One Billion People: One Vision

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ADDRESS TO THE NATION BY THE PRESIDENT OF INDIA DR. A.P.J. ABDUL KALAM ON THE EVE OF 57TH REPUBLIC DAY - 2006

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Gift extinguishes the dignity of human life

It was around 1940 and the Second World War was in progress. At that time Panchayat board elections took place in Rameswaram. My father was elected as Panchayat Board member and on the same day he was also elected as the President of Rameswaram Panchayat Board. Rameswaram Island is a beautiful place with 20,000 populations at that time. They elected my father as Panchayat Board President not because he belonged to a particular religion or a particular caste or particular language or for his economic status. He was elected only on the basis of his being a good human being. I would like to narrate one incident that took place on the day he was elected as President of Panchayat board.

I was a school boy at that time studying in fourth class in Rameswaram Panchayat School. Those days we did not have electricity and we used to study in kerosene lamp. I was reading the lessons loudly and I heard a knock on my door. We never used to lock the door in Rameswaram in those years. Some body opened the door, came in and asked me where my father was? I told him that father had gone for Namaz for evening prayers. Then he said, I have brought something for him, can I keep it there. Then since my father had gone for Namaz, I shouted for my mother to get her permission to receive the items. Since she was also on the Namaz there was no response. I asked the person to leave the items on the cot. After that I went for my studies.

I used to learn by reading aloud in my younger days. I was reading loud and fully concentrating on my studies. At that time my father landed and saw a tambalum kept in the cot. He asked me what is this? Who has given that? I told him somebody came and has kept this for you. He opened the cover of the tambalum and found there was a costly dhoti, angawastram, some fruits and some sweets and he could see the slip that the person had left behind. I was the last son of my father, he really loved me and I also loved him a lot. This was the first time I saw him very angry and also this was the first time I had a beating by him. I got frightened and I was weeping. Then he touched my shoulder lovingly with affection and advised me not to receive any gift without his permission. It is not a good habit. Receiving gift with a purpose is a very dangerous thing in life. He quoted a verse from Hadith which means “Gifts accompany poisonous intentions”. This lesson stands out prominently in my mind. This experience taught me a valuable lesson for my life.

I would like to mention the writings in Manu Smriti which warns every individual against accepting gifts given with the motive since it places the acceptor under an obligation in favour of the person who gave the gift. Ultimately it results in making a person to do things which are not permitted according to law, in order to favour the person who has given the gift. Therefore it is necessary that the quality of not yielding to attraction of gifts and presents must be inculcated in individuals, so that he/she may develop immunity against the desire for receiving gifts. It is also said that by accepting gifts the divine light in the person gets extinguished. I am sharing this, with all of you particularly the young ones, to emphasize that, not to be carried away by any gift with a motive through which one loses his personality greatly. I will be very happy if you can practice this sincerely.

Mother gives principle of truth

Now, I will narrate to you a story surrounding the life of a great saint Sheikh Abdul Qadir Al-Gelani which happened about one thousand years ago. One day child Abdul Qadir heard a cow saying, “what are you doing here in the grazing fields, it is not for this you have been created”. He ran back to his house feeling utterly terrified and climbed on to the roof of his house. From there he saw a large group of people returning from Arafat Mountain, thousands of miles away from his place in the neighbourhood of Mecca after performing Haj. Bewildered Abdul Qadir went to his mother and asked her permission to make a journey to Baghdad in order to pursue a career in knowledge. Mother understood the divine call and promptly gave the permission for him to go. She gave him 40 gold coins which was his share he inherited from his father. She stitched these 40 gold coins inside the lining of his coat and gave him permission to leave. When she stepped out of the door to bid him a farewell, she said, “Oh, my son! You are going! I have detached myself from you for the sake of Allah knowing that I shall not see your face again until the day of last judgement. But take one advice from me. My son, you always feel the truth, speak the truth and propagate the truth even when your life is at stake”.

Abdul Qadir travelled with a small caravan heading for Baghdad. During the journey, when the caravan was passing through the tough terrains, a group of robbers on horses suddenly attacked the caravan and started looting. None of them however took the slightest notice of Abdul Qadir, until one of the looters turned to him and said. “You are here poor boy! Do you have anything with you? Abdul Qadir replied, “I have got 40 gold coins which are stitched by my mother in the lining of my coat underneath my armpit.” The looter smiled and thought that Abdul Qadir was just joking. He left him alone and moved elsewhere. When their leader came and the looters took this boy to their leader and said to him, “A poor boy claims that he is in possession of 40 gold coins. We looted everybody but we have not touched him because we hardly believed that he has got gold coins with him”. Then the leader put the same question but Abdul Qadir replied the same. Then the leader ripped through his coat and discovered that he indeed got 40 gold coins inside the lining of his coat.

