The Grand Design: A Review

In the spirit of summarizing on books I read (see last blog post), here's my review on Stephen Hawking's 'The Grand Design'.

For the scientist or mathematician in us, this book is a work of art. It reminded me of why I loved these topics back in school. The book tries to answer in a scientific way the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And no, the answer is not simply 42! Stephen Hawking goes into great detail on the history of man trying to make sense of the Universe around us. From the Mayans to Plato to to scriptures and psalms from the Bible to Newton and Galileo to Einstein and Feynman; Hawking takes us through a remarkable journey of how science evolved and built on these 'shoulders of Giants', each time getting closer and closer to answering that one elusive question.

But what really struck me about this book was that although Hawking makes an attempt to theorize a set of scientific laws that can explain how our Universe operates, these laws end up generating an infinite possible answers for how the Universe works. In other words, the laws cannot explain why any one set of events happen instead of any one of a set of infinite other possibilities. And when the sheer vastness and complexity of the question we are trying to answer dawns upon us in the last few pages, the realization dawns that the Mayans, the Greeks, the Hindus, the Bible and other centuries old scriptures were right all along in believing in a superior being responsible for the workings of our world. Even Einstein in his last few years famously admitted that God does play dice with the world! Maybe that's what Hawkings wanted to tell us all along in his book...

Talking the talk

One of the many feedback I had got in the past on how I could improve was on being more concise. I have a tendency to belabor on a point even though the listener has already got the point. For many a listeners, this comes across as I being either unprepared, unorganized or inarticulate.

To work on this weakness, I am planning on two action items. Firstly, I plan to read a lot. I feel reading a diverse set of book will help my vocabulary and help me get the right words that I need to use in my conversations. Secondly, I plan to summarize every book or article that I read with the key takeaways that I got. this would force me to summarize in a short paragraph what a book of hundreds of pages had to say. This practice should help me be more concise. Whether these actions will help me remains to be seen.

Too big to fail?

A reminder to self that no matter how big you get, things can and will go wrong!

Have You Grown Up Lately?

When I was interviewing with McKinsey, I got the opportunity to talk to many consultants at the firm. When I would ask them what they aspired to be 5 to 10 years down the line, they would invariably start off with, “what I want to be when I grow up is…” . I found this amusing at first. 30+ year olds saying what they want to be when they grow up? Next thing I know, they’ll be asking me for a lollipop!

But on hindsight, maybe there is something to that statement. What do you do when you grow up? You are expected to be mature. You can’t say foolish things anymore. Grown-ups don’t make mistakes. Grownups are serious…. Grownups never fail! And while we aspire to be this ‘grown-up’ person, the best part is in growING up. You get to try new things. You are allowed to be stupid, to ask questions, to fumble, to fall, to fail… in short, you are allowed to try out a different you.

So, try that new idea you were excited about, jump at the exciting but risky job you always wanted to do, say your seemingly naive opinion at the meeting, fall in love. And never stop growing up!

(Image Courtesy: Megha Shenoy. Location: Googleplex)

Little Things

Here's a poem I wrote back in the Fall of 2000. I somehow happened to dig it up in the tons of mail that has accumulated since then. Mom keeps asking me to write more. Whaddya think?

"Little Things"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

If Life should be a joyous song
with moments that you'd want to sing,
I'd pick not wealth, not joy nor woe,
what'd matter most are those "little things"

Little joys of a 4 year old
snuggling up to his parent's side,
that little blush on the young girl's face
as the groom first meets the bride

Those little wrinkles round the old man's eyes
(They've been there since my life began)
that concealed pride in a mother's heart
watch her son be a man

that little wonder of a new born bird,
on "Why do I have these tiny wings?"
Such are the wonders I live for,
a life of wonderful little things.

Those little fallen Autumn leaves,
That dusty crooked village road
as Sunset makes the the world blush red
as birds fly by a day grown old

That little tear on a young girl's cheek
knowing not to stay or fall
That summer tree where lovers met
unkept vows on old brick walls

That unseen smile on the teachers's lips
watch her class learn to think
Those little flirts in the college hall
those unheard laughs, those unseen winks

Those silent words that old friends say
that old playground, that broken swing,
This is the life I live for,
A life of just.... well, little things!

