Bangalore Mysore Highway SH17

The Bangalore-Mysore highway, SH-17, connects the cities of Bangalore, capital of Karnataka, with Mysore, historical city and cultural capital of Karnataka.

View Larger Map.

Till 2005 this was an undivided, two-laned road, with several blind curves, speedbreakers, and a magnet for frequent accidents. Work started in 2004 to widen the road, convert it into a divided, four-laned road, straightening of the curves, all of which vastly improved the safety and also reduced the length of the road by 10 km, and was completed by early 2006.

SH-17 near Srirangapatna.


Bangalore-Mysore state highway SH-17.

This below is a photo I took sometime in May 2003 of the highway, before the four-laning had commenced. I don't remember where I took this, but I think it is somewhere near Bidadi. As you can see, with the daily volume of vehicles on this road in excess of 20,000, this road was long overdue for an upgradation.
As of writing this post, there have been news reports that there are plans to upgrade this to a six lane highway.


With the upgradation of the highway, the driving time between Bangalore and Mysore has come down to 2.5 hours. Some claim to have covered the distance in under two hours, whereas earlier it could take 3.5-4 hours.
There are many speedbreakers near and in Mandya, but otherwise the highway is free of speedbreakers.
Where the traffic conditions allow, the road is good enough to allow for speeds of 100-120 kph. One has to be careful enough to not get carried away with the high speed driving since there is always the possibility of unexpected obstacles emerging, like a truck that decides to drive on the wrong of the highway to save on driving an extra 100 yards to make that legal u-turn. Or the farmer who decides to cross the road, with his 50 sheep, goats, and assorted cattle. Or the crazy driver who is going out on a joy ride in his new car, with friends egging him on, with enough liquor to feed an army of sailors in their bellies. Speeds much in excess of 100kph are not advisable in any condition of the road anyway, since these are not access controlled roads.

Founders At Work-1

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Amazon.com book page link)

• Part two of review: On Books, Photos, and Travels: Founders At Work-2

Founders and co-founders talk about their ventures, the early days, learnings, tribulations, and life at startups. The questions are well thought of, and serve to drive the conversation along relevant lines, and are not really the cookie cutter types that you see most of the times. Nor are they intrusive or attempt to foist the interviewer's opinions on the interviewee.

There is no theme to the ordering of the interviews that I could make out, which the book would certainly have benefited from. Some obvious founders are missing - like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and others - but enough reams have about these founders and their companies anyway.

Otherwise an excellent book.

Instead of getting smart management gurus to dissect successful companies and not so successful companies and come up with grand theories and equations into which the ingredients of companies and the external environment in which they operate can be fed to produce a result that predicts how, why, and when a company would succeed, why not let the founders of successful startups talk about their experiences?

Do this with a sufficiently large number of startups and let the reader figure out for himself if there is indeed any secret sauce to making a monetizable pizza. And many a times it isn't even about money, initially.

There are 32 interviews here. I could not make out any thematic ordering of the chapters, but there may well be that has escaped my puny brain. There is no alphabetical ordering here, either by the founders' names or the companies', nor a chronological one.

I don't think people will want to read this book from start to finish in one sitting. Nor would, or should, people read it from the first page to the last in that order. Since each chapter works quite well on its own, I suspect, and this is pretty much how I am reading this book too, people will pick this book up and read a chapter or two, pick it up later and read a few more chapters.

There are the obvious interviews like the ones with Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail), Steve Wozniak (Apple), Tim Brady (Yahoo!), Craig Newmark (Craigslist), but also some lesser known names from more well known companies or well known products like Max Levchin (PayPal), Paul Buchheit (Gmail), Caterina Fake (Flickr), and many others.

If you are thinking you can read this book, cover to cover, and again, and somehow magically come up with the recipe for building a successful startup, then I don't think this book is for you.

There are no magic mantras here, no astras, no silver bullets, no formulae, nothing. The recipes for success differ from company to company. Hard work, perseverance, teamwork, some amount of intelligence seem to be the common ingredients. Luck is important, no mistaking. Being in the right place at the right time also helps, but it is not sufficient, nor is it a necessary condition in my opinion, reasonably speaking. There is Evan Williams, co-founder of Pyra Labs (Blogger), who says "I came to California after playing with the Internet for a few years because Nebraska wasn’t the place to be, very clearly." I obviously do not mean that having the idea for nuclear fission in the tenth century would mean you could be successful in building an atomic bomb then, which is why I said 'reasonably speaking'. Having good people helps. Good VCs helps.

To let the people speak:

Suits - Foreward by Paul Graham.

Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. And yet they’re probably the most productive part of the whole economy. Why the disconnect? I think there’s a general principle at work here: the less energy people expend on performance, the more they expend on appearances to compensate.

And yet conventional ideas of “professionalism” have such an iron grip on our minds that even startup founders are affected by them. In our startup, when outsiders came to visit we tried hard to seem “professional.” We’d clean up our offices, wear better clothes....

I think this has a lot to do with perceptions. We see successful people wearing suits, successful from the conventional metrics that we employ to judge people, successful people like Maddoff, Ernie Webbers, Jeff Skilling, Ramalinga Raju, Ketan Parikh, Kenneth Lay, who were successful, till one day when they weren't. We see such 'losers' as Mahatma Gandhi, Vinoba Bhave, Aurobindo Ghosh, Swami Vivekananda, and others who were not so nattily dressed (one of these people was actually derided as a 'half-naked fakir', by one of those in a suit).

