Sardars Invincibles!!!

The best ever cricket team to lay its foot on England soil was the 1948 Australian Team, right from the beginning of the tour till the end, the team never lost  a single match, be it a tour game or a test match! No bowler could challenge the batting might of Don Bradman, Arthur Morris and no batsman from the England team could stand the hostility of Ray Lindwall and Keith Miller.  In short, they were the Invincibles, for they swept aside the opposition with such audacity and ruthless professionalism that England were very much happy to see the back of Australians sailing on their way to Australia!

Approximately 4 and half decades after this historic Australian cricket team, in the Indian sub- continent, in Karnataka, in Bangalore, in Rajajinagar, an equally invincible group of women, who for all their capability and mind bobbling memory power had the prowess, to churn out 1^st class results, from each and every student who attended their classes! They were battle hardened to such an extent that any kind of student would fail to fail in the exams, even if he wished to do so, thus making them Invincible! I am not sure what kind of magic potion that they fed on, but they ensured that we fed on the text books along with every morsel of food that we ate during our last one year of high school, which happened to be during the 10^th standard!! Yes, I am once again talking about Sardar Patel High School, and the invincible group of women, who year after year dealt with all KINDS of students, churning out consistent 100% FC results, form the main cast of this Sardars’ Invincibles!!! 

The teachers whom I am profiling in this post, taught us corresponding subjects for my class, i.e. 10^th C. The same teachers could have taught different subjects for other sections, however I am sure, the experience would be almost similar, if not the same. Please go ahead and enjoy, as I profile few of them, and I am happy if it brings a smile on your faces!! So, time to unwind, and say “Good Morning, miss!!” (Oops!! by the way, in high school we were told not to greet the teacher in one loud voice. It would be sound like donkeys braying in unison, juxtaposing with the sweet voices!)

So, here goes the list:

KNM(K N Mangala), Maths-II: Our class teacher, who bore the brunt of all the complaints against our class. More than geometry, she had to contend with teaching moral science to her pupils (it was all about adolescent moral science, not that something nasty had happened, but whatever had happened was considered nasty, then ;)). A smart guy in our class had got stenciled letters from smarter students (the author’s gender was a big question till the end of the academic year!!) which caused unprecedented hoopla in the class, a concern for the class teacher, thinking that such “diversions” would affect the students’ performance in the exams! She also had to contend with a frail boy, who for all his goodness in studies, was forced to being a class leader, although for a very short duration! Unable to cope up with the newly given responsibility, the boy had the audacity to speak up to the big boss of the school that he would not be interested in the role, for which she was reprimanded by the big man!! She also had to contend with constant battles between the two races in the class, the Martians and Venusians for all the trivial issues! Amidst all these contentions, she had to contend with finishing the portions for her assigned subject, Geometry, which in itself had fewer contentions in terms of the concepts! Because for all that I understood about mathematics, is that you either get it or you don’t! and I used to get most of what was taught in Maths, however, there was one more sublime subject for all its facts and figures put together, was subjected to sublimation in my brains!!! SOCIAL STUDIES!!!

NRS(N R Sukanya), Social Studies-I (History and Civics): The owner of the softest voice you could never hear! The barely audible whispers would pick up pitch only in situations when the lady found that even students sitting in the 3^rd bench had started dozing off in her classes! It was very difficult to dislodge her of her composure for we never found her shouting at even a single soul in the class; this can be attributed partially to the subject which she taught! I was almost in awe at the accuracy of her memory in remembering dates! (Not the ones that is the default meaning of “dates” nowadays, but those which made their way to our social studies text books) and to instill such unbelievable retention capacity, she had found a unique way of  framing questions for the 1000 odd tests/exams we wrote during that year! She could manage to frame a question on each and every paragraph in the text book! I am not sure if this was her sole contribution, or other invincibles had a role to play in this plot, but our text books had paragraphs marked within square brackets, with numbering 1, 2,3,4… etc. Each number representing a point to be answered for a question on that paragraph and each point worth half a mark!!! (Till high school I never knew that decimals were worth their weight in gold, at least for the students of  SPHS!) Some meticulous types (the top notch rank holders), had gone one step further and highlighted some text within the paragraph, apart from the numbering!  The real history buffs, had notes written down at all angles across the text books along with these marked ones, with only them having the power to decipher what they wrote!! As a result, the Social Studies text book was a butchered tattered lump of printed paper, loosely bound by a thread, strong enough to bind together the pages until the end of the year! Another text book, that was bruised and battered by these savage markings, was Sanskrit!

