Friday, 25 November 2011
Book Review: Upworldly Mobile by Ranjini Manian
Friday, 21 October 2011
Book Review: Making Breakthrough Innovation Happen
Friday, 7 October 2011
Notes from Book: Romancing the Balance Sheet
- Two Rules of Good Financial Management
- Never invest your money without ensuring that the assets you acquire can generate a return which is at least equal to the cost of your capital.
- Invest your money in such a way that the assets will generate an inflow of funds before the liabilities demand an outflow.
- Lessons from Rule No. 2
- Long-term funds should be used for long-term purposes and short-term funds for short-term purposes.
- Healthy organizations may use, or should use, some long term funds for short-term purposes.
- But no organization should EVER use short-term funds for long-term purposes.
- Healthy organizations must maintain a current ratio of about 2:1 and a quick ratio of a minimum of 1:1.
Book Review: Romancing the Balance Sheet
Friday, 23 September 2011
Notes from book: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web
Tuesday, 13 September 2011
Notes from book: Business the amazon.com way
In this book, the author Rebecca Saunders has shared following 10 secrets of the world's most astonishing web business:
- Live and breathe e-commerce
- Fill the place with entrepreneurs (hire entrepreneurial talent for key positions)
- Focus (to be the world's biggest store on the net)
- Brand the site
- Get and keep customers by offering great value
- Develop unbeatable logistics
- Stay lean (practice frugality as value)
- Practice technoleverage
- Constantly reinvent the business
- Grow with the best (alliances, acquisitions and partnerships)
Monday, 12 September 2011
Notes from book: Coaching People
- Coaching is a means for learning and development. It is guiding someone toward her or his goals. It it also the mutual sharing of experiences and opinions to create agreed-upon outcomes.
- Coaching is NOT an opportunity to correct someone's behaviors or actions. It is NOT directing someone to take actions to meet goals. It is also NOT being the expert or supervisor with all the answers.
- Effective coaching is ongoing.
- Coaching Skills
- Active listening
- Asking right questions (both open-ended and closed-ended)
- Advocate opinions (to balance question-asking mode)
- Give feedback as coach
- Receive feedback as coach
- Build agreement
- While giving feedback, focus on behavior - not character, attitude or personality; be specific; be sincere; be realistic. Give feedback early and often.
- Coaching style could be directive, which is useful for developing skills and for providing answers. On the other hand, supportive coaching style is useful for facilitating problem solving, for building self-confidence, for encouraging employees learn on their own and for serving as a resource for others.
Book Review: Coaching People
Thursday, 1 September 2011
SARAL methodology
- Study client's business context and IT landscape.
- Analyze gap between current and desired state.
- Recommend solution options.
- Activate client-chosen solution option on a pilot basis for early feedback.
- Launch full-fledged solution.
Jokes apart, there are couple of differentiators that I have tried to capture in this methodology:
- Instead of studying just business requirements, study the business context as there could be some hidden requirements that we would otherwise miss.
- Don't recommend "the" solution but few solution options for client to choose. Ideally we would propose three solution options which could resemble like fast-food, square-meal and seven-course-meal options!
- A beta version needs to made available to users before launch to seek their early feedback.
Shaping Customer Agenda
Quite a few thoughts and topics were discussed in this program. I have noted following thoughts that touched me the most and can be considered as my takeaways from this program:
- Context is decisive. It decides our thoughts, feelings and action.
- It is easy to miss something you are not looking for.
- We carry many unexamined assumptions (e.g. I cannot draw, I am not good at talking to strangers etc.). It is needed to examine them time and again.
- Only interested people are interesting.Are we interested in others?
- Simplify to amplify - can we write about our business in less than 8 words?
- Enchantment is defined as creating voluntary change in hearts, minds and therefore actions of customers.
- Become aware of listening filters that include:
- It is not possible
- Judging
- Looking Good
- Taking it personally
- I already know
- Observable patterns of behavior can help us understand interaction styles of people around us. The interaction styles are:
- Relater: Introvert with emotion orientation - expect trust
- Analyzer: Introvert with action orientation - expect accurate and valid data
- Expresser: Extravert with emotion orientation - expect something new/big
- Director: Extravert with action orientation - expect competency
- How to manage client expectations? Set clear expectations, stay aligned to expectations and make your progress known.
- Conduct pre-mortem analysis before starting out with new project/initiative; assume the project has failed and discuss reasons for the same and then plan out ways to prevent these reasons to happen.
