Thursday, July 29, 2004

I am midway reading a book(Re Imagine!) by one of the most renowned management gurus of our time "Tom Peter", then I saw this announcement on the officeblog  about an opportunity to hear him speak his mind on the subject of outsourcing for details visit Live Meeting webinar with Tom Peters

Outsourcing being such a hot topic, should be interesting ...


Wednesday, July 28, 2004

All women tell you one thing about all males and that is that the guys love their cars more...well I don't know how many of you dispute that but I for sure don't.

Like women like to accessorize, we like to do the same to the car, well but here i just found a link of person who has gone the extra mile in accessorizing , he has put in a computer in there along with the xBox...etc .etc...etc.

See it here http://www.ridemods.com/carpc/ to believe it.

Found this link at scoble blog

Friday, July 23, 2004

Link Blog

Blogging has been light, but will recover over the weekend hopefully.

But just wanted to keep you all posted that i have started a link blog accessible at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/prashanth

What is a link blog?
Well simply put it will be a respository of links that i find interesting, i will filter all the information and only provide the links that i like....keep a track of it.



Monday, July 19, 2004

Thinking, Impossible Thinking...
 
Interesting blog by rajesh jain, on "Impossible Thinking"

Impossible thinking. It is what put men on the moon, allowed Starbucks to turn a commodity product into a powerful global business and permitted Roger Bannister to run the four-minute mile. While not every "impossible thought" can become a reality, very often the greatest obstacle to transforming our organizations, society and personal lives is our own thinking. This may seem to be a simple idea in theory - that what we see and act upon is more a product of what is inside our heads than out in the world - but it has far-reaching implications for how we approach life and decision making.
Business Rules

All of us in the application development business talk about business rules and understand how important they are in the whole scheme of things, but i just read this story about business rules on Michael Platts Blog, which is hilarious, Read when you have nothing better to do.

Thursday, July 15, 2004

SOA

Here is a really good post on SOA and what it really means by benjaminm, i have taken a few excerpts from the article which struck a chord with my thoughts,

interesting discussion points that came up:

There was some agreement that SOA is a pragmatic marketing term that unites many existing architectural principles around SOAP.

The closest agreement about a definition for SOA was that it was based around common architectural principles of encapsulation, loose coupling and messaging.

The four tenets of service orientation are necessary but not sufficient for a system to be considered a service oriented architecture. Some people thought they were too technologically focussed because they were tied too closely to XML technologies.

David mentioned that the best SOA installation he'd seen was using CORBA several years ago - it had support for finding services, common schemas etc. Michele backed up the need for shared industry schemas based on some of her experienced.

Career Page For IT Companies,

i have been reading this blog Technical Careers @ Microsoft for sometime now, It is quite interesting and gives us some insight into the HR dept and its functioning in big M, but this post that i read was something that i think all IT organisations which are focussed towards getting recruits off the web rather than pay HR consultants good money should spend time reading and more time analysing and adopting.
Doodles in google,

i have always enjoyed the way google is written each day on the site it is quite interesting and always related to an current affair, i always thought very highly of the people behind, it but never knew or bothered finding out who it was and today i saw this post in one of the blogs i visit and found it quite interesting.

Software that lasts a 200 Years

Dan Bricklin has inked his thoughts on a topic, "Software that lasts 200 Years" that should interest all of us in iT, for one i am curious, as in todays day and age software doesnt seem to last more than 3 years in its current state, so i wonder what a software that lasts 200 years would be like, i am just begining to read the essay in detail will post my critique once done,

POP GOOGLE,

POP3 Access to your gmail account, i came across this link and first i thought it was pretty cool, and wanted to try it out then i thought about it a little, with 1gb storage space and me using it almost like a repository do i really want to download the messages into my already over flowing (no space) laptop.

THis brings us to the most important point that i can not longer exist in a unconnected world, moving forward, then why doesnt somebody let me put/use my documents from up there.

Open Office this might be a way for you take over the online/virtul office.

Monday, July 12, 2004

Socially Mobile
Social Networking applications team up with Mobile phones to deliver this hot new service,

What does the service provide?

Say you’re young and single, and you’re out on the town one Saturday night. You take out your mobile phone and tap in the name of the restaurant where you're hanging out. You get a list of friends, and friends of friends, within 10 blocks. You can message each other about getting together, and maybe send a photo of yourself.

MITs Technology Review has done a good article on it

Now this is a new reason why i cant do away with my mobile phone though it is such a pain at time.