TGK(T G Karuna), Sanskrit-I : The lady who had the capacity to memorize text written in one language, translate it on the go and explain the same in English to a bunch of confused kannadigas!! (I can’t recollect anyone who was a non kannadiga in my class).  The sole purpose of studying great plays written by kalidasa, brahthruhari, bana bhatta was a target of 75 marks! Tuck in a few shlokas from the text book in your answer paper and you would be awarded additional marks!, not more than the quintessential half mark, mind you! But the toughest part was the confusion of quoting the shlokas! Of the hundreds of shlokas mentioned in the 10s of chapters in the text book, it was purely a guess work as to which shloka would fit in which answer!! I swear by the almighty, I dint even have a blinking idea about the appropriateness of its placement in the answers! Since, there was no logic to linking the text and the shlokas, my efforts in making the most of what Kalidasa, Brahthruhari etc had written, had become my struggle during that entire one year! Add grammar to the already existing confusion, and it would be a venkatesh Prasad/javagal srinath pair batting at the crease with 10 runs to win!! What’s the fuss about Sanskrit grammar? After all it’s worth only 50 Marks! Read on….

MKL (MK Lakshmi Devi), Sanskrit - II : What is the sapthami vibhakthi bahuvachana for munihi shabdha? Jaws as well as heads drop, few drop the pencil/pen on the floor and bend down to take an eternity to pick it up! Akaaraanth pulling raama shabdha prathama vibhakthi (raamaha raamou raamaaha) is the only shabdha each and every student can recite! Don’t even dream about the sapthami vibhakti, I doubt even Lord Rama himself would get it right!! With every student slouching to the lowest possible level, one of my dear classmate was made to stand to give the answer!! All the other heads in the class went up, sympathizing for the (ill)fate of the chosen one, and eagerly awaiting the answer! After about a minute, Phat! The familiar sound was heard! The cheeks of the boy were visibly red, and ooohhh an anxious sigh from the class was heard! This was the summary of the class which was attended with utmost attention and concentration by all the students. MKL m’ams love for Sanskrit grammar made her behave tough on the students to get it absolutely right, and right every time. But for all her efforts I must confess that I personally found it very tough to identify the alankaaras and chanddassu from the various Sanskrit shlokas! The only alankaara which I could clearly identify was Keshaalankaara :). Yeah the word at least sounds familiar because Yeah! This is kannada and kannada is easy, because it is maathrubhaase! But writing in kannada was tough, why? Up next….

PC(Padma Chikkerur), Kannada : “Sphutavaagi bareyodhanna ondh chawllenge (no its not a spelling mistake, this is the verbatim of the pronunciation) antha thogondu neevu bareyodhanna abhyasa madbeku” class after class, day after day, week after week, there was at least one session on hand writing improvement in every class! A female protagonist from our class was her ideal and was lauded without fail for the artistry in her writing! What pen does she use to write? How does she hold the pen? This girl seemed to have mesmerized the teacher by her hand writing!! She was the grapho-celebrity of our class!!! So in the interest of students to reach her level of calligraphic writing, PC m’am made us write one page of text in Kannada every day! This exercise which began in right earnest (mind you only by the teacher) fizzed out after students found ways and means of hoodwinking the purpose ;)! For a book that had a standard 20 lines per page, the first line of the page was dedicated writing the date, the second line for writing three letters “Kannada”, a line gap after that, and then start the text. Thus the students got away with writing approx. 16 lines per page. One of the baby einsteins of the class got the brilliant idea of writing poems for this activity! Great!! Each line would have two to three words and then jump to the next line! Writing hardly 50 to 60 words would fill up the page! Realizing that the kids have outsmarted her, PC stopped this exercise, half way through the academic year! Had we continued probably we would have had alternate careers as calligraphy experts! 

By the way, our female protagonist wrote “numbers” artistically as well :), so what’s the big deal!! Ahaa, yes, our Mathematics teacher was also a fan of her hand writing! Fortunately we dint have to write a page full of numbers! but yes, Malini Sampath m’am had a weakness for handwriting!

