6ix Deadly E-Mail Diseases

A couple of years back I had written this as a note on Facebook. As is the nature with diseases, they have mutated into more virulent forms and have struck havoc with many personalities (like Lalit Modi & N Srinivasan for example). What I mean is this list might be old but most certainly not outdated

CCitis

The malaise that makes the sender of an e-mail add on more people to the CC list as a chain grows. Very soon recipients are unsure why they are receiving the mails (especially the new entrants who behave like someone who got the men’s and women’s rooms mixed up). Most people read the thread top-down, resulting in what is popularly called the “Memento Effect” – following a sequence of events in reverse chronological direction.

BCCia

The patient suffers from a virulent version of identity crisis. This is a typical psycho malaise in which the patient is reticent to disclose his friends to other friends. Is very prevalent in forwarding jokes and other irrelevant stuff. The disease spreads by multiplication where a BCC recipient might further fwd the same message using BCC and often to the people who were in the first BCC list. Added Complexity: Some patients – in more advanced stages of the disease – alter the content of a mail while forwarding to blind lists. The original perpetrator of the chain often gets back the same mail – in BCC, of course – and spends a lot of time in creating “diff-reports”

Attachmenesia

People who are getting closer to embracing Alzheimer’s display this property. The sender usually writes a long verbose e-mail body describing the contents of an alleged attachment. Excellent stuff, until it is found that the mail sent out did not contain the attachment. Typically followed by every recipient replying to all that the attachment was missing. They very soon form a very happy – but not necessarily small – family. Medical advancement: A few software developers have published utilities that detect missing attachments. The software essentially snoops your e-mail and fails miserably when you write “Ms. Jayalalitha did a poetic dance presentation when she was attached with the Karunanidhi foundation of Family Charity”. The software expects you to attach one Ms. Jayalalitha.

Send Anxiety

A mainly psycho-somatic affliction where the composer of an email hovers endlessly over the send button. Generally caused by the freezing of the right index finger over the left mouse button when the mouse pointer is poised over the Send button of any email application. Mathematically, the intensity of anxiety (A) is equal to the square of the sum of absolute cumulative difference of levels of all recipients (reference point = sender) about to receive the mail.

Delivery Anxiety

The patient suffers from extreme discomfort after sending email; this discomfort can only be relieved by actually talking to the recipient of the email and asking “did you get my email?” If the answer is in the negative, the patient feels compelled to spell out the contents of the email in detail thus combining the disadvantages of both synchronous and asynchronous communication

H0B2S Flu (a/k/a Have Zero Brains To Show)

The e-mail is about a specific person or persons and the sender (patient hereafter) wants to know more about them. Instead of consulting the corporate intranet, the patient includes them in the “To” or “CC” list and double clicks to check properties (MS Outlook workflow). Glowing in an aura of self congratulation, the patient forgets to remove these people from the recipient list when hitting the “send” button. Many people, about to be terminated, have actually benefited from this disease and with this as weapon have often got the patients terminated instead (close contender for Corporate Darwin Award for Gene Pool Consciousness – having cleaned up a gene pool by taking oneself out of it)

Post Script

A friend on Facebook had suggested two diseases I must consider for inclusion - Delivery Receiptitis Syndrome (DRS) and Message Recallus Anxiety (MRA). Please put comment if you have encountered others that we should be writing about

Bloggers’ Block & P2H

I have not posted a single article in September. My readership has not fallen off the cliff but it is clear that I have been living off endowments.

I have been inflicted with Bloggers’ Block – an inability to feed a editorial content centric medium with thoughts that matter, conversations that advance a line of thinking. It is easy for me to sit back and attribute this apathy to several reasons but none of them would hold up against my dad’s principle – “If anything is worth doing, it is worth doing well”. And this blog is worth doing.

