca ably told before the ages of financial scams, fundementalist terrorism etc "Luck favours the prepared".

Be prepared in whatever you do , anticipate opportunities and hazards and enjoy the ride, in no time , we all will be talking about the top 10 blah blahs of 2009 and planning( the same) resolutions for 2010.

2009 Survival toolkit : Ability to anticipate

Ability to anticipate change is one of the very poorly understood and misrepresented and often ignored facets of life. Your abilty to anticipate change (good or bad) gives you an option to be prepared and as the ancient philosopher seneca rightly said 'luck favours the prepared'.

It is the differentiating factor between a normal dude who follows the crowd buying an iPhone and a smart guy who in the anticipation of the new 'iPhone application market' that has been opened spends some time learning iPhone SDK. Apart from those who are completely drunk and thinking hard to remember their home address (recent surveys indicate that 2% of them never reach home) nobody wants to be unaware of whats going to happen , otherwise astrology would not be one of the worlds most profitable and aged occupations ,the only obvious competition being ....

Surprisingly many of us including the all powerful leaders who have everything at their disposal blink and and caught unaware of surprising turns of our lives , a few of them would be 9/11, 7/7, recent 26/11, global economic crises. Though all the inciedents are easy to rationalise in retrospect. I feel we ought to learn from lesson and sharpen our toolset to face the bleaky future ahead.

There are only few who succeed in anticipating opportunities and hazards and prepare themselves and the corporations that they represent towards growth and/or avoiding failure. These are the nosy people who could visualize the war when others are struck with the nuances of battles, this is the ability that makes Alexander , Alexander the great.

To dig a bit deeper, what are the key ingredients required to have an ability to anticipate change

The first and foremost is access to the information , secondly ability to process the information either by themselves or by discussing with those who could to convert that into knowledge and finally to be able to rationally decide and act-upon or influence the key decision makers.

Access to the information is not a difficult task anymore thanks to the technology. Internet has cut the barriers of access to the information (to the extent that terrorists also tend to rely upon it for their survival, for instance google earth was supposed to have been referred by mumbai terrorists).

The second part is the most critical part of the equation, many often we tend to form very rigid learning and inference patterns based on what has worked for us(to our dad and some friends) in the past and limit our decision making abilities. And this is exactly the place where our personal priorities and prejudices start playing a major role. By nature , human mind has a tremendous ability to imagine and creates a design space for facing a scenario with numerous decisions and a more complex design space for linking multiple scenarios and so on.

To keep things very simple, if we imagine our decisions are stored in a library which is huge, more often we dont walk across all the shelves to get the exact book we are searching for. We stop at the nearest shelf which has closest possible similarity of what we are searching for. Our restriction of getting stuck to what we beleive is right (esp when we are aware of the fact that it could be wrong) breeds to denial. When we our mind gets used to 'denial' mechanism, it gets even more comfortable as it need to seek only very few inputs from outside.

This is one of the reasons why knowingly people get into mega-ponzi schemes of economic terrorists like Modoff and this is why there are jehadists who are hell bent to change the world in the way they are comfortable seeing with their little knowledge.

The third part of acting is where big mistakes are bound to happen, for e.g we cannot expect obama to sleep tight and think about a solution for on going economic onslaught, he leans on his advisers and his judgemental abilities (on the contrary people still beleive he is effectively googling for a solution), more than leaders we are always sorrounded by people who influence our thoughts and the perennial human itch to do something and be appretiated which would further complicate things.

In short, ability to anticipate really makes a difference in our judgements and keeps us prepared and increases our possibility to succeed. But there is a limit to what we can do and if one could anticipate all or most of the situations, management consultants/holy-men (strangely they both have lot of resemblance in their operations, less work and lot of money) and other advisors would vanish out of the window. Can you imagine a world with out Gartner/Forrester/Mckinsey types. Unfortunately i cannot.

Mindless Terrorism , Faulty democracy and a Small Orphan

The horrendous mumbai crime which was of epic proportions pushed the ongoing economic struggle for a week out of the headlines. Those who wanted to terrorise the psyche of people all over the world ,24/7 indian news channels who were clueless about professional integrity  and the horrible politicians who had narrow visions of their votebanks alone were all in the limelight and had their fair share of publicity, positive or negative.

The crisis clearly showed the guts of the mumbai people and their resilience, the bravehearts who dared their life to put a fullstop to one of the worst terrorisms that world has seen. Apart from the valiant fights of the brave and that of the people to comeback, the terrorists seemed to have acheived what they wanted to, i.e exposing the vulnerabilities of a country and its lack of leadership.

Any country or culture is always represented by their leaders in the tough situations, a Ghandhi was there to liberate india, a Winston Churchill was there to get Great Britain out of World war, a Martin Luther King was there to fight for African American's cause , a Rajiv Ghandhi was there to lead india out of russian-styled socialism to economic growth and the history is never void of these kind of heroe

s. But unfortunately current Indian leader are not more than a laughing stock.

Similar to Credit Crunch Crisis, Indian democracy is facing a systemic failure. Unlike anyother country India is an unique country which is a federation of different cultures,languages often with very less common cause. Only the great leaders of the past and rulers from outside(for administrative purposes) have kept india tightly knit together apart hinduism (intrepreted in different local names over the time) and the shared minds of people.

Indian democracy expects a strong PrimeMinister to get the act together and paint a strong i

mage to other countries, but unfortunately over the times the regionalism has gained popularity and the national parties have become weaked acoss. This pushes them to get into coalition with many regional parties, those who dont align to thier visions (or lack of it) and form an opportunistic alliance. Being pulled on somany directions to satisfy these parties which inturn do the religious/caste/sect politics, the national govt paints a very weak and vulnerable image to the outsiders. Added to this the pacifist mentality of the people who dont have a bigger cause than their monthly salary, an attitude to get things done by corruption has completely left the system in shambles. Over the times, the system in its current form has become a place which lacks space for somebody with a good cause and who could become a strong leader.

Till a point where  a strong leader emerges who could mend the rotten system and raise the 

hopes of people from Kashmir to Kanyakumari, there will be lot of phonies and cronies (like the current lot) who will rule india and these kind of inciedents would be talked for a month at a max and be forgotten and these cronies will be busy scouting (rather shamelessly) for votes and to save their vote banks, majority or minority.

While we wait for tough leader who could fix all the issues of India, lets apologise to Moshe who has lost his parents who beleived in India and its values.