The Generalist

Very often we come across discussions pertaining to merits and demerits of being a specialist or a generalist. While specialist boast of an in-depth understanding of a specific discipline, generalist bank on their understanding and conceptualization of framework which holds all inter depend modules together. Both spectrum of arguments make it zero sum game where its non-conducive to have either brilliance in isolation or a well-conceived story with weak sub plots. 

If we observe the traits of a specialist what comes out distinctively in their personality is their unrelenting focus. By virtue of definition, specialist does not dabble in various departments which bring superior command and grip on one particular subject of his pursuit. In contrast, generalist is your proverbial jack of all trades who can hold on to conservation pertaining to all subjects to the beginner level or may be to 201 notch. For an organization to succeed, both these cogs need to run in cadence with less friction.  In my short stint in technology services provider, I have been a staunch generalist. I have been working closely with specialists from various streams and while I have gained a decent understanding of the output they produce, in-depth knowledge is clearly missing. However, with due respect to specialist, I have come to recognize that what goes in the making of a successful generalist is tremendous quantum of grit and gumption.  While you are presented polished views of participating silos you need to bring down veil of technology and practice differential to create a unified appearance, consistent with corporate IT policies and standards, establish clear communication channels and implement well defined processes to ensure wheel of workflow runs smoothly without any spoke conflicting with other. This knack is no easy task. In fact, this demands rapid learning and unlearning of process playbook with reference to client’s context.  In our increasing independent global business, way to go about defining and implementing processes might vary across geographies and industry domain. Domain knowledge and cross cultural intelligence play major role in conditioning value proposition.  

Going Slow

Just think about one of the most pronounced traits in a successful salesperson. Will it be suave, loquacious, intelligent, extrovert….it’s a long list. I thought one of the trait that s sharply defines a successful salesperson is impatience...not any more. Recently we closed a strategic deal in Europe and it won’t be an exaggeration to say that yearlong pursuit left us all dreading the prospect of next business in this particular geography. 

That’s what I thought when it looked like a never ending process, client was raising questions on every single line in proposal and we were providing clarifications that shouldn’t have mattered (in our opinion) in a multi-million deal. We thought were they enjoying this delay or were they simply mistrustful of us. Was it our inefficiency that made the process drag or were they being too detail oriented. And given that we had got so tantalizingly close to whiff of victory slightest distraction looked so unfair. But now with all that behind me and in one of the reflecting moment I think – how many times do we get things worth having in a jiffy. Never. And this was a marriage of culture, could it have been solemnized without few hide and seek with the prospective suitor. Client gave us trying times and hard to meet deadlines and gauged our reaction. Yearlong we were driven to prove we were the worthy suitor, right match for their crown jewel. We pushed ourselves, held night long sessions, and challenged the team, all with an eye on proverbial fish’s eye of Draupadi’s swamvyar. Dropping the ball was not an option yet fatigue was inescapable and personally impatience compounded by taxing tactics of some of client’s representative had made me wonder if this chase was worth the object of affection. But now I know, it was. 

And therein lays a correction. Impatience in pursuit is not the hallmark of a successful salesman. All business is people business and if you are willing to take a leap of faith for a strategic partnership don’t think other party will do so as well. In fact, Japanese have a meticulous way of going about any prospect of business alliance. It’s called Nemawashi and it entails employee tabling the proposal taking it through all his peers to record their feedback and concerns. Once it passes the scrutiny of employee’s peer ecosystem it’s taken up for senior management review and there again it has to meet the approval of all stakeholders before crystallizing. Mere description of whole process looks erucitatingly long and might be deemed as stifling agility yet it helps organization stand behind a decision collectively and ensures fool proof due diligence for every important decision pertaining to B2B engagement. Thankfully, we were not dealing with this end of the spectrum yet it holds an important lesson in cross cultural sales cycle. We might nay will have to reiterate our proposition, explanations to their key concerns and why we make the best match. We will have to listen to new concerns creeping in when everything looked so hunky dory. We will have few detractors in client’s entourage  who will be dismissive of whole cross cultural business idea .there will be slip ups from our side, few frowns on client’s side but in the end if you can give attention ( not obeisance) to every request (or demand) of their , howsoever seemingly small you make a statement. I think we did that every single time and even though we might have had our focus dimmed and  patience running dry at fall end of chase, this closure will go a long way to teaching me ‘patience is a great virtue’ in strategic partnerships .