Since hard work is so much tougher than simply adorning a suit, we are quite tempted to try and adopt the sartorial route to success than the intellectual. It also has to do with intimidation - "my suit is more expensive than your dhoti, so I am better than you'. It also has to do with the way our minds work - we see successful people in suits so often that we generalize that anyone in a suit must be successful, or at the very least eager to be successful. Well begun is half done. That half part is especially easy if it involves putting on the right clothes.

Max Levchin, PayPal

Livingston: What advice would you give to a young programmer who’s thinking of starting a startup?
Levchin: Try to have a good cofounder. I think it’s all about people, and, if you are doing it completely alone, it’s really hard. It’s not impossible, in particular if you are a loner and introverted type, but it’s still really hard.

Livingston: Did things change a lot after PayPal was acquired?
Levchin: I think the acquirers tend to be more—it pays to be different from the founders; otherwise, you still have this clinging-on of the original culture. It’s very sad that, when you buy a company, you have to sort of squash a lot of the original stuff, but if you don’t, you foster this festering of distrust and dislike.

Evan Williams, co-founder Pyra (Blogger)

Everyone was getting funded, but it is still completely just a network. You have to know the right people. Whether it’s good times or bad, you have to know people and you have to talk their language, and we were just from a different place and not hooked into that at all.
...
The problem was, we didn’t see a business in Blogger. This was during the boom, but we weren’t one of these companies that was just, “Let’s get eyeballs.” We talked a lot about the stupidity of a lot of the dot-coms and raising too much money. We were very product driven.

There has been a lot of brouhaha over Google's Merissa Mayer, vice-president of product management for search (entry on Google's corporate page, Wikipedia entry), and her comment about academics (link to Feb 28 '09 story in The New York Times that started it, where it is reported she commented during an internal meeting, "That’s troubling to me. Good students are good at all things." when looking at a candidate's resume who had a 'C' in macroeconomics, and how her own achievements in other spheres has been less than glowing (she ran the Portland Marathon, in which she placed 7,074th out of 7,862 contestants. Or the Birkebeiner ski race, in which she placed dead last in the women's competition). The blogosphere and tech media went into a feeding frenzy over this (a search on Google.com yields more than 3,000 results as of March 15 2009). So this comment by Evan is, let's say, interesting...

Even when I was in school, I’d try to make up alternative solutions to math problems. When I was at Google, they had this huge focus on academia. Grades were super-important. Getting good grades at a good school is one filter of brains, but it might also suggest you like following rules.

This statement below is so so true, cannot stress this enough.

One thing that I used to be bad at was paying attention to how other people are feeling. So when problems came up with some of my coworkers, it totally surprised me. That stuff shouldn’t surprise you, and it did.

Joel Spolsky, Cofounder, Fog Creek Software If you have spent any length of time on the web, and if you are remotely aware of the world of software, chances are you would have come across Joel Spolsky's blog at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ If you haven't, I would suggest you spend a bit of time on the blog. It's opinionated, but informative. Take a look at these posts:
Camels and Rubber Duckies
How Microsoft Lost the API War
And in general just read through the posts collected under lists like "Top 10", "New Developer", "Rock Star Developer", "CEO", "Program Manager", etc...
He doesn't think much of liberal arts majors, something that comes across in several of his blogs as well as in the book:

There was a period in the late ’90s when starting companies was just a slamdunk, no-brainer kind of thing. The people that were going public with $100 million valuations were punk kids [who] just graduated from college and knew nothing about anything. There were some really bad implementations of very pedestrian ideas, and we thought we could do a lot better.

If you have wondered about the fascination that people have with products companies, as opposed to services companies, this is a nice explanation:

“That’s nice, but consulting is a business where your revenue is just a multiple of the number of people you can hire. Software is a business where your revenue can grow much faster than the people you hire.”
... So the idea was that the consulting would grow linearly with the number of people as you hired more good people that you could rent out as consultants, and the software business would grow like the hockey curve because, at some point when it took off, you wouldn’t actually have to hire new people. You could just make more copies of the software you were selling.
That was the theory. Realistically, it didn’t work, but we were able to suspend disbelief for long enough to start the company.

Knowledge is power. Joel argues that knowledge of what your competitors are doing is not power. Debatable, and certainly so if taken as dogma.

I remember thinking that, no matter what we knew that the competitors were doing, the information was completely useless to us. It never really changed what we were doing. If it’s like, “The competitors are going to do feature x,” well, if that’s such a good feature to do, why aren’t we hearing about it from our customers?

A lot of ink and internet bandwidth has been spent on debating whether the cogs in the wheel, the nobodys, the programmers, should have offices, or should they be herded into cubicles, the likes of which Dilbert is forever condemned to vegetating in.

What was astonishing at the time was that none of these companies were making any effort whatsoever to make the work environment pleasant and to treat the people that they were hiring with enough respect that they would be able to attract people.
...
Things that to us are basic: Aeron chairs; private offices with doors that close for every programmer; letting programmers report to other programmers, so that your boss will understand you. We had 4 weeks of vacation and another week of holidays, which you can move I think.