The astonished leader asked Abdul Qadir, what prompted him to make this confession? Abdul Qadir replied. “My mother made me promise to always be truthful even at the cost of my life. Here, it was a matter of only 40 Gold coins. I promised her and never betrayed her trust, so I told the truth”. The looters started weeping and said, you have adhered to the advice of your great mother but we have been betraying the trust of our parents and the covenant of our Creator for many years. From now onwards, you would become our leader in our repentance and they all decided to give up robbery and from that day, became righteous persons. Here the world saw the birth of a great saint, Shiek Abdul Qadir Al-Gilani out of a message of truth a mother gave to her child. At this juncture, let me recall a Thirukkural composed by Poet Saint Thiruvalluvar, 2200 years ago.

This means that “Truth in thinking and action will have a power higher than enduring Tapas and generous Charity.

Lessons from failure

I want to begin this piece, especially in light of the title above, on a positive note - indeed, I think everything below is positive if read in the proper light. Regardless, failure is often a critical element in success. I find it sad that our education system - and our society overall - doesn't reward risk-taking to a great enough degree. Think about the guy (or girl) who discovered just how useful fire could be. He or she probably died from the infection resulting from third-degree burns. But successive generations clearly profited from early failures, and, assuming that our fire-tamer lived, he or she might have gone on to invent the wheel, and perhaps retire on a beach somewhere.

We should, in fact, be eternally grateful to those who fail because they make success so much easier for the rest of us. Knowing what not to do is at least as important as knowing what works, and we won't know what works until we try. I'm always suspicious of people who never fail. It might indeed be that they are a lot smarter than the rest of us. But it might also be that they just don't try very hard, and simply note what someone else did wrong and make a small correction. Truly great leaps, however, often involve great failure. There is, for example, the story of how Edison tried literally thousands of filaments before achieving success with the light bulb. And as long as failure isn't the result of outright stupidity, we should be thankful that someone took a risk and showed us, at the very least, which path not to pursue.

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Six Management Tips From Dravid

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Lesson No. 1: A leader is not made in heaven

Some people are born great, others achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them. The Indian captain certainly belongs to the second category.

Lesson No. 2: How to handle power

Philip Kotler might believe in the top down approach but Dravid is all about the bottom up approach.
.. .. Dravid has always maintained his balance under pressure and ensured his deeds take precedence over headline grabbing mind games and sledging matches on the field.

Lesson No. 3: Grace under fire

Dravid hasn’t earned the tag of ‘the Wall’ overnight. It has taken him years of toil, hard work and practice added with performance on the field to make it happen...

Lesson No. 4: Sharing the limelight

Dravid’s best knocks have always been overshadowed by a bigger, more flamboyant one by someone else at the other end. ..

Lesson No. 5: You needn't be flashy to succeed

Dravid was overshadowed by Sourav Ganguly for the better part of his career. ...

Lesson No. 6: Work is life and the rest is mere details

... Those words and Rahul’s gesture perhaps best exemplifies his mantra – accessible, passionate and defiant to the core.

How does one build a successful technical career?

SUBROTO BAGCHI gives you the nine key factors.

THE other day, I met a bright young engineer in MindTree and asked him what his ambition was. He was very clear. "I want to be an architect". My next question to him was, what does he read? He looked surprised and then replied that he does not read much outside what appears on a computer screen. My next question to him was whom all does he admire in MindTree among the three best architects? He named the predictable three. Then I told him what the fundamental gap was between him and the best three. It was about the ability to make intelligent conversation about any subject under the sun - a capability borne out of serious reading habits.

The next thing I asked him to do was to poll these three on what were the six books they had read last. The result was amazing. The three named eighteen books in all - of which at least six were common. Ninety percent of the books had nothing to do with information technology. The exercise proves a key point - to be a great nerd, one has to have interests outside writing code. However, many engineers think that the path to a great technical career is about technical skills alone.

Long back, Bell Labs conducted an interesting study - closely watching the common characteristics among a group of technical professionals who rose to the top. The exercise revealed nine key factors outside just technical competence that differentiated brilliant technical folks from the masses. The study was conducted by Robert Kelly of Carnegie Mellon and Janet Caplan of Williams College. As I see the Indian industry today, I think the study done at Bell Labs remains relevant in every detail.

