9zonekarma [moved to a new home ]

I came across this amazing, powerful and moving sound bite of MLK Jr. when I accidentally clicked on a link in Oracle email announcing Martin Luther King day as a new holiday introduced next year. I am glad that I clicked on the link. It is a moving speech. I hope you enjoy it too Check it out

Andy Warhol is a genius way ahead of time (whether he realized himself or not :-)). He is credited with the quote

"In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes"

Now you can buy self-credited narcisstic 15 minutes on Yahoo Music for $1.99. Not very long ago, I used to be amazed with Dell customizing laptops for every single user. "You can do that?!" was my reaction. Today it is mass customization for etching your name in Jessica's song. We have certainly come a long way. Well, let me rephrase that.. we are certainly going a long way!

Thorton May of Computer World has a great post called "A Deeper Look at BPM" that I enjoyed reading today. Given decade of experience that I have in IT, majority of which is in building business applications, these 4 questions he poses in the post really resonated with me.

• Do we as a company want to know the truth?
• Will people tell the truth?
• Can we get the truth into the system?
• Will we behave differently when confronted with the truth?

I have personally seen companies struggle to solve questions #2 and #3. They don't even get to #4 because if you can't get people to tell the truth and enter it in the system, you don't even get to confront the truth, let alone behaving differently to it.

Your employees use business applications for two reasons.
1. There's no other way to get it done. Examples: Expense reimbursement, travel reservations, HR updates etc., Believe me no one enjoys wading through these applications to submit expense reports. They do it because there's no other way for them to get their money back.

2. It helps them to get their job done. Examples: Templates, document library etc., They see the benefit in using these applications. But typical users begin with consuming value before they think about donating value. However, over a period of time, people tend to donate more.

Most IT organizations typically think like #1. Most employees want #2.

Companies who want to hear truth should also realize that for truth to flow through their business systems, they have to gain employee trust. Give and you shall receive. Unfortunately this is still an anathema in organizations who traditionally think that they can hold their employees accountable. They lose trust and all they get is junk data.

So, how do we address this problem?

- Think about your employees like elusive, fickle web search users. If you don't make it sticky to use, they won't come.
- Provide enough opportunities for user feedback. Don't moderate comments - have a blog or wiki for users to vent, share and voice their opinions
- Take their opinions seriously. Show them that you care about them.
- Answer the question "what's in it for my users" before you slap another business app on them. If there aren't any features in the applciation that helps them, rethink the application

During my time growing up, I could tell an Ad from something that isn't. Not so easy for my son these days. With media saturation and zombied eye balls, advertisers have to find new and creative ways to market their products. Enter era of subliminal messaging. You just don't know when you are watching an Ad. You pay $10 for a movie only to see brands embedded in ways unimaginable. You can't miss the Coca Cola glasses on American Idol. Sun Microsystems created an online movie during the days of dot-com boom.

But in the recent times, two ad campaigns take the cake. Next time you are watching a movie or reading a novel, be careful..

Art of the Heist: Audi A3 ad campaign starts with a staged car theft in NYC. Viewers can follow and track it using website, print ads, blogs etc.,
Men in Aprons: Electrolux sponsored novel about cooking and cleaning - to reach to burgeoning population of single men households who hate the prospect of shopping for dish washers, vacuum cleaners and such boring stuff..

This has to do with life. Today I was saddened to hear from one of my colleague and close friend that his parent is suffering from terminal illness. During the conversation he mentioned that there are no guarantees that you will live for X years. You have to live life as though today is your last day. How true. Come to think of it every day is my last day because it ain't coming back. Time, in its merciless linear uni-directional progression, will only make me older. One day gone, another day gone and it adds up to years and before you know it life passes by. When we are facing our final moments, its terrible if we are facing "Should have, could have, would have" moment because nothing is going to make us go back and change things. Nothing.

Follow your heart, do your own thing and there won't be any regrets.

May my friend and his family find peace in this tragic and troubled times.

While we were being dazzled by July 4th fireworks dancing across our skies here in the US, there were two significant skyward events happening else where in the world - N.Korea and China.

No points for guessing the first one. Even though the much publicized, chest thumping N.Korea's missile testing was a spectacular failure, it was making a point. The timing of doing it around July 4th and the impact it has with S.Korea, Japan and the US are still resounding. We will have to wait and see how this N.Korea - US grandstanding evolves.