Microsoft has provided offices, with doors that shut, to its developers for the longest time I can remember. I recall visiting a friend's office, who worked at Microsoft, where he had this small office, independent office, with a door that shut, so he had privacy and quiet in which to work. Yes he could have surfed the NFL site, but people will do that even when seated in cubicles. Because everyone else is doing the same. Because that's what people feel they have to do to get back at the faceless, heartless borg of a company they work for. Which is sad.

Philip Greenspun, Cofounder, ArsDigita
If you have had any interest in photography, and have surfed the web in search for information, you would know of the popular photography site, www.photo.net, run by Phil Greenspun. He also wrote a series of articles, a story plus photo log, had strong opinions on certain things. His company, ArsDigita, is mentioned a lot in the book, by Joel Spolsky, so either way this chapter should be interesting.
Just as management literature talks about the core competence of corporations, and what your strategic advantage is, Greenspun talks about how companies are good at hiring and keeping one type of employees that are good, really good.

People used to say, “Why should we pay you guys $30,000 to $50,000 a month to do this thing, when we can just hire our own programmer?” What I would tell them is, “Each company has one class of stars. In some companies maybe it’s the salespeople, and in some companies maybe it’s the mechanical engineers. There’s going to be one class of people for whom it’s really easy to hire more people like that.” Hospitals are a good example. If it’s a good hospital, the doctors will be good, and it’s very easy for them to hire good doctors. But it’s hard for them to hire any other kind of person.

I have maintained that if you cannot explain something then you don't know it. It doesn't have to be in English, if English is not your first language. Use Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Punjabi, Bangala, Marathi, Gujarati, Telugu, Hyderabadi Hindi, 'Bambaiyaa' Hindi, Sanskrit, or a mix of whatever languages you know. But you have to be able to explain it. If you can't then you don't.

People don’t like to write. It’s hard. The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn’t write.

In the current state of the economy, with so much opprobrium heaped upon bankers, this particular bit should come as no surprise to us that underwriters too are no different. This is what underwriters told Greenspun when he went to them asking to take his company public, being profitable and making money and all...

They said, “We get paid a percentage of the deal. The more deals we do, the more money we get paid. If we want to take you public, we’d have to waste a lot of time doing due diligence. We would have to look at your accounting and talk to your customers. We would have to convince ourselves that you were a good company.”
...
“No, with all the other companies, we just look at the names of the venture capitalists who’ve backed them, and if it’s a big name like Kleiner Perkins, we just take the company public without doing any research. We have no idea what these companies do, we have no idea who their customers are or if they’re satisfied. We don’t do any research. We just take them public and take our fee. So in the same time it would take to take you public, we could do five or six of these VC-backed companies. Sorry, we’re not interested.”

VCs are people with money. Sometimes they also happen to be very smart people with lots of money. But mostly they tend to be people who have lots of money, but not very smart. But it is not right to think of rich people as being dumb. Mostly it so happens that people are at the right place at the right time, and they get rich when everyone around them is getting rich too. So after they have all this money, they start believing, 'I have so much money, I must be smart.' And other people think, 'He has all this money, he must be smart'. Greenspun had a different perspective with the VCs who were running his company:

Livingston: Didn’t you also insult them by describing publicly what it was like to have VCs run your company?
Greenspun: Only after they sued me. I said it was like watching a kindergarten class get into a Boeing 747 and flip all the switches and try to figure out why it won’t take off. That was before I got my pilot’s license. Now I know how apt it was.

Steve Perlman, Cofounder, WebTV Using WebTV you could surf the internet using your television. This was sold to Microsoft for some US$500 million. What Microsoft did with it is now known. Except that they couldn't make a success out of it. Maybe it was an idea ahead of its time. Streaming internet, or what Netflix is doing, by streaming DVDs to your television via the internet is really what the concept of WebTV was about, albeit in a different manner, and in a different context, and with the technical limitations that existed then.

There is a huge amount of research that suggests that not getting enough sleep can affect your performance.
However... to hear Steve tell it:

What I would typically do is not sleep for 2 nights; then I would get 4 hours of sleep and go back to work for another 2 days in a row, and then get 4 hours, and so on.
It was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life. Sometimes I’d take 10-minute cat naps by just laying my head down on my shoulders—just so I’d get some REMs. As soon as the dreams come, it resets your brain a little bit and you’re able to work again.

Yes - it is quite possible to work on something for hours on end, till you lose sight of what time of the day or night it is, and I certainly can attest to that. However, what is plain indisputable is how long you can do that without completely freezing up. I maintain that while in the short term it can be incredibly productive, when your train of thought is running at a breakneck speed, and your body, overdosed with caffeine and sugar, is able to keep up with the mind, and you can get done in hours what would otherwise take days, or in the hands of the incompetent, forever and then some more, you cannot keep that up for any reasonable length of time. You HAVE to take a break, to recharge. Different people have different thresholds. It depends on the task. It depends on the motivation. It depends on who you are working with. And many other things. But at the end of the day, what it comes down to is denial - you know your productivity is slacking off, you are getting sloppy, making mistakes you otherwise wouldn't, yet are unwilling to acknowledge it. Or if you do, you dismiss it by saying something like 'this is just a blip, I need a stronger cup of coffee' or something to that effect.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
# By: Jessica Livingston
# ISBN10: 1-4302-1078-8
# ISBN13: 978-1-4302-1078-8
# 488 pp.
# Published Sep 2008
# Price: $17.99
# eBook Price: $12.59
APRESS.COM : Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days : 9781430210788



Books on Larry Ellison:

• Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison
• Difference Between God And Larry Ellison*, The *god Doesn't Think He's Larry E: *god Doesn't Think He's Larry Ellison / Inside Oracle Corporation
• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle

Winning Through Intimidation

Winning Through Intimidation

No - this book won't teach you how to act like an asshole to get what you want. But it does talk a lot of how you can get screwed by assholes if you think the world is a nice place, that being nice will get you ahead, and that other people will put you first before themselves, and your interests first. This book however does tell you a lot about how people in the real world operate, what their priorities are, what your goal should be, how to recognize these people, how to counter-act and win against them.

