Being original

So there must be lots you have already read on being original.. Here's one more book on this - Mavericks at Work by William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre.

I bought this book because the TOC (Table of Contents) looked very interesting. The book is full of anecdotes of "maverick stories" from the world over. So, if you are probably looking for success stories and "being different and successful" stories, you will probably devour this book.

However, I expect a book to evolve some theory that can probably been used by other people. Just asking you to "be different" doesnt suffice, because the statement itself says that you have to do something that hasnt been done before.. so anecdotes are nice, but insufficient for authors stated goals. ("...opens your eyes, engages your imagination, and encourages you to think bigger and aim higher..."). The authors claim that "...this is more than a how-to book. It is a what-if book." At least I seem to have totally missed either claim in the book.

Having said that, I found the Goldcorp story (mining geologists heads worldwide) very interesting. Some other stories on interesting business models using the internet are a good read too (TopCoder, Wikipedia, Health research, etc; though I am not sure why the authors have given so much emphasis to open-source).

I do wish to put the same question to the authors, that I asked in an earlier blog - what % of company success can be attributable to CEOs? I have a feeling that it would be 100% if the CEO is a mavrick! So the new question is - does a CEO become a maverick before or after his success??

The long tail of everything

Just finished reading The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. It has pretty good reviews - Guardian calls it "...the natural sucessor to the "tipping point" in the field of business ideas". Thats a pretty strong statement, and I was not disappointed. This book is really good.

In summary the book says that if u can dramatically lower the cost of production and distribution, you can offer more variety. Along with variety, if you provide means to filter the content to suit different niches, you have mini-blockbusters. This is specially true for digital content distribution e.g. online music distribution.

The book is good because:
- it helps you see beyond the blockbuster hits. It helps you to probe the long tail of everything and see if you can find a substantial market.
- it lays down a theory for what has been observed about music ditribution etc and you can apply it to other areas of your expertise more easily now.

At some places the book becomes slow and repetitive, but overall it should be in your collection.

CEO and Company Success

I recently had an interesting discussion with a couple of collegues on what percentage of a company's success can be attribued to its CEO? We could not close the debate as my collegues opined that luck plays a 90% role and the rest being other factors (CEO included).

I have a totally different viewpoint. I believe that CEO is responsible for both the success and failure of a company to the extent of 75%. (Dont look at absolute numbers.. both 75 and 90... they are just to show how strong the opionion is). I belong to school of thought that "genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration" and hence I believe it is CEO's skills in aligning the organisation and making it a success.

What would be good measures to test this theory?

I got many interesting answers to this question when I posted it on linked-in network. See the responses here.
Full Link: http://www.linkedin.com/answers/management/planning/MGM_PLN/63783-1316944

If you have any interesting observations or opinions to share, do comment.

Hiring Smartly

I just finished reading "Smart and Gets things done" by Joel Spolksy... I am sure the author doesnt need much introduction, but if you want to read about him goto http://www.joelonsoftware.com.

This book is about hiring smart people, why that is important and taking care of the smart people (and again why that is important). Having hiring smart people as my perpetual problem, I was relieved to know that its a genuine problem and the "your- hiring-standards-are-unrealistic" kinds of statements from my senior are balderdash. Thank god, that I read this book just in time to avoid a great mistake i.e. plan to lower the hiring bar.

One thing that I disagree with Mr. Spolsky is the concept of private cabins/private cubicles. (He strongly recommends Peopleware. I will try to read that next). So the logic goes that private cabins increase productivity. Supporting this statement in the book is that a person, when thinking about something is disturbed, he loses much more time to get back "into the groove" than the interruption time. While I agree with the time hypothesis, I don't think that private cabins solve this problem. Here are my reasons:
1. The example assumes that private cabins will make the seeker of information rely more on Internet than on the colleague. (Time to use the Internet < time to walk across to the cabin) But mostly, the queries are project specific. So the Internet can help in some cases but not all.
2. IM is being used extensively in organisations nowadays (at least in mine) and mostly people even 3 cubicles across, just use IM. So I think that the "walk across" concept is also not there now.
3. The example only explains the comparison where 4 people are sitting in a single cubicle and can interrupt each other Vs private cubicles next door. But what about the open cubicles 2-3 cubicles away. The time needed by a person to walk 2-3 cubicles == time to walk to the private cubicle. So the "time comparison" logic doesn't seem to be true in this case.

Does this mean, that just putting the most likely people who can answer most queries, away from "seekers" can put the open cubicles at par with private cubicles?