Work life balance..huh

Okay, a post after 12 months. from a guy who thought writing is therapeutic. wow. where did i lose the track.


so without much ado, i'll wrap my thoughts around virtues of being happy. plain, simple happy. not making it a function of possessions, achievements and state of relative being. only happy. and that, doesn’t come easy. very recently, i was interacting with a French customer of Irish origin. his son was working with an NGO in India and had decided to donate his years of earnings to the school setup by NGO. Wearing my sales hat, i tried to fill him with details of Premji's donations to charity and all. Somewhere during the course of conversation, Mr Client made a very interesting remark - ' i am intrigued at how happy people are out here in this part of the world, in spite of not having much money or worldly luxuries'. Obviously, it was an observation borne out of what he would have read, heard from his son or people given to peans in praise of Indian penance culture. it was my turn to reflect. i thought, it was a virtue we lost in mindless race of 24x7 availability and professional demands. fat pay cheque, 2 BHK flat, mid sized sedan and secured pension, promises of future are robbing us of the pleasures of present. Its a sad phenomenon when you see guys my age reeling with stress related ailments. we have made great strides in advancement of medical science and longevity is going northwards. When i look at my father, gleefully gorging on all sweets and mutton curries followed by deep slumber, i long to have the same bliss for myself. there i am, with tingling neck pain, less salt, less sweet and guess what, its 1.30 AM and i am sleepless in Bangalore. not to say, i am on a reckless path, smoking was waved goodbye long back, drinking too got relegated to friends gathering and running is on my daily to do list ( my to do list is a fitting example of execution less strategy).


Few changes i have made to my professional conduct and might be useful for folks caught in whirlwind of demanding work space.

1. urge to respond to mail immediately should be curbed. one, you get more time to process the information. Secondly, many times our response loses objectivity when done at the spur. Rather, let the mail sit in your inbox. read it, let the response cross your mind and settle. Ignore it, do something else, come back to it and the right words jump from your keyboard. a repartee is a virtue in verbal conversation, in business emails its not.

2. Arguments are good. some where i read, good ideas invariably face resistance. Galileo, Socrates, Assange, etc etc. not to take away our right to be downright stupid and at the same time defending your ideas with conviction, that's something.

3. rest later..

What you saw..

Identities have a funny way of alienating entities.

Drawn in physical resemblance, expressed though localized pervasion of customs, reinforced in rigidness of opinions, identities are an attempt to define my existence much before I became conscious of the infinite abstractness surrounding the very idea of it.

Color of my skin, build of my skull, twirl of my hair, and style of my beard –all cues should converge to stack me in nomenclature of religion, race and regionality.

Choice of my favorite movies, culinary predilection, my pick of books, love for piano rock , should that tell you something about me?

Or subconsciously I am blaring for your attention and too self-effacing to admit it and subsequently surrendering to subtleties of aesthetics.

No, I don’t have a problem with that tattoo on your butt-crack or the belly piercing. It makes me notice you in a way I wouldn’t have in the absence thereof and heck I don’t know what to make of this visual mimesis.

Don’t get me wrong… I am arguably blasé to your desire to resist blending in banalities of average Joe’s fucked up, uninspiring nay unexciting existence. I totally get that…exactly the way I get people’s absurd conformance to logic-defying principles of saying no to animal’s meat on some days of week or deferring big purchases, etc , etc.

Such instances abound, and my humble upbringing in the aegis of God-fearing parents ensured I was in decent know-how of religious do’s and don’ts. So chances are I might know what I am talking about--- now, here is the thing --- When societal tenets set the coordinates for us to baseline the predictability in our outwardly appearance and religious outlook , adherence to an Identity is sought but as a continuum of the content. Now, When I refuse conformance and the tell-tale signs of my raucous dissonance tear down the sanctity of ‘Identity’, hither-to understood in its last archetypal version, paradoxically I am still desperately trying to carve an ‘Identity’, albeit presumably a different one.

Content may have got contaminated but tenacity of concept… never… it just gets louder in assertion much to the dismay of the harbingers of generation gone-by and it's contemporary proponents who remained steadfast believer in the purity of everything that was bequeathed.

So the compass of Identity has moved from an expression of collective noun to desire for intense distinctiveness.

Identity1.0 had the loyalties of larger group with underlying assumption of uniformity of opinions across its subscribers. In contrast, new notion of Identity has practitioners shifting away from the periphery of Identity’s paraphernalia to embody the very idea itself. It’s no statement on the profundity of the new state or genuineness of the new members yet it promises to devitalize the spell of proverbial ‘opium’ under which we have been held for long.

