Fish and challenge

The Japanese have always loved fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring in the fish. If the return trip took more than a few days, the fish were not fresh. The Japanese did not like the taste.

To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen and they did not like frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price.

So fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little thrashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive. Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish. So how did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan? If you were consulting the fish industry, what would you recommend?

How Japanese Fish Stay Fresh: To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenges. Have you realized that some of us are also living in a pond but most of the time tired & dull, so we need a Shark in our life to keep us awake and moving? Basically in our lives Sharks are new challenges to keep us active and lively.....

Miracle of positive attitude

Father : "I want you to marry a girl of my choice"

Son : "I will choose my own bride!"

Father : "But the girl is Bill Gates`s daughter."

Son : "Well, in that case...ok"

Next - Father approaches Bill Gates.

Father : "I have a husband for your daughter."

Bill Gates : "But my daughter is too young to marry!"

Father : "But this young man is a vice-president of the World Bank."

Bill Gates : "Ah, in that case...ok"

Finally Father goes to see the president of the World Bank.

Father : "I have a young man to be recommended as a vice-president."

"But I already have more vice- presidents than I need!"

Father : "But this young man is Bill Gates`s son-in-law."

President : "Ah, in that case...ok"

This is how business is done!!

Moral: Even If you have nothing,You can get Anything. But your attitude should be positive

Individual Vrs Group

Linux is named after Linus Torvalds, a Finnish programmer. Today Linux is one of the path breaking software which has been recognized all over the world. Linus Torvalds developed Linux all alone, but today since the source code is free to access and change, Linux goes on getting developed further by thousands of programmers working in groups or all alone. Here it was the creativity of one brain which gave birth to a concept. This concept has been developed to its present form by groups of people spread all over, thanks to the Internet.

Innovative ideas do start in one mind before taking on the world. The radio, television, telephone, electric bulb etc. all were developed by genius scientists who had the ability and courage to think something different. It is a well known fact that Albert Einstein was the mastermind of the nuclear bombs which US dropped over Japan. It was Henry Ford who innovated the assembly line production of cars. It was after his success with the Model T that all other car companies copied him. It may be argued that in the present world, all development takes place in the labs of huge companies by highly qualified technical staff. But once you pore deep into these teams, will you realize that there is an individual brain responsible for new innovations. It is true in the advertising industry. When a top creative leaves an agency, many clients follow suit with their accounts. David Ogilvy was king of advertising while alive. Today O&M runs on his name.

Groups of people when working together have to deal with the whims and egos of each other. Some frequencies simply don't match. An idea which may be innovative and mind blowing for one individual may be a truly rubbish concept for another. The members are then forced to compromise to more conventional and pedestrian stuff. We have well known examples from our daily life. Microsoft founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen took on IBM and soon became bigger than IBM. GE was the brain of Edison. Quite recently in the networked world, most new companies on the Internet, software arena are run by entrepreneurs. Venture Capitalists work on the same concept. They act as incubators- they fund an idea to make it a reality. Original and innovative thinking is revered all over. The fact that people prefer to launch their own businesses and be their own bosses is due to the problems of working in groups or under pressure. Senior executives ignore creative ideas from juniors just because they are less experienced. Innovative thinking then suffers and comes down to a more conventional and acceptable level. It is noting these facts, that business houses all over are trying to have a more horizontal structure where juniors are given more encouragement and given more opportunities to contribute their thoughts. The concept of the single person taking the final decision is age-old since the age of kings. It was the king or monarch who had the final say after consulting his council members, while today we have presidents and prime-ministers doing the same. Amazon started off with Jeff Bezos alone. Today it is called as the largest superstore on earth.