The other news didn't draw much attention but in my opinion has tremendous significance. China inaugurated the world's highest railway - a 710 mile railway line which reaches 16,000 ft above sea level connecting Beijing to Lhasa. Few decades and $4.1Bil later chinese government has silently asserted its control over Tibet. Besides the fact that this is an engineering marvel, the political impact its going to bring about is huge. Tibetians are wary of this unwelcome intrusion citing that enhanced transportation links will accelerate Chinese intrusion and smother their culture and environment. Chinese government cite region's progress as their primary motive but we can certainly deduce that its as much to do with getting Tibet under control.

People have different reading styles but the popular one is probably linear reading. Start from page 1 and read through the end without skipping or fast forwarding pages. I think that this approach works well only with fictions particularly where fast forwarding spoils the experience. This approach doesn't work for non-fictions for reasons discussed below:

1. Typically the core idea of non-fictions need time to reflect and assimilate
2. It is difficult to understand different concepts introduced in the book as well as anticipate the flow. In fiction, the story leads you forward. Non-fictions are more of digestion than discovery.
3. Non-fiction varies widely in their subject breadth and depth. Some take a narrow scope and go deep while others go for broader ground coverage. So, it is difficult to anticipate the scope if you are reading it linearly.

So, how then do we read non-fiction? Consider these apporaches. You can use combination of these approaches as well.

1. Spend time with prologue/introduction and Table of Contents. It gives you a good idea of author's intentions, background and perspective on what the book is about. Table of contents gives you a good idea of the structure and lay of the land you can expect.

2. Scan the book from beginning to the end before reading it. Read few passages from each chapter. This should take an hour or two. It gives you a good idea of concepts introduced, pace, depth and breadth of the book. Then read the book. Since you know all the major concepts in the book, you will form a mental canvas easily.

3. Make copious notes in the book to help you bookmark takeaways, personal commentary. Helps you revisit the book later. (Ofcourse the assumption here is that you own the book).

4. Put the ideas in action. This probably is the best way to internalize the book. In case you can't do this or if the book is theoritical, you can discuss the ideas with others.

Personally, I try to do all the above. Even if I can't, I definitely follow #1 and #2. It has helped me a lot. What method works for you?

What future has in store for us?. Lots of things but consider this very interesting, imaginative and frighteningly possible scenario put together by Marshall Brain in his novella called Manna
In his blog post Marshall also refers to a real-life system developed by HyperActive Technologies
. It is just around the corner people...

I have been pretty excited about the web2.0 initiated social and community revolution - the world of blogs, wikis, open source and creative commons. However this era will be no different than web 1.0 of dot-bombs and supernova effects as well. Following are some of the good, bad and the ugly I have come across this week.

The Good: I discovered Pandora this week. I must have been hibernating (actually I was) the past few years because I never heard about this personalizable online music station service before. But I am pretty excited about two things here. 1) I think that they have a genius concept (not so sure about their commercial model though). I admire their music analysts who painfully analyze each and every song in their catalog (according to their website it takes 30 minutes to analyze and categorize a 4 min. song). 2) Amazingly simple and beautiful user experience (flash based). Kudos to them. I think they can license their MGP model to other online music stations to monetize their business better.

The Bad: This is weird but CouchSurfing a website that connects travelers with people who are willing to provide free accomodation self-crashed its site because of "irrecoverable" database crash and back-up snafu. What shocks me is how in this day and age can such a thing happen!. Plain bizzarre. Two things jump at me: 1) Casey-the-founder shouldn't be blaming his database admins and sign-from-the-universe for this. First thing he should do is slap himself hard and then move on 2) There's got to be someway of getting back from this. Shutting the site down seemed to be the first thing he did - not the last. Again sounds a little crazy. Read more for other's reactions on techcrunch. There is a lesson for every one of us. All of us at some point or the other take a lot of tech practices too easy.
PS:I like the couchsurfing concept - so i hope they come back up

The Ugly: It can't get any uglier than PayPerPost.com. Its a website that pays people to write reviews on products and services. Its a worse idea than the dot-com crazy era's ad supported internet service which required you to click on an ad once every 5 minutes. Does this signal the end of innocence for the blogosphere? I think their business model is going to change very soon - focusing more on commercial blogs.