Real Test Of (your) Leadership

One of my colleagues used to say that leading an informal group is bit challenging than leading a team where hierarchy is already put in place. I would go one step further to say that leading an informal group is litmus test for one's leadership skills. What do you mean by informal group? By informal group, i mean that there are no rules set in favor of you and you have deal everything on your own. You have to stretch, bend, set standards, be flexible, listen with one thing in mind - achieving the vision of the informal group.

Unlike in traditional team setup where the lead/manager has naturally rules set in his favor either by organization or by himself, in informal group/initiatives, there are no rules set in favor of you. At every point of time, when you are leading an informal group, you got to make sure that you take consensus from everyone and be as democratic as possible. You got to really use your brain, sharpen your thinking, impress the group and win confidence of the group. Improvement is daily ritual. There is no wonder why my friend said, "leading an informal group is challenging". The work is quite involved, no wishy-washy :-).

In order for a someone to acquire some leadership skills, i feel that it is quite important for him to lead a diverse and informal group. This skill is more relevant in today's context where as more young people join the workforce who ask more questions, who are more inclined towards being democratic, who cannot be bound within a boundary, who cannot work with constraints, it is quite essential for the guys who lead teams to lead like leading an informal group. In an informal group, there are no power centers. The group favors who add value to the group. You cannot win the confidence of group just by words or by past action but got to show that in action every second. Leading an informal group is more about action at present.

So, the real test of leadership starts when you lead informal group.

What do you think?

Unconditional Burning Desire To Make Everyone The Best - Teacher's Day

Today is Teachers' day - a day that is dedicated to teachers. There will be at least one teacher (if you are lucky enough, you will have more) who made a difference in our lives. Often, they are Gods in disguise. They give us knowledge, wisdom, experiences, motivation, inspiration and what not without any expectation. The unconditional burning desire to make every student a better human being. During this wonderful day, I would like "thank" my teachers/professors (and all teachers of the world) and "dedicate" my professional and personal successes to them. In a sense, our parents, friends, siblings and seniors at work are wonderful teachers and my dedication to them too.

Direction & Initiation is Key

When you talk to good people, they point your mistakes and give you areas where you can improve. They will give you some framework on how to deal with your mistakes and insecurity (your perception) due to the mistakes you make. When you talk to great people, they don't tell you explicitly about your mistakes. They give just direction and some times multiple directions. They want you to explore many directions and finally arrive at a place in a way that fits you and that comes natural to you. 

The great people know the starting point and ending point are important but not the methods. For example, measuring the temperature is quite important when a doctor examines a patient who is suffering from flu. But it is not so important whether to measure the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius. Both makes sense and does the job. Using both ways, we can arrive at worthy inferences on the condition of a patient. The change or transformation is more important than the vehicle/road you chose for transformation. The directions set by great people are open ended that give way for exploration, imagination, contemporary thinking and creative. They just let us to find our way. They give us tools - direction & initiation, by which our ignorance are exposed and converted to experience.

GMAIL Priority Inbox

An email program that learns your reading pattern and brings those emails that are of your interest when the similar emails arrive next time. Already we have SPAM filtering but yet the number of emails that reaches our Inbox is huge. We also have various types of information shared with us at various levels of importance like personal credit card statement, bank statements, updates from facebook, important IM from your loved ones when you are offline and simply too many emails and too many important emails. If you don't regularly clean up your Inbox or if you are off for few days, there would simply so many unread emails. Sometimes, an important email (emails from your girlfriend) hides itself among not so important emails (emails from your boss). Thats were we need bit of help.

Yet again, Google has come up with Priority Inbox feature for all its GMAIL users. As soon as you login, check out Priority Inbox. It takes little time to configure. As and when an email arrives, you also have facility to increase or decrease its priority. There were two additional buttons to increase and decrease the priority. GMAIL learns it and remembers to apply the logic when similar emails comes next time.

For me, it seems to be a nice feature as it tries to bring up important emails and sorts them based on your reading pattern.

Here is a video from Google on Priority Inbox

Java Books - Must Read

I was involved in fresh professionals' training program and got an opportunity to think over list of books in Java that must be read by anyone who is new to Java.

Head First Java (Step 1)

I m great fan of Head First books. It is a killer idea to present complex technical concepts with fun. Many things get registers quite well and quickly. Head First Java, like usual Head First books, has lot of examples, lot of exercises at relevant places. The concepts are not covered in a hurry. For anyone who is new to Java, Head First Java should be the first book to get started with so that it gives you confidence. I would recommend to read this book cover to cover at least twice and make sure that you complete all the exercises. It is the worth the time spend.

Effective Java (Step 2)

This is a treasure. What is more required from a programming language? While many books teaches about certain concept, this book creates "love" towards the programming language and that makes you to create your own ideas/concepts. It makes you to think and stretches your imagination and technical knowledge. It raises many questions on the design of the language and answers them. What else can you expect from the author who has created many APIs in Sun Java.

