Abhinav Agarwal

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The unkindest cut of all

Just reading this will make most wince.
This is a public service poster by the family planning department, advertising the benefits of male sterilization. Shot in the holy city of Kurukshetra.

For those who can't read this, it is a public service hoarding on male sterilization. And to make it more, shall we say, palatable? to men, it promises to do so without any tear or stitch. Like that's going to make men feel any better.

© 2010, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Borders Bookstore

The Borders Bookstore in Burlington, Massachusetts, USA.

Borders Bookstore, Burlington, Massachusetts, USA

Borders Bookstore, View Larger Map

Some of the books visible in this photo below:
Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
The Zeroes: My Misadventures in the Decade Wall Street Went Insane
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

The most prominent book on this shelf is Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India by William Dalrymple.

Books featured in the photos:

© 2010, Abhinav Agarwal. All rights reserved.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

HBR - Are you High Potential

From the June 2010 issue of the Harvard Business Review comes this article, Are You a High Potential? This is a very useful and informative article, not to mention well-written and well-argued. It does leave out, by choice perhaps, given the constraints of space, several important issues germane to such a discussion on high-potential employees, but that is not to detract from the article to begin with. The article offers a brief introduction into "high-potential" employees, what it takes to get on the list, how to stay on, and the pitfalls there in. Interspersed into this discussion are a few vignettes of people who got on to the list, who could not make it to the list, who got on and then off the list.

Lists exist.

A broad definition of a high-potential employee seems to exist at most companies.

...to become a high-potential employee, you need to "Deliver strong results - credibly", "Master new types of expertise", and "Recognize that behavior counts"

Do companies have any kind of formal process for evaluating high performers to determine whether they should be on the "high-potential" list? Is this list compiled as a collaborative process? In consultation with other senior management staff? If a list exists, but is formulated in relative secrecy, then the list is open to the accusation that it is more a compilation of an executive's "favorites" than an accurate compilation of a company's best high-potential performers. A large company typically has several groups that function in relative isolation from each other. Do the executives from one group know about the high-potentials from other groups? Do they need to know? Should they?

Our research makes clear that high potential talent lists exist, whether or not companies acknowledge them and whether the process for developing them is formal or informal.

Early in your career, getting noticed is all about mastering the technical expertise that the job requires. As you progress, you need to broaden that expertise. You start by managing an employee or a small group, and then move on to larger teams and positions (for instance, at corporate headquarters) that require you to exercise influence despite having limited formal authority.

And very importantly,

At a certain point, you will face the challenge of letting go as much as the challenge of adding on.

Haven't we all met or known several people who could not let go, so to say, of their technical expertise? Often it is because of a fear of the unknown. Management and soft-skills, that are required to succeed beyond a certain point in companies, are the unknown, and there is a suspicion of the value of these skills. Employees often see soft-skills as no-skills. Or they interact with a manager, early on in their careers, who embodies the worst of management, and generalize their assessment of that one manager to paint all of management with that one brush. There are a few, very few, who are able to walk that fine line between technical detail oriented-ness and general management skills. The danger is that young employees look at these people, and think that that is the only model to adopt. Forgetting that these role models are exceedingly difficult to emulate. Having impossibly high goals may make you work that much harder, and may also work that much more to motivate you, but you also risk a high chance of failure, and the resulting loss of motivation.

Outstanding skills never really diminish in importance, but they become a given as you are expected to excel in roles with broader reach. Prospective candidates for that coveted high-potential label must demonstrate a behavioral shift from “fit and affiliation” to “role model and teacher.”

What if everything you can do is not everything you need to do? What if after doing everything, and everything right, you still do not seem to fall into that much-aspired high-potential category? Seek the X-factors out.

A drive to excel

A catalytic learning capability.
They have the capacity to scan for new ideas, the cognitive capability to absorb them, and the common sense to translate that new learning into productive action for their customers and their organizations."

An enterprising spirit

Dynamic sensors

And finally, everything is transient.

For starters, there’s no tenure. People can—and do—fall off the list...
Among the reasons for losing a spot on the high potential list are making a poor transition into a new role, diminished performance two years in a row, behavior that’s out of line with the company’s culture and values, and a significant visible failure.

Advertising - objectification

When advertising, it often helps to dehumanize, inadvertently of course, and objectify an entire class of people. Think fairness creams and how they almost dehumanize the dark-skinned.
In this case, the ad for Durex condoms, plastered on the Garuda Mall in Bangalore, is aimed at achieving a sexual objectification of females. The pusillanimous will surely point out that the ad attracted attention and aided brand recall, which is the aim of most advertising, so what's wrong with it? Others will take refuge in the claim that the ad is not meant to appeal to everyone, and that it is "edgy", "pushes the envelope", and if it offends anyone they are, well, jolly well free to look elsewhere.