The Bell Labs engineers who did extremely well for themselves - as they progressed in their career, showed the following qualities that differentiated them from their peers: taking initiative, cognitive ability, networking, leadership, teamwork, followership, perspective, organisation savvy and show-and-tell capability. Let us look at each of these and see what lies underneath.

Taking initiative

This is about accepting responsibility above and beyond your stated job. It is about volunteering for additional activities and promoting new ideas. None of these will jump out as apparent as a young engineer gets in to her first job. She will tend to think that her career progress is really dependent only on the ability to write code. The concept of initiative begins by looking for technical and other opportunities in the organisation and volunteering for them. The idea of volunteering is little understood - both by organisations and individuals. In the days to come, it will gain increasing prominence in our professional lives.

Initiative is also about two other things - dealing constructively with criticism and planning for the future. The latter is a function of many things - a good starting point is to start mapping the environment, learning to understand how the future is unfolding and then stepping back to ask, how am I preparing myself?

Cognitive abilities

The concept of cognitive development is about understanding the interplay of technology and trends in how they are getting deployed. It is also about recognising the business eco-system in which technology works. It is about situational understanding and consequence thinking. The importance of consequence thinking is very critical. It asks us to look beyond the immediate deliverable of a task and it is about asking who will be impacted by my work, what is the end state? People in our industry just think in terms of modules and seldom ask where is it going, who is my customer and more importantly - who is my customer's customer? Cognition is a key faculty that determines how much we are able to read patterns, make sense of things. Refining cognitive skills helps us to go beyond stated needs of our customers to explore unstated needs.

Networking

We tend to think of networking in a social sense. As one grows higher in life, we are often as powerful as is our network. Building a professional network requires us to step out of the comfort zone to look at whom can I learn from. Quite often, and more as one progresses in life, the learning has to come from unusual sources. At MindTree, we expose our people to social workers, architects, graphic designers, teachers, people who lead government organisations, leaders from client organisations. The interesting thing about benefiting from a network is that it works like a savings bank. I need to deposit in to it before I withdraw. We all have heard about how important internal and external knowledge communities are. Again, in MindTree, we encourage people to belong to 26 different knowledge communities that run on a non-project based agenda and are vehicles of learning. These create networking opportunities and open many doors.

Leadership

Next to networking is development of leadership skills. Many technical people associate it with "management" and shy away from developing key leadership skills like communication, negotiation, influencing, inter-personal skills, business knowledge, building spokespersonship and so on. Take for instance negotiating as a skill. Imagine that you are an individual professional contributor. Why should you learn to negotiate? Tomorrow, your organisation becomes member of a standard body and you have to represent the organisation as a technical expert. You will find yourself needing to negotiate with powerful lobbies that represent a competing viewpoint or a rival standard. Unless you have honed your capability alongside your hacking skills, you will be at a complete loss. Yet, you do not discover your negotiating capability one fine morning. You need to work on it from an early stage. Negotiating for internal resources is becoming another critical need. You can choose to remain an individual professional contributor but from time to time, you have to create mind share in the organisation where resources are limited and claimants are many. Establishing thought leadership is another key requirement of growth and independent of whether I want to be a technical person or grow to be a manager, I need to develop as a leader who can influence others.

Teamwork

Our educational system does not teach us teamwork. If you ever tried to solve your test paper "collaboratively" - it was called copying. You and I spent all our school and college life fiercely competing to get the engineering school and seat of our choice. Then comes the workplace and you suddenly realise that it is not individual brilliance but collective competence that determines excellence. Collaboration is the most important part of our work life. Along with collaboration come issues of forming, norming, storming, performing stages of team life. Capability to create interdependencies, capability to encourage dialogue and dissension, knowledge sharing become critical to professional existence. All this is anti-thesis of what we learn in the formative years of life. Add to it, our social upbringing - our resource-starved system tells us to find ways and means to ensure self-preservation ahead of teamwork. In Japan, the country comes first, the company (read team) comes next and I come last. In India, it is the other way round.

Followership

The best leaders are also great followers. We can be great leaders if we learn and imbibe the values of followership. Everywhere you go - there are courses that teach leadership.

Nowhere you will find a business school teaching you followership. Yet, when solving complex problems in life, we have to embrace what is called "situational leadership". I have to be comfortable being led by others, I must learn to trust leadership. Many people have issues reporting to a test lead as a developer, or being led by a business analyst or a user interface designer. In different parts of a project life cycle, people of varied competence must lead. I must be comfortable when some one else is under the strobe light. I must have the greatness to be led by people younger than I, people with a different background or a point of view. That is how I learn.

