Leadership 101 - Anticipate Failures

The world is a physical balance. It has good and bad, ups and downs, successes and failures. Often people get carried by Positive Mental Attitude and they feel that being over optimistic is PMA. There is a difference. When we approach work, it is right to be optimistic. But when you are planning, you have to plan for failures. The success is not the outcome but it is your ability to out think failures. When you anticipate failures, you will know what to do when you are about to fail.

Each outcome, irrespective of success or failure, needs to follow a general pattern. There is a success pattern and failure pattern. When you anticipate failure, you will be more attuned to recognize the red flags and hence you will try to make corrective action. When you do that, there is a great chance for you to get away from failure. One of the key things needed to be successful is the ability to anticipate failures due to your action and correct your action recognizing the red flags. Great leaders anticipate failures. It doesn't mean that they are pessimist. It means that they are even prepared for the worst. So, anticipate failures.

Leadership 101 - Truth Travels with Great Speed

One of the thing that I often wonder is "truth". In my lifetime, I have lied for many things and went against truth many times but yet surrendered to the truth "always". The more I think of being "untruth", the more fierce it becomes. So, it left a deep impact and I learned the importance of being truthful. The truth travels with great speed. If you are truthful, it helps us to steer through the tight corner and if you are untruthful it grills us. If you are untruthful, clear submission to the truth is the only option.

Today, I happened to meet a person who was very poor in something. The impact that he is going to cause me is very little but yet I sat with him and told him the "hard truth". Then, his perception about life/work changed and within few minutes he understood his true state. His confidence grew and he promised that I would see him differently next time when we meet. In the whole of situation, my contribution is very little but the contribution of truth is immense. Today, yet another time in my life, I learned the importance of being truthful. It was a wonderful day.

Retaining People – Human Resource is Abundance yet Scarce

The economy is recovering and we see organizations investing again with a lot of hope. Job market too has recovered due to people movement and creation of fresh positions. If you are leading a team and for next one year, you will be facing enough challenges in terms of retaining people. During this period if we keep up the basics and control things that we can control, firefighting will give decent results. Here are some of the things that you have to do. BTW, the following things should be done “always” irrespective of job market.

Connect with the team. Make them understand about the organization. Give authentic information and suggestions.

Challenge them quite well. Give assignments that make them think and always little bit tough to achieve with ordinary efforts. Appreciate openly and celebrate them when they make big mistakes trying big things they never tried.

Recognize both efforts and results. If you are dealing with less experienced people, sit with them and hear how they solved the problems. You can see their eyes go bright.

Give a feeling that you won’t let them fail. Authentically work on their growth. If they don’t have enough skills, sit with them and draw plan.

Motivate people and celebrate successes. Most importantly respect them. If you turn their suggestions down, do it respectfully.

Keep a close watch on overall performance. Understand the language of performance and never compromise on it. It is lifeline. You don't need non performance even if they have niche skills.

Understand their concerns. Empathize. If their concerns are not valid or reasonable, tell them up front that you cannot fulfill them. Let they also know why it is not reasonable. Set the expectations right.

Don’t negotiate money. If they want to exit because of money, let them do it. If it is more ownership and challenges, give them opportunity that gives them new experience. Don’t negotiate money. It doesn’t work.

Anticipate bad things and work on contingency plans. It is highly important that you deliver even when you don’t have super stars. Have “Plan B”. Start to work on contingency plans.

Always speak the truth. Don’t woo them.

I have been practicing above things past two years and so far it worked. I strongly believe, it will work in future too.

Are You Restless With Things Around You?

The external environment affects us so much and we just fall as victim to the environment. We feel so bad for falling as victim and often feel that we are not able to solve some problems. For example, we agitate a lot when we see child labor, misuse of power, corruption, someone not performing their duties and the list can be endless. The main problem is that we want this world to think exactly like us. If you are over pragmatic, you will know that is not possible and you certainly fall on the other spectrum which is not caring too much about you and the world around you. This post is for people who agitate, agitate a lot. Agitation or becoming restless is a wonderful thing. That shows that you have awareness and you are so concerned about the environment.

When will you become restless? You become restless when you are aware that you are wasting your energy not producing any work or little. This is exactly how the external environment affects us. We react to the happenings to the environment. We fail to understand that we cannot react at the pace of the environment. If you think so, you will have time only to context switch. You need to understand the purpose of life and diligently move towards it by channelizing energy. If you channelize the energy, you will not become restless. You will understand the purpose and feel satisfied with the path you have chose.n If you are restless, it is great thing. You need little introspection, little bit of self talking and little effort to connect with yourself in perfect synchrony.

The key to add value to this world is to become restless and then to move towards the purpose of life without forgetting the environment. The solutions to all problems lies in our head. We just need to channelize energy and think.

I have read few of self help books. I can say most of them did not apply to me because I feel that I am unique and I am special case. But all those books gave me little thought to do a deep introspection and all those books helped me to move out of "restlessness" and be focused on the "purpose".

Think Twice Before Acting on Others Decision

It has been quite an experience these days. Every year, I tend to work with great minds as my teammates and this gives me immense experience. When I started my career, I was weak and numb. But over a period of time, my confidence grew by just looking others. This experience has taught me "think before you act, think twice before you act on others words".

The above sentence has two parts. The first part "think before you act" is obvious. The second part "think twice before you act on others' words" is not so normal. It is abnormal. When you are acting on others' words, you are acting in conventional way. Most of the times, the conventional way is the way that is traveled more. It does give you experience but it doesn't give you different experience. You are going to be in a box.

But when you think deeply (that think twice), you need to understand the hidden meaning and things will start to appear differently. This is like you read a classical book for the second time - the gets into the clearly. So, when you act on others' words, you need to think twice. It is an opportunity to go creative. It is the way that is less traveled and you go out of box. Do it, you will be happier :-)

This is highly important because in this world we are always conditioned and it requires a strong will and mindset to think deeply. The entire world will conspire against you to condition you.

Difference between Guru and the Student

It was a gurukula, all the students were gathered for the graduation of a student. The student was excited and wanted to test his Guru in front of all the other students. Guru sensed that and simply smiled. In front of others, the student asked the Guru, "I now know whatever you know and I learned all you know when I am quite young". The student went on to ask Guru, "How long did you take". Guru said, "I m still a student and I don't think that I will complete by learning in my lifetime". The student now realized what it takes to be a Guru.

We always get carried away with the things we know. We stuff our mind with a lot of "I" and literally leaving little space for other important things. It is not a great deal to know all the information in this world. With this technology advancement there is no wonder if we come up with a device that stores most of the useful information in this world. It takes a great deal to understand how a thing affects the other. It takes a great deal to understand how things affects us when we change them. Any person with limited lifetime will have limited capabilities and it is practically impossible to have infinite lifetime or infinite processing speed. A lifelong student is aware of this limitation.

The difference between a Guru and a Student is that the Guru understand His limitations and continue to march towards excellence but a student thinks that he has already reached excellence by focusing too much on his merits. The difference between Guru and the student is "Awareness".

Where is Humanity? Painfully Inhumane

It should be more than 15 years and it was early January. I was climbing the mountains of Sabarimala as a kanni swami. We were group of 20 people and segregated into three groups. The youngsters in the group will march fast to identify the best place to rest and fetch water/refreshments for others. There will be thousands of such groups marching towards Sabarimala. I still remember many instances where irrespective of the group we belong to there will numerous helping hands. People all over India will be on pilgrimage and on the way to worship Lord Ayyappa they will offer service. I still remember a 80 year old swami massaging my legs. Now, I feel that it is Lord Ayyappa who massaged my leg. It is such a pleasant experience and a rejoice to see a man serving a man without expecting anything. But we also have people who never feel that it is their duty to help mankind needing desperate help.

Yesterday it was so painful to hear a driver was suffering from a massive cardiac arrest while driving his car. The bosses in the car were supposed to meet a top shot businessman for a party or meeting. As soon as they saw the driver uncomfortable and stopped the car, the three men helped him to find a nice place in a roadside pavement for a fresh air. One of them drove the car and went to the meeting. These three gentlemen can be a big business magnets, how the hell they will ensure that their customers, employees and the environment is peaceful if they can't help a person who drove them. Isn't this driver played a key role by driving them safely throughout their life? Why are they equating everything to balance sheets? What rights they have to claim that they are human beings? It is very pathetic that we have given the economy to private companies who have people like this.

Another ordinary person you just walked by saw the driver and hospitalized him. He also informed his family and currently the driver is recuperating. As usual, the doctors said that had he been hospitalized five minutes late, he would have been no more. BTW, the driver is in his mid fifties and the incident happened a couple of days before in Mumbai.

