I classify meetings that I go into two categories: content and therapy. And, they're almost always mutually exclusive.

The content meetings are, well, content meetings. You share some information and others learn and vice versa. May be you make a decision during a meeting, may be you don't.

The therapy meetings are the meetings where people go, chat, listen to each other, and walk out. It's a therapy for them. They feel good about venting their frustration and knowing that they're not the only ones with issues. No useful information is shared, no decision is taken, and the situation isn't any better than when they walked into that meeting.

For any given meeting, I ask myself this question, "Is this content or therapy?" In most cases, I can't necessarily change the way the meeting goes, especially if I'm not the one who is leading the meeting, but at least I know what to expect.

Photo courtesy: Incase

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"I'm coming back. Write it down in big letters. I'm not going out like this." - Mariano Rivera

Mariano Rivera injured his knee yesterday and is out for the season. Many people believe his career has ended. He is not amongst those many people; he says he is not going down like this.

With 608 saves under his belt he is one of my favorite closers even though I am not really a Yankees' fan. It is his signature cutter that intimidates the hitters.

I hope no athlete has to exit this way. He is 42 and his contract expires this year and yet he is determined to come back next year. This is the kind of spirit why I love baseball!

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"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

Just like Paul Graham I want to add this on top of my todo list. I had the same effect reading the fascinating post by a palliative care nurse, the regrets of dying. 

Success is a progressive realization of a worthwhile goal. It is often mistaken for accomplishment or happiness. It’s not. Accomplishment could lead to success and success could lead to happiness, but it doesn't always happen that way. 

A few weeks back, I also happened to read the post by Paul Buchheit where he recollects the series of past events and puts life in context. This riveting post has left lasting effects on me.

Happiness is a choice if you want it to be: live in the moment, accept the past, and be good to yourself and others.

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With the population of over 1.2 billion people, India is certainly a gold mine and a magnet for the CPG companies to mass market their products. Localizing products in India is far more difficult than it appears to be. Many CPG companies overestimate the value of their brand, confidence in their products, and their localization abilities. And they always underestimate the intangible cultural factors that could influence how people perceive their products. As Nandan Nilekani puts it "India is a concept." There are no binary answers for the Indian market. The answer almost always is, "it depends." It's a localization nightmare to cater to non-homogenous demographics in single country with different languages, education level, taste preferences, and cultural and religious beliefs. 

Which cola has the largest market share in India? If you think it's Coke or Pepsi, think again. It's Thums Up that has about 42% of cola market share. I grew up watching the battle between Coke, Pepsi and Thums Up where Coca-Cola bought Thums Up (Parle Soft Drinks) to compete against Pepsi. Their initial goal was to replace Thums Up with Coke, but that didn't work out. Localization isn't easy.

When the companies think they finally got it, they're in for a rude awakening — such as these potato chips — where people don't care for the names at all. It's the color. So much for the naming and branding exercise.

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I am home, just hanging out, since the school is indefinitely closed due to ongoing riots and on and off curfew. From a window, I would see people hustling on the street shouting that they just heard of new communal disturbance in the old part of the town - a group of people burning a shop or someone just stabbed someone else in the vegetable market. These people are running towards their respective homes or to a central bus station to catch a bus as soon as possible if they are from out of town. An hour later, the streets would be deserted, and a police car would come by with a P.A system announcing an indefinite curfew. They would instruct people to go inside their houses and threaten to arrest them if they violated the curfew. This is Godhra in 1980, a small town in the state of Gujarat, in the western India, where I grew up. The 1980 riots broke many records including the one of the longest curfew in any city. It lasted for 14 months. We got used to this curfew. Our family, like most other families, didn't own a TV. There was nothing much to do but I don't recollect getting bored at all. As soon as the curfew set in we would go out on the street and play cricket. As soon as we would hear a police patrol car we would run back into our houses. That year was so chaotic that my school didn't even manage to print the final exam question paper. The teacher wrote the questions on the blackboard and we wrote the answers on a paper and turned them in. 

During the riots, I would go to the roof of our house and watch fire trucks going to a large water tank, close to my house, to fill up water so that they can put out fire in all neighborhoods. I saw houses and shops set on fire by people in my neighborhood. I would sit on the roof and watch the flames and smoke. I was old enough to know and remember that these were Hindu-Muslim communal riots but I could neither comprehend nor analyze what was going on.

