Vishal Kumar

I was recently talking to a friend of a friend (now, of course, a friend, directly), who was in Bangalore, potentially looking for a job change. We had a few really good intellectual discussions which I wanted to record here, for safeguarding it from the merciless villain that is, forgetfulness.

Over a Costa Coffee, my friend, who was a working a global management consulting firm, looking for a switch to a financial company, described how he perceived the work that he was getting, to which I added some thoughts.
Basically, when you first join a job, you are pretty much told what you need to do. The work is usually cut out, based on a clear set of requirements from your manager, or a directive from your boss to do something that you have previously done in the past. I drew parallels to both these instances from working at my present role, and found both of them to be quite straightforward and easy to do.

With the passage of time, of course, this would become repetitive, and you begin to explore what more can be done. And here we must pause, because the juncture at which you as an individual realize that you can actually do more than you were tasked to, or that you begin to take on the right to question what is given, that is where you start contributing real, irreplaceable value.
Now, even with my limited employment experience, I begin to question what I am doing, and how I can make it better, faster, easier to comprehend, etc (usually through the powerful use of technology). I would begin asking, how can I use technology to make this better. My friend suggested, take it a step forward “”Why technology””. I had a pretty good answer (keywords: “”multiplicative effect””, “”do-once-run-forever””).

At this point, I realized that fundamentally, everything must be questioned to the absolute core. Why technology? To improve something? Why improve something? To make it better? Why? To serve customers better? Why? …. this process should go on, until the only answer you have is a test of how strong your company’s or your personal Vision and Mission holds against what you are doing.

And of course, where do the vision and mission come from? Well, someone has to sit and write them. A rather famous quote went something along the lines of “”If you aren’t working for your own dream, you are helping someone else’s dream come true””.

I thought I should end this short note with a few points from my discussion, lest I forget them.
1. Initially, absorb what it is that you are doing, and what you need to do it (from your peers, managers, parents)
2. Start questioning what you are doing, why, and how
3. Question all the way till you can define yourself and your organization.
4. Turn Questions into possible ways of improvement, focusing on the sticky points of your line of questioning, or abandon the current process for a better one (e.g. Why are we rewriting code in different languages => Switch to WebApps, etc)
5. Add value to whatever you are doing, making an impact that is attributable to you, a legacy to leave behind.

No process is perfect, and there is always scope to improve. The key lies in your ability to question things, and improve on them. Absorb, then question.

So I was just watching Suits, on my shiny new Nexus 7 Tablet (I haven’t used the word Shiny in front of the Nexus when I described it to you, you haven’t heard the news from me), when this one scene in particular struck me as Wow.

Donna, the secretary of the lead lawyer, has just been rehired, when she meets another opposing lawyer, Lois, and suddenly asks which suit he is wearing. We get his answer.

She immediately walked to her Boss (remember that guy was ‘opposing’), and tells her that, get this, 4 years ago, Norma (secretary of Lois), had told her that the day Lois becomes a Senior Partner, had a special suit made for it. And today, he was wearing it. And because he was wearing the suit, he was now made Senior Partner. And since her Boss is one of two people who can declare a Senior Partner, the Boss’ opponent is making backstabbing moves.

I thought wow, 4 years ago, that little tidbit. And this connection was made the day she was rehired after a traumatic exit 6 weeks back.

Sometimes we have all sorts of amazingly useless information that we get in our daily lives. But the brain does some seriously awesome stuff connecting the dots sometimes.

So when someone says something utterly retarded, but is a fact, keep it I deplore of you. Cherish that nugget of irrelevance, till that day when it has the chance to come up.

And now back to the show.

V

I was initially going to avoid writing about the drudgeries of office and work (though its been pretty damn interesting and impactful, so that’s cool), but I thought I’d mention this buzzword that we’ve started using:

De-Risk.

It basically is meant to be used as a verb, to reduce the risk of not completing a work on  time.

Now, as with most post-MBA work, this is pretty deadline intensive and critical to our stakeholders, so we’re on our toes working on delivering the best we can with the precious little time we have (for example, time spent going to grab a coffee and back is when I think about how to restructure my excel sheet so it makes sense – hint, this involves color coding).