Thus is born P2H – shorthand for Project Two Hundred. In the next one year, I set myself a target of 200 posts, without bunching them up and gaming the system. The objective behind this is two fold. First (and most obvious) is to ensure my readers get the content they expect from this medium. Secondly (and more important for me), I expect this will force me to find an hour of thinking time every day

To keep myself honest I shall post the standard Board Room “Target v Actual” graphs every month (if you want special animation in those or super-vivid colors, please write to me)

There is something that I would like you to do too. If you see some (or none) of what I have set as goals happening you will post an acerbic comment on this post. I shall not delete it. It will serve as a permanent footprint on cyberspace of not doing well something that was worth that effort

PS: As always, there is a bit of Seth Godin in all this

The End and its Means

I apologize to my readers who come to this blog mostly for Product Management, technology and capital markets fare. I hope you will pardon my digression to a matter that has occupied the collective intellect of most good-minded citizens of India over the past fifteen days

The worst time to speak about peace is during war. Positions are drawn, feelings run high, and rhetoric is generally a preferred option over rationality. Populist polarization fueled by a zealotry sense of attachment to a stand mostly ruins any chance of a civil debate, leave alone meaningful negotiations. Over the past twelve days India has witnessed precise enactment of this script. The fast of a septuagenarian symbol of crusader against the greatest malaise of modern day India – graft – both united the country in rising a voice of protest in unison as well as sharply dividing opinion on both the means and the efficacy of the suggested end. The media – both social and news-centric – exploded into action and it was impossible to cut through the hardened feelings and have a constructive debate. Binary positions evolved on either side and articulation of a position immediately attracted attacks from the other end of the spectrum. Logic took a holiday, much like how law-making had from our executive institutions. Now that the dust has settled it perhaps merits a closer look at what transpired, with an eye that casts a look back at history and sneaks a peek in at what the future might hold. But first a look at the protagonists, the colorful cast that was necessary to act out this even more colorful drama

It is a curse to be on the treasury benches of the Parliament especially at a time when a mixture of complacency and hubris concocted to bring the ruling party to a state where it seemed to be on a path of self-destruction. The Grand Old Party of India, the Indian National Congress lead coalition, the UPA, found itself precisely in that uneviable position. The Congress party has ruled India for most of its sixty four years of independence – sixty four years that until 1992 saw a deeply socialist rule. Given this model where the state controlled most resources and the extensive longevity of successive governments, it is not surprising that members of this party, past, present and those harboring ambitions, are well adept at both creating and exploiting leakages in the system to their benefit. Yes, there were periods on unrest, especially in the 1970s, which was dealt with brute force by the ruling Congress party, which also created a precedence framework of dealing with dissent, especially if the dissent threatened to rattle the seat of power. This is exactly how the government, the current UPA government, dealt with godman Ramdev when it first negotiated and then negated with brute force what was otherwise a relatively inconsequential protest against corruption. Peel the layers back on Ramdev and you will discover that he lacked one vital ingredient that sways public opinion. Credibility. And in that vacuum stepped in Kisan Baburao Hazare, reverentially called Anna

Anna Hazare once contemplated suicide, possibly from depression after serving the Indian army in the 1965 war against Pakistan (he was a truck driver and his co-passenger was riddled with bullets in front of his eyes). He pulled himself up and in 1975, chose to reform a small hamlet  called Ralegan Siddhi, fifty miles from Pune. Studies show that this village today stands head and shoulders above comparable hamlets in economic development (per capita income has risen eight-fold since Anna Hazare came into the scene at Ralegan Siddi). How did it happen? Hazare had quickly identified the root cause of what plagues the village – total lack of productivity and went about solving that in an authoritarian way. He banned alcohol and personally tied up offenders to a pole and flogged them with his army belt. He introduced family planning and refused to give a seat on the village panchayat anyone who had more than two children. Hazare banned non-vegetarian food in the village claiming it increases craving for alcohol. For a man who would later use the electronic media to dance like a puppet to his tune, Anna Hazare banned cable TV in his village – a ban that was lifted only during the time when he went on a fast at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar earlier this year. Hazare tasted success in his social experiment at Ralegan Siddhi and spurred by this heady tonic, he marched straight towards the issue that most captures the imagination of the common man in India. Corruption. And in doing that he merely copy-pasted his previous coercive tactics and a naive belief that what worked spectacularly for a small village will be as successful in a complexly interfaced national governance structure

What happened subsequently in the confrontation is well documented, if not extremely well followed on social, electronic and print media and does not merit repetition but it was important to evaluate the happenings in the light of the past positions of the protagonists that participated. The twelve days were pregnant in possibilities of case studies around game-theory, media handling, low cunning and marketing amongst others but let us devote a quick look at iconism.