At first glance it may appear that the book is essentially negative in tone and outlook. After all, it tells you that people are basically rotten at the core, will screw you to get ahead, and do so with no compunctions. I.e., these people are the intimidators. You are the intimidatee. That the only way to counter this to become an intimidator yourself. To get the advantage you need by dressing right, by acting like you know it, and by impressing people into submission. Shock-and-awe. That's not really the kind of message that we need to learn, right? Given so much negativity and cynicism around so do we really need a book to reinforce this?
But look at the other side also. The author says that this is reality. He insists that this is the real world, and if we ignore this reality, we do so at our own peril. We may not like it, we may not accept it, and we do not need to respond to it, but we do so at considerable risk to our financial and emotional well-being. If you want to talk the talk, you had better be prepared to walk it too. The author also makes it clear that you do need to follow up on the dressing and the talking with action. You need to put in the hard work to be prepared. And mostly, the author tries to put it across to the reader that you need to be paid for your efforts. Attaboy, great job, well done, you're a star, amazing - hype is fine, but it doesn't pay the bills. If you work, make sure you get paid. There's nothing wrong in that. The book's tone may appear negative, but the message, I believe, I submit to you, is essentially positive.

• Mass Market Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Fawcett (November 12, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449207862
• ISBN-13: 978-0449207864

The earlier chapters are by far the most enjoyable and educational. Each of the author's learning experiences is presented in the form of a lesson taught by a 'professor' at a school, 'Screw U.'. Yes.

...the bottom line was getting paid. ... Closing deals is not the name of the game; it's only a means to an end. One's exit strategy must be focused on walking away with chips in one's hand. In every area of life-whether business or personal-getting paid is the bottom line.

How do you intimidate? Why do you intimidate? The answer to the second question is easy. To win. Mostly it is about winning money. If you treat the game as a zero-sum game, wherein if the other guy gets ten rupees, it means ten rupees less for you, then it is clear that you have to win to make sure those ten rupees land in your wallet and not his. Where it is not about money you are dealing with psychopaths and sociopaths, and that is not the purpose of the book - to teach you how to deal with socially maladjusted psychos. As for the first question, the answer is you intimidate by pretending to have an attribute of superiority over your opponent.

At the top of the list of master intimidators disguised as (self anointed) saints are chest-pounding critics, syndicated columnists, and TV commentators, ever on the alert for an opportunity to seize the moral high ground. [page 2]

Judging from the way most people talk and act, one is led to wonder if a resistance to reality is genetically programmed into a majority of the human species. [page 4]

Work is not its own reward, the author is quick to point out. Nor is it enough to have the belief that if you work, all good things shall come to you. No. That rarely happens.

Like millions of other people, I, too, fell into the trap of believing that my great reward would ultimately come if I just focused on working hard and displaying a positive mental attitude. [page 7]
I myself had a masochistic tendency to focus on the other person,s best interest, particularly in business dealings, naively clinging to the belief that my benevolent attitude would be appreciated and that I would be handsomely rewarded. [page 17]

If winning is so important, why hasn't the market seen a zillion books on the topic. Books that actually work.

I concluded that there were a number of reasons why successful people, as well as authors of many self-help books, tend to espouse unworkable solutions. These include, among others:
1. Success has a tendency to breed self-righteousness, [page 8, 9]
3. Finally, many authors of business, self-help, and motivation books deliberately withhold, for commercial reasons, the realities of what it takes to succeed. It's much easier, and far more popular, to sell success myths...

If someone cheats you, is he being dishonest? Per the author, honesty and dishonesty are RELATIVE.

I now understood that a person could only be honest or dishonest relative to the facts in a given situation, or relative to some individual's personal moral standards. [page 19]
Note that I did not say that honesty is not relevant, but that a discussion of honesty is not relevant. [page 21]

I had long before concluded that all members of the Discouragement Fraternity had two things in common: (1) Because they were insecure, they feared competition, and (2) they were ferocious about protecting their turf.
...
Battles are for ego-trippers; wars are for money-grippers. [page 27]

When it comes to winning, usually the person who is the best equipped to win shall win. That may mean the person who is the most knowledgeable, or the most skilled. Right? Yes, sort of. Because, as the author contends, people will often pretend to be something they aren't. Like being knowledgable. But what they will have, and use to maximize their advantage in the battle of winning, is the ability to pretend that they have these skills. Learn to recognize that.