Call it the celebration of individuality, manifestation of our inflated persona, call it your fuck-whatever, even though the world we know has shrunk to the size of your smartphone, it has also placed us in a crucible of yawning contradictions.. its numbing to make sense of several lives we live, trying hard not to let the Identities we grew up with come in way of Identities we long for and Identities we let go of. New order is not just about the movement of enterprise’s production base and extension of their supply chain… it has also heralded the era of cultural trade where aspirations and opportunities are not in parity (understandably so)…where tradeoffs run the business of life and ensconced in the instruments of hedonism we talk about this rut.
Funny!! may be Sad..


PS: ‘Identity’ -2003 was my 3th brush with MPD( after ‘Psycho’ and ‘Primal Fear’) ...climax was a beauty.

Getting your Ps and Ts right

For a B school graduate freshly out of haven of academia, it takes a while to digest that folks in new companies are not rubbing their hands in anticipation of your recommendation and suggestions in the last slide. Fed on a staple of case studies, we dreamt of easing our way through the complex 'strategic' problems plaguing organization . We would do some radical earth-shattering number crunching of their performance indicators, market trends and industry benchmark. We will call to question their unacceptable positioning at right-bottom quadrant of fix-it-all-need-analysis-cost-benefit-bell graph and anoint them to that elusive market leadership position. How ???
Just wait for that last slide of recommendation and next steps. It was like the richer cousin of some regional party election manifesto in terms of articulation. Sexy, promising, eloquent and forward -looking. So what went wrong in the real life ?

Actually, nobody asked for one.

So that begs a question whether they were too timid to acknowledge our intellectual radiance or we just stuffed our brains with jargons that were rendered meaningless in the face of organizational dynamics.
Or we just thought too much too soon.

My short stint in an IT company has taught me a thing or two about organizations. Though not a fair extrapolation, yet I would like to believe my observations will be traceable to majority of corporate workplaces.
I hope to be remain objective in my narration and therefore, may be 1 point at a time is what I may do justice to:

1. People, process , technology (PPT): My presales experience has given me tremendous exposure to molestation of this otherwise profound abbreviation. If you are entrusted with outlining a transformational framework for your client’s existing set-up or in-house divisional restructuring or executing a new project regardless of scale , remember this- You have three candidate dimensions to effect changes and drive efficiencies.

Technology might be the easiest to turnaround but the efficacy of any change across any of these 3 dimensions are so closely related to the readiness and acceptance of the other 2 that absence of alignment spells doom for all transformational undertakings. Before any radical shift, get your people in line for they are the end-users and it’s in the trenches of junior management that change agents lose their way.

Then pan out the components of workflow and identify the points where the implementation of new technology will cause changes. Once the complexities arising out of new technology adoptions have been identified and remediated, conduct a pilot phase of implementation. This will help in picking up the bottlenecks that were glossed over in planning and assessment phase.

Once the big –bang or phased deployment of change element is complete, next step would be to closely monitor the performance metrics of new environment to stability and have a help-desk for handholding of end-users in their understanding of new set-up. Now just as I wrote the last line, I felt my professional bias has taken over the neutral mindset i intended to stick with.

To cut the chase, even though you may have the wisest of intentions or best in breed technologies in backyard, unless there is an aggressive strategy to engage people, little can be achieved. Now I won’t pontify what great feats have been achieved by people willing to do something inspite of absence of all standard enablers yet my takeaway is that even in context of profit driven organization, sustainable benefits can be realized if only managers invest in nurturing employees and upholding organization’s values system. Long back in Mr Handa’s witty one-liners I read- you can fool the people you work with, you can fool the people you work under but and that's a big BUT..you can never fool the people who work under you.

Hypocrisy on the part of top management can let indolence run amok. Likewise, a battery of top managers totally dedicated to customer’ cause and employee’s legitimate interests will draw a multiplier effect on the morale and motivation of the people they represent. We have been told all this in context of leader's virtues but corporate set-up has a wonderful way of inverting the fallacies of democracy. In your company you don't get the manager you demand but we most certainly strive to deliver as he wishes.