HR and Virtual Teams

This is one organisational structure where the traditional HR models or paradigms are irrelevant. The reason is simple: conventional organisational hierarchies have no meaning in a team where the members hardly ever meet face-to-face. Also, given the high time-to-market pressures, these teams often need to be set up fast, and are disbanded even faster.
Yet, organisations all over the world are increasingly depending on such multi-lingual 'virtual' teams to achieve business goals. As companies have gone horizontal, they no longer have the luxury of collocation. Today, most products are developed and manufactured across boundaries, time zones, cultures and enterprises. As a result, the fundamental nature of teamwork is undergoing revolutionary changes, with companies getting networked and working through joint ventures and strategic alliances.
A typical virtual team could look like this: the team leader lives in Hyderabad, his deputy works from London, the production team is based in Malaysia, the marketing men are stationed across the world and a few others work out of their homes.
So how do companies make sure that the team functions seamlessly? Cutting edge technology is one solution and several companies are coming up with innovative measures. For example, Accenture's virtual collaborative software design extends the traditional notion of a video conference to an eye-to-eye interaction between users and virtual work objects. Projection technologies help to create the illusion that the users are on either side of a window, while visualisation and touch-screen technologies turn that window into a collaborative workspace.
But technology can solve only one part of the problem, as 'managing without walls' isn't easy. Relatively routine tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, become complex and fraught with interpersonal friction when one person's workday begins when another is sitting down to dinner or is sound asleep.
When key team members from various functions sit next to each other all day, information transfer is frequent. Formal meetings keep the project on track and establish goals and commitments, while informal meetings around the coffee table allow people to build trust and teamwork and to discuss ideas or get help with problems.
Thus, the key challenge for HR in making virtual teams work is this: when people who are supposed to work together can't see or talk to each other conveniently, a sense of isolation grows. This sense of isolation may lead people to feel that they are left out, not getting enough information or not being told the true story of what is going on. That is why has developed a regular Meet-the-People programme which is attended by every virtual team member. The company also has a 'war room' -- a virtual space where team members located in different physical locations collaborate on a real-time basis in order to achieve a common goal.
HR experts of companies that have institutionalised virtual teams say such teams need to be led with a level of professionalism and expertise much higher than in a traditional team. This is because virtual team leaders rarely have any sort of supervisory power over team members and have to rely on influence and inspiration. To counter the absence of togetherness, the team leaders have to set specific outcome-based challenges. For example, while a 'physical' team leader can take the route of 'we need to develop a plan for improving customer satisfaction', the virtual leader has to clearly state his goals in no uncertain terms: 'we need to eliminate all late deliveries within 90 days'.
A corporate reorganisation at Microsoft created a virtual team that needed to develop a new product offering. The team spanned four locations in different time zones, each contributing to the product's development. Disparities in company size and corporate cultures were among the immediate challenges the team faced. In addition to variations in languages, and diverse business structures, the number and structure of team intranet sites and multiple approaches to communication and collaboration varied from location to location prior to the reorganisation. Content that team members from one location defined as out-dated or inconsequential was considered valuable to teams from other locations. The result of the reorganisation was a virtual team with disparate work processes. Thus, the team needed a way to collaborate across disparate locations, cultures and work processes.
Technology wasn't a problem for Microsoft and the company used that in countless creative ways to improve communication among the team members. For, the principles of managing virtual teams are not much different from the principles of managing anybody or anything well. Communication is the key -- more so, when the team is dispersed in different corners of the globe and physical proximity is absent.
Here's what an innovative team leader did with his virtual team. Since he couldn't have regular lunch or coffee breaks with his virtual team, the leader provided a novel mechanism for such informal interaction. He had virtual pizza parties: send pizza to each location at the same time, and get together in an internet chat session or conference call to gab.
This is one organisational structure where the traditional HR models or paradigms are irrelevant. The reason is simple: conventional organisational hierarchies have no meaning in a team where the members hardly ever meet face-to-face. Also, given the high time-to-market pressures, these teams often need to be set up fast, and are disbanded even faster.
Yet, organisations all over the world are increasingly depending on such multi-lingual 'virtual' teams to achieve business goals. As companies have gone horizontal, they no longer have the luxury of collocation. Today, most products are developed and manufactured across boundaries, time zones, cultures and enterprises. As a result, the fundamental nature of teamwork is undergoing revolutionary changes, with companies getting networked and working through joint ventures and strategic alliances.
A typical virtual team could look like this: the team leader lives in Hyderabad, his deputy works from London, the production team is based in Malaysia, the marketing men are stationed across the world and a few others work out of their homes.
So how do companies make sure that the team functions seamlessly? Cutting edge technology is one solution and several companies are coming up with innovative measures. For example, Accenture's virtual collaborative software design extends the traditional notion of a video conference to an eye-to-eye interaction between users and virtual work objects. Projection technologies help to create the illusion that the users are on either side of a window, while visualisation and touch-screen technologies turn that window into a collaborative workspace.
But technology can solve only one part of the problem, as 'managing without walls' isn't easy. Relatively routine tasks, such as scheduling a meeting, become complex and fraught with interpersonal friction when one person's workday begins when another is sitting down to dinner or is sound asleep.
When key team members from various functions sit next to each other all day, information transfer is frequent. Formal meetings keep the project on track and establish goals and commitments, while informal meetings around the coffee table allow people to build trust and teamwork and to discuss ideas or get help with problems.
Thus, the key challenge for HR in making virtual teams work is this: when people who are supposed to work together can't see or talk to each other conveniently, a sense of isolation grows. This sense of isolation may lead people to feel that they are left out, not getting enough information or not being told the true story of what is going on. That is why Wipro has developed a regular Meet-the-People programme which is attended by every virtual team member. The company also has a 'war room' -- a virtual space where team members located in different physical locations collaborate on a real-time basis in order to achieve a common goal.
HR experts of companies that have institutionalised virtual teams say such teams need to be led with a level of professionalism and expertise much higher than in a traditional team. This is because virtual team leaders rarely have any sort of supervisory power over team members and have to rely on influence and inspiration. To counter the absence of togetherness, the team leaders have to set specific outcome-based challenges. For example, while a 'physical' team leader can take the route of 'we need to develop a plan for improving customer satisfaction', the virtual leader has to clearly state his goals in no uncertain terms: 'we need to eliminate all late deliveries within 90 days'.
A corporate reorganisation at Microsoft created a virtual team that needed to develop a new product offering. The team spanned four locations in different time zones, each contributing to the product's development. Disparities in company size and corporate cultures were among the immediate challenges the team faced. In addition to variations in languages, and diverse business structures, the number and structure of team intranet sites and multiple approaches to communication and collaboration varied from location to location prior to the reorganisation. Content that team members from one location defined as out-dated or inconsequential was considered valuable to teams from other locations. The result of the reorganisation was a virtual team with disparate work processes. Thus, the team needed a way to collaborate across disparate locations, cultures and work processes.
Technology wasn't a problem for Microsoft and the company used that in countless creative ways to improve communication among the team members. For, the principles of managing virtual teams are not much different from the principles of managing anybody or anything well. Communication is the key -- more so, when the team is dispersed in different corners of the globe and physical proximity is absent.
Here's what an innovative team leader did with his virtual team. Since he couldn't have regular lunch or coffee breaks with his virtual team, the leader provided a novel mechanism for such informal interaction. He had virtual pizza parties: send pizza to each location at the same time, and get together in an internet chat session or conference call to gab.
(This article was published in rediff.com.This is a reproduction of that article for the benefit of my readers)