Many activists are now trying using RTI to know who are those three and who is their boss, their company. I am also eagerly looking forward and join the activists. More story can be read from the following like - Mid Day. Will Mid Day disclose the information they have and help us to stop such cruelty.

Critical Thinking Scenario - Train Havoc

Ram is a software engineer working in Kolkata (a city in India) and heads to his hometown Chennai for Diwali. As he gets his backpack organized, he hears a news channel giving a cyclone warning in Andhra Pradesh (a state in India, through which Ram needs to travel). He packed up things in a hurry and heads towards a railway station. He identifies his coach which is three coaches behind the engine and he made new friend instantly.

His fellow traveler was a retired military man and during their journey they shared their worldly experiences. It was about 20 hours after the journey started in Kolkata, the rain and storm slowly started to build up. It was about two kilometers before a big bridge and it really takes two minutes to cross for a train traveling at 100 kmph. The river was supposedly overflowing as the flood was heavy. When the train approached few hundred meters before the bridge, there was a power failure in the train and the driver was clever enough to pull the break. The train stopped before the bridge but four coaches including the engine were in the bridge. As expected, there was a heavy flood in the river and it was very unlikely that the train can move even if the power is restored.

What will you do in this situation? Fire up you neurons to firefight this scenario.

BTW, this is an exercise to tip off your critical thinking and if it works well, I will share more such scenarios. One thing that you need to remember that there are no right or wrong answers. You just need to respond to this situation.

Be Selfish, Yes, Be Selfish

We get too much carried away with the word "selfishness" and it has be given a wrong intended meaning. It is fine to be selfish. If you take any great thinkers of the world, you can observe that they are selfish. I am not talking about people who claim themselves as thinkers. I am talking about Buddhas, Vivekananda and so many other thinkers that this world has seen. First, they were selfish. For example, Buddha wanted to know what is the root cause of all miseries. Swami Vivekananda wanted to see God. Buddha never thought that his quest to understand the root cause of all miseries is a desire. He was able to bring higher level of thinking. He differentiated the desire and the purpose. Same is the case for Swami Vivekananda.

If we are selfish about our purpose and if the purpose is at a higher level, it is good. Our selfishness will only yield a better world. In this world, we have limited number of purposes at higher level. However there are at least infinite number of ways to realize the purpose. We fail to understand the purpose and get caught in the way (most of us die in mid way). Only way how you can walk the full distance is by being selfish - being selfish to understand the purpose and pursue life to attain the purpose. So being selfish is not really bad, it is a great thing.

Shortly after I published this post, I read Robin Sharma's quote in Twitter, "Best way to improve world is to improve yourself". If everyone is selfish in taking care of themselves, this will be a better place.

Privileged Moment - Slightly Feeling that I m Making Sense

It is exactly 11.30pm (12-Oct) and just now finished talking to my office buddy. I met him once while giving a presentation on how to write white paper. One of my teammates recently told that this office buddy wanted to talk to me. When I listened my teammate, he told me that "Lakshmi, my friend wants to talk to you and he really likes the way in reinvented myself". He went on to say that "whatever my inner guy says that holds now" and that we call it passion. He has started to find resonance and no doubt he is going to be a rock star - it is exactly the resonance of "inner thing" and "your action". When time comes, I will introduce him through this blog. BTW, he is a great guy and just trying to become greatest working on his daily improvements.

I feel that now I m making little sense to people around me. It is a great feeling and it is my privilege to help people to see through things (i do this by just asking questions. I m equally excited because I feel that this is going to be a turning point in my life. I m going to meet my office buddy tomorrow (13-Oct) at 7.30 pm and we fixed the date/time just few minutes back.

Life turns exciting at anytime. Thank you my dear friends. You add a great deal of value to me.

Leadership 101 - If you cannot Change, Don't Complain

Many of us often complain that things are not perfect or near-perfect. Being perfect is very difficult and nearly impossible and so is near to perfect. But, we can always try to be perfect. When it comes to others, we will have highest standards and see others' accomplishments as tiny. But when it comes our accomplishment we always see them through lens. This mentality introduces a fake inconvenience and we pass on our negative emotions to the environment. We question, then we complain and finally we fly away without causing any trouble.

But did we think that "flying away" is not a solution. If you fly away thinking that the other side of the river will be good, you will later realize that it is just another bank which is as good as or as bad as this bank. Mere complaining is a sick way of looking things. It is ok to complain as long as you authentically find ways to fix it. The complaining is the tool of people who solve problems and it is not tool to vent out your negativity.

Next time, when we complain, we need to find what are we going to change with our complaints. Then complaints make bigger sense.

How to become a better developer?

Once I was traveling in a bus and my school friend (who is also a software engineer) asked me how to become a better developer. He was a Java developer and asked me how to be a better Java developer. What are the things that one should learn to become a better Java developer. I answered him that "first be a developer" and then "try to become a better developer". I strongly believe that any person can be a better person only by asking questions. The questions has to be open and push one's own thinking and also others. It is the curiosity and questioning will make us better.

If you have whole a lot of experience and if you just ask closed ended questions, you are quacking like ducks. You can be a better person in saying what a thing does. But you cannot be a person to make something better. It is of no use either to you or anyone around you. First criteria to become a better person is to ask questions that provokes thinking. Once you ask such questions, you will automatically become a better person, better human being, better developer too. Questions matter a lot.

Where does the Next Business Opportunity - Tourism

While many of educated ones go for starting up a tech start up, there are few things that is currently evolving that has a potential for a fantastic business opportunity in future. India, as a tourist destination is evolving and in a very short future we are going to witness increase in number of foreign tourists. Even the people of our country want to explore places by touring across states. Tourism is evolving as experiential tourism and adventure tourism. The people who tour the country want to know about culture, social, economy by experience (by living with masses in tourist destinations). Another aspect is adventure where people tour places like sea, lake, mountains as adventure. If you are avid traveler and fond of traveling, you may want to think or see traveling from business point of view. It is for sure pays off in future. Doing couple of certifications and investing in allied areas such as food, photography, travel and other adjacency will also help.

Gods in Bus - How to Live? One hour story

Yesterday, I was traveling from Villupuram to Chennai after meeting my aunt at Villupuram. I boarded the us around 6pm and the journey was as usual. There was a old lady around 85 years also boarded and she came alone. Somehow she got help from a young chap and said that he would her somewhere in Chennai. There was also another Mr Vasudevan who is a priest and spiritual person. The first few hours went as usual.

Everyone in the bus expressed concern about the lady traveling alone. She tackled everyone with some reasons. Mr Vasudevan also interacted with her, being a spiritual person his interaction was much at the higher level and he connected with the old lady pretty fast. It seems like the lady is in some Pandurangan temple and plans to visit Kasi to attain mukthi. Mr. Vasudevan asked her, if you are with Pandurangan, why do you need Kasi? Why do you want to go to Kasi in this old age? You can attain mukthi in your very place. If possible try to chant and offer work in the temple that your body allows. Else keep quiet and just attain mukthi.

The Patti was quite impressed and took it as order from HIM. She said that she would go back to the temple and never come back. She also blessed Mr Vasudevan that he should get married soon. The bus stopped at Tambaram, both of them got down. Mr Vasudevan gave her ten rupees and they parted as if they are true/long friends. During the journey there was some spiritual discourse and bhajans by Mr. Vasudevan and Patti.

But I could see heaven in the bus for an hour. I learned on how to make meaning and be useful to others.

Problem Solving - Tools are Different, Techniques are Same

It has been a while and restless search to desperately find something, something that is invaluable to me - the experience in solving problems. Without knowing what to do, I have been wandering here and there for a while (close to seven years) only to find that problems can be difficult, the problems can be different, but the solution is common. The solution is to solve them. During my wandering, I found that algorithm of solving problems is same. But the application of algorithm will be different. Let me explain with an example.

In order to explain with a software engineering example, let us take "traveling salesman problem". This algorithm gives near optimal solution to reach nodes of a graph. This is a single algorithm but can be applied in courier distribution, aircraft industry to optimally fly aircraft between destinations and many more. A mathematician cannot say that he cannot solve airline problem if he can solve traveling salesman problem. If this can work for math, can't it work for solution problems?

Yes, it will work perfectly fine for solving problems. If we have experience in solving a single problem, it gives us knowledge to solve many problem and we understand the process of solving problem. When we are trying to solve the problem, it is the approach that gives us solution. The solution is not really the outcome of knowledge you possess but an outcome of the process you follow, the approach you choose and your ability to think through the problem - techniques are same, tools may be different. In order to solve the most difficult problems, first you need solve one problem and the rest is matter of time.

This is one of the priceless lessons that I learned when I wandered like a mad guy. :-)

OOPS - What is Abstraction?

