Interview in the Times of India

You may want to check out this interview in the Ascent section of the Times of India.

Note that the values I accentuate are the very things we try to teach at Proton.

Also note that my views need not necessarily be the best for you to apply in your life - but they are worth thinking about.

Happy reading!

Social networking requests

We all receive for connections on social networking sites such as LinkedIn or Facebook. It is a good idea to filter the requests appropriately. My own rules are as follows - I am sharing these because some of these requests may be coming from you students!

Facebook and Orkut: I will become friends with anyone who files a request, even a Kalashnikov-carrying Taliban. But I will usually not join any groups that I don't know as that seems more dangerous to me.

LinkedIn and Xing: I will usually connect with only those who a) I know very well and/or have worked with, or b) who are clearly good at what they do.

You may want to create your own such rules over time.

Project planning screenshots

I hope these images help illustrate the extremely simple project planning template I have been talking about. The one thing missing here is a budget vs. cost tracker, but that can be added. Please do use this extensively during your MBA and during your future career. It's simple but very useful, especially when updated and shared regularly with the project team. You will find such trackers used at all larger companies, including Nagarro, and where you don't find them, you can introduce them!

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing

On a recent visit to Proton Ahmedabad, I was wearing an offwhite linen jacket with a pale blue shirt and a tie in a solid color with charcoal trousers. A student said, “Sir, I think your jacket is not matching your shirt. You should be wearing a dark shirt with your light jacket.”

This is not a post on dress sense, rather this is a post on why it is important to not rush to judgment. Every statement of fact, or almost every statement of fact, is an approximation. We see this in physics, where even Newton’s laws of motion are approximations. We see this in all generalizations about race, and social systems, and corporate strategies, and moral systems, and of course the highly subjective and evolved worlds of literature and abstract art … and sartorial fashion.

We learn that we must never begin a sentence with an “And” but the best writers sometimes do with great effect. We learn detailed rules about how a PowerPoint presentation should look like and then someone makes a great presentation while flouting all these rules and putting, say, just four words on a single slide. There are always more advanced approaches.

And wearing light colored shirts with light colored linen jackets may be a good idea if you want a muted sophisticated look. A dark tie adds a more measured dose of color than a dark shirt would.

(The photograph is borrowed from the Sartorialist.)

How to use projects to rise in an organization

People often wonder how they can get noticed in their organizations and rise to positions of greater responsibility. I believe an easy formula is

• to pick a problem or opportunity that senior management believes is of great importance to the company, and then
• to successfully execute a project, under the sponsorship and guidance of senior management, that addresses this problem or opportunity

This is fairly easy. The idea may not be yours, the approach may not be yours, but a successful project execution will make you a hero!

The first step in a project is to define the scope and objectives very clearly and then break the project into various tasks. Raw managers tend to create too few or too many tasks – I think a general rule of thumb is to have 20-30 tasks for a typical project. You have to really visualize all the aspects of the project in your mind, with a feeling of ownership and responsibility, to come up with the right task list. One can separate good managers from bad managers just by how they break up a project into tasks.

It helps to create and circulate periodically (e.g. strictly every Monday) a simple Excel tracking sheet showing the various tasks, the single points of responsibility for each task, the initial estimated task end dates, the percentage completed values, and the current/actual task end dates. Risks and mitigation approaches for each risk must be recorded. I think using such a tracking sheet is HIGHLY IMPORTANT.

With the right circulation of the tracking sheet – including not just the project team but also a few senior executives – you can make an impression with your command of the complexity involved in the project. You have a good chance of moving up in your organization, especially if you can declare victory at the end of the project and sometimes even if you can’t!

The challenges of entrepreneurship in solar energy and energy-saving

This blogpost is a result of a discussion yesterday with Ms. Iris Becker of Let’s Bridge IT, who is very interested in making German solar energy technologies as well as advanced energy saving techniques available and popular in India.

Well, solar energy appears highly promising and it appears likely that the world will tap into it in a big way in the coming decade. Yet the term “solar energy” is just an umbrella term for dozens of fairly distinct technologies. When a lot of competent players are competing to improve these technologies, how can a small entrepreneur get in the game?

It seems to me that the answer is to innovate instead in the local education, marketing, sales and deployment of whichever technologies come out on top. In other words, to provide the local channel. I suggested to Iris that if she and her corporate partners would create strong training programs and logistics infrastructure to supply and support a large variety of products and services, local entrepreneurs might be attracted to work with this group. The products could vary from the fancy to the very basic – from hi-tech solar panels to the most basic heat reflecting paints and films.

Do you think this approach makes sense? What other approach might you take?

Parenting and operations management

As you may know, I have just become a father for the first time. My son Ekagra is now a week old. I find it useful to apply a few fundamental concepts of operations management to streamline the way we interact with him

Take nappy changes for example. My brother Prashant used to say that the key to a successful nappy change with the least amount of crying is SPEED. I had forgotten his words but came to the same conclusion myself. For a quick nappy change, everything must first be in position – the baby on the plastic sheet, the packet of wipes at hand, the trash can all ready, and the new nappy all spread out. Then you must move very fast to minimize the touch time from operation start to operation end. It’s a little reminiscent of Shigeo Shingo’s Single Minute Exchange of Dies (SMED) approach for quick setups (trivia: the “single minute” here actually means “single digit minutes” or less than 10 minutes).

From Wikimedia, we have the following explanation of a few of the key points of the SMED approach.

1. OBSERVE the current methodology
   
2. Separate the INTERNAL and EXTERNAL activities. Internal activities are those that can only be performed when the process is stopped, while External activities can be done while the last batch is being produced, or once the next batch has started. For example, go and get the required tools for the job BEFORE the machine stops.
3. Convert (where possible) Internal activities into External ones (pre-heating of tools is a good example of this).
4. Streamline the remaining internal activities, by simplifying them. Focus on fixings – Shigeo Shingo rightly observed that it’s only the last turn of a bolt that tightens it – the rest is just movement.