It was godsend that Hazare was diminutive, dark and frail. That visual mixed with equal parts of support to similar causes and moderately identical battle-strategies had every Indian associate Kisan Baburao Hazare with Mohandas Gandhi. Very soon Anna Hazare’s tactics started borrowing traits from Gandhi’s struggle for self-rule (astute was the choice of 16th August as the start date of the campaign and the huge visual of Gandhiji behind the stage from where the little old man fought his crusade). A team of technocrats gathered around Hazare and kept the public enthralled, blood boiling, aspirations soaring and rhetoric going all while the icon of the movement was a non-violent, small man who made India dream of a land where a magic wand had obliterated corruption from public life. Great communication depends of building strong visual affinity to the cause and Team Anna (a term cleverly coined to align with the ICC Cricket World Cup winning Team India) did that to perfection

Unfortunately it were members of Team Anna that robbed the movement of its credibility. Enraged minds are easily impressionable. This is what members of Hazare’s team played with. Binary positions much like George W Bush in his mindless war against Iraq emerged – if you are against Anna Hazare in any form you are supporting corruption in all forms – and citizens got lead to the slippery slope of a notion that the democratic state has failed and to build  a better structure it was necessary to raze to ground the existing institutions. Democracy was lethargic to present change opportunities once every five years, so it was perfectly fine to deliver a heat-and-eat governance through popular revolt – it was professed. The bath water had gotten dirty and needed to be thrown out and the public was asked to please not shed tears if the baby also went out with it. Thankfully, better sense prevailed at the end, but a whiff of doubt lingers – what lessons did this movement teach us?

One key cornerstone of popular corruption in India is that the end is what matters – the means are secondary (talk to anyone and watch out for the unconditional praise on the term Jugaad, a get-done-by-any-means approach of success). Scarily enough, this movement against corruption was in a large part that. One can rightly be dismissive of Rahul Gandhi who does not have a cogent stance on anything of political or social significance but it is foolhardy to brush off his argument that a coercive method like what we witnessed could easily be carried out for causes that are vicious, divisive, improper or all of the above. As we have discovered through this movement, whipping up sentiments through popular channels of communication is not a difficult art and perhaps there will emerge guns-on-hire tomorrow to serve ulterior causes at appropriate price. The celebration that has swept the country today is not that of eradication of corruption, nor is it about a successful implementation of a framework – or even a roadmap – of what will lead to it but a mere submission of a bumbling government to agree to start a legislative process. It is an important milestone, yes it is. However as the intoxication of victory settles us down in sobriety, spare a hard look at the method. History often takes an unforgiving stance towards baneful precedences

Title Inflation

My first brush with title inflation was through a mixture of frustration and serendipity

It was our year of graduation from business school and the placement scene was bleak. Contributing to the bleakness were factors economic and also that we dared to think beyond the IIMs (no we did not actually end up in the Institute that currently is suing everyone and their dogs, but to a lesser known Institution). The act of defiance emerging not from masochism that some protagonists aggressively preach on television these days, but obvious lack of good CAT scores. What we lacked in pedigree we attempted to make up through cunning, resulting in regular Wednesday raids to the Library to pick up a copy of the Economic Times – or more specifically their jobs supplement “Creme de la creme”. We would comb through the advertisements and create the crudest form of database on a pirated version of Lotus 1-2-3. The intent was to apply for positions advertised in the paper and either land a job (bird in hand v in bush argument) or gain experience of handling real-life job interviews before campus recruitment commenced. This astute act of foresight was stalled by an abject dearth of jobs that sought out graduating MBAs. One razor sharp brain however pointed out that our educational and soft-skills were exactly matching with what advertisers were seeking for Managing Directors or CEOs . After a bit of debate – and some spilled coffee and tempers – we concluded that our only hope was if some company were willing to accept us with a title of “CEO (Trainee)”

A decade and a half later I know a name for this phenomena. Title Inflation.