At times the curfew would go on for 3-5 days without any breaks. This meant no place to buy milk and vegetables. My dad is a well-known doctor in the town. He would go to the collector's (administrative head of the county) office to get a curfew pass that would allow him to be on the streets during curfew. My dad and I would drive to a dairy, that supplies milk to our town, to buy litres and litres of milk. We would come back and distribute that milk in our neighborhood. My dad won't take money from poor people in my neighborhood who survived on hourly jobs for their livelihood. I didn't think of this as charity. These people were clearly out of jobs and had no way to earn money to support their families. I just thought that we should help these people if we could. It was as simple as that. I could not have imagined this any other way.     

During 1980 riots a few people from the national army were deployed to help the local police maintain order in Godhra. These people were new to the culture of the city. I would go with my friends to strike up a conversation with these folks and would even invite them for tea to our houses.

Growing up in Godhra involved growing up watching these riots.

Since 1980 Godhra experienced small communal riots every few years and then it was 27th February 2002 when a train coach was set on fire near Godhra train station where more than 50 people were burnt alive. 

It has been exactly ten years since this incident occurred. I haven't forgotten a thing.

When the Godhra train incident happened I was in the US. I called my brother as soon as I discovered what happened. When my brother found out that a train coach was set on fire and quite a few people died, he actually drove to the site of the incident to see what happened. It must feel like a crazily risky thing to do, but then he also grew up watching riots just like I did and he didn't seem to have any fear visiting the site. He rushed back home before the curfew was announced. Godhra, as a city, was completely locked down with full police presence and the riots didn't spread much in the town. But, this time, it caused much more damage and claimed hundreds of lives outside of Godhra, in other parts of Gujarat, especially in Ahmedabad. Even villages that were never part of any riots became victims of these riots.

The next time I was in India my dad took me to this burnt train coach. It was kept a little outside the train station. That's where I took these pictures. I saw burnt clothes, water bottles, shoes, and all sorts of other things. I was inside the coach taking pictures and I could imagine and reconstruct the incident in my mind. It was really nerve-racking and sad.

Growing up, I didn't quite understand the complex factors that caused these riots. My dad is a doctor and he used to see a lot of muslim patients. The mechanic who used to fix my dad's car and my brother's awesome bike was muslim and so was the driver that my dad would call when he would go on long trips. There were no religion boundaries, distinctions, and preferences when it came to business or even to friends. I went to school with many muslim kids and I'm still friends with some of those even if I live thousands of miles away. In fact, growing up, I never explicitly thought about this distinction.

The riots were almost always politically instigated and everyone lost, the hindus as well the muslims. They didn't want to. No one actually wanted the riots. No one wanted to burn down a shop or a house and no one wanted the business to shut down for months. But, they were manipulated to believe that victory over other religion means something. This is so stupid. The business took a toll after the 1980 riots. Quite a few industrial projects in Godhra and in nearby towns were cancelled. These projects never came back. People are still paying the price.

Having seen the world a lot more compared to when I was a kid, this bothers me a lot more right now than it did then. Hundreds of innocent lives have been lost.

I wish people realize that human lives are too precious to waste and are above whatever other beliefs they might have.

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Today, the people in India are celebrating Maha Shivaratri, a festival celebrated in reverence of Lord Shiva. The celebrations and rituals vary from one region to another. My memories of celebrating Shivaratri are associated with people drinking "Bhang", an intoxicant similar to hashish or marijuana made out of cannabis plant. I grew up in a dry state where selling as well as consuming alcohol is prohibited, but bhang, despite being more intoxicating than alcohol at many levels, was perfectly acceptable - socially as well as legally. Drinking bhang was not only acceptable but it actually made you look religious!

Making good bhang is quite an elaborate process and some of my friends took pride in executing a perfect recipe that included a marathon effort of using metal from a currency coin and stone-grind it with bhang leaves for a few hours. I never ended up drinking bhang but saw people around me getting intoxicated with it. The effect of bhang lasts much longer and it makes people do strange things. If they were laughing while they drank bhang they would keep laughing for hours or if they were eating then they would overeat and later throw up. Then they would fall asleep and won't wake up for hours and when they would wake up they won't have any recollection of what happened to them.

It was a strange festival. The best place to get free bhang was the temple of Lord Shiva. Some of the people that I knew went to Shiva's temple on this day even though they never worshipped the Lord Shiva. Some people neither worshipped Shiva nor went to a temple but made their own bhang that day and threw a party. The next day they all shared some of the most weirdest hangover stories.