Transition phase of IT

Traditionally, IT has long burdened itself with the tag of ‘business enabler’ and even that was a kind euphemism for an organizational function that works in the background. Clichés of IT-business alignment have really suffered a reality check with the recessionary headwinds of 2008 and subsequent years have forced CIOs to ask hard-hitting questions which had got sidetracked for its elementary genre. That question has started haunting them back. In one of the Gartner reports, GM’s CIO puts it across without any bells and whistles – ‘how do we help in selling more cars’!!Boom. There you are. With all the fancy paraphernalia of disruptive technologies and cutting edge voodoos, just one explanation is begged of IT head honchos – how do you help me sell more, how do you increase my top-line, how do you make me grow organically.

We have seen process innovations that have helped in reducing the cost incurred in procurement of IT assets. Not to mean operational optimization has become any less significant but at the same time it is sort of IT putting its own house in order that reaching out for impacting business development. If an organization’s IT spend were to be bucketed into before the sale, during the sale and after the sale categories, only minuscule dollars and inputs find way to during the sale and before the sale dimensions.


Cursory analysis of key IT contributions across industry verticals for past decades will be along supply chain automation, business processes optimization ,accounting, inventory control, purchase order and several related sub-activities. Though critical, these capabilities relegated IT to an uncelebrated contributor to overall business. Another study proclaims more than 80% of an enterprise’s IT budget goes to running the ‘Business as usual’ (support & maintenance)and only 20% find way to innovative projects that can actually optimize the way IT conducts itself and may align more visibly to selling process. With the advent of cloud computing, IT has a real chance of bringing its investments in line with business demands but more than the cost element it would be the value propositions of agility and responsiveness that IT department must push for. Saving 2 penny in IT expenditure will slowly become a hygiene factor and if IT helps me in selling 5 pennies more, that’s when business will take notice.


With my limited understanding, I feel a CIO can thump up the table in a boardroom if he can just get the mojo of mobility and social networking right. Cloud for sure is a big differentiator and will change the operating model fundamentally. Yet, on the sales front, when IT starts powering the sales application, products are displayed on tablet, giving the feel of interface and usability, inventory is checked real-time, delivery schedules vetted , POs are generated on the fly, that will herald the true enablement of man on the field and bring back rave reviews for IT. The ergonomics of tablets and smartphones will need power of mobile business productivity applications to unleash their true potential in enterprise context. Companies have started owning up the concepts of Bring your own device where employees are promoted to use their authorized gadgets to access corporate applications. Not just it eliminates the capital expenses on assets but also allows employees not remain tethered to their desks. As more and more taskforces derive resources from diverse teams and functional units, collaboration regardless of geographical distance and disparate applications would determine how productive they are in their joint endeavors. Mobility is one idea in enterprise sphere whose implementation will allow real time communication and increase responsiveness and visibility across the value chain.


Closely related to the idea of collaboration is emergence of social media which has radically changed the way consumers connect for their personal communications however smart enterprises should appreciate the great pace at which tools of Facebook and twitter have invaded the consumer psyche and a grudge against service provider or product vendor finds disproportionate reverberations. None of the media had so far been successful in establishing a duplex communication in a way new 21st century portals have. The other day one of my Facebook pal had his under-service airtel number reassigned to some random guy. In all issues ranging from my-dog-is –so- happy to what-was –mayawati-thinking he shot his outage on Facebook and within a day he had detractors of Airtel liking the past and narrating similar woes in comments section. If Airtel PR thinks they can sit over such tid-bits events for long they should stop smoking whatever they are now. During my brief stint in Technical Support Services presales I had come across workflow of support department actively mining millions of tweets for outage specific keywords and establishing direct contact with the aggrieved party post verification of entitlement. Here’s the thing, in the age of fickle customers with power of snapping back with tweets and posts you really can’t afford them terrorizing your existing customers and prospects. And make no mistake, way way back in 70-80’s when Zukerberg’s father was a jobless youth, Intel was forced to recall million digital calculators which had a floating point approximation error that too recurring after several million calculations. The impact of the apparent flaw was insanely disproportionate to the outrage building against Intel in the media and academician. Just to reiterate, the elements of brand promise and brand performance are shaken by apparently trivial events. The multiplier effects of social media if leveraged thoughtfully can spring big positive surprises. For a CIO, opportunity lies in marshaling his analytics resources to gauge the indicators trending the market and give actionable insights to business units.

