Social Intelligence - Be a better leader

It is yet another wonderful reading of an article on Social Intelligence. The article titled "Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership" by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis was published in HBR. This article is treasure for me and it brought out the reasons on why one should be social intelligent. It gave me immense insight and courage to improve my social IQ. I would like to give a short writeup on my reflections on the article and then would like to correlate the article from our perspective (based on Indian values). Here goes the a short write about the article.

The authors candidly convey why a leader should be socially intelligent? What is the chemistry behind socially intelligent leaders and his followers? How one can improve upon fusing the social circuitry of neurons by changing one's behavior? As per scientists, there are three varieties of cells in brain - Mirror, Spindle and Oscillators. (I believe there should be more varieties. but we are going to stop our discussion with three :-) ) Certain mirror cells are fired for specific action done by self or action done by others. When the mirror cells fire, that is when we feel a shared experience. The Spindle cells helps us in making decisions which we also call as gut feeling or intuition. The oscillators is responsible for physical movement that happens unconsciously due to some action of others. When the social IQ is low for a leader, it affects the followers as the brains of followers and leader is fused into a single brain. The bad leaders end up firing wrong cells of their brain and their followers brain. If the leader has good social IQ, the chemistry between him and the followers will be good and hence the team will be highly performing. The authors also claim that one can improve social intelligence irrespective of the gene and brought up by reviewing and analyzing one's behavior. One can make the right cells to fire by changing the behavior. I would recommend the interested readers to read the article in HBR website. Let us continue our discussion on these ideas with Indian values.

If we understand Indian value system, this what exactly the ancient and modern spirtual gurus convey to us. Let us slightly shift our focus to mind from brain. So no bilology stuff. The mind (I am replacing the brain with mind as brain is a machine and I believe the brain in not discussed much. It is the mind from where the thoughts crop are discussed. Need to get my view validated. Any views?) throws lot of thoughts. Some thoughts manifest itself in the form of behaviors. If the thoughts are not worked upon or not given importance, it just vanishes away. In order to build a circuitry in your brain for effective leadership (according to the above article or anything in general), it is quite essential to keep a watch on the thoughts that are acted upon. It may not be possible to keep a watch on the thoughts as they are produced in mass numbers. However it is much easier to keep a watch on our behavior. When one builds behavior quite consistently, it becomes habit and the habit gives birth to character (when behaviors/habits are fed back to the system positively, a positive character is built). When a character is built in you, the character is you and you are the character. It is almost written on stone and fuses the neural circuitary. One needs to work hard to go in opposite way. So, this is one part of the story which is measuring yardstick. So, one needs to work until the character is built.

Another part of the story is how to identify what needs to be done to be socially intelligent. I strongly believe that it will be a failed attempt if we have a checklist and work on it. Rather , becoming socially intelligent should be an experiential learning as social intelligence is tightly coupled with the situation. Though one can generalize socially intelligence, I don't think one can improve upon social IQ in a general way. It has to be done hard way by analyzing ones behavior and constantly correcting the behavior leading to character. Buidling a character is constant and process. So fusing the circuitry in brain for effective leadership is requires hard work.

References:
1. "Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership" by Daniel Goleman and Richard Boyatzis (HBR)
2. Wikipedia

Constant discomfort – Is it good or bad?

Most of us feel that we are doing monotonous work and often find ourselves in our comfort zone. As soon as we feel that we are in comfort zone, we will have certain discomfort of our being and a urge to come out of it. It is this urge of constant elevation makes the evolution of human race. But yet, most of us fail to appreciate the importance of moving out of comfort zone and do something we dare to do because of the general tendency of not accepting the change. Here is an incident (this is not fictional story. it is a real incident).

Today, due to unavailability of fuel in petrol bunks, I traveled in electric train. The train was fully crowded. Jam packed crowd may be farthest meaning. I stood on my toes. I got down at Nungambakkam and as I walked up to the stairs, I heard a mid-aged man saying “Steps”, “Steps” and shortly after that “Flat”, “Flat”. Within few moments I happen to see a person (later I understood that he was in fact visually impaired) with no signs of being visually impaired, having a jute bag on one had, was cleverly following the instruction, reached to the top of the staircase without hitting anyone (On a contrary, I noticed a man (not visually impaired) hitting his fellow passenger and flew away). I did not have a percent of sympathy for my fellow passenger, rather inspired by his confidence and agility. During the course of his move, his response to the changes in terrain was impeccable, smooth and fast. He adjusted quite well and without the voice that guiding him, no one would ever guess that he is visually impaired.