So with certain high level meetings coming up, we’ve had to up our game even more, leading to understanding questions like ‘I understand that’s a lot of work – how are we going to de-risk that’.

Alright, admittedly, nothing ground breaking about that. I’m sure everyone’s got their own kind of killer buzz words (last week I introduced ‘Redflagging’… which had its 15 minutes of fame (more like 10), before we were worrying about de-risking our red flags).

It’s been a pretty good productive week, and a historical first of cooking in dinner for a friend. That involved derisking the experience as well, as I was already off my schedule by an hour, and had to minimize my shop trips, and parallel process my cooking (ala MasterChef Australia, which I’d been watching on regular basis now after work).

Another good relaxing weekend on the cards. Might try coding a bit, and then work on something that I’m supposed to be derisking.

Cheers,

V

 

Clusterf*ck. That’s the only term that comes to my mind when I’m witnessing a 5 way intersection of roads where every vehicle driver believes they have the right of way.

I’m currently in an Auto, stuck about 5 mins away from office. I called up a colleague to check if we had any morning meetings, and she assured me no, and also told she was stuckin traffic too. I suspect we’re talking about the same traffic jam.

On a positive note though, this increases my ‘commute’ of 10 minutes tops, to a half hour slice where I can feel cool about pulling open a laptop in an auto and working (ahem, bloggin).

Lovely weather as always. I suppose that’s the compromise. Stuck in traffic? Admire the weather, move on.

Life does, anyway.

V

 

Dear IIMB viewers.

I confess to being a Geek. Big Time. Computer Geek. I used to spend hours late into the night trying to learn how to install databases, rewrite linux code, craft CSS and tinker with javascript and jquery for purposes even now I’m not sure of.

You may judge me for this. It’s ok.

But otherwise, since you are here, you might as well check out my Chat Noir game at http://www.vishalkumar.in/works/jscat

Cheers! 🙂

Vishal

Hey,

Some of you have noticed that this blog has been down for quite some time. Well, I’ve dusted off the cobwebs and decided to breathe new life into this blog. Because as they say – the value of the blog is directly proportional to which year you are in at an IIM. … or something like that.

Anyways, nothing ground breaking as such. I’m still the same crazy, geeky, lovable (ok, ok, tolerable) me that I was.

Unfortunately, there was a database error in which I lost the last post I made (a very financially technical post about how to extract capital data from repository of financial data), but well, hopefully that’s not too much of a loss.

I’m the happiest I’ve been for quite some time, especially looking forward to seeing my mom and dad in Delhi.

Here’s to another attempt at keeping this blog alive! 😀

V

Dear Reader,

I myself was wondering when I would actually get to sit down to actually put up a proper post regarding my most recent significant development in my life so far, i.e. my admission to the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. Oh yes, that place, with the yeah, 3 idiots, hmmhmm, yep.

Funny how after nearly two months (wait, what?), I finally feel like I have the time to do so. I have mapped out exactly what needs to be done for which subject and due. I had 4 classes today, and one pre-placement talk, followed by dinner, then helping out a friend who dropped by, with her presentation, then a remarkable 30 minute sleep before I had another quick meet for discussing Managing Organizations write up, followed by a lengthy meeting what we have in mind for Unmaad, IIMB’s mega cultural fest. Incidentally, I am a member of the Student’s Cultural Committee here (ask for my other business card ;))

It’s been quite a journey till today. From one of the most hectic first weeks ever – future bschoolers, look forward to it. To just gloss over the good parts, we were pretty much thrown into the deep end of the pool, and had to battle it out. Met some very good people there (incidentally, a recurring theme at IIMB: you always meet some fascinating folk here on campus. Your untold story is probably even more interesting than that guy who came from Uzbekistan, studied in Malaysia and was born in Germany ;)). (Yes, this is meant to provoke)

Anyway, we were divided and assigned loads of work, and various team building activities. One of the highlights was going to Breakthrough, a physical activities place that specializes in teaching lessons through group activities. More long stories short, I was the first person from the first year batch to present a powerpoint presentation in the auditorium to the entire batch of almost 400 people. Petrified. But well received.