The great thing about this phrase is that it can easily be defined by swapping out a few words from the classical definition of (financial) inflation. “Too many people chasing too few titles”. Let’s break this phrase and tackle the parts independently. “Too many people”. Yes, ambitious people were fewer in number earlier. My father got a job in a steel plant apparently when the plant manager was impressed with my dad’s soccer skills and he worked in the same plant till the date he retired with a Casio digital watch (called “electronic watch” those days), a Parker pen and a plaque. But kids these days? They have peer pressure from firms that dole out titles like Assistant Vice President when hiring freshers from colleges and not to forget the eternal pressure from wives for elevated titles to tout at the next kitty party. New titles are flaunted in social networks like LinkedIn where the rest of your three hundred and seventeen connections get to immediately know (and are nudged by the network to congratulate you, however reluctantly) of your latest conquest. That’s another three hundred and seventeen people who will walk up to their bosses asking for a promotion in the next few weeks. Take a conversion rate of 25%, assume they get onto the LinkedIn showoff mode and each has an average of two hundred connections – you get the drift, now do the math. Whatever number you got – and you had to represent it with an exponential, right? – is a giant number and that is precisely what the demand side of the equation looks like. Why do you think these hair replacement guys are doing such booming businesses these days?

Let us cast a glance at the “too few titles” side of things. Starkly different – almost antipodal to the first problem. Organizations were designed to look like pyramids and one way to make that happen was through a control on the titles and the number of people who could get those titles (okay, full disclosure – I have worked for a firm that had two CEOs but that was an aberration). Thus in the traditional scheme of things one joined a firm as a trainee, worked up to ranks of Assistant Manager, Manager and then to finally a Managing Director, with levels squeezing up at each subsequent climb. This design horribly fails the demands of the modern day careerist, who essentially is demanding a promotion every two years (assuming a 28 year worklife, that is fourteen titles if one – hypothetically – stays in the same organization). Organizations also evolve in the same Darwinian way as other forms of life, so over a period of time they have created methods to stave off this promote-me assault and yet flourish in the labor markets. They have invented titles where none exist. And subterfuge with genetic mutation of existing titles.

Coming back to my Dad’s era, I remember how reverentially we were asked to  treat the General Manager of the plant. The DGM – Deputy General Manager – commanded lesser respect. It is not uncommon these days to bump into Assistant DGMs (yes, their titles are not acronym-ized. ADGM would sound kinda funny, no?). This is where organization creativity met organizational structure met promotion thirsty employees (a Holy Trinity of sorts, yes). I remember once receiving a mail from my boss, marked to all my peers, expressing the need for a level between Team Lead and Project Lead. I was on my way to the airport that day and there were at least a dozen possible levels – sorry, names of levels – sent in by the time I had checked in. Creation of a new title is ratified by social acceptance. The pace of such acceptance has also accelerated these days fuelled by attrition. A disgruntled employee after receiving a word-play-title might decide to seek a job at competition, which then quickly discovers the new title and passes it on in their organization, thereby providing the social seal of acceptance and opening up room for even wider propagation.

On the other hand, mutation – or expansion of existing titles – is typically achieved by use of phrases like “Senior” (Senior Manager), “Deputy” (Deputy General Manager), “Chief” (Chief Architect. “Chief” is my personal favorite and prime recommendation for individual contributor roles. Like your firm has just one “UI Designer” and he’s clamouring for a promotion. Go right ahead and make him “Chief UI Designer”. Nothing changes) and “Junior” (Junior Foreman). This list is – like they say – illustrative and not exhaustive. For an organization that operates in multiple geographies, the possibility of word-play-titles is incredibly magnified because they have at their disposal ways of slicing and dicing geographies in addition to the conventional tools mentioned above. Much rather than be surprised when encountered with a “Global Chief Project Leader” you should spend time counting the words that represent the most likely number of times the person has approached his boss with a successful bump-me-up demand.

A lot of my skeptic friends say this won’t continue for long. Bullshit, I say and point them to this phrase called new-normal. I also hope for the sake for some humor we do not see a mean reversion to vanilla titles like “Partner”, “Manager” and so on. Yawn, how boring and 2008 these titles are
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That’s about my experience – what’s yours? What exotic titles have you come across? Write, no?