I was thinking about this incident the entire day and thought I surely write a post (to reinforce my learning). Generally, many human beings do not exhibit such attitude unless they have the urge to excel (burning desire) or they are in tight corner (situational). But there are very few bravos who constantly take initiative to move from their comfort zone. and keep raising the bars. If we are complacent, we will generally feel that it is fine to be comfort zone as the going in comfort zone generally will be good. The going will be good until an external force is met (Netwon's third holds good). When an external force is met, the situation demands a change. So, the people who are in comfort zone (due to complacency) react to the change rather in a pathetic way. They argue, without giving it a try, that the change will not work. But another set of people who know that they are in comfort zone but they have constant discomfort in being there. They try to adapt to the change with lot of help and guidance from a helping hand. They react to the situation. (I feel that I fall in this category but surely I would like to go the next category that we are going to talk about)

The set of people who constantly maneuver between comfort zone and discomfort zone anticipate the change and respond to the change gracefully. They understand that the change is required to bail out themselves from uncertainty or to constantly elevate them. The incident I said in the first paragraph is an outcome of a man who constantly come out of his comfort zone . For these kind of people experiencing is more exciting than being in limelight. They never intentionally act to be amazed. They enjoy the experience of being in discomfort zone. They never intentionally set themselves as reference points. It is just the by-product.

So, my answer to the question “Constant discomfort – Is it good or bad?” is both yes and no. It is good if you are acting on the discomfort. It is bad if you have it at feeling or emotional level. When you have it emotional level, it is like monkey having bananas in both the hands and mouth. When one more banana is given, it tends to drop one banana from hand and get the new banana from you. Discomfort should not itch you rather excite you to push yourself.

Wisdom - Necessary but not sufficient

As a follow up post on my previous post “When Experience Sucks”, I gathered the boldness to express further after reading an interesting article in Harvard Business Review. It was rather a short article but insightful and I am not going to repeat what has been told in HBR. That article helped me to validate my perception on experience and also added another perspective.

Though it is true that hard work or learning the things in life hard way bring the wisdom, sometimes wisdom alone is not sufficient to solve a problem. Even if we directly correlate experience with wisdom, the article claims that the wisdom alone is not sufficient to solve a problem. I am not going to talk experience without the wisdom (for me, it is not experience is whiling away the time). If experience alone is sufficient to solve a problem, every person with average intelligence should solve the problems (but it isn’t the case). It is reasonable to say that “all experienced people do not solve problem” or “all experienced people do not solve a problem quite well”.

The scientific studies say that “human beings” tend to think reproductively. I am trying to tie a knot between HBR article and point raised by creativity expert Michael Michalko in his book Cracking Creativity. In his book, Michalko says that most of the human beings think reproductively in a conventional way. Rather it takes a genius touch to see things productively. The ability to see things productively is needed and one can see the world productively by constantly unlearning the knowledge about the object or the problem statement. However, we have tuned ourselves in such way that we always feel it easy to have a blurred vision – seeing things from only very few perspectives. So, ability to see problem in new angles is another important attribute problems (if you solve the problem in novel way, it is bonus).

Mere experience will not help us to solve a problem or at most help us to solve the problem in “yet another time” fashion. But if one shifts the focus and sees things fresh, I am sure we will be bring in “yet another way” of solving the problem. Experience is also about constantly unlearning previous perspectives and constantly learning to see things in new perspectives.

Satyam – Never want to imagine fraud of this magnitude

The articles of Satyam Chairman’s fraud came very late and after the stock market reacted by beating down the stock. The stock is at record bottom and probably based on the current facts, the valuations are quite higher. The company’s future, one of the pillars of Indian IT industry, won numerous awards and have more than 50,000 employees, is a question mark. There are so many people invested their hard earned money build their retirement corpus. Not only the investors lost the peace of mind, every Indian corporate, every Indian who wants India to shine lost their peace of mind.