MS(Malini Sampath), Maths-I : The most affable of teachers for a mathematics subject who found more beauty in hand writing than logic. Her insistence on neatness and legibility was justifiable, however when it started inclining towards artistry we students found it a bit difficult to relate the logic behind the artistry of writing numbers! Her unique ways of making students realize what is wrong was worth patenting! 

Picture this: MS m’am starts writing on the board the solution of a problem and 50 odd buffaloes religiously bend the head down and start copying the same! Almost at the end she gives a pause, turns around a gives a cold stare at the whole class, carefully searching length and breadth of the class, hoping for someone to raise their hand and say, “ but m’am…..”. Realizing that the “Dimaag ki batthi” has a blown fuse for the buffaloes of both the genders, she says….”this solution is wroooooooooong!!!” Boooo!! The sound emanating from all the corners of the class, few giggles... The gentle lady could scold no more than the following statement, “Don’t howl like owls!!” the permanent rhyme we used to hear throughout the academic year! 

Apart from the above mentioned teachers, there were others, in whose class the activity of teaching/studying passed through uneventfully :), not that those classes weren’t fun, but were less eventful! However, for all our monkey pranks, the above mentioned teachers and others molded and chiseled us, for what we are today, and I would forever be indebted to this bunch of wonderful women, who shaped the future of every student they taught and made sure they pass out of school in flying colors!

My heartfelt wishes to all the teachers who taught me at 10^th C, in VVS Sardar Patel High School

KNM m’am, NRS m’am, TGK m’am, MKL m’am, PC m’am,  MS m’am, PN m’am, CVP m’am, GK m’am, PR m’am and last but not the least PV sir, A BIG THANK YOU FOR ALL OF YOU!!!

A[V]I

Business Models!

For a person who is far from having a strong business acumen, when I sit around dreaming about my future and refreshing my past, occasionally I end up thinking if at all I start a company of my own (which for my “free spirited day dreaming Piscean” nature is a remote possibility) what would be kind of strategy that I would adopt. Having worked in a highly volatile industry for just over a decade which includes a couple of startups, I guess I have been able to vaguely figure out, two distinct ways of achieving success!! To someone who raves about time pass, good ol days, cricket, fun and frolic, buzz words such as “strategy”, “business model” seem alien,  but for a while I just thought I could put my thinking hat on,  dish out a comparative studies about two of my perceived  business models which could probably succeed. 

Disclaimer: I am hard core Linux professional, and my only connection to business and management, is that my wife is an MBA graduate, and the connection ends there! All that is written below, is my take on going further in sticky matters of business, and probably a self-reference material if at all one day, I decide to call it a day for my 9 to 7 career and take the plunge!

Time to put the Blazer on, and say, “Hello and Welcome!!”

So what’s that ONE deciding factor that everyone who ever wishes to start a company, need to be absolutely certain about? Because that one decision affects everything else you do in aid of that budding company, your dream baby! You need to figure out whether the company is going to grow slowly, steadily, bit squeamish but profitably or whether the company is going to have a big bang with fast growth and lot of capital investment.  To keep up the reference further down; I would call the first model as a “Steady Model” and the second one as a “Land Grab Model”

The fundamental concept of the Steady model is to start small, with limited goals, and slowly build a business over a long period of time. The product that you would be trying launch in the market, would have lot of established competitors.

The second one, the “Land Grab Model” works on that one brilliant concept/idea which no one has thought about till date, and work on that idea to materialize it into a feasible product as quickly as if your life is depended on it, and release it to the market fast!!  This calls for raising a lot of capital and that’s where your Giorgio Armani clad technocrat image will come in handy in selling that brilliant idea into a feasible business proposal to the VC, that they would instantly invest the moolah, so that you don’t have to work for the next 25 years!!If you don’t have any real competition, because you are the first in the market, there is a pretty good chance that you succeed in the land grab, that is, get as many customers as possible, and establish a customer base as quickly as possible, so that later competitors will have a serious entry-barrier into that market. But if you're going into an industry where there is already a well-established set of competitors, the land-grab idea doesn't make sense. You need to create your customer base by getting customers to switch over from competitors. And that takes time!!!

What’s wrong in taking time? The problem is that you need to create a network of customers and create that network pretty fast and somehow make them stick to you, so that they have no other way of getting away! This is like a snow ball effect, because the more customers you have, the more customers you will get! eBay is a good example. Suppose you want to sell your vintage bike you're going to get a better price on eBay, because there are more buyers there. If you want to buy a vintage bike, you're going to look on eBay, because there are more sellers there!! 