Laws of Motion version 2.0

Joel Spolsky had once written about two groups tasked with making clay pots. Group A was asked to make the pots as perfect as possible while Group B was asked to make as many as they could. Over time it was observed that pots coming out from Group B were much better than what Group A was shipping. The point here is this – shipping often and shipping early leads to learning that can go to improve subsequent shipments.

Writing – or any work in the knowledge age for that matter – has its laws of motion. An idea or work will remain in its state of inertia until you break that state with something. Anything. It is like the first pot that came out from Group B – possible imperfect and maybe not even looking like a pot. But once that inertia is broken, the second law takes over. Your work continues in the state of motion, picking acceleration from the effort you keep providing to it. The third law is not so far behind. Visible feedback from your work is instantly available in today’s age and time. Your action provides the feedback. But here is where things break away from the Newtonian laws. Your feedback is neither equal nor opposite and it does not necessarily have to work on the same object. The magnitude of the feedback grows exponentially as it makes your work progressively better and the halo effect spreads to other adjacent (and perhaps even non-related) projects (If asked, the successful Group B would most likely paint their pots much better than Group A).

Effort is vastly underestimated as perfection is rated much more than it ever should be.

PS: I was postponing the idea of writing a business plan, looking to find the best structure, data points, graphics and so on. Actually, I was getting blocked by the idea of picking up the keyboard and banging on it. So I decided to pick up a book I was reading and just started typing out the contents of a chapter. Maybe this is how athletes get into the zone, but soon I realized I was thinking better and was all ready to start on writing my own stuff. Quantity wins – quality follows.

 PPS (humorous aside): You haven’t heard of the Mahesh-Majumdar laws, have you?

Picture courtesy: blogymate.com

Twenty Eight Years of Keeping the Faith

India defeated Sri Lanka in an exciting cricket match last night to win the ICC Cricket World Cup 2011 after a gap of twenty eight years. Here is a curated list of readings worth your time

Bhubon-Joyee (world-winners): (Bengali) By Sumit Ghose and Gautam Bhattacharya in Anandabazar Patrika. Bengali authors somehow still retain the Neville Cardus like touch while writing about the sport

Sydney Morning Herald: Pedestrian writing but easily the best photographs amongst all reports of the match. UPDATE: Peter Roebuck more than makes up for the earlier insipid report with this analysis

Timing the campaign to perfection: Simon Hughes in the UK Telegraph heaps praises for the Indian skipper. Also the toss controversy (this article claims the Sri Lankan skipper called “Heads” first up – and the coin landed heads – while replays are inconclusive)

The baton passes: Blogger Sidvee writes on how a team that won the cup for Sachin Tendulkar has now learned to move ahead of the little master.

KAPSLOCK: 1983 cup winning skipper Kapil Dev writes on the 2011 cup winning skipper

The Victors & The Vanquished: Vineet Khare writes for the BBC – on the joy and despair at the rival camps after the game was done

Maturity of the Indian Squad: Sharda Ugra of Cricinfo analyzes

Goodbye Gary: Indian Express (Nihal Koshie) pays a tribute to the never seen yet ever present figure in the last four years of Indian cricket

The New York Times: A Reuters editorial, buried in the bowels of the online edition

Nice to know you, Herr Einstein

Media houses generally try different tricks on April Fool’s day to humor their readers. It has caught up with social networking sites as well. Here is what LinkedIn suggested as people I might know (and would want to connect). Click for a larger image you if cannot see it properly

Go on – if you are on LinkedIn, go ahead and check who you are fortunate enough to know. I won’t tell you the names that came up under “See more>>”

Well done LinkedIn.

The Story of Mankind

HIGH up in the North, in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

The Story of Mankind, Hendrik Van Loon

 

We shared the same first names. Unfortunately that is where all similarities ended, for he was about my father’s age and much different from my father. And I was a student in the 8th standard. A colleague of my father’s – though not the engineering shop-floor type – he drove a motorcycle that made such a racket that it was easy to spot his arrival even when he was a quarter of a kilometer away from our home. My father had detected – perhaps pretty astutely – that my education in the English language needed external intervention which he (my father) was not able to provide. So, Subrata Sinha, started his Monday-Wednesday-Friday routine to our place – to teach me the three Rs.