Photo by Debra Solomon

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Messaging is overrated and the messages are underrated. The powerful messages are simple and phrased to be the most impactful such as the president Kennedy's speech in 1961 where he said, "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." He didn't say "we are investing in advanced aerospace technology to enable us to accomplish breakthrough innovation." Kennedy's message was also personal and simple. Obama's message, "yes, we can," also shares the same characteristics - simple, personal, and united.

These messages are hard to craft.

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Someone asked me a few days back who is my role model. It took me a few seconds to answer "No one in particular." I don't have a role model in my life, but I like certain characteristics of certain people that I try to bring into my life. I don't really want to be like someone. I would like to be what I am with those added gems from the people that I admire. During my last physical checkup I had to fill out a form that had a question, "What's your annual health goal?" I answered, "Stay the same." Likewise, I don't chase a role model but I do have an anti role model. Actually, quite a few.

I received one of the most nastiest and demeaning voicemails from one of these anti-role models. Till date, I have saved that voicemail. Occasionally, I replay that voicemail and tell myself, "I will never be this person."

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In India, if you hand out a bag of lentils, for free, to poor parents every time they bring their kids for shots, would you call it a bribe? This was an experiment by Esther Duflo who analyses poverty worldwide. 

Having grown up in India and worked with many poor people I can relate to incentivizing the poor. I won't call it a bribe. One of the biggest incentives that I grew up with is about providing free lunch to poor kids. The program is known as "Mid-Day meal." The parents of these poor kids have little or no money to make or buy lunch for them. If there's no lunch, instead of going to the school kids will end up working at construction sites or in a farm where their parents work as daily laborers. The parents have the best intentions to send their kids to a school but in most cases the circumstances would not have allowed them do so.

I have been working with a few passionate people to help build an elementary school in a small village in the western India with a vision to bridge the rural-urban divide and provide all kids, mainly poor, a competitive environment at par with their urban counterparts. While talking to the teachers there, I found out that we can't run two shifts in the same building because it's up to the elder sibling to bring his or her younger sibling to the school. Both the parents work in a farm and if both the kids can't go to the school at the same time, they will drop out of the school. 

There's an intricate social fabric and a culture of positive incentive that is required to work with the people at the bottom of the pyramid. It's not a bribe.

Photo by: selvin

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A few months back, I was helping a very large customer of ours to help simplify as well as automate their process of trading financial instruments. During one of my many visits to their office, I met a person who was trying to explain to me his job in supporting the people that are involved in this super complex process. I always ask a lot of questions — until they're totally annoyed and ready to kick me out of the room — to get a complete understanding of the business rationale behind whatever they're thriving for and their personal motivation behind it. Something unusual happened at this meeting. Instead of getting into the gory technical details of how they get things done, he chose to tell me a short and simple story.

"You know, um.. there's this early morning meeting everyday that Peter goes to with a bunch of other people. They all gather around a large table in a dimly lit conference room with a bunch of printed spreadsheets, a laptop, and a large calculator. Peter has a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette in the other hand talking to people who have coffee cups in their one hand and cigarettes in the other hand. This is their lives. I am concerned about Peter and I want him to stop smoking. Can you please help me?"

Now, this is the job that I love that makes me get out the bed and run for it. This is the human side of enterprise software. It's not boring.

Photo Courtesy:Jane Rahman

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During one of my trips, I had a transit in Munich. While I was walking out of the plane, I overheard a conversation between two people in front me. One of the persons said: "I saw a Kosher plane". For a moment, I thought I misheard what he said. I continued to hear the conversation and was amused at the analogy.

The person who was describing the plane as kosher lived in a middle-eastern country and hadn't travelled much, especially to colder places such as Munich in Winter. He referred to the process of de-icing the plane as koshering the plane, for real. Fascinating!

Photo: Courtesy Mark

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Auto replies are largely boring. People don't give a #&^$ about why you are not in the office. They curse you for not being helpful to them and envy that Hawaii vacation. This is for the recipients. But for you, this is an opportunity to send an unsolicited email to market the hell out of yourself.

Let's be honest, when was the last time you had an opportunity to lecture all the folks about all the great work that you have been doing. It's shame that other people don't care as much about your work. Some souls have no friggin' clue what exactly you do for living and why the company even bothered to employ you. You can't really invite all these people to a thirty-minute webinar where you could lecture them about what exactly you do. But you can use auto replies to tell them at great length why they should care about you.