Raju was too modest in his letter to regulators and trying to take full “credit” for everything that has happened. But, I am sorry to say that his words are too modest to believe. How come board was blind, how come the “so called” executives were blind. Were they simple “accommodated” this fraud? Whatever it may be, everything should have started at a micro level. Like many drops make ocean, all the micro frauds has undergone a fusion and finally exploded as Fraud Fusion. The investors are totally blind folded and so far they have been forced to see false valuation. (There were footages in News channel where a senior citizen shared his opinion.) It is disheartening to see such scams and the after effects. It is very bad mark on Indian companies. So far, many thought the politicians are corrupt but now this fraud has given as one more lesson. There is no difference between politicians and business leaders. Both are same as they are human beings. Greed can be devastating.

Secondly, many Indian news channels (quite often sucks) have become proactive. They are proactively reactive. They start to ask questions such as “Will it affect Indian IT?”, “Will it affect FII investments?”, “Will it affect the numbers?”. I happen to listen to Dr Narayana Murthy and he rightly pointed out that we need to make our system more transparent and teach business ethics. There are two perspectives to look – Intruder and Affected Side. From intruder side, it is the Indian IT company which did the fraud and it is up to India to fix it. Fixing it may be helping Satyam’s clients to run their business by delivering projects, taking care of investors, taking good care of employees and restoring the confidence among the entire business community of the worlds including Citi, GE and Ford. Every Indian and every Indian IT company must take this to their heart and create “Integrity as their DNA”. When many institutions/companies promote Integrity and Ethics, it becomes DNA of every professional. Looking from the view of the affected party, it is quite reasonable for someone to react as they have lost their peace of mind. So, they will react however they will continue to do business with Indian companies provided they see solid and definite action from India. The response should be from peers of Satyam, management and employees of Satyam and of course Indian government.

Thirdly, the regulators, the policy makers, the associations and independent bodies must work on making the system better. The primary focus should be on repairing the system rather than speaking, speaking like a person suffering from oral diarrhea. For God sake, let us focus on much broader issue rather than localizing the issue. The secondary focus should be to bring out the truth, at least now. Let the trials start, continue and end within definite dates.

On a whole, this is a black day for corporate governance. But this is opportunity to learn hard way. But the tuition fee is quite high.

Are you a Good Leader?

I have been digging around to understand the true meaning of Leader. I almost read short biographies of leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Alexander The Great. I am currently reading the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi. I am not going to give their life histories as you will find it in Wikipedia. However, I would like to register my thought on leadership. Here it goes

Let us start with an example. You have a new born baby in your home. After few months, the kid tries to flip on its own and fails. For the little kid, flipping is a good amount of risk. After a year, the kid tries to crawl, tries to stand up and walk. When the kid tries to walk, there is risk of falling. You know that there is risk of falling down. Yet, you do not prevent the kid from flipping and filling. When the kid falls down, you cheer the kid. Within few days, the kid walks and runs.

This simple imagination (and yet it is true in everyone's life) brings out one of the essential qualities of a leader. "Do not prevent/decouple the risk, just be there to facilitate a faster turnaround". When this quality breeds, you will see yourself growing and others growing. If you do not allow your people to take risk, they will not have stamina to deal with day-to-day work. So, "Don't prevent risk. Facilitate Speedy Recovery".

Mahatma may change my life and thinking

After hearing/reading one of the books of Robin Sharma, there was an urge in me to read the autobiographies of great people. Shortly after that I went to a book shop and got "The story of my experiments with Truth" by Mahatma Gandhi. I believe, the work was originally written by Gandhiji in Gujarati and later translated to English.

The writings of Gandhiji and translation was so good and I felt that Gandhiji was talking to me. Right from his childhood, his marriage, study in England and work in South Africa were excellently portrayed. If fact, the book was so engaging and made me to continue my reading throughout night. That is about how it was written.

But more interesting question is "why it is written" and "what is in it for me?" After reading 100 pages of book, I understood "why Gandhiji had so much passion towards truth?". More than the truth, it is accepting the truth that makes one a human being. In many places, he openly discussed his mistakes. Those are not confessions but true passion or love towards the truth.

I am yet to complete the first half of the book. However, I feel that I need to carry that book with me wherever I go. Interestingly, I never felt such closeness with any other book. This is the book, for the first time, I feel that I should carry with me. I want to take this book as my text book to build my character.

More reflections after reading the book fully :-)

If you have any other autobiographies, please do drop in comments section.

When Experience sucks...