There is song in a movie in Tamil (Alavanthan) and the song sequence happens in a party. Everyone would crack joke and our hero would share a joke. Here it goes. "A little kid asks his parent. What is the meaning of sex? And their parents explain with a lot of struggle. and try to explain the meaning of sex. Finally the kid just asks, Should I check male or female in the application form". We, the developers, without understanding what is abstraction try to develop application. For a kid it does not make sense to say intricacies of something as it incapable of understanding that something (example, sex). The parents should abstract the idea in a form that is sufficient or needed for the level. And sometimes the details are not required.

Another example of abstraction in real world could be appearance of beach sand. For someone who sits on the beach, the sand will appear course but for someone who is traveling in an aircraft few kilometers above the sea level, the beach itself appears as a thin line. In the real world, the abstraction is quite common and we human being appreciate abstraction quite well.

Let us take another example. How will you tell your find that you are going home? Assuming that your home is in "Nanganallur, Chennai, Tamilnadu, India, Asia" and you are in S"an Jose, California, US, North America". You just say that you are going to India. But when you are in India, you give more specific address.

Yet another example of abstraction is someone taking bath. If someone is taking bath, you hardly worry what he is doing inside. You never try to investigate what someone is doing in bathroom. But the guy who is taking bath, he does it with a lot of details. You shed out details when it is not required. Interestingly, in real world you clearly know when to shed out details.

So abstraction is something that gets built up as you move up the hierarchy and you leave out details intentionally to make the concept more generic. Now again, go back and reread the real world examples. It should make sense. Then correlate with abstraction in object oriented programming.

Article Publication - Mere Coincidence

It is an important milestone in my life and my career. I m completing five years as author of Linux for You and I am wondering how I still continue to write. I still remember the day I had a discussion about threads with my colleagues and went ahead to write a multi-threaded program in Linux with POSIX threads. Fortunately, my lead was writing articles for LFY and thought I could also write articles. I contacted them and they were prompt to reply that "Introduction to Threads" was already published and asked me whether I can extend it.

I suggested another topic "Synchronizing Threads" which was accepted. The next article was implementing the system call in Linux. The first two articles were written in quick succession and still remember those moments. For all these years, I have written more than 20 articles in many areas - Linux, Network Security, Java, Javascript, Tools and Design Pattern. Later this gave me confidence to speak in conferences that are related to Open Source like LinuxAsia, GNUnify, OSI Tech Days, and Software Testing/Engineering like STEP Auto.

I remember the editors who helped me during this journey - Rahul, Tina, Samartha, Atanu, Sujata and Atul. I made so many prints because of you guys. Thank You. You played a very big role in making me an author :-).

But writing for LFY was mere coincidence but I can say for sure that it ignited me to move towards excellence. It gave me a very big platform to continuously learn and share with others. Overall a period of time, I was able to write something on my own that makes sense and of use to others. You can find all the articles published by me here. It is a wonderful feeling to be part of Open Source community and writing in Asia's best open source magazine. Thank You Linux for You.

Looking forward to collaborate with you.

List of Articles Published in Linux for You (scroll down the page and go to Publications section)

OOPS - Rules of Overriding?

This is a typical interview question. What are the rules of overriding. Here goes the answer

1. The method in the subclass should have the same signature as that of the method in super class
2. The method in subclass should not be more restrictive in the context of access specifiers
3. The method that overrides the method in super class cannot be through broader exception meaning that it cannot throw the super class of exception thrown by super class.
4. "final" method cannot be overridden

Leaving out the last condition, as it is obvious, is there a reason for top three conditions. Why does Java (or any object oriented programming language) have this as rule? Is there any logic? BTW, this is not a standard interview question. But a question that provokes thinking. Will post the answer in couple of days (meanwhile if you know the answer, write in comments)

Big Aspiration - Making Myself An Architect

I have written in the past about my lack of focus. I feel that if I focused more I would have feeling better now. When I sit back and think, I have few reasons to cherish and to feel good but overall I feel that I could have done better. I have come up with a list of things that I should do and planning to correct my approach with a year long immersion and self realization program. Yes, in a year or so, I planning to transform myself as a software architect. The primary purpose of this immersion program is to bring in focus and discipline in my efforts. I need to think properly and realize importance of channelize my efforts.

Hope many of you agree that as we become more experienced the things that are expected of us will grow exponentially. An experienced guy cannot create wow by just putting efforts. Even at a personal level, the satisfaction due to hard work will be for a while but fades out gradually. The satisfaction due to thinking, mapping the results against the decisions due to the thinking and impact created to fellow human beings due to the results will drive us towards excellence. Becoming an architect is the first step and during my journey I will share my thoughts through this blog.

If everything goes good, I will be rolling out a workshop on software design and architecture. I aspire to conduct workshop to change perspectives and remove prejudices that are not needed or hinder healthy thinking process. To stay on course, I have created a page, TinyThoughts and this will be under construction for a year. After a year, TinyThoughts will take shape.

This is another way of taking control or becoming an architect of one's own life. It is great feeling :-)

Innovation - Simplification and Abstraction

I had a very vague understanding about innovation and trying to get good perspective by reading books, sharing experiences and seeing innovation live. Innovation is all about seeing things differently when your trousers go down :-). In my life, I had a great opportunity to live very closely with a person, who, in my perspective is very innovative. She is my elder sister who always moves through the problems to find solutions. She literally sees things in a different angle and many times she solved my problems. She has a great skill - she can simplify a problem and register the problem/solution at a very abstract level so that it can be applied to a different unrelated problem.

Innovation is about abstraction and simplification. You are working on a problem and it is highly likely that you will come up with a solution. This experience gets registered in your mind. Whenever you encounter a similar problem, you just apply it. You become machine. But on the other hand, the innovation is more about applying your experience and learning to a totally unrelated problem. That is humane. The first step towards innovation is simplification and abstraction. Then comes, the application of acquired knowledge.

Fantastic Day - Let everyday be like today

It was a great day today and the best day in my career. For the past few weeks, I have been involved in recruitment and conducting interviews. Today is the second in this month that we sit for interviews. Today, I did over twenty interviews that I will forget in my life and I did two interviews, I will never forget in my life.

First one, a candidate with two years of experience was doing a decent job but there was little gap. I sat with the candidate and give feedback about the performance and how it can be improved. The candidate was moved and said "no one so far gave me feedback" and thanked me. I feel that it is not usual thank you but heartfelt one. That moved me and showed me that I was doing something right :-).

The second instance was interview whom I thought ordinary but he turned the interview extraordinary. He had basic knowledge of Java. With his knowledge, he was able to connect the basic knowledge and came up with a system that is flexible. Soon he is going to join me at work. I promise you that I will have him write a post about his experience. Whatever he did was simple but elegant at the same time. I feel that I played a crucial role in asking him right questions to unblock his mind. He played a very very crucial in connecting those. He is a thinker.

Thank you guys.

Overall, a fulfilling day and I wish everyday pan out to be like today.

Leadership 101 - New Journey, Great Aspiration, Absolute Followership

It is always great feeling to follow someone. If that "someone" is very close to you and inspires you daily to do more and in fact make you do more, you need to realize that you are getting ready for a paradigm shift, a transformation, a pleasant storm taking everyone by surprise and you are going to be an absolute soul. A month back, I had a new start at work and life is more exciting than it used to be.

I have a great aspiration of touching at least billion lives directly and indirectly. I aspire to facilitate growth for the people who have potential and fire excel by helping them to mobilize their potential at right time, right pace and right level. I strongly believe that this is going to be a great learning experience for me, not only technically but also managerial and leadership skills. Sometime back, I read the book "Transform your Workplace" by Ken Blanchard. In his book, Ken Blanchard talks about Servant Leadership and inverting the pyramid. I also happen to work in a place that asks people to "invert the pyramid". Next few years is going to be absolute excitement and new learning.

I am really looking forward eagerly for some of teammates to lead me :-) I will keep you posted about my learning.

Web Goat - Deliberately Weak

We generally call "scapegoat" and in web application security world, there is also a scapegoat "WebGoat". WebGoat is deliberately vulnerable web application that helps us to learn web application attacks and this knowledge helps us to avoid those vulnerability in the application we develop. WebGoat is written in Java and so we can install on any operation system. All the web attacks are discussed in 30 lessons and it also comes with install guide. WebGoat is being maintained by OWASP. The details can be found here.

Open Gyan - An Update

Some of you know that I have started an initiative for the students. Few folks joined with me later to when I started the website and Badhri created a Orkut community. As I promised you in one of the previous posts, I here to give you an update. There are reasons to be happy and finally we have given another dimension to Open Gyan. We have launched a long training program for the students who have at least 2-3 years to complete their degree (BE, MCA, ME, MSc). This program comes from a collective experience of 17 years and we are positive that many more people will join us.