The other side of superstar

From Dr. Gayathri Sreekanth's "The Name Is Rajini Kanth – A biography" Visiting that Ragavendra temple in Bangaloreis almost more than a routine for her. She has not seen him ever before in the temple.

He was sitting on the floor with his closed eyes, folded legs and locked fingers in 'Gnana Mudra'. He looked strange and different with a turban on his head and the very long flowing beard. Some thing was there in his face that attracted her. She could not understand what that was.

She finished her 'darshan' and came out; she saw the man was walking in the corridor. Again something was happening in her, she could not understand what was that. She was telling herself, "a poor old man. I have to help him". She ran to him, gave rupees ten in his hand and forced him to accept. He smiled, expressed a reverence like a 'prasadam' by keeping it in the forehead and thanked her by keeping the hand in prayer position ('Namasthey' ).

As she came out, she saw the man was getting into his Mercedes Benz, she was perplexed, shivered and ran to him and said, "Sir (Ayya!), Please forgive me, I did not do this to insult you. By seeing your dress and appearance, I thought you are struggling in life and offered you the money. It is a blunder. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Please give me back that money. I am sorry".

The man with the fake beard and turban laughed and replied her politely, "Ammaa.. There is no mistake of yours. It is the other way. The creator is again and again reminding me through some body, "You are nothing. You are not special. Everybody is equal in front of me". He keeps on sending this message again and again and today you happened to be a medium. That's it. Thanks a ton". His hand again went to prayer position, expressed gratitude to the lady and he went into his car.

When the lady realized the man was none other than Super star Rajini Kanth - Asia's number one paid actor, he has left the place.

She did not know what to do. With tears in her eyes, she was starring at the direction that the car went.