When you're out of office, set up an auto reply that describes all the key projects that you're working on with an apology that you are not going to be working on this and that the sender may have to wait for the right response. If you are out for a conference, tell folks that you're so cool that you have been invited to a conference to present on some obscurely awesome topics. Also, let people know that you get too many important emails and that if they don't hear back from you, it just means that you're busy doing more important things.

People may not listen to you when you're in the office, but they will read your *&^% when you're not in the office. Give it a try.

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I still can't get over the tragedies of the last few days - Steve Jobs, Al Davis, and now Jagit Singh. I have never seen any other Ghazal singer with the voice that Jagjit had. This is coming from a die-hard Ghulam Ali fan. What I liked the most about him was the perpetual tenacity in his voice. He became old, but his voice didn't age. Because of him, a lot of people that I know got introduced to the genre of ghazal. He made ghazal mainstream - something that was considered niche and obscured only to be enjoyed by a very small group of people. Steve Jobs made the design mainstream proving that if you design a beautiful product that gets the technology out of the way and evokes emotions, people will flock to buy it. Jagjit SIngh did the same with music. He picked the right ghazals and composed them based on Indian classical music in such a way that the masses could enjoy the composition without having to understand the classical music. And he touched people's lives when he sang them. 

Jagjit Singh had a rough past. He lost his son, Vivek Singh, at the age of 21 in a car accident. I knew Vivek (his nickname was Bunty) as a friend of a friend. His wife, Chitra Singh, stopped singing after that. This tragedy changed Jagjit's life, but he continued to sing and excelled in every single album that he recorded and wowed people at every single live performance.

Thank you Jagjit Singh. May your soul rest in peace.

Photo courtesy

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Growing up in India, I did two things: watched Hindi (Bollywood) movies and played cricket. One of my favorite directors, Yash Chopra, chose Switzerland to shoot parts of his movies including Chandni, Darr, and a super blockbuster Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. These movies sold Switzerland as a tourist destination to the people in India. Today, Switzerland enjoys a very large number of Indian tourists every year. There's even a lake in Switzerland known as the "Chopra Lake". They should thank Yash Chopra (and say Happy Birthday to him - it's his birthday today) and Bollywood. When the Bollywood directors got bored with shooting movies in Switzerland, they started moving to Australia and then to New Zealand. The Indian tourists followed them and made those destinations popular, as well.

Then comes Spain.

Zoya Akhtar recently released a movie, Zindagi Na Milegi Dubara (roughly translates to "You don't get to live twice"). The entire movie is shot in Spain complete with the cast taking part in a bull run in Pamplona during San Fermín, deep sea diving near Costa Brava, sky diving in Seville, and dancing in a Bollywood sequence during La Tomatina in Buñol. It's a complete package that sells Spain as an exotic tourist destination. Now, in India, everyone talks about how beautiful Spain is as if the country never existed before. The overzealous kind even tried to organize a tomato festival in India that eventually got canceled due to the tomato growers lobby opposing the "waste" of tomatoes.

Thanks to Bollywood, now Indians have discovered Spain. Dear Spain, watch out for bus loads of Indian tourists to your La Tomatina and the bull run. ¡Cuidado Señorita!

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Today, Chris Sacca tweeted:

After getting laid off he went on to work for Google as head of special projects. He worked on many things including the wireless spectrum project, Google's free WiFi in Mountain View and led biz dev and M&A transactions. He then left Google to become an angel investor to invest into companies such as Twitter, Heroku, Instagram, Posterous, and Twiiio. The Wall Street Journal cited him as “possibly the most influential businessman in America”. Not a bad deal, eh?

I have seen many people in my life — close and distant — who lost their jobs, doubled down and rebounded their careers. They have much better careers and personal lives. One thing is common amongst these people. They didn't blame themselves or the employer, instead they took it as a positive sign and seized the opportunity. They worked hard and put their energy into what they believed was the right thing to do. I know, it's hard to tell someone that things happen for a good reason when they lose their jobs, but that's the truth. That job is now history. What matters is what you do next.

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Today, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. I will remember this day.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.” — Steve Jobs 

For me, Apple is not just a personal choice that is better than other alternatives, but it's also an ongoing proof of what's possible if you believe in what you think is the right thing to do. It's also about the elements of design and endless perseverance that I can thrive for. Thanks Steve for showing what's possible and wish you all the best with your health and a speedy recovery. I hope you can stay on and mentor others at Apple for what's going to be a great future of computing.