Another extremely effective network effect is in proprietary chat systems like say for example, Skype. If many of your friends use Skype, then obviously you need to go to Skype, if you want to chat with them. Rather than asking all of them to come over to the chat system that you use, it would definitely make lot of sense for you to create an id on Skype, and start chatting. One more customer added to Skype, because of network effects, and nothing more! That’s where the customers are locked in!

But how do you throw the bait initially? That’s a simple thing, as giving free service for say around 6 months, and then when you have enough customers locked in, start a monthly subscription! Similar to all these banks offering various services such as paying all your bills from your account like an ECS or a standing instruction. After some months of very less service charge, you would be a bit grumpy if they increase the service charge, but still to avoid the hassles of changing the account for each and every payment that you have authorized the bank to pay for, you allow them to suck your pocket just that extra little bit!

Hence, there are certain businesses that have these natural network affects and if your business strategy is a brilliant one as that, you may as well set the stone rolling for the “land grab model” before anyone else do and make a fortune!

Steady model companies start with a limited capital amount! VC s isn’t interested in funding you, and hence break even as early as possible would be the Numero Uno goal initially. If you are lucky, and get profitable, reinvest the profit and hope to get bigger! If it fails, fair enough, it is very little investment that you lose and you lost the time, but you got valuable experience as to how not to do something you started! Steady models keep churning out little profits and ensure that they walk the banana skin carefully! Occasional huge profits should not blow the confidence through the roof, and prompt the employers to think that they have enough capital now, and hence go for the land grab model!! This is where the founders of the firm should instill corporate values, which would lay down ground rules about the acceptable growth rate at which that culture can be promulgated throughout the employees in the firm. The Corporate values are worth their weight in gold in such companies, and the whole bunch of guys working for the firm live and die by those values! 

Corporate values mean a little in a company that’s on the land grab mission! The tearing rush to get big fast, leaves little room for someone to sit and think about decisions that may change by the minute! Also, the employees working for these firms get the impression that things are really working out in this firm! When they see 50 odd guys joining the company every week, the employees get a feel (mind you only a feel) that they are a part of something really big!

As a rule of thumb, you can make a nice place to work, or you can promise people they'll get rich quick. But you have to do one of those, or you won't be able to hire.Some of your employees will be impressed by a company with a high chance of an IPO that gives out lots of stock options. Such people will be willing to put in three or four years at a company like this, even if they hate every minute of their working days, because they see the pot at the end of the rainbow.

If you're growing slowly and organically, the pot may be farther off. In that case, you have no choice but to make a work environment where the journey is the reward. It can't be hectic 80 hour workweeks. You have to give people decent vacations. People have to be friends with their co-workers, not just co-workers. Sociology and community at work matter. Managers have to be enlightened and get off people's backs, they can't be micro managers. If you do all this, you'll attract plenty of people who have been fooled too many times by dreams of becoming a millionaire in the next IPO; now they are just looking for something sustainable. If you're even reasonably smart company, you're going to succeed. It may be a bit of a struggle, there may be good years and bad years, but you're certainly not going to lose too much money, because you didn't put in too much to begin with.

To conclude if you are going into a market with no existing competition, lock-in, and network effects, you better use the land grab model and of course if you're going into an established market, getting big fast is a fantastic way of wasting tons of money. Your best hope is to do something sustainable and profitable, so that you have years to slowly take over your competition and this happens in a Steady Model.

The worst strategy is probably having a vision of a land grab model for your company, and work like a steady model company (However, denying it all the time!!!)

OK folks, the blazer is catching me short of breath, and someone like me to sustain even writing about business strategy for so long is making me sulk, time to head back to day dreaming!!

A[V]I

Perils of Multitasking!

For all the posts that have made an entry to my blog, I have been dwelling for a high percentage of time in the past! For all that I have cursed about my studies in school, PU and in engineering, which for most part of the time made me feel like a cow on ice, I am today a manager, albeit a technical one, shepherding a herd of cats called programmers! I felt I need to pen down what I consider as the most difficult job for a manager… managing people!! But wait, isn’t it what I am supposed to do as per my designation? Man management isn’t an easy job! When you're managing a team of programmers, one of the first things you have to learn to get right is task allocation. Two words that make you load one program into the startup menu, the MPP!! 