I often get a question from my friends "How are staying in a company for so long years?". I have been working in the very same company for more than 6.5 years while most of my friends switched or made to switch to some other companies due to lack of opportunities. The friends who know my nature (of being blunt and sometimes hurting, no most of the times) never ask me such a crap. I am not measuring my experience in terms of years/months/days/hours but rather want to measure in terms of the number of times I got excited. To be precise, the quality of my excitement. As long as I continue to get that excitement, I will stay. If my company gives me the excitement permanently, this will be my first and LAST company. For most of the people, the experience is proportional to the number of years the spent in office. But I have a different perspective.

Experience with ignorance is hell. Experience with suck ups (you can find in most places) is devil. Experience without learning or reading books is suicide.What one should do with experience? Experience helps in making faster decisions and creating people who can make decisions. If one think experience is something sitting (half of the time in bench, one-fourth in tea/coffee/meetings/off-sites, one-fourth in Saturdays/Sundays) in a company and yet if you want to call yourself as leader. Go to a corner of this planet, probably to a forest and yell "I am the leader". So, they are planning to create a separate world to have such bozos. The world is transforming along with this economic recession.

When the experience does not bring in maturity and if the experience is failing to see true capabilities of people, it is worth not having it. It is like coconut given to dog. It is going to roll and eventually the coconut gets bigger. Most of the times, the so called experienced people fail to notice a young chap thinking smartly. However, the experienced guy make it a point not to see the young chap. Many a times, the experienced guy physically sees the smart guy. But it is mere insecurity and his failure to think like a smart guy makes him to be blind or act to be blind. There is also another group of people which revolve around the world which talks about improving the productivity by 10%, 2%. If you are going to bring only 10% productivity improvement, believe me, you are not going to do anything practically. I vaguely remember about Carnot engine and my professor told me that everything in this world works based on the principle of Carnot engine. So, the losses are inevitable. Rather, have guts to say that "I want to improve productivity by 2 times or 10 times" and that is disruptive. Stop talking in percentages and switch over to "number of times". With your experience, if you cannot set goals and achieve it, better not to have that experience.

If you cannot set bold goals, you cannot even achieve mediocre results. Experience is all about setting big goals, taking calculated risks, making earlier decisions, energizing your team and achieving it.

Will this be "yet another year"?

Every year is passing by and the churn is the same. Personally, this year was fulfilling both professional and personal front. During the last part of the year, I was discussing an idea with my friend Rajkumar about starting a website to share knowledge. Finally, we, together with yet another friend Badhrinath, started a website OpenGyan targeting college students.

Assume that there is a wonderful person this world. Everyday he credits few thousand bucks (86400 bucks) a day but he takes the balance when he credits 86400 bucks the next day. In other words, he just refills to make to sum to 86400 bucks. What will you do? Won't you make sure that you fully utilize the entire money and make it zero bucks. In fact, all of us, irrespective whether it is holidays, weekends, festival and illness are receiving 86400 bucks but most of us do not utilize it fully. If you have not figured it yet, the answer is "number of seconds in a day". We often waste our time in unnecessary things.

So the first thing, I would like to do is "Not to waste time" and "Having sense of URGENCY". In Hindu mythology there is king who does his funeral everyday. When you have that, everything will fall in its place and the world will unfold new opportunities.

Being a human being, I would like to do many things such as reading/understanding few Unix/Linux books cover to cover, do some serious blogging on technology, make some meaning in my life (and others' life), just shed 30 kilos of my fat, read at least 2 autobiographies, 10 new books and so on. Unlike the other new year, I eagerly look forward for 2009 to see myself transformed.

Cloud Computing - Redefining Internet (Part 1)

Cloud, often used synonymously for network is getting a traction. Cloud computing is a buzz word today and the technology is quite progressing in terms of deployment and communities are getting together to build technology and also suitable business model around cloud computing. Few days back, I happen to visit a youtube video quite accidentally and started to dig about cloud computing. In the next series of posts, I am planning to log my understanding about cloud computing from different perspectives - technology, bottlenecks, examples, related technologies, enterprise cloud, infrastructure and business model. Though my knowledge on cloud computing is very limited and experience is no more than just few days. However, I would like to post my understanding both from a layman's and software engineer perspective. If you want to explore further, kindly go through links and materials given in references section.
Cloud refers to network. It is a convention to represent network as cloud. Cloud Computing is a technology which enables the delivery of computing resources over Internet. Before discussing further on Cloud computing, let us quickly see few examples.