Don't allow yourself to be intimidated by someone else's knowledge-or apparent knowledge. [page 35]

Think about it for a moment. Everyone wants to position themselves such that they can extract the best possible deal for themselves. A student does the same during a placement interview. A recruiter does the same, when speaking to a company or to a prospective employee. A broker will do the same. When he speaks with the owner he will profess an absolute paucity of prospective tenants, finding a hundred faults with your property, its location, its amenities, the rent the owner expects. When speaking with a prospective tenant he will mention half a dozen tenants waiting to move into the property tomorrow and at a higher rental than what you are asking for. Advertisers do the same for their clients. An investment firm will commission those ads that make it appear that they are as fond of you as your grandmother, are as doting, and as eager to make sure you can retire into that golden sunset that you have always dreamed of. What they will rarely say is that they want your money, all of it, at any cost, legal or what they can get away with, and will lie, deceive, flatter, cajole, obfuscate, intimidate, and in general do whatever it takes for you to part with your money. Your interests and goals - what you want and need - are secondary. The suits they wear are meant to convey authority. The glistening buildings with the Italian marble flooring is meant to indicate they are well enough without your money, thank you, so you are doing yourself a favour by writing them a check. The titles - vice president, super president, head of global investor screwups, and what not - are meant to convey that the bank values you soooo very very much that they will not have any nobody talk to you because they respect and value you sooo very much. But more on banks later.

This below is the title of a chapter. Yes. Really. Basically, there are people who say they are going to screw you. And do. Then there are those who will screw you, but won't tell that at the outset, but will screw you anyways. And then there are the third type:

Type number three is sincerely sorry that he grabbed your chips, but the result is just the same as if he were glad [page 40]

The second type are the most dangerous, so to say. The ones who say they are saints, but turn out to be satan. "Devil in disguise", as Elvis once sang.

...spent an inordinate amount of time expounding on the virtues of dealing only with people who possessed buckets of integrity and the highest ethical standards-like himself, for example-an almost sure sign that the person with whom you are speaking is a rapist, murderer, or/ worst of all, an unethical real estate developer. [page 64]

One of the most important weapons that all wealthy people have at their disposal is staying power.
...
... under the circumstances, he would be leaving for the airport right away to try to catch an earlier flight back to New York. It was an eye-opening experience to witness a professional intimidator in action.
...
It was painful to witness sort of like watching a lion devour a gazelle on one of those animal shows on TV-but very educational. [page 58, 59, 60]

Interesting that the author states that there seems to be an inverse relationship between how much a person professes to be a saint and how much he is actually an honest person. I read this in Bob Sutton's blog today:

My hypothesis is that the longer a code of ethics in a company, the more likely they are too be sleazeballs. As I've heard my father-in-law say many times, when people talk about ethics and morals more than seems necessary, his impulse is hide the good silverware. [The Enron Code of Ethics: Something Every Boss Should Read]

How do you succeed? By sheer dint of work. Right? Well... maybe. But know that most successful people don't really become successful that way. There are exceptions. Yes. But these are exceptions. Which is why they are exceptions. Not the rule.

If one aspires to great accomplishments/ he must recognize that the quickest way to the top is not by fighting his way through the pack, but by leapfrogging over it.
[page 87]

Image is everything. Style over substance.

It's not what you say or do that counts, but what your posture is when you say or do it. [page 89]

Do you really care what people think about you? Because if you do, then be prepared for penury. The author says you can either be liked and be a johnny-do-gooder who will be liked, yes, but not respected, and certainly not rich. Because you will be trampled all over by the 'intimidators' who will walk all over you, or worse and more likely, devour you like a hyena that chases down a deer and eats it, bones, skin, meat, all. Except in real life, you will suffer deaths-by-hyenas again and again. Ewww.

Being liked was not much of a reward for being poor and disrespected. By the same token, money and respect were more than enough consolation for having a pack of insecure neurotics dislike me. [page 93]

In every area of life-whether business or personal-getting paid is the bottom line. If you think this applies only to real estate brokerage, you missed the book. In that event/ return to page one immediately and start reading again-slowly this time. [page 223]

Several chapters, starting with Ch 10, "Using Posture to Get the Ball", essentially describe, in some detail, how the author used his learnings from 'Screw U.' to be the 'intimidator', and make a tidy pile of money in the real-estate business. The metaphor used is football, American Football, so phrases like outfield, midfield, touchdown, etc... are liberally sprinkled. Sort of similar to football, but not quite. Real estate dealings are described in detail, so it may or may not interest you that much. If you plod through the chapters, handle the non-stop self-adulatory back-slapping, and the decidedly 1970s cartoons, you may be able to abstract out lessons to apply in other situations. You will notice that a lot of the lessons have to deal with being prepared, doing your homework, and other old-fashioned principles involving hard work. Pity, no magic mantra, astra, or silver bullet here.

In every area of life-whether business or personal-getting paid is the bottom line. If you think this applies only to real estate brokerage, you missed the book. In that event/ return to page one immediately and start reading again-slowly this time. [page 223]

The book is a quarter century old. That it is still mostly relevant is a huge credit to the book.

On the topic of people who can be defined more by the size of their posterior cavities, the first book in the list below is one of my favourites, while the second book is an excellent primer on understanding how other people get you to do what they want, and how to recognize those signs. There are likely many more books that could be added to the list, but it is a sign of my abject literary ignorance that I do not know about those books. Maybe what I should do is search the web for a list of books that sound authoritative, and list them here. That would make me appear more knowledgeable. And thereby place me in a position to intimidate others.
Because, consider this. Most people would not have read most of the books listed on the page. Yet they will not admit that. Yet will act like they have, and therefore are far more erudite than you. So if you list books that you have read, and not those that you want others to believe you have, then your list is almost always going to be shorter than the other guy's list.

• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Beware The Busy Manager

Weekend reading yielded this mildly interesting and somewhat insightful though not all together surprising article from the Harvard Business Review, written by the late Sumantra Ghoshal and Heike Bruch.

• HBR link
• Amazon link:Beware the Busy Manager (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)
  

Plotting managers on the two axes of focus and energy, the authors come up with a two-by-two matrix, where managers are slotted into one of four types based on where they are placed on these attributes (of focus and energy). Their contention is that busyness is not necessarily a good thing, because it may leave managers with little time for introspection and the thinking that is needed to plan ahead on a strategic level.

                               Focus                          
                Low                  High
Energy:   Low    Procrastinators      Disengaged  
Energy:   High   Distracted           Purposeful

The authors contend that many managers tend to confuse activity with work.

In short, you'll see an astonishing amount of fast-moving activity that allows almost no time for reflection.
They think they're attending to pressing matters, but they're really just spinning their wheels.

Procrastinators: 30% People often procrastinate when they feel insecure or fear failure.
Other procrastinators coast along in the chronically passive state that psychologist Martin Seligman called "leamed helplessness."

The biggest waste for a company, in my opinion, is to have any employees who fall into the 'Disengaged' category, because these are people with high focus but are not motivated enough to put any meaningful sort of energy into achieving their own professional and corporate goals.

Disengaged: 20% Many managers in this group practice a form of denial we call "defensive avoidance": Rather than acknowledging a problem and taking steps to correct it, they convince themselves that the problem doesn't exist
...
Disengaged managers tend to be extremely tense. That's hardly surprising, for they are often plagued by feelings of anxiety, uncertainty, anger, frustration, and alienation. They deal with those emotions by withdrawing and doing the bare minimum, which make the situations worse. Despite their low levels of energy, these managers suffer from bumout far more frequently than their colleagues do.

It should come as no surprise that those with low focus but high energy, or the ones I would call the 'active clueless', are the largest in number, at 40%. Roughly half of all managers fall into this category. Not only do we all know such managers, it won't be difficult to look in the mirror and recognize that we, at some point or the other, also have fallen victim to this behavior. A crisis looms, and a frenzy of activity ensues. "Do something, anything". An angry missive from the boss, and everyone snaps to attention and then panic. "If I am seen doing something **now** I won't be seen as having done nothing when it really would have mattered."

Distracted: 40% When they're under pressure, distracted managers feel a desperate need to do something-anything. That makes them as dangerous as the proverbial bull in a china shop.

One in ten really know what to do and do it with diligence.

Purposeful: 10%
One reason that purposeful managers are so effective is that they are adept at husbanding energy. Aware of the value of time, they manage it carefully. Some refuse to respond to e-mails, phone calls, or visitors outside certain periods of the day. Others build "think time" into their schedules.

Sumantra Ghoshal (1948-2004) was a management guru and an academic par excellence. His best known book is 'Managing Across Borders', which the Financial Times called one of the best 50 management books of all time.

• Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution
• Transnational Management: Text, Cases And Readings in Cross-Border Management
• The Future of the Multinational Company
• Transnational Management: Text, Cases And Readings in Cross-Border Management

Coorg and Dubare Elephant Camp

The Dubare Elephant camp is located in the district of Coorg (Britannica link), now called Kodagu, in the state of Karnataka, in south India. The district of Coorg is spread over 4,100 sq kms, and comprises of three taluks: Madikeri, Somwarpet and Virajpet. A taluk (तालुक), in case you were wondering, is also called a tehsil (तैहसील), and is an administrative division, comprising of a town and surrounding villages and towns. 30 percent of the district is forest area. Its population as per 1991 census is 4,85,229, which gives it a rather sparse population density of 137 persons per square kilometer, about two-fifths of the average population density of India, which is 350 persons per sq km.

Thank you very much for the geography lesson. What about the elephant camp?

You can watch elephants. You can watch elephants bathe. You can bathe elephants. You can watch other people bath elephants. You can ride elephants. How about that?

Per the Jungle Lodges web site, their page on Dubare has this to say:

"The Karnataka Forest Department has about 150 Elephants in various camps and Dubare has been historically an important camp. The Elephants for the famous Mysore Dassehra were trained at Dubare elephant camp. But presently after logging operations have ceased, the Forest Department does not really know what to do with all its elephants! They (elephants) have been practically retired except for giving some rides to odd tourists. At the same time, the Forest Department spends quite some money to maintain them and their mahouts. "

And Wikipedia has this to say (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dubare):

"Dubare Elephant Camp is located on the banks of River Kaveri (Cauveri) in the district of Kodagu (Coorg), Karnataka. The Karnataka Forest Department has about 150 Elephants in various camps and Dubare has been historically an important camp"

Ok, so how does one get there?
Let's map it. It works for Kaplan and Norton, so it should work for us too.

View Larger Map. Overview map of the route: Bangalore to Mysore to Dubare

In the map above you can see Bangalore and Mysore. To go to Dubare, from Bangalore, you need to go towards Mysore. Actually all the way to Mysore. Basically, if you are traveling from out of Bangalore, and are flying in, then also Bangalore should serve as a good beachhead from where to make all such road trips. From Bangalore to the Dubare camp is roughly a 240 km drive, depending on where you start counting the miles from. The drive should take you between 4-6 hours, depending on what time of the day you do the drive, how fast you are willing to go, how many breaks you take, and other factors.