This program is an attempt to help students to improve their experiential learning. If you have any of your friends who are in college, you may want to pass this information to them. The detail of this program be accessed through this link - Open Gyan

When do you Look Out? It really Matters

The world throws out enough of case studies and sometimes it will stunning that you happen to learn each minute. Only thing that one needs to do is to be open. One of my friends/classmates shared his experience and here it goes. Sometimes, the mangers, who in the name of leveraging or delegating mess up with things. The real shortsightedness makes them so vulnerable without they knowing that they are vulnerable. It is very pathetic and for an outsider it is quite evident. The delegation of your delivery cannot happen across teams but you can always leverage. But when you are leveraging one needs to know what is being leveraged and the risk involved in the leverage.

One risk that comes with leveraging is sudden spike of advantages - immediately you will have advantages however you will not have the experience that comes with building the advantage. But when you leverage you are going against the nature and evolution. In this world, the advantages brought by evolution is relatively stable. When we leverage and if we do not know the associated risk, it is like crossing a free way - you may luckily get away but you may also get crashed. So, the managers need to use "leveraging" as getting to a place fast but always should invest time in getting something organically. Always organic is good. When you look out is more important. If you look out for something which you need to build in-house, the end results will be tragedy. So, always (or most of the times) do not look out for leveraging. If it takes hard work to do, just do it as the hard work will strengthen the system further.

What you are leveraging, when you are leveraging and the associated risks have to be studied before leveraging. Don't leverage something which takes only few minutes to think/build. (It sucks).

Informative Talk on Entrepreneurship

It took me 29 and odd years to understand that simplicity and modesty is the way to start. I was fortunate to attend a talk by Mr. Raju Venkataraman, a serial entrepreneur at IIT Madras, Chennai. He was talking about entrepreneurship and qualities. When to take risk, how to take risk and how to sustain the own venture talking examples from his life. He quoted in many places about Tata, Ambani, Gates, Steve Jobs and many others.

During his talk one thing that stood out was his - simplicity and modesty. He quite often connected the dots and making the participants to know the unknown through known simple principles of life. He never tried to force things. When some asked a question about being ethical. Without any prejudices, he answered "being ethical" is part of your value system. I would say that is an important take away for me and anyone who is trying to become entrepreneur. Apart from whole a lot of inspiration, having a value system is quite important.

Being ethical or unethical is the manifestation of one's value system. It is "ok" to rob if you are a thief because it is your value system. He doesn't mean or want us to have low value system but his point was to convey the importance of "value system". I feel that I need to spend sometime reflecting about my value system and make it "real" value system.

Great Insights.

Open Source Appliances

As a follow up to my previous post, this one talks about appliances in open source. When you say appliance and immediately Linux comes to my mind. I haven't seen any other open source operating system that is widely deployed as Linux. Today, most of the appliances (watch, microwave, routers, switches and many more) are powered by Linux. Unlike general purpose computers like workstations or PC, the appliances are built for specific purpose. The appliance should be an "expert" in doing something. For example in the case of router appliance, the appliance characteristics should be throughput and performance in routing packets.

The appliance market is quite heated up and there are many small players turning the heat and screwing up big market players and industry leaders. They do not have "low cost" as their only advantage but they are in a position to give features, performance and throughput on par with industry leaders but at the half the price or even less. From here on, I believe open source appliances is going to get into mainstream and slowly open source appliance will take more market. Making open source appliance (or take it from me, it makes sense to make Linux appliance) is the way to go. The appliance also gives us a viable business model to sell products and services particularly in a developing countries like India.

Where is education? Is it education Industry?

We are living in the world of commercialization where even relationships are commercialized. Education is no exception. Few years back, I was traveling to Delhi for a conference and fortunate to meet a senior person. Since Chennai to Delhi travel time is two and half hours, I wasn't sure about how to spend time. Fortunately, I happen to sit next to a senior person who is Engineer by profession but retired from service.

He was talking about present education system and commercialization of education. He felt that even the educated were falling in the trap of education industry business magnets. He said that the real education did not happen in classroom and the real education for the student was to connect the dots - ability to know the unknown through known. He said that the students of those days suffered from poor exposure and even these days it didn't improve. It is through exposure and constant practice one can become a perfect engineer. He was suggesting me that I should contribute more the society and share my knowledge with others.

Our journey ended when the flight landed in Delhi airport and he wished me for my talk that afternoon and blessed me. I cannot forget the travel and it comes to my mind today because I m so excited to architect a prolonged training for students from computers background to make them employable. I am going to put all my seven and odd years of experience in this initiative. I am going to do this through Internet with the help of web applications. I ll keep you posted and you can expect a post in a month.

Java Decompiler - Reverse Engineering Java Bytecodes

For quite sometime, I have been working on reverse engineering and particularly on reverse engineering Java applications. When we say reversing, we immediately think of generating source code from the binaries. For Java too, we have a decompiler that works like a charm. The tool is Java Decompiler. Few months back, I tried using this tool for reverse engineering an enterprise web application. I did not face any issue either interpreting the output (source code) and in using the tool. It did a decent job in reversing the bytecodes.

Java Decompiler comes as three components. JD-Core is core for decompiling that has the logic for bytecode interpretation and creating source code. JD-GUI is the frontend for JD-Core. Apart from these two packages, it also has JD-Eclipse. As the name suggests, it is a plugin for Eclipse. I didn't get a chance to use JD-Eclipse. I used JD-Core and JD-GUI and recovered source code of more than 1000 class files. If you are security expert, this is one of the tools that you should have in your toolkit.

The homepage of Java Compiler can be accessed through this link.

Scope for Open Source Products in India

India is pioneer in IT services and the number of products that are made and marketed in India is very little. Today, when we take IT for a commoner who wants to automate his business he often goes for a proprietary software. Multinational product companies like Microsoft typically use India as they marketplace and I feel that there are lot of market to be tapped in India as we are at early stage of computerization. When there is a rapid computerization, we need many product companies in India to serve our markets. There is a big problem with existing products - the big price tag. Neither the companies will be able to spend thousands of dollars for infrastructure nor it is sensible to buy even if they are willing to do so. Even if you have open source products, again most of them are developed elsewhere in the earth and still there will be moderate price for their services. The next shift in Indian market will be commercialization of open source with an intention of serving Indian markets. We need much better service for a smaller price tag.

There are open source products available for almost everything however that needs to be customized for specific needs. This gives an opportunity to use existing open source product (for free or for a minimal through away prices) as base and pay only for services (like support or customization). Moving forward, the concept of products is going to erode and move towards services/solutions model. Within next few years, we will witness a drift towards open source products in India and there will many open source companies. The companies which understand this will be a big hit in India and potentially go global with the help of open source.

What do you think?

Leadership 101 - Look Inwards

This is post can be tagged by many words - experience, confession, realization and outcome of pure hard work. Of late and after reading many books and discussing with many of my friends who are trying to make a difference and add meaning to themselves and this world. My professional experience of first six and half years is simple to summarize "I looked outwards and I failed". I was literally looking things that are materialistic and often liked by others. I was driven by lust towards accomplishment. This last half year is full of learning and learning beyond horizon. I started to look inwards and things that interests me. There are lot of questions pop out of my mind - most of them are discarded immediately, few of them are discarded after a while and I retain few things. For example, in past few months you would have found few discontinuous posts. I would have promised you that I will post something continuously but failed. These are things that I felt interesting and later realized that are not so interesting and dropped those.

But this experience has given me the required guts to take up things that I like and in the process I started to look inwards. Looking inwards (to one's self) will do a miracle and it is when one understands one's own potential. On a contrary to looking outwards which is supposed to exciting, looking inwards will be thought agnostic and thought provoking. As one of my friends said that looking inwards will generally be a slow start and then suddenly at one point of time it will lead to an avalanche effect. Look Inwards is one of the priceless lessons I learned from my friends.

Reverse Engineering Java Apps

Professionally, I am a Java developer and had worked sparingly in C++ and other scripting languages. I always felt that Java is easier and with the modern day IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans, you don't even need to know what is compilation and building and similarly you dont even need to know OOPS. As an interviewer, I always face candidates, at least handful, who do not know how to set the classpath and compile using "javac".

Java by its inherent nature is very easier than C/C++ and these IDEs make it much easier. If forward is easier then in most of the cases the reversing should also be easier (but there are exceptions like security algorithms). Unfortunately, reversing Java applications is much easier and I would say it is much easier than developing it. In the next couple of weeks, I ll be writing few posts on my experiences with reversing Java applications and my inputs on how to carry out effective penetration testing for Java applications.

Most Fruitful Day

Today was a fruitful day. As I told yesterday, I needed to give a technical talk to Bank of America office at Chennai (this is Merrill Lynch office to be precise) on Security. It was raining later in the afternoon, but I had a little window when the rain stopped and started from my office around 3.15 pm. The journey to Merill Lynch took almost an hour. After going through security check (like the one in airports), I met my friend who invited me for the talk. Within few minutes we were ready for the talk.

