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The Butterfly Diaries 03- The Wide Window

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While the IT industry represents a wide window of opportunities for a diverse set of candidates, the IT buildings do not have even a narrow window. It was the first time in my life when I was spending a considerable amount of time in an air-conditioned environment. And a considerable time it was, for the training was rigorous. It had to be, for the objective was to bring together a bunch of young kids from diverse educational backgrounds and stamp them into a similar mold. After all, the diversity was not intentional but a by-product of an attempt to make up for the lack of a captive student base by skimming the cream off the student bases in other fields. The first month focused on introduction to computers, Windows basics and soft skills. At the end of the month, a sorting hat would declare not just our technology stream but our business unit as well. No one knew the basis for this selection. The financially lucrative American market and the cutting-edge Internet technologies were th...
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The Butterfly Diaries 02- The Reptile House

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What is the difference between a reptile house and a software development block? In a reptile house, the outside walls are opaque, and the individual enclosures are transparent. In a software block on the other hand, the outside walls are made of glass and the partitions between software engineer cubicles are opaque. That was the first impression I got of what was going to be my first ever office. And yes. There was one more difference. The reptile houses were the only houses the reptiles had. We software engineers however had to have other houses as well to keep our belongings and to sleep in. And the important business during the weekend was to find these other houses. For right at the stroke of midday on Sunday, our 5-star hotel dream stay would come to an end. If we didn’t find a house before then, we would be on the streets. With the snakes and the crocodiles. And of course, the ubiquitous stray dogs. But to the company’s credit, they did not leave us out in the cold. At their ow...
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The Butterfly Diaries 01 - A Bad Beginning

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This was back in the days when even the good old dumb phones were still novelties. The second gold rush was just starting. This time it was the turn of the Indians to rush West with their wagons and pick axes. The mines though were not physical but corporate. Any enterprising fellow who could string together two dozen lines of code that did not crash the system, had his fortune made. Was I to be left behind? More so since I was one of the few who actually loved stuff such as if…then conditions, for…next loops, variables etc. that produced the magic to make the idiot machines dance. But then it looked like the great Indian IT dream was going to end even before it began. They were talking of something called the ‘dot-com burst’. I did not know what it was except that it had caused my June Bangalore joining date to change into a July Bhubaneswar joining date and then to an August Chennai joining date. My dad had seen numerous transfers in his twenty-five-year career. And here I was seeing...
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The Steve Jobs Way - Chapter 9 - Holistic Development

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The key aspect of this chapter for me was the Innovators' solution idea of integrated architecture versus modular architecture. The writer speaks of every aspect of a product needing to gel together giving an example of Gillette cans that rust because the cans are not manufacture by Gillette and because the brand executives are not users of the product. That has been the much repeated central message of the book - of having executives that make the product be not just users but passionate about the product and not ones who just look at numbers. On the aspect of modularity versus integrated architecture, Apple has always been known to promote integrated architecture. So it is no surprise that this chapter extols the virtues of an integrated architecture. I guess it is also the Apple brand and positioning which makes this best for it. But as professor Christensen says, it makes sense to choose the one that suits the present maturity of a product in most cases.  I could relate what th...
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Steve Jobs Way - Chapter 8 - Recovery

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 This chapter is about how Steve got back into leading Apple. I would say the main takeaway here are his marketing abilities. And again centered around passion for the product. Steve Job pitches his NeXT computers to develop the operating system for Mac and finds an entry back into Apple. His preparation for the pitch is highlighted. The chapter talks of his unconventional background and how he was driven by passion, talking of his school education and how a teacher inspired him. And about how he always got what he wanted through his passion - convincing companies to sponsor projects, getting his adoptive parents to send him to the school he wanted to go to, internships etc. It talks of how he met Steve Woziniac during his younger days and came up with ideas to commercialize the computer he was developing. This chapter tells how Steve Jobs convince Apple to buy out NeXT along with all employees, including Steve Jobs as a consultant. Of how he then eventually got to replace the CEO ...
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The Steve Jobs Way - Chapter 7 - Surviving the Winter

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 As I read through, I feel this is more of a book around the life and myth of Steve Jobs than hard business lessons. More of self improvement type lessons if any than business theory that that can be replicated. So let me go with the flow. The Chapter is about surviving lean periods. The 10 years when Steve Jobs was out of Apple. What he did during that period. He took his money out of the Apple Company shares. So he had money. He started Next Computers to realize his Mac vision on his own. He invested in Pixar. Though Pixar was an animation company, Steve Jobs' interest was more from the point of view of a computer for high resolution graphics which they had built for their animation work.  There are some superficial lessons mentioned in this chapter. About executives who live for the passion of the product versus those who care only about personal career growth. This is my own personal peeve about corporate careers. I could resonate but not sure if there is any solid lesson ...
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The Steve Jobs Way 6 - Right Organization

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 This chapter is about the right organization structure, right incentive, right channels - aspects that professor Christensen talks about a lot. This chapter's hypothesis is that a company should be organized by product rather than by function. Rationale being functional organization will try to standardize and not cater to the different needs of different product. This books talks of Mac, Lisa and Apple II. It doesn't really talk of how each one's need is different. But the chapter is more on how John Sculley wanted to adopt approaches similar to consumer goods focusing on distributors and retailers which was not working for Mac. The retailers obviously are not incentivized to sell Mac with no need for peripherals and no training needs thus giving them no scope for revenues. This is the aspect of choosing the right channel. Traditional channels will not favor innovative products. And from blue ocean stand point this is the implementation aspect. We see how Steve Jobs wante...
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