Traveling by road, you can either waft through Mysore, catch the sights of the city, and proceed out of the city towards Dubare. Or, if you want to bypass the city, you can take the Outer Ring Road, and skirt the city completely. It saves time.


The Bangalore-Mysore highway, SH17, in Srirangapatna.

See the map below. Coming from Bangalore, you will most likely take the superb Bangalore-Mysore four-lane highway, SH-17. A few kilometers after Srirangapatna, which not only boasts of the 1000 year old Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple but is famous as a historical town and capital of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, and just before you enter the town of Mysore, you come across a large four way intersection. You need to make a right at this intersection to take the Outer Ring Road. If confused, or lost, or just plain need to make sure you are indeed on the right path, simply stop and ask for directions. This could be a pedestrian, or a cyclist, or a chai-coffee stall owner. You will need to take at least one left turn at an intersection, and one right turn after that. You will join the highway again, or the Hunsur highway, which is a pretty good stretch of road, which should allow you to do 100kph, provided the traffic allows for it.

View Larger Map Map of Mysore and surrounding area with markers for route to take.

After exiting Mysore, the Hunsur highway for some 20-30 kilometers is a very well paved four-lane divided highway.




You then take SH88, towards Kushalnagar, and proceed on it for some 50-60kms, and then follow the signs to the Dubare camp.

As you can see, SH88 is not a divided highway, so you have to watch out for trucks and other vehicles that may decide to overtake each other, in which case you may well be staring down the barrel of a ten tonne truck hurtling down straight at you at 80kph. Apply your knowledge of school physics, especially the parts dealing with momentum (P=mV, which means that momentum is equal to the product of mass and velocity), and you would do well to avoid getting a refresher course in physics and Newton's Third Law.

Otherwise the road itself is very good to allow for comfortable high speed driving.


The further away from the concrete jungles you get, the lusher the greenery, the older the trees, and pleasanter the drive. This banyan tree below must be a hundred years old or thereabouts.




More driving on SH88


More driving on SH88, towards the Hunsur bypass



Elephant, somewhere in the Coorg district.

At Dubare


This is the Dubare Inn, by the Cauvery river. Across the river is the Dubare elephant camp.



On the other side of the river. The Yamaha powered boats take a minute or two to cross the Cauvery river to ferry you to this side of the river.


Around 9AM or so, you can see the first elephant make its way to the river, with the mahout leading him in.


The elephant loves it. Drinks some water, poops a bit, and then plops into the water to bathe and simply relax.


And oh yes, the appearance of the elephant is followed by the appearance of humans. Gawking humans. Indians, foreigners, adults, children, all.



And even more people. And more elephants. Adult elephants, calves, all.


Soon, elephants and humans are both in the river.


Then the bathing begins. And the photography. And the posing.


Ignore the chain. The elephants seem to.


The mahouts do make it a point to give a good scrubbing down to the elephants. Which this tusker above evidently is enjoying to the fullest.


Cleaning the ears is important.



This is where you climb up, wait for the elephant to appear, and then climb on top of the elephant. You are taken for a short fifteen minute ride.

The Making of An Expert

The Making of an Expert - HBR.org, from the July–August 2007 issue of HBR, by by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely is an excellent article that deserves to be read, re-read, and passed on to as many people as you can.

"New research shows that outstanding performance is the product of years of deliberate practice and coaching, not of any innate talent or skill."

This does seem very obvious, doesn't it? Yes, to some extent. We all have been taught about the virtues of hard work, dedication, and practice. Kabir had this to say: "karat karat abhiyaas ke, jadmat hot sujan, rasarii aavat jaat se sila par parat nishaan .. " ("करत करत अभियास के, जड़मत होत् सुजान, रसरी आवत जात से सिला पर परत निशाँ .. ")

But what this article does is to tell us that hard work is not enough by itself. And that how much hard work do you need? Why does practice by itself not produce the desired results? If you need help, what kind of help do you need?

"Current research has revealed many other fields where there is no scientific evidence that supposed expertise leads to superior performance."

Huh? Yes, you read that right. Wine tasting is one such example. If you were among those that believed that this self-concocted myth about skills involved in wine tasting is nothing more than the creation of a bunch of self-styled fatuous experts, it should not come as a surprise that in a wine tasting competition organized in 1976, "the experts often mistook the American wines for French wines and vice versa."

What does true expertise really mean? How do you go about becoming an expert?
Firstly, according to the authors,

"Real expertise must pass three tests. First, it must lead to performance that is consistently superior to that of the expert’s peers. Second, real expertise produces concrete results. Brain surgeons, for example, not only must be skillful with their scalpels but also must have successful outcomes with their patients. A chess player must be able to win matches in tournaments. Finally, true expertise can be replicated and measured in the lab."

I think that the first two points are pretty much one and the same. Superior performance and concrete results are more or less the same, wouldn't you agree? A brain surgeon, if he is skilled with his scalpel, and produces successful outcomes with his patients, would be thought of as having performance superior to his peers, especially if he does so that is more consistent than his peers.

Then,

"You need a particular kind of practice – deliberate practice – to develop expertise. When most people practice, they focus on the things they already know how to do. Deliberate practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well – or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.

This kind of deliberate practice can be adapted to developing business and leadership expertise."