The talk itself was very interesting to me and the audience asked me questions from basics to advanced. The management made the event lively by giving away some gifts to participants who answer questions. I felt like this was most interactive session I ever presented. I talked about Security, why it fails, myths and attack spectrum of a banking application. Due to lack of time, I cut shot the presentation by 15 minutes but overall I felt that I learned a great deal by giving this talk. I received a feedback of 3.5/5 and shows that I got to improve. During this talk, I met new friends.

On the way back to my home, I had an appointment with my college friend (who is research scholar in IIT Chennai). He was explaining me about his new venture and his business plans. We discussed about his consulting experiences, stock market, education system, social responsibility. We planned to collaborate in few initiatives that greats impact in society. I spent around four hours with him and it was quite a learning for me. We also discussed about algorithms, mathematical modeling, fiber optics, network security, open source and philosophy.

Overall, today (particularly the afternoon), went like a super fast express.

Security For Thinkers - Tech Talk

Tomorrow (26-Aug-09), I will be giving a technical talk in one of the famous US banks IT department at Chennai. After reading few pages of Beyond Fear and few pages in System Thinking, I tried to put together a presentation that primarily focused on security from system thinking point of view. So many things fail or produce adverse effects due to poor understanding and security is one. The attacks that are published are only very few percentage of the attacks and many do not like to report it. We never think about how to have our software/hardware secured. It is quite a irony that an attacker who knows about our application hardly anything cracks the software in no time or in few hours.

This shows the incapability in thinking and still we are playing a catching up game. In this presentation, I am planning to give system thinking view about security, the proactive security and sensible security. Unlike other security talks, I will not be presenting or discussing about Top 10 attacks as we never know which will be in Top 10 and we cannot predict when 100th attack will move to Top 10. We need a view that protects us always. Here is what I m planning to cover.

Credits should go to my friend M.S. Rajkumar Pandian for recommending me to BoA friend. Thank you Raj. I would have been much happier if we present this talk together.

Why Security Fails? - One Reason

All organizations pay huge price for security, something like running a separate department and spending millions of bucks to just secure from outdated attacks. Most of the software or devices just secure the assets from a worm that pampered few years back. We think that the attackers are naive (again and again they prove that they aren't). Why do we think that they are naive? It is simply because we never want to think differently, we never want to squeeze our brain and we don't know how to use our brain.

We focus on luxury part of life and so most of us discount ideas which needs hard work (like thinking). Thinking and productive thinking is stressful exercise and now you know why attackers keep winning. Attackers have great mindset (but obviously bad motive). But we say that our motive is good but we lack the attitude of hard work. We still think that someone's devices/products/software alone secure our assets and we fail to appreciate "thinking" is necessary to secure the assets.

This blurred view leads to "panic and patch", "let it happen, we have products to secure" situation. The situation becomes pathetic where the people are ready to offer sympathy and ouch. If you want to secure your asset, you need to be hard working thinker and build the ability to see through the system and emerge with good understanding of the systems. It is our understanding about system will secure not the devices.

So, the security fails due to poor thinking. This is going to be my topic for my upcoming talk in Chennai.

Leadership 101 - Write Test Everyday

One of the priceless lessons I learned from my father is "write test everyday". My father is a teacher. He retried from his paid work but continues his work for free to local students here in Chennai. He was a Sanskrit Pandit at Villupuram. I don't remember the year exactly but it was the time when I was in school and I was complaining about school exams. I said to my father that these teachers were killing me with exams and progress cards.

Being a teacher himself, he said that the students' life is relatively stress free because they write once in a quarter or once in a month. But a teacher writes exams everyday when he stands before his students to impart the lessons in text books and the lessons of life. But generally, the teachers never feel the pressure because they do it out of passion. But eventually they write test everyday. The teacher does the home work and remains open when he delivers his lecture. When you have the attitude of "writing test everyday", you will never take a job without understanding and planning. Once you do that, you job is almost over.

Expect Job Market in Another Six Months

The world has seen enough of this - "the effects and after effects of economic recession". You have the reason to cheer because of the words "after effects" meaning that the recession is ended as far as my understanding is concerned. You cannot shed more jobs as you have already fired many and this is the time that everyone is going to be buckle up for job market. First you will see a move of highly qualified and intelligent workforce move from one company to another company. It is happening in Wipro, CTS, Infosys in India and many product companies. Breathe.

The job market is going to heat up in another three to six months and within the next nine to twelve months, each company will have record high attrition rate, may even be close to 20% (many are saying that it may even go to an extent of 30-40%). Even if you pay more, the people will not be willing to stay as they will use this opportunity to move out for many reasons. If you are intelligent company, you should selectively remove recruitment freeze, bring in talented workforce now. Because, when the job market recovers, you need to pay them more as there will many people who give them good offer (Demand-Supply baba). So, if you do not see further pressure to your business, lift the recruitment freeze. If you are highly conservative, wait till next recession so that you can be right at least in the next business cycle.

Leadership 101 - Don't Negotiate with your Team

Many of us use negotiation at wrong places and one such place is negotiation in teams. Don't negotiate anything with anyone in your team to build trust. "If you give this, I will give that" will not work in team building. Negotiation is sick when it comes to team. Never try to build trust by negotiation. It is the language that will not work in a long term. While it may give momentary successes which are often fake, it does not have steam to give long term and sustained successes.

The successes and team can be built due to trust and never decreasing and ever increasing trust between the team members. If you negotiate with the team, it breaks the bond of trust. Once you have done it few times, it is very difficult to come out of the negotiation mode to mutual trust mode because you then need to build the trust again from the scratch (this negotiation also changes your subconscious mind to be cunning and tactical). If "negotiation" is your mode of communication, stop it and look for authentic "trust model" to communicate with your team. Then you will realize the "soul" in the team.

Leadership 101 - Potential is Great but Kinetic is Greatest

If you heard about S.V. Shekar (multi-facet person, hero, comedian, politician with dignity), you should probably heard this one.

Character 1: What was your ambition when you were young?
Character 2: Like my father, I too wanted to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer and a teacher.
Character 1: Oh great. Is your father a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer and a teacher.
Character 2: No, he too wanted to become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer and a teacher
Character 1: Thinking of committing suicide :-(

If you see, in real world, there is no difference between "character 1" and us. We think that we have great potential but the world measures us with the action we do, the results we produce and the impact we make. There is a big dam with full of water. You cannot harvest the crops without letting the water flow into your field. You need to open it and allow water it move. Dam has a potential to give irrigation to thousands and thousands of acres of land. But it is of no use, if you don't open it.

I agree that unless you have water you cannot irrigate the land. The potential is an entry criteria to make an impact. In order to be useful, you need to convert your thoughts to action. So, potential is great but kinetic is greatest.

Leadership 101 - Be Level Headed

Sometimes when I do extreme things or things that are extreme to my capabilities (like jogging for 10 kilometers continuously), I feel superior and bump people like a maniac. When I m faced with an athlete who knocks off 40 kilometers consistently, I fall down and I consider inferior to them. Factually, it is a absolute truth but generally we are more psychological than factual. We need a fact to either boost or ditch things. We never treat and behave based on the facts.

I have also written couple of posts on Emotional Intelligence and this is a overlap between this post and those. It is quite essential for leaders to stand on their legs. Because of the position they decorate and the number of decisions they take everyday, it is reasonable to say that the decisions they make create an impact (positive or negative) on every stakeholders. If you are a born jerk, it is quite true that all the decisions you are going to make will be bad decisions.

It is quite essential that one should start living a level headed life - not get carried away with successes and failures emotionally. Take them as a fact to add up your experience and move on.

Create an Image of Yourself

In this fast paced world, we tend to anything and everything that gives as pleasure. Most of the things that give us pleasure don't generally give us peace after sometime. We get addicted to those habits only to spoil ourselves. For example, eating fast foods, smoking, drinking, sleeping, procrastination and the list goes. We do all things that put us in pressure and finally after doing it we feel that we need to relax. We either go to spa for a massage or party out in a pub only to get pressurized more. The cycle of pressure and relax goes on and on. We never know how to break the cycle and during each iteration the pressure and the need for relaxation grow more.

But the real growth starts with a purpose like "absolute willingness to be a good human being", "helpful to self and possibly to others", "spread the goodness to the universe". This may sound altruistic. But that is what the life is all about. I never believed in the words of others (how great they are) but now I have started to feel that those words make sense. I am thinking how Swami Vivkenanda would have lived his life and wanted to have similar impact in my life. Sometimes my mind travels into 1800 to these days West Bengal to sneak peak what Swami Vivekananda is doing. I look at Gandhi's passion towards truth and want to resemble him in truthfulness. All these great qualities did not come to them but they acquired those qualities by constantly working on those qualities - sometimes alone and sometimes with their Guru.