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Kindle for the Web

Amazon has launched a Web based version of their Kindle reading app (read more at Kindle for the Web). This one works from a regular browser, and does not require any download. The funny thing is that the button to read a free chapter from a book requires you to be on the non-Kindle page of that book.

If you are on The Girl Who Played with Fire, you see the button labeled "Read first chapter FREE" in the green box (see below).

Example of a Kindle App Embedded:

But if you go to the Kindle edition for the same book, The Girl Who Played with Fire, there is no such box. Which seems a bit odd. The other options for sending the book to any of the supported Kindle Apps is there, but not the option of reading the book on the Kindle Web app.

One of the neatest features of the web app is that you can embed the Kindle Web reader on any web page.

Embed on a web page

Email, or share via Facebook or Twitter

You can change the size of the text, line spacing, and even a color.

The other interesting thing is that you can only read Kindle books that are available on the Amazon.com store. So, you cannot, as far as I can tell, take a book in a PDF format for example and read it on the Kindle Web app. Same is the case for other Kindle Apps actually.

Amazon.com Help: Kindle for the Web Beta

Free Reading Apps

Monday, September 27, 2010

Food Rules

(Could save your health, but destroy the "Nutritional Industrial Complex" - Amazon.com review)
Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

This is a (very) short, handy, easy read, full of common-sensical, practical advice on eating and food, neatly itemized into 64 rules, organized into three categories. The rules are meant for food eaters, for humans. These "rules" will however be anathema to corporations who sell "edible foodlike substances" (author's phrase). This would include corporations like Pepsico, Cola Cola, Dr Pepper, Kellog's, Burger King, Jack In The Box, Wendy's, McDonald's... the list is endless. Corporations who take food and other substances, natural and artificial, synthesized and chemical, mix the two to create something that while edible, is certainly not food as we humans have understood for centuries. Food, rather than being something found in nature that humans have used to feed themselves, has now become a substance that is manufactured by corporations, advertised to the gullible, and distributed to markets from where it is sold to people. A means to an end. The end being profits. Not health. Not well-being.

Though possibly a lot of the content is derived from his earlier book(s). The short (and long) of this book is that processed food is bad for you. No question. Processed food is manufactured to be advertised, to last long, be cheap to make, expensive to sell, to be profitable, and to benefit everyone except you. Reverting to a mostly plant-based diet is good for you. A little meat is not bad. Fishes the most, birds next, cows and other four-legged animals the least. Treats are ok as long as you treat them as treats. Snacking between meals is not good. Seconds are not good. And so on.

This book is a short compendium of 64 rules, broken out into three sections, "What Should I Eat" - with 21 rules, "What kind of food should I eat" - with 23 rules, and "How should I eat" - with the remainder of the remaining 22 rules.

"What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us are now eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick!" [page 8]

The reason behind this new diet is not difficult to fathom:

"The more you process any food, the more profitable it becomes. The healthcare industry makes more money treating chronic diseases (which account for three quarters of the $2 trillion plus we spend each year on health care in this country) than preventing them. ... But for the Nutritional Industrial Complex this uncertainty is not necessarily a problem, because confusion too is good business. The nutrition experts become indispensable; the food manufacturers can re-engineer their products (and health claims) to reflect the latest findings..." [page 8]

"Today foods are processed in ways specifically designed t get us to buy and eat more by pushing our evolutionary buttons - our inborn preferences for sweetness and fat and salt. These tastes are difficult to find in nature and easy for the food scientist to deploy, with the result that food processing induces us to consume much more of these rarities than is good for us." [page 13]

"The food scientists' chemistry set is designed to extend shelf life, make old food look fresher an more appetizing than it really is ,and get you to eat more." [page 14]

Some of the rules are:
Part 1 - What Should I Eat?

Avoid foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup.
Avoid food products that make health claims.
Avoid foods you see advertised on television.
Eat only foods that will eventually rot.
It's not food if it arrived through the window of your car (a not so subtle dig at drive-through fast-food outlets)
It's not food if it is called by the same name in every language (again, a dig at fast-food products like 'McBurger', 'Big Whopper' etc...)