Thursday, July 08, 2004

These are notes from an Excellent article I read at HBR, "Which Way Should You Grow" written by George S. Day

Standard approaches to growth:

Acquisition - CISCO , GE
Competing in low price - high volume market - DELL, WALLMART
Jump starting Innovation

Typically there are three classifications of organisation based on value proposition:
Performance Value Leader - MERCK, MEDTRONIC
Price Value Leader - WALLMART, DELL
Relational Value Leader - IBM Global Services

To craft a winning growth strategy a firm must identify
Companies Value Proposition
Including, capabilities, Assests & Cultural DNA

Price Value Leaders should ideally plan to grow by extending their low-cost value proposition to adjacent markets

Relational Value Leaders that create value by offering customers integrated solutions, they act as production partner in many cases. Their growth path is best to keep expanding their scope by broadening the definition of the solution. A pivotal question to ask is "Which of the functions that our customers perform could we do better?"

Performance Value Leaders grow best through continuous innovation, they do that by deploying a decentralized team oriented organisation.

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

Manager

Today, While reading the an article "A time of Growth" from the HBR, this absolutely simple and applicable concept surfaced,

Different altitudes of management,

A manager needs to work at different altitudes of thought.

Like most things in this world, there are three altitudes, first the lowest level which is the nitty gritty or the execution level, moving up we have the strategic level and finally right up there we have the context level, that is, mission, aspirations, values, and leadership that basically define the company/group.

It is important for the manager to move nimbly between the various levels.

He needs to contribute at the various levels and not restrict himself or over emphasis on any one of these levels.

Summarizing, There are three altitudes/levels at which a manager should function,

Altitude 1: Context
Altitude 2: Strategy
Altitude 3: Execution

Rules for functioning:

Work all the altitudes
Move between altitude nimbly.
Last couple of days I have been giving a lot of thought to objectives/KPIs/CSF's , reviews and related topics , since I have send in my teams details during the course of this week.

Well during my weekly review of some of the blog I found this interesting piece on Employee Reviews (in Microsoft) this was by John Porcaro's , I think he is a VP at Microsoft.

Monday, July 05, 2004

EMAIL, Are we secure!!

All us email users are of the belief that the email, once it leaves us desk reaches the receivers place and the only place that anybody can read it is either in your sent items or in the receivers inbox right,

well here is an article idicating how far away from the truth it it, according to this article there are 10 locations at which the email can intercepted, read & worry. I AM!!!

Presentation Continued

The last blog was about presentation and you cant talk about presentations without mentioning power point in the same breath, so here is one on power point from one of my favorite bloggers Michael Hyatt,

Review his blog on the resources available online to build good presentations, excerpts

"The problem is that most people using PowerPoint have not received adequate training. In fact, most have received no training whatsoever. As a result, too many people misuse the tool. This results in too many slides, too many bullets, and too much copy. Consequently, the tool often becomes a hindrance to communication rather than an aid.

Evidently, these people are not aware that the Web is full of PowerPoint resources. I contend that in less than two hours of surfing, you can radically improve the effectiveness of your PowerPoint presentations. Here is a list of resources to get you started"

Communication - Presentation

All of have wanted to improve our presentation skills, I am in the process of acquiring a "Say it with Charts" book (recomended by Mckisey Mind). My first thinking was I must have a methodology to how I go about my presentation idea. Then I read this piece by the "Simple Geek" and it gave me an broad outline

Model for presentations - Methodology
Start with a brain dump whitepaper.
Rework the paper to tell a story,
build headlines for the major sections,
then use that to drive a slideshow.
Don't religiously follow this use this as a guideline, however the idea of focusing on the story, the key points, and simplicity are important.


Friday, July 02, 2004

well blogging has been very light for the last two weeks as I have been traveling, well now I am back home and it feels very good to be back.

An interesting thing during the course of the travel was the people I met when flying around,

first I met a guy "A*****" I forgot his name, he worked for sun and was responsible for hardware design of memory chip set in the sun Solaris machines settled in silicon valley, had quite a nice time talking to him about a lot of things from school to what he is doing now to what he is planning to do in the future...it was pretty good & lively conversation, we had a blast.

second, I met a gentleman who runs his own shop designing computer chips for various organizations in the world, his name was ganesh..he had bought some cool automobile equipment for taiwan its pretty cheap there..we were both on the waiting list from taiwan to Singapore.

third, met a person called prasad, who works in the HP laptop division, we spoke about laptops and how they get manufactured in taiwan and so on.

Last I met ram, a scientist with HP labs, spoke about phds and a lot more stuff about research, technology and so on...pretty cool stuff

I had a real nice trip but for all the work I had to do.