-Milind

(Image Courtesy: Ankita Sawani. Costa Rica, 2010)

What is your 30 seconds?

In my first class on Management Communications, Professor Vancamp highlighted the importance of good communication through an interesting experiment. She showed us a video of a guy, probably a computer scientist, describe his startup and idea and persuade people to join his team.It was a 10 minutes video. At the end of it, she asked us whether we would join the person's company. None of us raised our hands. Then she asked how long through the video did it take us to arrive at our decision. Interestingly, almost all of us took less than 30 seconds to arrive at that decision. The most impulsive amongst us in fact made a decision within the first 5 seconds of the guy talking! We all agreed that the guy was clearly not very convincing and went on this whole diatribe about what he should have done right.

But then, after hearing us tear him apart, Professor Vancamp asked an interesting question. "If it took you less than 30 seconds to decide that you did not want to join this recruiter's company, how long do you think it takes a recruiter to decide whether he wants you to join his company?".

The only sound we heard was of the lump in our throats....

(Image courtesy: Movie: Jerry McGuire. from AMCTV.com)

Peer Feedback

After the end of last quarter, I had asked my fellow class-mates for my 'Peer Feedback'. This is a fairly new system at Kellogg where students are encouraged to constructively critique each other on how they could improve on their leadership qualities. Unfortunately, it has not been taken as widely as it should. And I can see why. All our life we work on building our reputation. Now asking the world to find out what we lack goes against what we have been hardwired to do.

And I wish I could say that after getting the feedback, you feel much better. Far from it. You feel cheated! You wish your classmates had told you earlier that this is what bothered them. You feel you were misunderstood.... you feel humbled.

And yet, I feel this exercise is absolutely necessary. Better to know how you are perceived now rather than when you get out of school and in the workforce. If you are already in the workforce, better to know yourself now rather than after many years when you miss out on promotions because no one told you that you could have improved way back when you were up for promotions.

Another argument against getting feedback is that you are fine with getting feedback from only certain people. Getting feedback from just about everyone you work/study with will not be fair because these people don't really know the real you. If you ask me, it is the people who don't know you whose feedback you should be really getting. Even if you feel you are surrounded by morons, the fact is that these 'morons' are the ones you will be interacting with on a daily basis. Knowing how they perceive you is just as important as knowing that that perception is wrong.

So suck it up. Ask for that feedback. And once you get it, work on it. For if not now, then when?

The MBA

As an MBA student with 2/3rd of it done, I should be good at well, managing. Managing people, managing product launches, managing corporate finances, managing pricing issues... yup, they teach all that and more at B-School.

But what about managing yourself? That's one part that seems to get more and more difficult to manage. This is no surprise. Our lives get increasingly complex. The responsibilities we take up, the knowledge we acquire, the personalities we encounter... even the number of friends we have on Facebook keeps increasing as we grow.

Is this self-imposed complexity in our lives out-pacing our ability to manage it? Gandhi had once said, "Be the change you want to see in the world". I would add that that we manage ourselves the way we aspire to manage the world.

The Flexibility of Happyness

Loved hearing Daniel Gilbert's talk on why we are such poor predictors of what makes us happy. However, the good news is that we can change what predicts our happiness. Daniel calls it the Synthetic Happiness... one where we can be happy on things we are not supposed to be happy about! Which leads me to think, don't we all do well in jobs that we are truly passionate about? And don't you need to be happy about the job to be passionate about it? Thus if passion can be synthesized in our minds, then we can come to love any job out there.

To borrow from someone's famous words, Ask not for a job you will be passionate about. Ask what passion can you bring into the job you've got!

Connecting the dots

Come mid-Fall quarter and you see 2 things at Kellogg. There’s the wonderful fall of the leaves as they go from green to red to yellow and eventually glide their way to the ground beneath. And you see another kind of Fall, the one that involves 1st year students! You see them move from the glowing color of triumph and a yearning to learn about every business case out there to one that is more sullen, unshaved, barely awake and just skimming through the headlines of only the most mandatory of cases. Having been there and done that, I often get asked what are the shortcuts to reading these cases. Are those supplementary readings worth it? If I’m going to have a career in Finance, does it make sense to spend my time pouring over books on Social graphs and Personality Types?