Part II - What kind of food should I eat

Eat mostly plants, especially leaves ('chutney' for one :-)
Don't overlook oily little fishes
Eat your colors
Don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk (none of the garbage that's advertised on television: like "chocos" for example)
Eat all the junk you want as long as you cook it yourself

Part III - What Should I Eat" - How should I eat

- ... Eat less
- Eat slowly
- Serve a proper portion and don't go back for seconds
- "Breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, dinner like a pauper."
- Don't get your fuel from the same place your car does.
- Cook

Now, the book is really short. 112 pages. Even less once you take out the index, cover pages, and so on. Possibly less than 80 pages. Much of it is supposedly available in the author's earlier works (In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals). It is priced at $11. And that is probably expensive, for the content and originality. You can buy it from Amazon.com for $4.49, or for $5.48 from Wal-Mart. These represent close to a 50% discount off the list price of the book. At $5 and change it's a bargain, I would submit, even accounting for the fact that much in it is supposedly derived. I say "supposedly" because I have not read any of Michael Pollan's earlier books, ,yet. The other thing going for the book, even despite its size and list price, is the fact that it is really very easy to refer to the book. All you do is flip to a page, any page, and there is advice, pithy and pointed. There is value in that. I would like to read the more detailed, more researched, more argued books like The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, or In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, or The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, but that is not to deny this book's place on your bookshelf.

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Highways, Massachusetts

On the road, in the state of Massachusetts, USA. This was Monday, September 6. Labor Day in the US. Which meant that the highways were bereft of vehicles. Much less than on weekdays for sure. Even lesser than on weekends.

Monday, September 20, 2010

Readling List - Jan 2009

Partial list of what I read in January of 2009. Kinda late (you think so???), but thanks to Google Reader (per Wikipedia, it is a web-based aggregator of RSS and Atom feeds that you can read online as well as offline), I do not have to try and remember what I read, or go to my browser history to figure that out.

Colors In Corporate Branding And Design - the Bank of America site has a distinctive color pallette, the Hershey's site has a very chocolatey look-and-feel about it. The online experience is meant to be consonant with the brick-and-mortar branding, so that customer feel a sense of familiarity around the online site.
Examples, Symbols, and Signposts - Scott McCloud takes on the TED conference
DiggGraphr: Digg Stories in a Treemap - if you are into data visualizations, the Treemap is put to use for visualizing stories, with interactive filters vailable to filter stories by time and geography.
Bob the Impaler - Robert Cringely argues, quite radically, that Microsoft should layoff not 5000 but 50000 and then ask some hard questions.
Barkha Dutt and NDTV, the Joke is on You! - on NDTV's Barkha Dutt using the power of big media to intimidate a blogger into silence.
The Most Ticketed Cars on the Road [Cars] - no surprise that the Hummer is the most ticketed vehicle (vehicles that are ticketed the most above the average).
Google Chrome Accesses Hotmail by Pretending It's Safari [Browser Wars] - it is 1996 again, and the browser wars are all the rage again.
Helping the Terrorists - Bruce Schneier on how technology can be used by the terrorists as much as it can be used to fight terrorism.
Critical Condition - from the Daily WTF site. Need I say more?
Ridesharing in the Future - Scott Adams on trust and ridesharing using the iPhone.
My Cat - very touching post by Scot Adams on his cat. Who would have thought this - coming from the creator of the Dilbert cartoons.
Immortal Jellyfish - what if we were like jellyfish?
Sybase iAnywhere Again Named a Top Mobile Middleware Leader - mobility, enterprise software, and analysts.
Mapping open source into mobile: who, where and how - read when you have time.
Mobility: Past, present and future - more on mobility.
Microsoft’s Zune crashes as iPod sales grow - is it fair to even call it a battle?
Apple awarded key "multi-touch" patent covering the iPhone - a 358 page patent at that.
Cadbury Bournville : You Have to Earn It - Harish Bijour on why Rs 75 is an attractive price-point for a chocolate. I miss the days when a Cadbury's chocolate could be had for one rupee.
Savlon : Heals Without Hurting - again from Harish Bijour, branding guru, on the fascinating battle between Savlon and Dettol.
Saint Juice : 100 % Juice , Nothing else - by Harish Bijour. Juice, as opposed to selling sugary flavoured water.
triangles and blue sky - beautiful photos, though this is not the best example. From the Daily Dose of Imagery site.
Why charity begins – and stays – at home - Tim Harford on why suffering diminishes in the eyes of people the farther it is from them.
Sleazy Legitimacy: How to Keep Your Corporate Jet - Bob Sutton on how corporates behave they way they do.
John F. Kennedy on Myths - Bob Sutton again, that the greatest enemy of truth is myth.
Getting Even: A Great Book - Bob Sutton on this book, Getting Even: The Truth About Workplace Revenge--And How to Stop It, also on my wishlist.
Risk Mismanagement on Wall Street - Bruce Schneier links to an article from the New York Times.
The Easy Part - John Battelle links to an article comparing Google's and Microsoft's earnings.
Google's Repricing of Options - from John Battelle. How this repricing effectively transfers half a billion dollars of wealth from shareholders to employees.
Status - on Microsoft's layoffs. On why 5000 layoffs are nothing more than an eye-wash for analysts.

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Cars in Mirror

Cars as seen in the rear view mirror. At the intersection of Wayside Rd and Cambridge St, Burlington, Massachusetta, USA.