Reflections of my thoughts…

I finished with "The Angel of God" by Jyothi Menon. Jyothi is currently Senior Vice President and Head of HR Shared Services at Scope International, Standard Chartered Bank based out of Chennai. (as described in her LinkedIn profile)

The book is talking about three parallel stories of Moosa, Bhaskaran and Aboobacker(also his lost brother coming into seen in the half way). Moosa had born and brought up in Dharawi which is regarded as the largest slum in Asia. The bad living condition and his family situations made him a criminal, who started everything by killing his own father who tried to rape his sister. Soon he became a hired professional killer. He built up his own gang and he slowly started controlling the Mumbai underworld. He started various business and those made his rich than anyone else. Even he’s doing dirty business, the people who were working for him was very happy. His generosity was infamous among people.

As part of expanding business, Aboobacker is getting introduced to the scene who was very honest and brave enough and was working for a rich man in Kozhikode, Kerala. Aboobacker worked well for Moosa and the returns from Moosa was more than enough, that he can think of. Sooner he became a rich man in the area and he also started several business.

Another guy called Bhasakaran also plays critical role in Moosa’s life and later he inspired,mentored Bhasakaran to get serious about life and do well with his studies. Also Moosa finds his lost brother Raashid, who later undertaken Moosa’s business.

The way Moosa becoming the best with his business, the humanity inside him, how he made others life better. How he made his family. Those are the highlights of this novel. And Jyo did it well.

The story always propagated the fact that, "people are the key to success". (Of course we should expect this from a HR professional no?). During some chapters the novel became a people management chapters and it was quite inspiring. Jyo’s way of writing is marvellous. It’s simple, professional and never make you stop anywhere in between(**cough,cough***)

The few problems I’ve noticed are that, the redundant sentences in many chapters like "~ best in the world", "best minds where money can buy" etc. I never felt comfortable with this redundant sentences and sometimes it gives us an exaggerated or boasted feeling of the situation. Also few abrupt ending of chapters, some lame comparisons were not suitable for her stunning story. There’s a guy introduced in a chapter, who taught Moosa about table manners, dressing and all. at the end of the very quick chapter he’s passed away. Actually it was really odd in that situation. Another example is Aboobacker’s newspaper becomes "the best" in recent surveys. Actually these kind of sentences had given an odd feeling. Except all these the story is good, interesting, simple and surely it inspires, motivates you for a better tomorrow.

4-5 months ago, I finished reading Seth Godin’s new book “Tribes: We need you to lead us”.  The book is very short and is very interesting.
Tribes, the book is talking about leadership in the new age. The book makes sense in this age of social networking. “Tribes” is concept of few to infinite number of connected people where the group will be having a leader and the interested common topic for the tribes he attracted. The book helps us to realize that, there’s leader inside everyone.
Social network like twitter, facebook, and friendfeed are booming around and millions of people are roaming around various social networks that are having their own “tribes”. The best way explain about Tribe is to talk about twitter. Twitter is a simple website share the answer for a simple question “what are you doing?” There are people whom are following you and also you can follow many. The messages are simply limited to 140 chars. whenever you share a message; it’s been distributed to tens, hundreds, thousands of people following you. The interesting thing is that you can receive and send new tweets using your mobile phone itself.
I never realized the power of twitter and social networking websites before reading this book. The simple example is the posts in this blog. All posts and updates in this blog are shared to friend feed and friends feed is shared with twitter. This means that, all updates in this blog will be distributed globally to those who are following me through various social networks.
The book is starting with story of Joel Spolsky, one of my favorite blogger, entrepreneur, programmer etc. Seth explains how he attracted people and created his own tribe. The topic chosen by Joel was “how to run small software companies?” the interesting articles spread among people and thus he made his tribe.
Seth shared some interesting short stories connected to twitter.com. He explained how a housewife Laura attracted millions people to her social network by gaining their trust and keeping interests by small tweets and how she became a consultant. How Scott Beale thrown a party within no time by a simple tweet? It’s all about power of social networking, leadership and keeping your tribe with you.
The book is also talking about various short topics like

• Leading from bottom – how a person attracted many people with his innovative security ideas after World Trade Center disaster? What all he did was a 3 hours presentation discussing about various security challenges and solution for them.
• Opportunity of leadership – leading and marketing
• The difference between crowd and tribe – Crowd is a tribe without a leader and communication
• Changing the status quo – Trying something new – Changes from conventional systems and procedures. Few stories related to it.
• Difference between how a employees and tribe?

The book is really good give us a light on new age marketing, building social networks, earning trust, leading tribe following us etc. but the book misses details on how? It’s only provide some collected stories who are successful with their tribes. The book is really missing on how to do the ground work? Just trying view things in an abstract point of view. However we can learn lot many new things, which is up to date with current affairs and business styles.

Here are few quotes from the book.

• You don’t need a keyboard to lead, you only need the desire to make something happen
• Without leader, there are no followers. You’re a leader, we need you to lead us.
• Leaders are having followers while managers have employees.

Hello fellow Programmer, have you ever experienced resolving your debugging problems while you explain it to someone else? If yes, we call this process as “Rubber Ducking”

It’s a very simple but practically useful technique for finding the cause of a problem by simply  explain to someone else. Why it works? By explaining the problem to someone else may help you to gain new insights to the problem.

The act of Rubber Ducking is explained in the book, “The Pragmatic Programmer”

The other person should look over your shoulder at screen and nod his head or her head constantly (like a rubber duck bobbing up and down in a bathtub). They Don’t need to say any word; the simple act of explaining step by step, what the code is supposed to do often causes the problem to leap off the screen and announce itself.

Sure! you can get it for free. nVidia making GPU Gems 2 available online. They’re not releasing the whole text in a single release. Rather they provides the whole text in subsequent releases.