I hear you. You see, more often than not, these cases are about some business that perhaps was an interesting problem a few decades ago. And more often than not, its about an industry that is likely obsolete or has been shipped overseas. So at a cursory level, and definitely by only skimming through the summaries of these cases, I always felt that this was a waste of time.

But I think the 2nd year for an MBA is for a reason. Strangely enough, after a year of cases and an internship, one can, to paraphrase Steve Jobs, “see and connect the dots”. You begin to realize that the case on some Gillette razor that added another blade was never really about whether adding another blade made a better business case. Far from it! It really was about the lessons you can draw from it; timeless lessons that can be applied in very different settings. Marketing yourself on just a few lines (Facebook status message), creating a need in consumers for something they were doing without (iPad), the psychology of consumers towards deals (Groupon), etc have something to draw from this age-old case. And therein lies my point. It’s not about the cases. It’s about the dots that you can draw from there to issues that abound today.

This reminds me of Moksh. He’s 22 months now and in that phase where he’s still blabbering baby talk but does use some words every now and then that we understand. What’s surprising is that even he, in his own little way, connects words he picks up from different sources. Whenever Megha is having coffee, she reminds him that its is not for his consumption. In his own toddler-like way, he calls Megha as "Menga" and Coffee as "Koshi". We had some guests the other day and opened some beer. When we told Moksh that it was not for him, he pointed to the beer and exclaimed... "Menga Koshi!" :) . Through the little cases of his life, my little boy was also connecting the dots!

So, yes, my MBA 1st year friends, please read as many cases as you can. But don’t just stop there. Go ahead and connect the dots. For as any child who has done the puzzles on connecting the dots will know, the more dots you can have to draw from, the faster you can converge on the complete picture!

God Speed!

The New Lifestyle

Today was the first of the many Sundays to come when I will be leaving my Megha and Moksh in Waukesha for attending school in Evanston. We plan to meet every Thursday evening to Sunday evening. It will be sort of like a Consultant’s lifestyle – the classic 3 nights, 4 day away from family.

I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I am looking forward to my 2nd year of MBA. The 1st year and a summer internship helps put things in perspective. You realize (or at least you think you do) about what you want to do with your life after MBA, what you lack and what courses and skills you plan to work on to get you to what you think you want to do eventually. In any case, it is definitely something that you look forward to… the kind of excitement that every kid has on their first day in a new grade in school. Those feelings… no matter how old you get, will never change!
But at the same time, there is that lingering concern. How will we, the MMm’s cope with the new long distance relationship? How would Moksh take to this new schedule? These days he cries and refuses to sleep if he does not see me sleeping next to him. In the day care, which we started last week, he apparently cries for his ‘Annu’ the moment he realizes that we are not around. And Megha’s starting a job. Actually two jobs… one involves building a mobile X-Ray system, another a toddler! How will she manage? What if the demands of one outweigh the other?

There are questions that you can get answers to. And then there are those that pertain to human relationships. These are the hardest of all… left best for time to tell!

The lil' master

Getting him to wear swim diapers: 15 mins.

Minding him while he swims: 30 mins.

Getting him out of the water: 30 mins.

Enjoying a glass of wine with Megha while he sleeps after a tiring swim... timeless!

There are moments when Time stands still. For everything else...there's my son!

The Semi-Conducive Industry

The Semiconductor Industry is a paradox. Having worked in this industry for close to 7 years, I should know. Thanks to a dude called Gordon Moore, who, besides confining many of my friends at an institution called Intel, also coined the Moore’s Law. Plainly put, this law states that the average size of chips (semiconductor, though this may apply to the potato variety as well) halves every 18 months. What Jesus is to Christianity, Moore is to the Semiconductor industry. The Semicon Industry takes his word as gospel and spends on an average 20% of it’s revenue trying to reduce the size of chips and prove him right.