In an old world office, it would be as simple as sorting out files,(the paper cardboard ones, with lots of papers in them), and “file dumping” them in the peoples’ lap!! Poor souls with their single minded devotion towards “closing” the file, would work at their pace, file after file in a sequential manner. 

Cometh the age of computers and software, the buzz words such as “parallel”, “simultaneous” seem to be omnipresent in a manager’s vocabulary and they unleash it on the poor programmers in a status meeting in its full ferocity ! The result; unhappy subordinates venting it out on their keyboards and near coffee machines in the office or in the canteen with other colleagues! Although me being in the same manager league, beg to differ completely about working on two things at a time!! And since I am technical manager, my analogy would invariably take an example of programming! 

Hypothetically let me assume there are two CPUs, one which performs tasks in a sequential manner, and the other (more likened by the manager!!!) performs tasks in parallel!! Each CPU is required to perform two separate computations A and B, each consuming 10 seconds of CPU time. Our CPU that performs tasks sequentially would perform the tasks this way.

Computation A										Computation B
1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16	17	18	19	20

Another CPU that is multi-tasking would perform both the tasks simultaneously however its execution would be as follows:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

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18

19

20

Hmmm, so what’s the fuss all about?? Most people's gut reaction is that multitasking is better. In both cases, you have to wait 20 seconds to get both of your answers. But think about how long it takes to get the results to each computation. 

In both cases, the results of Computation B (shown in orange) take 20 seconds to arrive. But look at Computation A. With multitasking, its results take 19 seconds to arrive... yet with sequential processing one of them is ready in only 10 seconds :) Yay Yay!!! Even if you consider the average computation times, a sequential execution would take on an average (10+10)/2, 10 seconds, whereas parallel execution takes (19+20)/2 which is 19.5 seconds. I am not even considering the amount of time taken for task switching and already we have a difference of 9.5 seconds on an average computation!! Before you readers stop reading further and click the tiny Red Cross mark on the right hand corner of your screen, I will stop my technical analysis here. However, computers are built modeling themselves on humans and parallel processing of work even in humans in pretty difficult, well, next to impossible actually!! 

OK, back to the more interesting topic of managing humans, not CPUs. The trick here is that when you manage programmers specifically, task switches take a really, really long time. That's because programming is the kind of task where you have to keep a lot of things in your head at once. The more things you remember at once, the more productive you are at programming. A programmer coding at full throttle is keeping lot of things in their head at once: everything from names of variables, data structures, important APIs, the names of utility functions that they wrote and call a lot, even the name of the subdirectory where they store their source code. Bump into him to update him about your Facebook update, Disturb the programmer for a clarification, just poke him to send a neat little document about his work, or just in between out of nowhere, pop up a very small task of changing the variable names in another person’s code; his memory is down like a pack of cards…The human brain seems to move it out of short-term RAM and swaps it out onto a backup drive where it takes forever to retrieve. It really takes time to gather back thoughts, logic all over again and align back to that “zone”. Three or four such task switches or interruptions a day, are enough to ruin his day, and the quality of the software he is writing. The overall productivity and other dependencies down the chain like schedule take a hit. At the end of the day, it is you as a manager, who would be frantically playing number games in the MPP, to accommodate the schedule.

From my personal experience I have noticed that whenever one job is assigned to one person, they'll do a great job, but if you assign two jobs to that person, they won't really get anything done. They'll either do one job well and neglect the other, or they'll do both jobs so slowly you feel traffic on a Monday morning in busy Bangalore road in moving faster. That's because programming tasks take so long to task switch. As it turns out, if you give somebody two things to work on, you should be grateful if they starve one task and only work on one, because they're going to get more stuff done and finish the task sooner. In fact, the real lesson from all this is that you should never let people work on more than one thing at a time. Good managers see their obligation as removing obstacles so that people can focus on one thing and really get it done. When emergencies come up, they think about whether they can handle it by themselves before delegating it to a programmer who is deeply inundated in a project.

Things are easier said than done!! Being a manager myself, I strive really hard to ensure that one person is working on one and only one thing at a time but it is real hard work!! The end objective achieved, when I have a happy subordinate who is always willing to work for me, and also have super-efficient robust software running in our product. Win-Win situation all round!!!A dream day when I just keep browsing, updating my blog whole day, drinking tea!!! occasionally poking my team mates asking "Whats the status?" :)

A[V]I