These great people make us so tiny and yet give us hope that we can also experience their excellence in our lifetime. I believe, in order to do that, we need a mental model of ourselves, need to be sure about the ways of reaching them and inner, never ceasing passion to be self. The only thing that is required is to be self and constantly working on improving our inner self. The other things like discipline, character, wealth, health, peace and all goodness comes to us automatically. It all lies in our hands - creating an image.

Leadership 101 - Integrity, Makes You Feel Great When You Die

I just love it, the word Integrity. I have a great respect for the word and I consider people with Integrity as my Guru may it be two years old or hundred years old. Integrity is one of the rarest quality that we can find these days. When the man invented money he started to lose his integrity. Often his desire turned to greed and he had become a maniac to go to any extent and most of the times even up to losing his Integrity.

I don't want to hide the fact that on a daily basis there are challenges that put me on a hot stove only to test my Integrity. When I encounter those situations, my inner tells me that don't mortgage Integrity for the sake of momentarily success on petty things. But yet, my greediness wins and I lose Integrity. How powerful my greediness is?

After deeply introspecting, I found myself a "self centric" person focusing on myself and never tried connecting with the whole. I never searched whole. For example, when I m in my home, I think about home but do not think home in the context of a whole "town". When I think about "town" I don't connect it with my country. When I think about my "country", I don't think about my planet. When I think about my "planet", I don't think about my universe. When I think about my universe, I don't think about myself.

We the human being often fail to appreciate the interconnectedness between many objects in the creation. We know little things and often we fail to realize that we know only little. The ego and greediness rules and that leads us towards something insane. We guys know how to crab someone without appearing like a "ditch guy". We are experts and we call it growth, outpacing competition, strategist and business leaders.

If you are going to do something after mortgaging your Integrity, the world is not going to like it and so are your people. I feel that before working on my business skills, I need to work on my Integrity to make myself a good human being. After doing that my business skills will make some sense to this world and myself.

Video Post - Java Code Coverage with Emma

Here you go, for the first time, I have recorded my voice for a tutorial on Java Code Coverage with Emma. Please have a look and let me know whether it is useful to you. I m planning to slowly but consistently release similar tutorials on Java, Tools, Operating Systems and Network Security. Watch the first presentation on Emma by clicking this links

1. Emma Code Coverage - Part 1
2. Emma for IDEs - Eclipse
3. Emma for IDEs - Netbeans
4. Emma - Offline Instrumentation
5. Emma - On-the-fly Instrumentation
6. Emma - Reporting
7. Emma with Ant
8. Emma with Junit
   

Leadership 101 - Trust, Remember it starts from you

If there is a broken relationship or a failed business, there will be only one reason - "Failing to establish the trust". This world has seen and probably each one of us might have seen businesses and relationship fail because of lack of trust. It is the same trust that is behind each successful organization and peaceful relationships. For example, assume that you go a shop to buy a thing for a buck. The trust between you and the shop keeper is just for a buck. It is when either you or the shop keeper trust the other for more than a buck, the relationship grows, else it decreases gradually. This is exactly why we are pleasant to few and unpleasant to few.

If we are unpleasant to few, this shows that we don't trust them fully - there are strings attached, you trust them with conditions. When you want to grow the relationship or business or lead a team, you got to trust them more. When you trust them more, they sense and experience it, then they trust you even more and it grows. On the other hand, when you trust them less, in return, they trust you less and finally both of you end up in mistrust.

Like me, if you believe in God, the God within you, "Trust Others, and They will trust you more" and I believe, this is the foundation for strong relationship and leadership.

Have a Great Day.

Leadership 101 - Listening People Isn't a Bad Idea

It takes a great deal to be a leader and even hard is to become a charismatic one. If you look at the charismatic leader, they listen to others and they communicate well. But is it sufficient? Every charismatic leader are down to earth either in terms of accepting what they don't know or put their knees down to reach out the people who are hurt.

They know their limitations and even if they cannot fix all the issues, they just hear the voices, feelings and emotions of hurt souls. Generally, people fell great when someone hear them. Just check this with any three old kid. He will come to you and explain his own story about moon. After he completes his story, his eyes go bright. He feels that the person who hears him respects him. WoW, what a feeling? Think about when you show similar respect to other human being who feels that his voice hasn't be heard. Just hear it.

Listening is a way of leadership when one sits with a person who is seriously hurt. Just keep on listening and speaking only little to help him to vent out his feelings, emotions and words. During listening, authentically engage in active listening. Don't browse your cell phone, laptop or think about your friend who will wait for you in a cinema theature next week. Engage in active listening. Listening is sufficient to put your views across that you are respecting him and that will lift his morale.

Listening is equivalent to leading. It works.

Leadership 101 - Paint the wall of Great Future

Many of us were good in the past and good in present. Given a task or work, all of us will complete it successfully. There is no doubt about it. Many of us call ourselves successful if we are little better than others in our own scale. The scale or the parameter we compare with others vary and it is a convenient marriage between what you achieve and what others don't. We generally do not compare ourselves with our weaknesses (which is often other's strength). That is fair as it is human tendency.

You can witness the very same thing in organizations. They call themselves number one in profit, lines of business, revenue, number of clients, and many others self proclaimed scales. This stinks and this shows that those organizations do not have legs to stand up. They are in terrible fear of future. Many organizations just ride their future by aligning themselves with economic and business cycles.

Leadership is all about painting the wall with glory of the transformation. Leadership is setting a compelling vision to eradicate fear among people and give them courage to add more glory. It is leader's responsibility to paint the wall of future with compelling vision but not with usual vision of being number one, deliver high quality products and blah blah. For instance quality is no more an competitive advantage and so is cost advantage. If you do not have quality, you will be out of business. The future is more important than delivering the current projects.

Leadership 101 - Dusts are Great, It is Part of the Process

I was crossing countryside and I found a small a small heap of sand. After few hours, when I was returning back to my home, I saw a huge hill of sand. I went to the place and found two kids unearthed so much soil to dig a pit. How much soil they unearth is not that important when compared with what deeper they want to go. They focused on digging, digging and digging deeper. They understood the fact that going deeper makes sense than getting carried away with amount of soil they unearth.

Like kids digging a pit, we are also making a journey towards excellence. Excellence is similar to digging pit and going deeper. If you are also digging excellence and didn't make much progress, remember you are unearthing and going deeper. It will take little more time, dedication, effort and digging. But don't stop digging, dig further. If you have found too much of sand, it is great because it is part of the process and it shows that the process is working for you. Throttle and move on, you are right on track. If you don't unearth dust or it stops, then it shows that you are not digging.

So, dusts are great, it is the part of the process.

Gung Ho

Learn Trading - Enter with Exit in Mind

You might at least heard from few of the stock broking firms or from your friends that you can make great deal of money by short term trading. If they also say that there is equal chance of losing the money, you can believe their words. If they build their pitch around profits, get away from them. Even world's greatest traders and technical analysts cannot exactly pin point when the market will reverse and go against your position. But this doesn't mean that you are going to be loser always. But the loss is a possibility. There is a risk and the risk pays you off equally.

Unless it is long term investment, if you are trading for short term to medium term for some quick profits, the key is money management and taking positions in phases. We will more about more about these in upcoming posts. The more important is the mindset. For example, if you buy a stock for 40 rupees and waiting for making huge profit without any time line or price target, you are unlikely to get profit. So, when you are taking positions, it is very crucial to enter in the right price and right time. It is equal more important that you exit in right price and right time. In the next post, we will discuss why "entry" and "exit" are more important with charts.

Lots of Money To Be Made - Really.

This year is going to be start of another bull market and it is likely to run for at least next few years. After Oct' 08 lows, everyone (including myself) thought that the market is going to hit another bottom. The stock market proved again that anything can happen. It never made another low and probably won't hit a new bottom again. The stocks which traded in hundreds came to as low as to 10 rupees. For example, my preferred stock HDIL made a low in 60s and went up to 300 rupees.

By looking at the patterns, I feel that there are lots of money lying with mutual fund houses, domestic institutional investors and particularly Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC) that needs to come to market. These educated folks don't invest like kids. They are guys who make the markets move in either direction. These folks have real huge money and many of them are sitting on reasonable proportion of cash. This tells us that those money has to come to market sooner or later.