Java Concurrency in Practice (Step 3)

If there is one book in Java on threads, this is the book. It is worth the money and time you spend on this book. Period

Inside Java Virtual Machine (Step 4)

In order to understand the interpreter, there is no other material available better than this. This book talks about internals of JVM and logic behind each modules. A must read for those who wants to understand internals of JVM.

Java Language Specification & Java Virtual Machine Specification (Step 5)
It is always great feeling to get ourselves exposed to specifications. Once you get sufficient handle in Java/JVM basics, these two specs should take you deep drive into design decisions of the language and JVM. It may be bit dry to start of with but certainly be interesting as you read. The following are the links.

Java Language Specification
Java Virtual Machine Specification

Hope this helps.

Software Design Puzzle #4 - Building A Flexible Weather Station

The puzzle is on building a flexible weather station. This weather station's main job is to provide instantaneous updates to its clients on various weather conditions like temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, pollution levels and a forecast on the rain. The clients are heterogeneous starting from a full blown weather forecasting websites which are interested in all updates (everything from temperature to rain forecast that are available time to time) to a roaming marketing guys who just want forecast of rain to plan their travel. The point is there are few clients that want all updates, few wanting all except few conditions and many wanting only few conditions. The clients will also be requesting for more weather parameters dynamically.

The requirement is to identify design pattern(s) that will suit these requirements. Model the class diagrams focusing on important aspects of the design. The following is a just a sample client (thanks to Google).

A question that comes to my mind on these puzzles. Does it really help me to build my OO expertise?

An honest answer is it depends. The idea of posting these puzzles is not make us OO guru with few hundred puzzles and in fact OO requires naked thinking. I feel that a lot of thinking can be stimulated by these examples. Memorizing a design doesn't help though. Just skim through the puzzle and solve it. When you are solving think about abstraction. Abstraction is your ability to see sand in a beach as a thin line when you are flying few thousand feet above and view them as a mighty rock when seeing through microscope.

Verify Everything - Feel It Before Accepting

The self realization has never been a group work. It is an individual's efforts towards knowing himself. The object painted by society is just the view of the society. It is framed by people like you and me. So, there is every possibility that it is wrong. Because, human errors are natural. However the society makes every attempt to make you to accept its view and to be ingrained in its view leading to deep conditioning. The society (may it be the society we live, work, party, religion and many other groups) has a deep conspiracy. The conspiracy of not to allow us to think. Society says to man, I will allow you to think but you have to think the way I want you to think.

As man grows, his views about world widens. He becomes knowledge base and his knowledge is dangerous because his knowledge was never verified/validated by him. But he simply endorse it. He conditions you and then he comes to you with a group, the group conditions you. Because, the group feels the majority makes them right. So, he conditions you. If you get conditioned the society wins, you lose and if you don't condition yourself the society loses and you win. It is all about survival of the stronger. So far, mostly the man lost.

When you are a child, you questioned everything. You didn't think about the relevance of a question. But you just question. You get worldly experience by asking questions on the things you perceive through your senses. When you are a child, you verify everything. You give very first hand information. When you say, the fire will be hot, you experienced by touching it and you say with confidence. Thats why the child never say there exists a God (but the parents make him to say so). Verification is key to contemporary thinking. If you don't verify something, you cannot endorse it. If you endorse something without verification then it is conditioning. 

Verification is key to self realization.

Have a Great Monday and Fantastic Week.

Notion of Best Practice - Does It Make Sense?

Most often we say that something is a best practice or at worst someone (who generally doesn't know anything about the problem you are trying to solve) asks you to follow a best practice. First, the very notion of best practice is wrong. The term "best" signifies that it is the superior and no other better option is available. In reality we, the human being, have not perfected any system with such an accuracy and deeper knowledge so as to say something is best. Most of the systems and processes are still evolving.

Assume that there is already a known best way of solving a problem and even there exists a proof to conclude that it is the best way of solving problems. The proof says about the best way and various other known ways of solving problems. It compares the known existing methods. For example, while there are numerous ways of sorting a given set, we can pick a efficient method to a job. But the proofs do not talk anything about other possible but unknown ways of solving problems. What happens if there exists a solution that is better than the best?

In the context of problem solving and thinking, the term Good Practice makes a better sense than Best Practice. The notion of best practice is wrong and the "best practice" thinking arrests productive thinking.

Have a Super Sundae.

Don't Just Scream

Many times, we see people who just scream (aka articulations, speeches and anything that boils down to inaction). They scream at cockroaches, the politicians who never work in public interest, someone in traffic who just zipped across on to their way, their teammate who doesn't understand what is work, their managers who is root cause of all their problems, the wall they dashed at. They have all sort of things and whole a lot of time to scream, just scream (at different places, volumes and languages, like this one ;-) ).

