A Butterfly in a World of Bulls and Bears

As we headed towards the training completion, it started feeling like we were at an academy going through a rigorous educational program. Classes, attendance, exams, projects – we had it all. I hoped this was more a transition and real work was going to be nothing of this sort. All my efforts to rally support turned out to be unnecessary when it became clear this lady had no intention whatsoever of exacting revenge upon me. I was so relieved that I did not even care about her contribution on the next one. And we managed to pip the other team at the post yet again. Next came the final course – Visual Basic. And with it a new kind of trouble. Again, the project team was shuffled and this time we lost that petite girl who had been with us through the two earlier courses. She had been quietly competent and a total team player. Her presence had been so gentle and calming that I had not noticed it until it was gone. And man! It hit me hard. Especially when I saw her hanging around with her ...

I have read about how factories in Europe were the miserable mills that powered the industrial revolution. I often wonder if tech parks in India were their equivalent, powering the digital revolution. Of course, watching someone sitting in front of a computer altering thousands of images to fit different browsers does not evoke the same sympathy as watching someone standing in front of an assembly line and attaching thousands of parts. The stream-specific courses came with group projects, our first taste of the mill. As if to ensure that we did not escape the misery, they allotted only one computer for every two persons. This halved each group’s speed while subjecting everyone to the joy of watching someone else blunder their way through the module assigned to them. My Malayali friend and I circumvented the situation by unofficially signing up for the night shift that came with the additional perk of a free dinner. The first course was Unix. For the project, I was paired with a guy fr...

I have always lived in environments where windows were kept wide open for most of the time to let fresh air in. This was my first experience of being cooped up in an environment with no windows. Of course there was the air conditioning. But that is no replacement for natural air, is it? We had to spend long hours in these buildings, for the training was quite rigorous. How else can young kids from diverse backgrounds be shaped into a pool of professionals with a similar set of skills? The diversity I guess was not a feature but an acceptable bug when one tried to skim the cream off the student bases from various fields. While Hogwarts had just one sorting hat, we had two. One to put us into a technology stream and the other to put us into a business unit. And no one knew how they worked. “ It is all based on your interview performance, ” said some. “ It is based on the college you are from, your grades and the engineering branch, ” said others. “ No. None of these matters. It is all a...

While initially the software development blocks with glass on the outside were looking cool, as time went by my mind started summoning images of the reptile houses I had seen at the Guindy snake park. The only difference was that 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. Meanwhile the assignment for our first weekend was to find houses of a different kind – human ones - for us to stay in. For, like Cinderella’s ball, our 5-star dream stay would end exactly at the stroke of midday on Sunday. And by then if we didn’t have our own place to stay, we would be on the streets. With the ubiquitous stray dogs, who, unlike humans and reptiles, had no houses. Waiting for us after breakfast on Saturday morning was the brokers’ van instead of the company bus. To take us around the city looking for houses....

I used to think the saying ‘ Well begun is half done ’ meant anything that begins too well ends up remaining half done. You know the concept of peaking too early and all. So, I was not particularly averse to a bad beginning. As if on cue, this thing called ‘ dotcom burst’ hit the IT industry just a few months before I was to join in Bangalore. They said join a month later in July at Bhubaneswar. “ Why not, ” I thought. An extra month of vacation plus I get to see a new city. But then when they changed it again this time to Chennai in August, I began to worry. Transfers were nothing new to me, having lived through so many of my dad’s. But two of them even before joining seemed a rather alarming rate. I heaved a sigh of relief when the August Chennai joining date did not change into a September Pune one next and we were finally asked to come and be counted among the company’s employees. And our grand welcome at a 5-star hotel seemed to make up for all the waiting. I opened the door of m...

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...

 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 ...