In my next article on the same topic I would try breaking these macro-trends into sub-components with a ground-level commentary of how some leading enterprises have institutionalized the paradigm of new age data center.

one year in Bangalore

To be honest, this has been one of the most satisfying years of recent memory. Surprisingly, the year before had me graduating out and lapping up my first naukri and year ahead will most probably when I get fall prey to my family’s vicious plans of getting me hitched, yet neither the landmarks of past nor the promises of tomorrow can dim the radiance of this wonderful passing by calendar. For one, I finally felt at ease with myself and this has happened after a long long time. Notion of being ‘in control’ has a vague condescending tinge of smugness and henceforth acceptance is what I would strive for. Acceptance of things I could have effected and could not, endurance of pricks I could not have changed and have not. Consequences of action are one load and sighs of inaction even heavier. Coming close to the realization that I am the sum total of my judgments and bias, I have started to let go of opinions concerning people, much more than ever.
I would rather be an outlier in the maudlin vortex of social Venn’s and namby pamby demonstrations have always made me uneasy. This year, I have made real attempt to pull the plug off on the biggest trigger of all, yes, I kissed goodbye to all the beers, brandy and blends. Single malts would be accorded due respect on need basis, need being a linear function of company I choose to drink with. I have been told by some of my peers that need to be gentler in my personal dealings and hell I’ll try that, regardless of how synthetic it may appear in execution. With my friends, I don’t choose my words and err on the lighter side with sprinkling of brutal logic and argumentative dressing. Never cared a toss if that’s making a dent, now will exercise more restraint and better judgment in such interactions. Guess, my teetotaler musings have a tad to do with enabling such ambience where i weigh my words and don’t become reckless myself.

I am finally settled with the idea of making a career in IT industry. Only challenge I foresee is to inculcate a dose of moderation in my articulation and be more thorough in my understanding of technological constructs. The phase so far has been more fulfilling and I guess that’s rewarding enough. Surprisingly, my mild cynicism for IT services industry has melted in the face of some of the smartest folks I have had the privilege to work with. I still distinctly remember when to a question on whither Indian IT industry, I had cribbed about their lack of ascent on value chain and how then stand no chance to the might and bright of product companies like Google and Yahoos (this was 2008). Wrong conclusion with pitifully un-informed generalization of companies which are as different in their business model as apple from oranges (again a lovely metaphorical banality in IT industry). Product companies like Microsoft, Oracle and apple have their revenues tied to the sale of the proprietary codes that enables the hardware for specific functions. To run a set of complex activities circumscribed by the IT division of any organization, high degree of customizations are required in the application. Many organizations have legacy and bespoke applications to support the unique set of business demands. Engineering arm relies on developments and testing of several separately developed modules of the final demonstrable prototype. Again, all these components have to been monitored for their availability and performance on a relentless basis lest business suffers due to breakdown in customer interfaces and productivity of employees. This is where our good old IT players pitch in and assist Boeings and Wal-Mart’s of the world. Just a look at the landscape they compete in and tags of HP, Accenture and IBM are hard to miss. Would like to mention even the swindling fortunes of IBM was revived by retrospectively applauded decision of Lui Gerstner to make a significant shft in business focus from products to services market. Deep pockets and wide-spread incumbency of global companies have traditionally been the odds against the IT services companies of Indian legacy and going by the count of new deals they are pocketing against strong global players they may well even it out in foreseeable future. This hypothesis has been many local variables and global imperatives and is a debate for some other time. Discounting the relevant digression, point I was driving home was about my sense of relative comfort courtesy fair and unobtrusive work culture of much scrutinized IT industry.
Then in my relationship spectrum- with my parents, I have touched a nadir, jumped to crescendo and then again been adrift in a strong wave of indifference. This volatility will go on for a while till the time either they see the man in me or I acknowledge the child in them. Don’t know why, but elders have always evoked my Sheldon Cooper’ish moment with all the befuddleness and bambozzleness of ‘aisa hi hota hai’ crippling my arguments before they germinate. Would love to understand them better but at present its respect... And peace.
I am buying a bike, albeit a used one. It checks my 11th grade dream of owning a Pulsar. Fond memories, I used to have a Pulsar ad cut from the last page of India today beneath my bed. Now I have one. Coming days will be fun with rides in divine Bangalore weather. Need to check if have ever showered gems and sung homilies in love of Banglorean weather on my blog or not. If not, then may be because I was too busy basking in the soothing winds than staring at my laptop and arranging some random words in a lame attempt to make sense in a funny way as I am doing now when it has become a lot nipping.

PS: just finished The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo…nice read