- Actions for enchantment:
- Likeability - listening, language, smile and handshake
- Trustworthiness
- Listening - facts, feelings, intention and filter
- Become Mensch, a person of integrity and honor
- Reciprocity - transactional, pay-it-forward and goodwill
- Appreciate - say it when you see it
- Personal Branding Statement should explain what you do and why you exists. It must be Authentic, Believable and Coherent.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Book Review: McKinsey's Marvin Bower
father of management consulting. The book weaves together many
anecdotes to illustrate vision and thought process of Marvin Bower. I
found three case studies viz. Royal Dutch Shell (1956), PwC (1979) and
HBS (1979) quite useful. The book provides quite a few lessons in
consulting hence I would recommend it to every budding consultant.
Friday, 5 August 2011
Book Review: The Social Media Marketing Book
from a marketer's perspective. After an introductory chapter, eight
chapters cover each of the following social media types: blogging,
twitter and microblogging, social networking, media sharing, social
news and bookmarking, ratings and reviews, forums and finally virtual
worlds. The author provides prescription for strategy, tactics and
practice in the second last chapter. The last chapter is devoted to a
crucial topic of measurement. Well-structured information and
insightful wisdom about social media marketing makes this book useful
for everyone interested in exploiting social media phenomenon for
marketing their products and services.
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Latest Forrester Wave on Enterprise Architecture Management Suites
Architecture Management Suites (EAMS). The EAMS market is not so well
defined, so I guess Forrester is trying to establish this product
category through this report. It has identified 10 vendors, which
offer products that closely matches the Forrester definition of EAMS.
It has identified Mega, Troux, Software AG and Alfabet as leaders with
following comments:
1. Mega is the most advanced second-generation EA tool migrating to
EAMS with strong GRC.
2. Troux Technologies is the strongest for standards and application
portfolio management.
3. Software AG promises the best business connection to EAMS.
4. Alfabet is the thought leader and a defining force in the EAMS category
Forrester has further identified Metastrom, IBM, Casewise, Avolution
and The Salamander Organization as Strong Performers with following
comments:
1. Metastorm offers interesting technologies to become an EAMS player.
2. IBM offers a modular approach to EAMS adoption.
3. Casewise builds on its ease of use to construct an EAMS strategy.
4. Avolution is a newcomer with a surprisingly strong showing.
5. The Salamander Organization provides a toolbox and services to
build your own EAMS.
Finally there is one vendor - BiZZdesign, which has been named as
Contender as it provides a strong second-generation EA tool but lags
in the EAMS space.
Though this report would be useful for Enterprise Architects in
general, it would have become more useful if it had contained more
discussion about this product category itself.
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
Book review: Head First Data Analysis
very different and welcoming treatment as used in this this book. This
book is a learning guide on topics such as optimization, hypothesis
testing, bayesian statistics, regression, etc. Each chapter uses a
case study to discuss the topic. The book makes use of a lot of
pictures and exercises to provide conceptual understanding and to keep
you awake while reading! I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book while
(re)learning otherwise complex topics. I highly recommend this book to
all those who are new to data analysis and wish to enjoy learning the
same!
I give five stars (out of five) rating for this book!
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Book Review: "Psychological Testing at Work" by Edward Hoffman
If you are generally interested in knowing about what kind of psychological tests that could be used in workplace then this is an excellent book to read. It provides an extensive survey of several dozens of psychological tests, classified by the purpose they serve.
What I liked the most is chapter three briefly covering history of workplace testing. Then there is another chapter (#7) that is dedicated to probably the most popular psychological test at workplace – Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Other chapters that could be of interest include the ones covering tests related to leadership and emotional intelligence.
In all, it is a book to read if you do not know much about psychological tests but wish to know the basics within few hours.
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Publishing powerpoint slides on youtube
- Save PPTs into PNG images. PowerPoint will save all slides as images in a folder.
- Use Windows Movie Maker (freely available with Windows XP) to convert these images into WMV video file.
- Upload WMV file on youtube.
BTW my youtube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/user/
Freemium
you give away a core product for free and then generate revenue by
selling premium products to a small percentage of free users.
I guess this model is well known, thanks to the companies such as
Skype that have championed this business model. But it was interesting
to see that someone has named it so well.
For more details, please check out Wikipedia article and also a blog
site at http://www.freemium.org. This site features an e-book that
explains this term in more details.
Happy reading!