Perspective

This is the hardest to explain. It begins with appreciating why I am doing what I am doing. Quite often, I find people having a very narrow view of their tasks; many do not see the criticality of their task vis-à-vis a larger goal. So, a tester in a project sees his job as testing code or a module designer's worldview begins and ends with the module. He does not appreciate the importance of writing meaningful documentation because he thinks it is not his job or does not realise that five years from now, another person will have to maintain it.

I always tell people about the story of two people who were laying bricks. A passer by asked the first one as to what he was doing. He replied, "I am laying bricks".
He asked the second one. He replied, "I am building a temple". This story explains what perspective is and how the resultant attitude and approach to work can be vastly different.

Organisational savvy

As technical people grow up, they often feel unconnected to the larger organisation. Some people develop a knack of exploring it, finding spots of influence, tracking changes, creating networks and in the process they learn how to make the organization work for them. The organisation is not outside of me. If I know it well, I can get it to work for me when I want. Think of the difference between one project manager and another or one technical lead from another.
One person always gets the resources she needs - the other one struggles. One person knows who is getting freed from which client engagement and ahead of time blocks the person. One person reacts to an organisational change and finds himself allocated to a new project as a fait accompli - another person is able to be there ahead of the opportunity. Larger the organisation, higher is the need to develop organisation savvy. It begins with questioning ones knowledge about the larger business dynamic, knowing who does what, tracking the work of other groups, knowing leaders outside of my own sphere and a host of other things. Importantly, it is also about tracking what the competitors of the organization are doing and keeping abreast of directional changes.

Show and tell

This is the bane of most Indian software engineers. We all come from a mindset that says; if you know how to write code, why bother about honing communication skills? Recently, we asked a cross section of international clients on what they think is the number one area of improvement for Indian engineers? They replied in unison, it is communication. Show and tell is about oral and written communication. Some engineers look down upon the need for communication skills and associate it with people who make up for poor programming prowess. It is the greatest misconception. Think of the best chief technology officers of companies like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM Global Services or Sun. Their number one job is evangelizing.

If they cannot forcefully present their technologies, nothing else will matter. So, every engineer must pay attention to improving the ability to present in front of people, develop the ability to ask questions and handle objections. In a sense, if you cannot sell the technology you create, it has no value. So, building salespersonship is a key requirement for technical excellence.

The foregoing points are not relevant if you have already filed your first patent at the age of eighteen. Everyone else, please take note.


The author is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting.

A to Z of stress management

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Always take time for yourself, at least 30 minutes per day.

Be aware of your own stress meter: Know when to step back and cool down.

Concentrate on controlling your own situation, without controlling everybody else.

Daily exercise will burn off the stress chemicals.

Eat lots of fresh fruit, veggies, bread and water, give your body the best for it to perform at its best.

Forgive others, don't hold grudges and be tolerant -- not everyone is as capable as you.

Gain perspective on things, how important is the issue?

Hugs, kisses and laughter: Have fun and don't be afraid to share your feelings with others.

Identify stressors and plan to deal with them better next time.

Judge your own performance realistically; don't set goals out of your own reach.

Keep a positive attitude, your outlook will influence outcomes and the way others treat you.

Limit alcohol, drugs and other stimulants, they affect your perception and behaviour.

Manage money well, seek advice and save at least 10 per cent of what you earn.

No is a word you need to learn to use without feeling guilty.

Outdoor activities by yourself, or with friends and family, can be a great way to relax.

Play your favourite music rather than watching television.

Quit smoking: It is stressing your body daily, not to mention killing you too.

Relationships: Nurture and enjoy them, learn to listen more and talk less.

Sleep well, with a firm mattress and a supportive pillow; don't overheat yourself and allow plenty of ventilation.

Treat yourself once a week with a massage, dinner out, the movies: Moderation is the key.

Understand things from the other person's point of view.

Verify information from the source before exploding.

Worry less, it really does not get things completed better or quicker.

Xpress: Make a regular retreat to your favourite space, make holidays part of your yearly plan and budget.

Yearly goal setting: Plan what you want to achieve based on your priorities in your career, relationships, etc.

Zest for life: Each day is a gift, smile and be thankful that you are a part of the bigger picture.

Primary Needs of Men and Women

Primary Needs of Women:

• Caring
• Understanding
• Respect
• Devotion
• Validation
• Reassurance

Primary Needs of Men:

• Trust
• Acceptance
• Appreciation
  
• Admiration
• Approval
  
• Encouragement

The primary needs of women are secondary to men and vice-versa.
The needs are complementary to one another e.g, Trust and Caring are complementary. If a woman trusts a man, he will start caring her and vice-versa !

Source: Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus - John Cray!