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.