Let me give a counter example in favour of open cubicles. We have open cubicles in my company and the architect sits with other developers. The architect overheard one conversation and prevented an erroneous decision about to be made. Of course, reviews etc may have caught the error at a later time, but that would have been at a higher cost, specially in terms of productivity.

So there are pros and cons in the open cubicles Vs private cabins debate, but I am not willing to concede that one is defiantly way better than the other. Of course, I plan to revisit this blog once I read peopleware.

But, other than this, I highly recommend this book to everyone who has the responsibility to hire smart technical people.

Official Google Blog: Putting health into the patient's hands

This is an interesting article.. future of healthcare on the web. I think there's a lot to innovate in this domain.

Official Google Blog: Putting health into the patient's hands

Custom search engines

Like Google, there are other providers of custom search engines too... I discovered Rollyo. There must be more out there. If i find more I will update this blog.

But for now, I think this is one clear innovation in search and the right step forward. It can become as popular as blogs. What do you think?

Custom search engines: Health

This is a custom search engine for health related searches. This search engine only searches "credible" health sites. Currently, I have put in some sites that that I have used in the past. Suggestions for improving this search engine are welcome. Thanks to Google for providing cool coop feature.

Innovation and India

India seems to be the buzzword now for everything...

Lots happening on the innovation front too... Startups mushrooming all over. Good resource for India based startups can be seen here.

Innovation in Healthcare Domain

I have been researching the availability of online medical information and it seems that are very few good sites around. Also, there is a question mark on the reliability of information present on these sites. Looks like a scope for innovation here, using the new technologies available.

Will some kind of rating system help? How can that itself be made reliable, in a scalable way?

What does the medical community feel about the online availability of medical information? Do doctors feel threatened by this information or do they feel there is a value add -- patients can ask specific questions and be better informed.

My dad recently started taking medicines for a particular disease -- the doctor forgot to mention that alcohol is not allowed with those medicines. Luckily for him, I knew about this from other sources and probably helped prevent a gross mistake.

Came across this site http://www.meraMD.com Looks interesting, health portal in india.

Innovation for taking control of your IT infrastructure

I noticed that I have talked about books and investing, but nothing on innovation yet. So here goes...

Last year has seen a new IT category emerge - Change control. People (specially IT managers) have felt the pain of downtime due to unauthorised changes on the system and so far there were no good solutions for this problem. Now enterprise class products have emerged in this area and prominent players in this market are Solidcore (www.solidcore.com), ActiveReasoning and Tripwire, according to a Gartner report on this category. Solidcore has the USP of actually enforcing that unauthorised changes are not even allowed.

I think this category solves a growing pain in the market -- how to ensure that systems are locked down in the current state, so that services are available 24*7.

- Have the readers felt any pain in this area?
- Any horror stories you want to share, where an unauthorised (but probably well intended) change led to major loss of revenues due to downtime?

I feel that this area has scope for tremendous innovation and must be watched carefully. I will keep people posted on developements in this area.

All Fools

I recently finished reading the book "Fooled by Randomness" by Prof Nassim Nicholas Taleb. This book is about how people are fooled by random events and attribute to skill, things that could have happened by chance alone. By the time you are through with the book, it leaves you with a feeling that everything is random, specially in the financial markets!

Good thing that I read the second edition where the good Prof had clarified that its just "more" random than you think, otherwise I am sure that I even I would have thought that its all pure luck and skill doesnt matter at all.

Maybe I need to read the book again... but what do other people who have read this book feel about it?

Value Investing

An excellent site to visit for thoughts and discussions on value investing.

http://fundooprofessor.blogspot.com/

This is owned by Prof. Sanjay Bakshi, who was my professsor for the Business Valuation course at Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, from where I did my MBA.

Thanks to his course, my investment style has totally changed. The most important side effect is that now I dont feel the daily urge to see the stock tickers and also now I sleep more soundly at night. :-) :-)

You should definately bookmark this site.

What does winning mean

I was recently reading "Winning - the answers" by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch. Its a kind of follow up on their original book. No doubt the book is very helpful, my younger brother tells me that we hoped he had read it earlier - it would have helped him in writing his essays for applications to Business schools in US.

Anyway, an important question asked was - what does winning mean for you? (By the way, this comes towards the end of this book, I feel it should have come at the beginning.)

It would be nice to get your thoughts on this.

Incidentally, I just realised that this blog is now over 1 year old... wow time really flies! Seems like a few months to me...