Ideally, one should have started to invest during October so as to "bottom fish" but literally one cannot bottom fish as no one knows where the bottom is. So, the key to successful investing is systematic investment. Like SIP plans in Mutual Fund, one should go for building portfolio at crucial support levels of each stock. By this, one can reduce risk and maximize the returns. While "buying at bottom" and "seeing at rise" is a common strategy, the strategy cannot be applied directly. One has to systematically plan for investment, spilit up the prinicple amount into at least 4-6 portions and invest at every crucial support levels (or for every 2000 points drop/rise in Sensex).

When you invest/trade like a machine, you must make a real lot money. Period.

Role of Financial Consultant

How long will you work? At some point in your life, you would like to take a permanent off from your work and people call it retirement. This is the time, you will spend more time with your family, doing small things that excites you and do some traveling/pilgrimage. In order to have peaceful life, it is absolutely essential that you have enough corpus to support your family and yourself. It is quite reasonable if you want to build a corpus of 1.5 - 2 crores.

When you want to build a portfolio of products, I strongly believe and recommend you to go for a financial consultant who is experienced and who will be working for you and sensitive to your needs. Do not get in touch with inexperienced consultants who offer you products bits and pieces. For example, most of the consultants whom I met before I met my current consultant (Mr Anand Srinivasan) were focused only on specific products. They never asked me questions on current investments. As far as they are concerned, it is their business, they want to sell their products.

But with any experienced/knowledgeable consultant like Mr Anand, they start their interaction with the clients with questions. I still remember the number of questions he asked when I met him first time. He literally made my father and me to run the safe more than 5 times to bring the details of investment. He clearly analyzed my "risk-reward" in accordance with my age and finally suggested me to go for few products. Most importantly, he never pushed me to buy products from him. He was focused only on creating the corpus - slowly with discipline. Periodically, he used to visit my home and make sure that the investments are on track and make timely shuffling to reduce risks. He is one of the very few people who look things over a long term and do shuffling for short term to maximize returns. There is no wonder why I still continue seek Anand's help for all my investment.

When you want to retire with a good corpus, it is essential that you need someone to educate you and who can help you to make sensible decisions. Go for a financial consultant not brokers.

God@Earth - A Puncture Boy

Each one of us can think, write and want to live like Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Gautama Buddha. But most of the times, we forget to follow the soul. If we follow our soul, we will find all the great people among us. But unfortunately it takes a lot of time to understand this as we get stuck in details, see, smell and perceive things with poor understanding, and we never get connected with the whole - the soul.

Today, I happen to meet a great guy. I dont know his name, let us call him Mr. Perfect because for me he appeared perfect. He might have been 15-20 years old or may be much younger. He works in a cycle shop in Vadapalani (Chennai, India) and the cycle shop has an extension for fixing the puncture (both bicycle and bikes). Today, it seems like a good day for me and fortunately my bike got punctured (this is a regular phenomenon). I needed to walk at least 500 meters to find this shop.

When I parked my bike, Mr Perfect was fixing puncture of a cycle. He took around 10 minutes to fix it. He was fully focused on his work. There was another elderly person who was working with a bike. I thought that the elder one is going to fix my bike. As I was thinking, Mr Perfect was so fast to fix the cycle and he just smiled at me. Again, he was fully engaged and dedicated towards his work and my God, I never seen a "Puncture Boy" like him (you can believe my words, I have seen my puncture shops in Chennai).

After he finished, he double checked whether he fixed it properly. I m not sure how many of us, the "so called" software engineers do this. He said, "Sir, I ll make sure again, it is almost 9 pm and you will not find any shops if it again goes off". I was stumbled with his customer service, surely, he is "Gung Ho". The point is, he has already worked on 50+ punctures and he never got tired. He didn't take sandwiches, snacks or juices. But, his energy level was pretty high.

Truly, a God at Earth and one of the great leaders I have ever seen. Here is the picture of Mr. Perfect.

Leadership 101 - Leader Will Always Be a Follower

If you are obsessed with something, you will love it like a mad and it applies to leadership too. When it becomes a passion, you will understand the leadership is more about following and less about being followed. You will live for the principles that you believe in. When you have your vision on moving up the career or a top post, it is very unlikely that you will reach it. But rather, you to have see top post as a by-product of your leadership. The foundation is your attitude to see followership in leadership.

This following is not running after people. This is more about giving more power to people who think right and act right. Many people call this "Inverting the Pyramid" where the people are allowed and motivated to make decisions. It is faster way of creating decision makers and leaders and right way too. If you are a true leader, you will accept that creating thinkers and leaders will be of top most priority. "Inverting the Pyramid" and following the decisions of your people will make you unmatchable team and bring up the hidden potential of individuals leading to transformation.

So, a leader always has follower's mindset. Any thoughts?

Money Investing - Multiplying Hard Earned Money

It was two years back, I was introduced to a financial consultant Mr Anand Srinivasan by my cousin to get exercise my ESOP. My financial consultant (and friend) introduced me a stock broker and my demat account was created in a day. Being a high risk taker, I was in involved in short term and intra day trading. I had to lose around a lakh and half to understand an important lesson "money management" is key to successful investing. Over a period of one year, I lost 1.5 lakh and covered my losses in just few months when I fine tune my strategy.

I generally do not believe getting a paid service for stock recommendations. I understood that over a longer period of time, the fundamentals of the companies matters most and one can play in short term to medium term with the help of technical analysis. After watching few stocks, I understood that multiplying hard earned money or at least getting a decent returns (100%) in a year is quite feasible and particularly in bear market.

In this blog, I would also like to keep my post related to stock markets and products related to stock markets like mutual funds and retirement funds. I do not assure you that my method will work magic for you. However, I strongly believe that you can take away this learning and avoid silly/idiotic mistakes that I did. I m not seasoned or paid consultant who is expert in trading but trying to become one :-)

Happy Investing and Learning.

Leadership 101 - Can ATM be a Leader?

The era of old (and old age) management and leadership is eroding. If you deny that you will be eroded along with old management styles. So far, we lived in the era of making money and most of the successes of corporations are upheld with single digit and sometimes double digit money matra - profit, revenue. Often, the people are called resources and head counts. But we are not far away from the world of oneness and mutual respect.

One of the key points that was discussed in "The Moonshots to Management" was that the power will go to people who add value and power will be yanked from people who do not add value and by the way, "The Moonshots to Management" was an article focusing management innovation from top notch professors and business leaders. Many people like Ken Blanchard have spoken about Inverting the Pyramid. If you haven't inverted it yet, do it now before you get buried when the pyramid inverts itself. The key differentiators in future centuries will be your people.

If you see "profit" is sufficient criteria for taking up leadership position, then an ATM that dispenses cash can be a great leader. Ask yourself what you have done for the people that you are representing and you privileged to lead. Have a time slot in your day (at least all working days) to think about your people and how you can transform them. Profit is fine for business but transformation is beyond business. Be sensible before it is too late. People will be proud to follow you. Period.

Leadership 101 - Consistency is Key

When we were kids my father gave us (to my younger sister and me) a small container which we used to save daily pocket money. My mom used to give us 25 paisa and I remember in few months we were able to save 10-20 rupees. There is another instance. My father was a bread winner to whole of my family (including my grandma who was living in a village). Out of little money what my father used to give her monthly, she saved 1000 bucks (she might have saved for years) and deposited in a local bank in my name. She was an example of being consistent. Before I became fully aware of this, I loved her, later I loved her and respected her discipline.

Generally we don't care when someone advices about tiny improvements. Being the young blood, we just focus on big things. We ultimately focus on "big things" and lose focus on actual process. But the people who are experienced and matured will focus on tiny and important things. I learned the paramount importance of being consistent from my previous Project Leader - Mr. RK Raja. He is man of consistency and he pushed me towards consistency. My CEO Mr. Vineet Nayar, in one of his yearly meetings talked about rain drops and how the rain drops make an ocean.

When you want to dig 100 feet deep, you need dig 1 feet 100 times consistently. If you dig 25 feet three times or 50 feet one time, it isn't sufficient. Consistency is the key to transformation.

Phishing - What an Idiot?

I never used to look at my SPAM folders and just send those emails directly to graveyard. Today, I happen to see one of the emails that appears to be from ICICI Bank. This is the phishing email and the guy was making everyone idiot. The phishing was tailored in a simple way. Observe the following picture and carefully look at the red rectangle. One rectangle highlights a text linked with a URL. The text of the hyperlink has http://www.icicibank.com/..... and the actual URL goes somewhere which can be observed from the second rectangle.

I was using Google Chrome which promptly pointed that the website was phishing site. This shows that the internet users illiterate in basic information security and the attackers take those innocent but careless people for a ride and make a big sum. This guy still uses a very foolish method to fool us. Beware, when Chrome or Firefox says something, just give it the deserved attention. This is just a thought to promote Information Security in normal life. We are so much obsessed with Internet and we need to use the knife to just cut the fruit and not our hands.