Example 1: Google Docs
How does Google Docs work? I am honest to say, "I do not know". Google provides software over Internet to its customers and the users of the software are not required to bother about how it works, where the files are stored, who manages it, what format it is stored. Also, you don't need install a piece of software in your laptop. It works across world and also in Moon. You can read your documents whereever you have internet. Isn't it?

Example 2: Web Hosting
Let us assume that you are hosting a website. In order to host a website, you need web server, storage (hard disk and databases), IP address, Domain name. You go to a web hosting provider and buy a package that fits your purse. The web hosting provider just gives a web user interface to manage your account such as host files/services. For you and your users it is still a website. However, your hosting provider may choose to run the servers/software on totally different physical systems but yet he is able to give you the flexibility of running in a single system. You are happy with your provider and so is he.

Example 3: Online bookstore
Assume that you are starting up a company like Amazon and you want an infrastructure to run your business. And you also know that building your own infrastructure is going to cost you more. You feel that you want to customize your business based on demographics which requires quite a churn in the infrastructure. You need to spend big bucks for IT infrastructure.

In the case of first example, you can see a lot of flexibility to the users in providing software as service. The users prefer software being provided as service. The first example need to necessarily be "Cloud Computing". It is just software that is being given to you over network. If you look at the example 2, you can call it "Cloud Computing" if you have all hardware/software being provided by Web hosting provider. In the third example, you want an infrastruture as service or computing as service. When you go for "Cloud Computing", your computing happens on Internet and the benefit for you is "Peace of Mind". If your core strengths are online publishing or running a bookstore, you can just do it. You don't need to have a big IT force. The "Cloud Computing" folks will take care of building networks, equipping your network with devices, install servers and software with accepted service level agreements.

So, in short, "Cloud Computing" is delivering computing over Internet/network without needing to know about anything about resources.

Law of creativity evolution

I have been in an illusion that all geniuses in the world such as Einstein, Edison, Leonardo da Vince, Michelangelo and Darwin are only creative thinkers. Their hard work in producing the masterpiece is huge and their masterpiece is so massive and elegant that the quality of invention is sufficient to over weigh the hard word. Recently, I got an opportunity to start knowing about creativity reading a book of Michael Michalko where he talks about the how ideas can be generated, what are steps and takes through them progressively.

One of the thought that impressed me and I quite agree because of my similar thought in my subconscious was "Law of Darwinian Evolution applies to creativity". The nature ensures that it creates millions of species and combining many genes and it leave those species there. It is up to the species to survive against the time. The nature provides level playing ground and the concept of "Survival of the Fittest" is quite a powerful idea and the truth. The nature never deviates from the truth even by a negligible margin.

In similar way, the creative thinkers were able to play the role of nature by just creating so innumerable ideas. And finally, let the ideas to float and pick the right ones. To be precise, the right ideas manifest to their eyes. This is how most of the inventions are made.

Based on the above statements, I would like draw some inferences that will be useful to me and keep me focused. Creative Thinking is not feasible without hard work. Hard work is the basis and common attributes of all creative thinkers. If someone is able to generate creative idea, it just happens once as a mere coincidence. If you want to be consistent in producing creative idea, get the basic right which is work hard. This is evident from the fact that there were 3500 note books scribbled by Edison during his lifetime. So, work hard.

Creativity - Yet another journey

A couple of months back, I bought a book "Cracking Creativity" and forgot about the book. Recently, when I was searching for some other book, I found this book and thought I should give it a read. It happens consistently that I never complete a book (except Freedom by OSHO) and I do not have any sort of complex of not reading the books completely.

I read first few paragraphs and found that I should read the book. My intention is not become creative but to know who creative people like Einstein, Edison, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and so many others saw the problem differently. There was absolute comparison between creativity and human evolution. The author conveys that the many speicies exist today due to "trial and error" approach of the nature. The nature creates many species and only very few survive many years. This applies very much to creativity. One generates different perspective and many solutions solving the problem. Then the "trial and rule" comes into play. The nature or system picks up one solution over a period of time and that becomes widely accepted solution (probably a best solution). So this ability to see a problem in different dimensions will by itself bring a variety of solutions to the table.

I strongly recommend this book to someone who wants to see the world differently and think differently. By the way, I just read few pages of book. Wait for sometime for chapterwise review.