And therein lies the paradox. Customers of Semicon Companies expect the Semicon Cos to halve the cost of their chips every 18 months! And if the Semicon Cos don’t do it, their customers always have their competitor’s number on speed dial. So that puts these Semicon Cos in a situation where they actually spend more on research so that they can charge less to their customers and make less money! Talk about shooting yourself in the foot! The only way they can make any profits in this situation is to sell at least twice the number of chips. Unless we all figure how to either double our consumption or our population every 18 months, the Semiconductor Industry will be stuck with a case of a flooding of chips. Perhaps this also explains why this industry sees such a cyclical pattern of growth and downturns with the downturns lasting longer and deeper than the times of growth.

So is the future for anyone in the Semiconductor Industry doomed? Not at all. In my next post, I’ll discuss my thoughts on the business opportunities in the Semiconductor Industry. In fact, I’ll argue that it’s a great time to be in the Semicon space.

And so Mr. Moore, while we will thank you for your famous law, we thank you still for not making any further ones. For sometimes, it’s best to let those foolish entrepreneurs be ignorant about laws that go against what they’re trying to build…. that’s the only way they succeed.

How many engineers ...

A video clip to a party we had at our place to celebrate IIT Bombay's Diwali Dhamaka performance. Don't remember the exact date but sometime in late December. Kind of reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek question about how many engineers does it take to do something. In the case of opening a champagne bottle, well, all of us. But then, not all jobs are judged by how few people are needed to do it. For jobs like these, it will always be all of us. We know no other way. Go IIT-B!

Sher ka baap bandar!

I did not realize it when the picture was taken. Thanks to Binaisha for the smart remark! 

Jane Kahan Gaye Woh Din.

Got this poem from my friend from back during my school days. Jay Wagh and his twin brother, Vijay used to swim with me. When you are into competitive swimming, you virtually spend 1/3rd of your life in the pool. And the people you meet in these turbulent waters are the ones who become friends for life.

"How Lives change....?"

Here i am sitting in my room @ night...

Thinking hard about life
How it changed from a maverick college life to strict professional life......

How tiny pocket money changed to huge monthly paychecks
but then why it gives less happiness....

How a few local denim jeans changed to new branded wardrobe
but then why there are less people to use them

How a single plate of samosa changed to a full Pizza or burger
But then why there is less hunger.....

Here i am sitting in my room @ night...
Thinking hard about life
How it changed.....

How a bike always in reserve changed to bike always on
but then why there are less places to go on......

How a small coffee shop changed to cafe coffee day
but then why its feels like shop is far away.....

How a limited prepaid card changed to postpaid package
but then why there are less calls & more messages......


Here i am sitting in my room @ night...
Thinking hard about life
How it changed.....

How a general class journey changed to Flight journey
But then why there are less vacations for enjoyment....

How a old assembled desktop changed to new branded laptop
but then why there is less time to put it on..........

How a small bunch of friends changed to office mate
But then why we always feel lonely n miss those college frnz.....

Here i am sitting in my room @ night...
Thinking hard about life

How it changed..... How it changed........

With Lot of Change,
Regards,
jay

What Me Valentine?

A little limerick as I wait for Meg to join me for a movie. Earlier we were wondering how people spend so much on Valentine's Day when they had the rest of the year to prove their love...

Then it was a special day,

Now it's part of life's way.

Then I said with a dozen flowers,

Now,  it's us and the unsaid hours.

Then I said she's the world to me,

Now through her the world I see.

Then this day her love I sought,

Now we laugh at the world Valentine bought. 

String Theory

Updating on my last triathlon. This one was called the Pacific Grove Triathlon (http://results.eternaltiming.com/event/PGT2008). Here's a link to the pictures that Megha's uploaded on her site 

http://picasaweb.google.com/mshenoy/PacificGroveTriathlon#. 

This was an Olympic Distance Triathlon (1 Mile swim, 25 Miles Bike and 7.5 Miles Run). It is considered one of the most scenic triathlons since it is along the famous 17 Mile Drive. 