One thing I really like about this place is the energy levels of people. I’d come to learn about the organic structure in Managing Organizations class (fellow IIMB’s rolling their eyes right about now), but the experience organizing and conducting the Aarambh 2010 – the freshers cultural show, in like 5 days, was quite phenomenal. The concept of POC – Point of Contact, helps give some responsibility of communicating and acting as a nodal point, but beyond that, everyone is quite highly talented and able to, well, simply put, ‘make things happen’.

Moving on, classes soon became part of our life. In the early days, it was mostly light hanging out, trying to get out of campus (managed a very few times only). Yes, to clarify, I don’t live in Bangalore. I live in IIMB. I see Bangalore a few times a month, no more.

In between, I put in my hand at some of the tech stuff I apparently am, well, known for. Created a few videos for Aarambh, and for an Ad making competition – where my new found Salsa skills also helped 🙂 Good fun doing it.

Then things got a little crunchy with tests and exams. I’ll touch on this later in another post, because its worth lamenting posting on. 🙂

All in all, IIMB is quite a terrific place. Not a bad place to land up after spending the last few months of your life chasing a cat. (International viewers: CAT is the entrance exam to get into the IIMs. Most news regarding IIMs pretty much involves every possible permutation of terrible puns on felines).

As I was saying, quite some work cut out for me, including studying for final exams next week. Just like to thank Kaushik for reminding me that I in fact, do have a blog (and that it is giving off more malicious warnings on entry than a usb pen drive that was just inserted in our lab computers).

So where next is the obvious, cliche question. Simple answer. I don’t know. But there is definitely something that the interviewers at IIMB saw in me amongst thousands of others (or so we are told repetitively by our seniors) that is going to rock your world.

And as for posting on this blog, I’ll probably have lesser and lesser narrative descriptive tales of what happened yesterday (call me), what I had for breakfast (Twitter), or funny dialogues from class today (Facebook), but just general deep thoughts that I get when I do that brooding me. I figure this is also a reasonable forum to answer any big questions regarding IIMs, though I can only speak from observations and 2 months of life here.

A little warm up gyaan (subtitle: wisdom) here. People say that when you’ve reached a certain position in life (got in IIT (I haven’t), got in IIM (check), got into so-and-so company), “Your Life is Set”.

It’s not.

It only means people’s expectations of you have increased, and the game just got a little tougher. On an optimistic note, that ‘certain position’ guarantees a minimum worst case scenario of a status in life that is perhaps a hundred, thousand, or a million times better than, well, a vast majority of our society.

Just don’t let that get to you. Don’t let your life set. I acknowledge, easier writing this sort of thing on the other side of CAT, but wherever you are, know that there is more to live, and more to live for.

Its almost 4, and I have class in the morning. Ah, sleep cycles should make for an interesting next post, if I ever do get around to it.

Hey, I recently gave a presentation on jQuery, the javascript library.

For those of you new to jQuery, its an awesome Javascript (the in-browser scripting language), that allows you do play around with your webpages, and create some really fancy interactive elements and actions.

The basic points I discussed, in the order:

• Some basic applications of jQuery (Forms, Sliders, DOM traversing)
• Implementation details like jQuery function
• jQuery’s Function Chaining feature
• The $ function
• Links to various live examples.

View the presentation on the SlideShare.net embed, and download the pptx file, after the jump.

Google has just launched its Google Public DNS service, freely available for you to use. Another free Google service, yaay!

Wait, what is DNS?

DNS is something that ideally, you wouldn’t even know what it meant. Actually, it stands for Domain Name System, and is the system of computers and registries around the world that convert your delightfully easy to remember www.vishalkumar.in or www.orkut.com to get to your website.

What happens in the background is that your computer asks the DNS on which server www.vishalkumar.in is being hosted, and then downloads the data from that server. And you didn’t have to memorize the IP address (a delightful number like 74.125.45.100 (which incidentally, is Google’s homepage), and can surf the net that much easier.

The benefit will be apparent when you start browsing, as things will start moving faster, with the site and images and content loading faster (especially on sites where content is pulled from other sites). Overall, switching to Google Public DNS is a good idea, and unlike some ISP’s DNS servers, you don’t get pulled into an ad filled search page if your site is wrong, saving on bandwidth too.

Here’s a screenshot filled tutorial on how to set it up with your BSNL Router, or normal connection.