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The $0.00 sign for a gallon of gasoline of all grades doesn't literally mean what it displays. It means that the pump is closed. But, wait, why spend energy to keep the lights on if the pump is closed? Somehow $0.00 a gallon makes you think that "something is off" and in a split second you realize that the pump is closed for gas but the illuminated sign suggests that the convenience store attached to the pump is not. You can't buy gas, but you could still get your soda pop to quench your thirst.

In many cases, a wrong signal or even a missing signal has way more profound meaning than the correct signal. Merely existence of a signal is good enough in many cases than the quality of signal itself. I have used this phenomenon for many different situations. I take bus to work everyday and track its arrival time while I wait at a bus-stop. The tracking itself isn't that accurate, but existence of a (any) number tells me that I haven't missed the bus. 

Photo courtesy: Tim Hohm

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I rarely eat lunch at my desk. Eating lunch in a cafeteria is such a precious opportunity to waste. I plot for serendipity. That's right. Some of the best conversations that I have had with people — on my way to a cafetaria or in the cafeteria — are purely serendipitous, but they're not purely accidental. I even pick a cafeteria that requires me to walk a little more. I believe you can always create opportunities for good things to happen to you. When people say "It's a small world", they are so wrong. The world isn't small but they're at the right place at the right time to think it's a coincidence. The coincidences do happen but there's a larger force behind orchestrating the possibilities for such coincidences to occur.

The same applies to creativity. You can design an epiphany.

I have heard people say that they had an epiphany while they were in shower. It's not the shower but it's illumination followed by a prolonged incubation, two phases of creativity. The other two phases are preparation and verification. Preparation is a phase where you decide that you want to solve a specific problem. When you continue to work on a problem over a period of time, your brain, the unconscious, never stops working on it even if consciously you're not spending any time on it. This is called incubation. This lasts for a while. The "shower moment" is the illumination phase where you finally figured out a solution, after your brain unconsciously kept solving it for the entire night, and hence the metaphor of glowing bulb for innovation. What remains is the verification phase to prove that the solution works. We all do this, but we don't spend enough time on the incubation phase and hence many ideas don't go beyond that. You can plot for this epiphany by not letting a problem go for a while even though you think that you don't have enough time to work on it. I tell my students to start working on their projects early on for better results for that purpose. It feels counterintuitive that you could solve a problem by spending less time on it as long as you keep solving it for a longer duration off and on.

I have blogged about cloud being a natural platform to design tools that could create network effects. The tools that create network effects also offer an opportunity for digital serendipity. I have discovered many people through Twitter and learned quite a few things that I would have never explicitly made an attempt to learn. And, I'm not the only one who has had such an experience. I'm a big fan of social tools and platforms that enable opportunities for such serendipity to occur. There're only so many cafes and water fountains in the physical world; the digital world is far bigger in that sense.

Design your routine to plot for serendipity and epiphany and credit yourself instead of the shower. Creativity can be tricked. You will be positively surprised.

Cross-posted on my personal technology blog.

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Would you pay for being treated with respect? Turns out the answer is, hell yes.

The only time I watch CNN is when I am eating lunch by myself in the company cafeteria. I don't get to pick the channel. CNN runs this commercial by a law firm specializing in dealing with IRS. The tag line is "We make sure they treat you fairly and treat you with respect". They're not claiming that they will help you reduce the tax or even keep you out of jail. The only thing they claim is that they will make IRS treat you with respect. And, they charge for that.

Most likely, this bearded dude is a total sleazy swindle, but he is my hero. No one likes to be humiliated. In many cases the customers will be happy — only if — they were heard and treated with respect regardless of the outcome. This is the principle that I always keep in my mind during any conversation or negotiation; I always treat people with respect even if I know that the person is full of &^%$. In most cases, I don't control the final outcome, but I do control the conversation, at least from my side. And in some cases — treating people with respect — indeed, has positively influenced the final outcome.

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I take a bus to work everyday where I met this lady at the bus stop. She has much cooler name, but let's call her Jane. Jane saw graffiti on the bus stop pole where we were standing and told me a story about her mom dealing with graffiti near her house where Jane grew up. Jane's mom's house was next to a high school where the high-school kids defaced the area near her house with graffiti all the time. She called the cops every time that happened. The cops came to her house, talked about the grafitti situation, ate an apple pie that she would bake for them and left. Her mother finally bought a spray can of grey paint that she started using to paint over the graffiti. A $3 dollar grey spray can is cheaper than the cops eating your pie.

Moral of the story: Pies can't solve graffiti problems, neither can cops, but a $3 spray can can.

Photo Credit: Oren Zebest

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