Screams are not tools. Screams are just annoying thing and negativity. Actions are tools for correction, action is positive, action brings in change, action leads to transformation, action leads to evolution, action leads to natural growth. Scream can't just bring anything but high blood pressure. When you are acting on a problem, the scream is "ok" and people will bear with you or relate to you. For some people scream is natural when they focus. A star tennis player screams when she plays a difficult shot, when she stretches a lot and she screams because of pain and the pain gives her energy to focus. But not just screams. Screams are just shit. So, please show something in action when you scream. If you do that, you look lovely.

Have a Fantastic Saturday

I Have Found My Deadliest Enemy, What About You?

I have found my enemy who always cheats me, stops me from driving towards excellence, he is the one who is making me lazy, he betrays me, he gives me lame excuses to not to do something, he spoils my consistency, he always questions my unconventional thoughts and he stands as a hurdle when I want to take the road that is less traveled or never traveled, he asks me not to take risks, he asks me adventures spoils happiness, he highly conditions me and passes a judgement that I can do only this much, he stamps me as a software engineer, he stops me from growing human, he says where is the time, he makes me to sleep in couch like a lazy potato (pig?), I m addicted to his way of thinking, I don't want to think like him but yet he wins. Who is that? He is "Me".

Many of us would have been in the scenario of failing and would have blamed someone or something other than us. But the real fact is that it is "us" who is responsible for the failure. The responsibility doesn't stop at failure but rather starts after we fail. When someone says that he will take responsibility of a failure, it should mean that he will fix the root cause of the failure. The pain of failure is far lesser than the pain that will arise due to lack of awareness or ignorance. If you take ten things that you wanted to do but never did and analyze what is the root cause of the problem, you will simply see the truth.

For example, I was trying to jog for past few months (years?) and never did consistently. One day, I had work, the other day there was drizzle, another there was a relative at home, yet another day I was not feeling well but certainly I didn't have a single day in life without an activity so that I can jog. When I gave excuses, I fail. I dont really know whether I can say that as failure. Because failure comes when you do an activity. When you don't do the activity, it is not a failure. It is lack of thinking and awareness.

So, I have found my deadliest enemy and it is "Me". what about you?

Have a Super Duper Day (yeah, weekend is arriving).

Ethics - What Is It?

We say that we think a lot. We say that we are taking decisions after deliberation. We say that we are trying to be ethical without knowing what is ethics, why one needs to be ethical, what is an extent to which one can be ethical. We prove time and again that we talk about ethics when our survival is not under question and the ethics takes a back seat when our survival is under question. This is one of the reasons why we have business cycles, recessions, depressions (both economic and psychological) etc. A specific economic indicators like dropping housing market is not the cause for recession. But the indicators, as the name implies, indicates a systemic failure and one of the reasons is lack of ethics.

Here are the points that comes to my mind when I think about ethics (why am i thinking about ethics now is another big question). Well, I haven't proven it yet and hence all the points can be debated to bring in more clarity.

I have been trying to understand what is ethics by observing people. The first mistake I did is trying to copy ethics from others. If i try to copy from others, my ethics is very subjective. After watching many people, friends and thinking about how I lead life so far, I feel that ethics is a framework. The framework is quite flexible and one can draw his/her own boundaries. Ethics is set of standards that is beyond law and society. It is quite difficult to measure ethics and hence no one can certify you that you are ethical. It is unique to each one of us. Ethics is personal, you can customize it and you can keep customizing it.

Ethics is awareness and introspection. While ethics is personal, if you violate the boundary, you have to pay the price (either your conscience hurts you or you will be in a situation in which you ought to pay the price and that boils down to experience). Ethics is awareness and looking inwards. Ethics is a system. A best possible self correcting system.

Mahatma Gandhi has a very high ethics. If one reads, "My experiments with Truth", it is quite visible that Mahatma Gandhi was not the same in his early days. He needed a street play to ignite his passion. How he reached there? How a thief turned himself to a saint Valmiki? Ethics is all about life experiences and daily introspection. Quite often, we need to do the introspection to make the framework of ethics wider and bigger, more meaningful and more sensible. I feel that this is central premise of building ethics (If you believe Hindu mythology, you would question how can thief be a saint. We have been told that we will be punished when we committed a sin and we are less told about introspection and awareness that occur due to punishment. If one can introspect, the punishment can be avoided. Actually, it is the introspection and awareness which can nullify the Karma). Clever people expand their ethics. Every day, they become more ethical. Ethics is ever expanding/evolving entity, it has no boundary. But one sure thing is that it can be made better every day even when you are in death bed.

You walk on the road and suddenly fall down. You expect that someone will lift you and help you. To your disappointment, you find no helping hands. The next day, you walk in the same street but this time you are very careful of the small pit that made you fall down yesterday. Near by the same place, you find an old woman asking your help to cross the road. It is the same road you traveled yesterday. Out of joy, you help the grandma to cross the street so as to make this world a better place. You prove that human beings evolve. Ethics is something you do (with joy) irrespective what is been done to you.

Have a Super Day.