Mutual consent quickly reduced it to just two Rs as we found it was much more pleasurable to figure out the riddles of Alice in Wonderland than work out the devious progress of that monkey climbing a slippery pole. Sir – as I would call him – had a great flair for astronomy too. It is almost impossible to find clear skies in polluted industrial townships but he was relentless in his attempts to explain to me how to identify stars and constellations (I learnt that the “Saptarshi Mandal” or the Big Dipper was a misnomer because one of the stars – the smallest one in luminance – was named after Angira, the consort of sage Vashishtha). And why planets emitted a steady light while stars twinkled. One day Sir said he’d change the routine. He would read me, once every week, a book he thought was important for me to form a world view (it never crossed my mind why he could not just leave the book with me for me to read). Thus started my first introduction to world history (actually much more than just world history – history of the world, to be more accurate). The book started with the same quote that I started this piece with – lines that got seared in my mind (Later on I have read Richard Dawkins using a metaphor of one-century-per-page to explain the vastness of evolution and I would go – why can’t you use the mountain-bird thing). My journey through the history of mankind became fascinating and it opened up vistas in my young mind that shaped my subsequent love for history, anthropology, evolution and sociology.

We had reached about the middle of the book – a small, hardcover, greenish volume that Sir would carry tucked in his trouser (carry-bags were unheard of those days in semi-urban Bengal). It was the 30th of January, 1984, Monday, and I had returned from school, deciding not to go out to play like we usually did because I needed to complete an essay that Sir wanted me to write. Tears welling up, my mother informed me that it wouldn’t be necessary. Subrata Sinha – Sir – had had a cardiac arrest while at work that morning and had breathed his last even before they could rush him to the town hospital.

Yesterday I discovered the book – The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik Van Loon – on Amazon. The price was a piddly $2.99 to get it on my Kindle. Yet it was priceless. I shall start retracing steps of my first quest of knowledge exactly twenty seven years after the one who got me past the start line passed away. Thank you Sir, for starting me on this wonderful journey. I hope you pardon me that it has taken an excess of a quarter of a century for me to resume. But in the larger scheme of things, the little bird has not eroded much of the tall mountain at Svithjod.

Attention is Precious

So is that the reason why you are wasting spreading it around?

Everyday we start with a finite amount of attention and choose to do something meaningful with it. Faced with options to choose between investment choices for attention, we make immediate – yet conscious - decisions. Finish off that presentation takes higher precedence than updating Facebook status, for example. The universe of choices however is increasing at an alarming rate. There are so many blogs to read, so many posts to comment on, so many interesting people to follow on Twitter, your RSS feed is bursting at the seams – and not to mention the demands of your professional and personal lives.

We go about this in a manner of “let’s do more” – let’s get more attention to spare from somewhere. Unable to make ruthless choices of cutting down the demand side of the equation, we stretch a finite resource like it was a bottomless pit. Remember the rubber-band that got pulled endlessly? Why don’t you try the “less” approach. What if you scaled down your activities and did only a handful of things and did them well outstandingly well? Yes, you’d be less informed about ash spewing Icelandic volcanoes but become a force to reckon with in your chosen field.

If you doubt the veracity of this approach, I have two words for you. General Electric.

Picture courtesy: helpyourautisticchildblog.com

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,000 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 108 posts. There were 12 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 318kb. That’s about a picture per month.

The busiest day of the year was August 5th with 132 views. The most popular post that day was Waving Good-bye.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were googleblog.blogspot.com, 45289-ol2hu0e5974bu11i-jrs.hop.clickbank.net, lmodules.com, productmanagementtips.com, and facebook.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for anti facebook, signing treaty, treaty, signing a treaty, and facebook logo.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Waving Good-bye August 2010
1 Like on WordPress.com,

2

Product Management in a Start-up March 2009
2 comments

3

We hereby agree… July 2009

4

Now on Facebook! October 2009

5

Hierarchy of Equals: Mahesh Ramakrishnan January 2009
4 comments