This - deliberate practice - for me is they key to becoming an expert. My favorite example is from the Mahabharat, the great Indian epic. The great guru, Drona, took the Pandavas under his wing, and started training them to become skilled warriors. Arjuna, the third of the Pandavas, was a skilled archer, and Drona wanted to make him the greatest archer ever. One night, as Arjuna was eating his dinner, a wind blew out the candle and Arjuna's hut was plunged in darkness. But, he did not stop eating. By force of habit, his hand was able to find its way to his mouth, even in complete darkness. This is also pretty much true for most of us - we can, usually, rely on our hand to find its way to the mouth, darkness or not. Coordination of muscles here is something that is almost so effortless as to be considered reflexive. It was then that Arjuna realized that if he could train himself to eat in complete darkness, even without realizing it, he could train himself to become the world's best archer.

But how much practice, for how long???

"By now it will be clear that it takes time to become an expert. Our research shows that even the most gifted performers need a minimum of ten years (or 10,000 hours) of intense training before they win international competitions."

Yikes! Yes - you read that right. 10,000 hours. Let's break that up. Say, if you practice something, with diligence, dedication, and focus, four hours a day, five days a week, it works out to 4 x 5 = 20 hours a week. Do it for 50 weeks a year, allowing for breaks. That gets you to 1,000 hours. Do this for 10 years, and you have 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours, or ten years - whichever way you look at it, the cost is there for you to see.

But, look at the flip side too. If you can find it in yourself to work at something you choose for so long, with the dedication required, and with the honesty it calls for, it is pretty much an unmatched barrier to entry (to use a strategy phrase). The number of people who can then compete with you at that level could be measured in tens or hundreds, out of hundreds of thousands or even millions who are in that same profession. And as we all know, economics students or not, price is a function, linear or not, of supply. And the supply of super-skilled professionals is extremely limited. The prices for their expertise is, by corollary, high. Think of the price an expert brain surgeon or very successful lawyer can command.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, champion bodybuilder, never had calf muscles that were as toned, as developed, and as awe inspiring as his biceps. This is a relative assessment, mind you. His calves had more musculature and more definition than most people in the world, but when compared with the competition, they were only average. He set out to work on them, and a year later, he had calves that could stand up to the best in the business. When asked about how to build such muscles, his response was, "500 hours". That's the time it took him to work, regularly, with dedication, to turn his calves into trophy winning pieces of musculature.

Practice can make you a skilled archer. It can even make you charismatic. Yes.
"

Genuine experts not only practice deliberately but also think deliberately.
...
It’s very easy to neglect deliberate practice.
...
So charisma can be learned through deliberate practice.
...
Deliberate practice involves two kinds of learning: improving the skills you already have and extending the reach and range of your skills. The enormous concentration required to undertake these twin tasks limits the amount of time you can spend doing them.
...
Deliberate practice was a key to his success. “Practice puts brains in your muscles,” he (Snead) said.
“
...
If we analyze the development of the well-known artists, we see that in almost every case the success of their entire career was dependent on the quality of their practicing. In practically every case, the practicing was constantly supervised either by the teacher or an assistant to the teacher.” Research on world-class performers has confirmed Galamian’s observation. It also has shown that future experts need different kinds of teachers at different stages of their development.
"

गुरु देवो भवः
What this says is that apart from dedicated and targeted practice you also need a guru. Take the case of Arjuna again. When Arjuna realized the importance of practice, Drona stepped forward, and told Arjuna that he was going to make him the world's best archer. So Arjuna, at a point in his life when he needed it most, got the best guru that an aspiring archer could have asked for. The role of a guru is so vital and important in the context of Indian culture, that the example of Eklavya has become legend too. He became as good an archer as Arjuna, or perhaps a better one, by practicing in front of an idol of Drona. Why Drona refused to take Eklavya as his disciple in the first place, and what happened with Eklavya and the guru-dakshina he had to give, is another story, with different lessons.

"
Your ability to attain expert performance is clearly constrained if you have fewer opportunities to engage in deliberate practice, and this is far from a trivial constraint. The best coaches also identify aspects of your performance that will need to be improved at your next level of skill."
...
Before practice, opportunity, and luck can combine to create expertise, the would-be expert needs to demythologize the achievement of top-level performance, because the notion that genius is born, not made, is deeply ingrained.
"

"
Expertise is not captured by knowledge management systems. Knowledge management systems rarely, if ever, deal with what psychologists call knowledge. They are repositories of images, documents, and routines: external data that people can view and interpret as they try to solve a problem or make a decision. There are no shortcuts to gaining true expertise.
"

True. Very true. Where KM systems do help is by providing in a single place materials that are relevant to the pursuit of gaining expertise. They make available a whole range of documents, images, papers, discussions, and more that a person could peruse and over time acquire expertise. This assumes of course the preconditions the authors outline in their paper: dedicated practice, and mentoring.

Books such as Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else, Outliers: The Story of Success, and The Myth of Multitasking: How "Doing It All" Gets Nothing Done supposedly cover the same topic. I have yet to read any of these books, but will blog about them once I have, if I have.

The one book that the article cites is The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, which is a compilation of studies "based on rigorous research that looked at exceptional performance using scientific methods that are verifiable and reproducible. ... The 900-page-plus handbook includes contributions from more than 100 leading scientists who have studied expertise and top performance in a wide variety of domains: surgery, acting, chess, writing,computer programming, ballet, music, aviation, firefighting, and many others."