How to Build Emotional Intelligence - Get Rid Of Psychological Memory

It is easier said than done. My journey towards building emotional intelligence is very painful. But I believe that I can endure the pain because at the end of the day it makes me a nice and pleasant guy. On the way, I tend to learn so many things about humanity, human relations, psychology, how to get away from "don't walk the talk people" and yet to unaffected or affect negligibly.

Human beings have excellent memory - many many billions of terabytes. The wonderful thing about human beings is that they forget even the biggest blunders when there have benefits and they tend to blow up small mistakes which goes to an extent of taking a revenge. We need to build the habit of selective amnesia - the ability to forget our psychological memory. This is the key aspect for building emotional intelligence.

There are two types of memory - factual and psychological memory. For example, when your close friend does some unpardonable mistake which you cannot digest, you feel so much pain - the real pain due to the wound and the psychological pain due to your friend's action. In reality, it is the psychological pain that causes so much wound and prevails beyond the physical wound. You tend to spoil your inner well being and your low emotional intelligence erupts in many forms but mostly yelling at others or at your friend. The yell causes more damage to you than to your friend. The first step towards building emotional intelligence is to forget psychological but retaining the factual memory (which adds to your knowledge base) to add the scenario as your learning. The second step towards better Emotional Intelligence is getting rid of psychological memory.

Other posts on Emotional Intelligence can be accessed via this link

Leadership 101 - Doing Right Vs Being Successful

There are two ways of looking at things - "Doing Right" and "Being Successful". All actions that are right may not lead to success and all successes which are gotten might not have been gotten in right way". We call someone goof who had the capability to think in a right way and we can give many examples. Like many man made objects, the successes are also made by man. If someone becomes successful after cheating (for example, building a house with corrupt money), we still praise him for being successful (and indirectly for cheating). If someone does something in right way and still fails, he is done. Because of this feedback system, most of us just do whatever is needed to be successful. We just praise success and do not care about being right.

We, the human being, get carried away my the momentary pleasures and gather the guts to do wrong thing if that wrong thing can be hidden or widely accepted in your society. You an option out of two.

1. Being Right and Doing in right way
2. Being Successful

Success gives pleasure gives to your ego and you feel excited until success ebbs out, but "being right" is humane and divine thing, it always excites you. When you are right, there will be great force in you that will drive you towards excellence and you will understand excellence is more than successful.

Who said "excellence" is journey. When you stay in the state of "being right", for you, the excellence will be a destination. This is great lesson I learned and also learning is that "being right" is toughest in life.

Leadership 101 - Leaders Aren't Faint Hearted

Mistake make the man perfect. Not only it makes us perfect, it also makes us strong and gives us opportunity to test our integrity. It was two months after I assumed lead, I made a miserable and bloody mistake. But I was able to sail through with much ease simply because I accepted that it was my mistake (I made others 0% accountable). Since I openly and unconditionally accepted my mistake, my natural response was fierce. When you make a mistake there are two options

1. Bury that mistake thinking that no one sees and be passive as if nothing has happened. When you do this the possibility of you learning something is nil. And you will ditch not only yourself but also the people you trusted you. The trust between you and the stakeholders will decrease and ultimately seize.
2. Stand up like a kinder garden kid with a lot of enthusiasm and accept that "I am the culprit" and own it 200% and make a damn honesty effort for a steeper recovery or probably a vertical recovery. Your stakeholders will be proud of you. They will trust you more and finally they will be loyal to you. That is how you build relationships.

Choose the second one because it takes a great deal to stand up when you are in tight corners.

Leaders Aren't faint hearted.

Two more blogs

It is great feeling to share one's learning in the form of presentation, training, discussion and writing. Now, I have started two more blogs to document my learning, express my thoughts and validate it and give some food for thought for you. Yesterday, I registered as PMI member and this means that I will be taking up PMP in near future. That is going to be a steep learning curve needing discipline. I have a started a blog on Project Management and for the next few months I will be posting on PMP and occasionally on other aspects of Project Management. The blog address is http://tinythoughts.grabyourfreedom.net

Many of us will be willing to earn money and multiply it taking some risks by investing in stock markets directly or indirectly. I primarily started to play with stocks not to earn money (but I dont know why I started to play). After playing for a while, I made tiny losses and huge losses before making small profits. But overall, the learning was great and it taught me how to shield oneself from others emotions. Believe me, stock market is a place with low emotional intelligence and if you can continue to make profits consistently, you are really maturing. So, I am planning to do research on stocks/technical analysis/reading charts. I will be posting few to start with at http://finance.grabyourfreedom.net

Two more blogs to our portfolio

Tiny Thoughts
Value Investing

Leadership 101 - Respect Your Juniors Twice You Respect Your Seniors

It was a gathering. A senior executive was standing in a podium and crowd were following the usual protocol - putting the mobile phones on mute. Another scenario. It was a meeting, the same senior guy was talking to his juniors and all the folks are listening. Suddenly, the phone rings and the guy (one of the juniors) just asks the permission to speak (as a courtesy). The same junior guy speaks to his teammate (who is junior to him) and picks up the phone without showing any courtesy.

For God sake suck up your senior but at the same time do not ditch your juniors. Show them courtesy and show them they are worth showing that courtesy. It makes them happier, it provides enough motivation to be your ambassadors, they become the sales guy of your idea and they adore you to pieces and all of a sudden you become their role models. Two (rather three) things that are important

1. Show authentic courtesy
2. Respect your juniors twice you respect your seniors

This will redefine the trust between you and your juniors. This is one of the things I learned during my journey in pursuit of leadership.

Leadership 101 - Goodness Comes Through You (not from you)

I recently read somewhere, "Employers do not pay employees, they are just mediators, it is customers who pay". This can very well be applied to leaders leading a team. All bosses and particularly if you are someone's boss need to remember that you are not giving prosperity and growth. You subordinates earn it and the growth/blah-blah comes through you and not from you. This is true. Since this is truth, it needed not be twisted or you need more examples. The truth is so simple and straight forward.

But the moment when you feel that you are the giver and everything originates from you, no one can stop your downfall and the state of your team will be pathetic. You may not crush your team initially but slowly you will. To be a leader, you need to understand your boundaries and one such boundary is "knowing that all goodness come through you and not from you". This is first thing I learned when I started my role as a leader two years back. Thanks to Zig Ziglar.

You happen to be there, you do nothing more than that. Your duty is to add value and add more value to your team.

Be a follower, then a leader is a possibility

Many of us (I should say most of us) are both leader and follower in everyday life - may it be at work or personal life. At work, we are boss and subordinate to someone and in personal life same is the case. So, we cannot shy away either from leadership or being follower. In order to be at best in both leadership and follower role, we need to understand the factor that connects both leader and follower.

A bad follower cannot be a good leader. Let us say it again - A bad follower cannot be a good leader but can be a good manager. The leader and follower relationship is two way lane. First, the leader should be highly self motivated, highly intellect and give respect to his follower. When a follower has such leader, first he respects his leader, then loves him and finally draws inspiration from his leader. From respect to drawing inspiration is a gradual, study and time consuming process. When the follower reaches a point, then the follower becomes a leader. A follower needs to spend at least one cycle of respecting his leader, loves his leader and having him as a source of inspiration to become a leader.

So, the leadership starts at being a faithful, honest and great follower.

Leadership 101 - Good things should end to spawn better things

It has a three successful association and for the past three years has been such a learning - technical, leadership and emotional intelligence. The three years long relationship with my client comes to end. We have completed the mission quite successfully and our openness in learning gave us successes throughout the journey. It is good to complete a project but it is very painful to miss people. But life just goes on and it will.

I would like to split my tenure into three - first half with technical challenges, next six months with leadership challenges and the final part emotional intelligence challenges. Overall, the past three years taught me - need for patience, walk the talk, building high performance teams and kindling the servant in you. But now, it is time to say goodbye to all the folks who helped me to sail through this journey with a lot of learning. Come on guys, our time is over. Let us party.

In the next few posts, I will be writing on my experiences which shaped my thinking, elevated my performance and kindled my interests towards management more specifically in learning strategy.

Get the basics right - Fix the root cause, not symptoms

Some say, "We are following world class processes to deliver software with quality and in time". Is it the processes that deliver software? Isn't it people? When you want to deliver great software, you got to have great people or at bare minimum you should make great people. Because any great things can be delivered by great people. Mediocre people just deliver mediocre stuffs. Mediocre people with world class processes is just waste of time, false baptism and false hope.

Great people do not need processes, because they know how to do it but they may take different approach - the alternate approach is not usually mediocre, they are just different but equally efficient and effective. If you want organizational transformation, processes won't help you, tools won't help you. You got to make employees great by transforming them. The other methods sucks and usually fails. If you really want to build a world class teams, focus on right things, get your priorities right and do it always - transform people.