I love taking part in such distance events... the ones that make you wonder what in the world were you were thinking. Waking up at 4:30 am, driving down to the sea, plunging into the frigid Pacific before the sun comes out, biking with feet that are too numb from the cold to feel the pain and then running without quite knowing whether it is the sea water or your sweat that's got you all drenched... Triathlon, Sir, is a cruel sport! 

And yet, perhaps that's why one does it. It makes the finish line that much sweeter. 

As for me, I like to think that I learn something new each time. This time it was Kelps.

Monterey Bay, where we had the swim part of the triathlon, is the Mecca of Kelps, the trees of the sea. Think of them as these gigantic spinaches with just their noses sticking out of the water. And boy, this was one Kelpy sea! So much so that it was less of swimming and more of wading and plowing my way past these leafy vegetables. 

Not used to so much 'greenery', I struggled at first to swim past these plants.  I was trying to cut my way past them.  And that' s when I saw a fellow swimmer zoom past me. I realised that instead of fighting these plants, he was actually embracing them! He was using them as a bunch of strings, clutching them and then pulling against them to propel himself forward. In a way, he wasn't quite swimming at all. He had adapted his swimming style to pull his way out of the situation! 

I followed suit. Very soon, thanks to these Kelps, I had managed to 'pull' myself to the finish line  and ready to start my bike stretch. 

You know, almost always, it's in deep waters that one learns new ways to stay afloat. I had prided myself in being good at swimming in open water. And yet here, it just took an innocuous leafy vegetable to make me unlearn what I had learnt over two decades! We all have our share of these unexpected randomly floating Kelps... the strings attached to our ocean of life. We can fight 'em. Or we can learn to use 'em...  for sometimes, pulling the right strings might just help you get home faster.  

Circle of life

I’ve been thinking about professions. About the jobs people do. And about how the jobs are all connected to each other. I have been working in the semiconductor industry for quite a while now. And am amazed at the number of people and industries involved in building something like say the iPhone that eventually fits in your pocket. I work at a company that designs chips. Our designs are sent off to a fab in China that turns this design into millions of silicon chips. These chips are integrated with several other of their cousins by guys called OEMs or module vendors. In addition to these chips, which are perhaps worth a couple of dollars each, the OEMs also procure a bunch of 5 cent capacitors and wires from companies that build nothing else but that. The OEMs put this all together on a circuit board. This is then packaged in a bigger box with a “Made in XXX” sticker on it and sold in stores like Walmart and perhaps these days over the internet.

And then you have the ecosystem of software companies that develop all kinds of wonderful applications for the users on these products.

And then, if it is a mobile application, you have all these telecom carriers who come up with equally wonderful plans to make your wallet and head lighter to start using these applications.

Its humbling when you think about it, the role that one plays in building a small fit-in-your-palm sized product.

What intrigues me however, is where this chain ends. And that’s where I am beginning to realize that my industry is connected to a much larger ecosystem; perhaps is a small appendage to it. All the companies involved in the chain above were funded at some point by investment houses. And even for those that were funded and are perfectly operational, we see that they are still controlled by  a handful of private equity companies on Wall Street who can change its course at the drop of a few cents of investor confidence. (eg: The Icahn-Yahoo deal). It’s funny when you think about it; the distant and yet obvious connection a Wall Street banker has with a coder breaking his head over a computer program in the wee hours of dawn.

We all aspire to grow in our profession. To understand the big picture.

The question is how big is the paper that you are drawing the picture on. 

A stroke of insight.

Today was my first day as a swim instructor at the YMCA.

I loved it.

I had to teach swimming to four adults who were barely managing to stay afloat.

I have always loved teaching, but have never got an opportunity due to my limited knowledge in most fields. But perhaps it was in these deep waters that I finally found ground. 

I think we all are passionate about certain things. And given an opportunity, we’d all love to share our passion with others. And I guess that’s what teaching is all about; sharing your passions. I loved teaching my students today; some of whom were twice my age. But that didn’t really matter. For that one hour, I got a chance to relive my time as a fledging swimmer, making all those mistakes that my students were making today.

I am not sure if I was as good a teacher as my coach who first taught me the joys of the water. But I know that if he is reading this blog, he would have the same words to say to me as back then, “Jump in… It’ll be ok.”

Guess he was right…