iLatish

Some time ago i had a post on Paisa,Passion which was a result of my trying to set the priorities for both. During the
discussion/debate/introspection few questions came up. An interesting point that came up during this whole process was about handling the feeling of guilt which came in when you saw others in need even for basic resources.

The following  questions makes an attempt to trigger the thought process for those who have still not thought about it.

1. How much money do you want to make.
2. Why do you want to make this much amount of money
3. How will be others in need benefited by your wealth.

There is no right or wrong answer here. These would be the answers you may have to give to your kids someday 🙂 .

Your thoughts on this are welcome.

I regularly receive queries from my friends for a requirement of a particular blood group. Was thinking it would be kool if we had some database so that people could query for their blood requirement and they get to know someone with a exact match. Some googling and i found this really good site i.e indianblooddonors.com which serves the exact purpose.

To explain in plain English ,2 things can be done here

1. Donors can register for donating blood.

2.  Request for blood can be made by anybody who requires it.

Rediff also has a article about the founder here.

Go ahead and check this site out. The least one can do is continue to spread the word about this  so that it could make a difference to someone’s life.

A friend of mine had an interesting thing to share about the concept of normalization with me. Read on…

Dictionary.com has the following for the word normalization

nor?mal?ize

–verb (used with object)

• to make normal.

–verb (used without object)

• to become normal; resume a normal state: Prices soon normalized after the war.

When he was a kid his parents used to perform the ritual of normalization when there was a fight between him and his kid brothers and sisters. This was to make them realize that they were equal.
When he was in the growing up stages he had realized quite early that no thing such as normalization exists in the outside bad bad world. After all some great guy did say..’Life is not fair’.Another one goes like ‘There are no free lunches’.

This was a real simple logic. You had to put in effort if you needed something.

No effort = No rewards
More effort = More rewards

Then he joined a BIG company. A interesting thing of this company’s HR campaign was that they had a concept of normalization that affected a small area. This area was the payslip part. The corporation made sure that none of its children a.k.a employees were left with any bitter feelings. about their pay check. It used to normalize their pay check amounts.

He was perplexed when he learned that his earlier equation for getting rewarded was not true now.
There were more complex hidden parameters which had to be considered in that equation. He being a poor engineer and not a rocket scientist struggled real hard and finally managed to create a modified version of his earlier equation

No effort = Good_chance_of_getting_rewarded * some_luck
More effort = Not_necessarily_more_rewards
E*mc2/ Normalization * Effort = More_rewards

The mystery was now solved. He had finally decoded the normalized truth of life. He was enlightened that no  matter how hard you try you can never be sure that you will get rewarded. Instead he was happy that he had good chances of getting rewarded with almost little effort as observed from the derived equation.

PS. He is still working on the E*mc2 part of the equation so presently he is not in a position to answer any questions about that.

Came across this 5 yr old article on rediff which states the facts about Indian Software talent in a very straight forward way. I would have preferred the author to put that in a slightly sugar coated way but as they say “Sach kadwa hota hai!”

An interesting read. I hope the situation improves when my kids read this article 🙂 .

As always comments welcome….

2 P’s …which play a very important role in deciding the job you are in.

Paisa- The one ‘P’ you cannot do without ( except when you dad has lots of that)

Passion – The other ‘P’ (which is technically not required) when present  can make life a lot easier.

What do you work for ? Is it possible to combine the 2 P’s and live a happy life. ? What do you feel is the ideal percentage of both to make life a “Star bucks”  ? 🙂

This is a “food for thought”  post with me expecting all the answers so that poor souls like me can be enlightened.

The Present

In India expect for a few cases (am being generous here) one will find it really difficult to see an example of efficiency in the way government works. This is the place where Indian corporate world shines. They seem to have adopted the right points from the West.

All organizations have a set of KRA’s (Key Responsible Areas). An employee’s performance is judged by the points he scores in all the areas defined in his KRA. Every employee is motivated to perform and thus efficiency,productivity automatically increases.This approach requires a senior to monitor to rate the performance of the junior. As seen this approach pays off and work gets done.

Problem: No Kra’s

For government we have no such formal KRA defined. The political parties decide their own KRA’s which only few care to check once they are elected. There is no authority present which monitors the performance of the ruling govt to check if all the points mentioned in the KRA have been successfully completed. This approach only benefits the political parties and the ministers many of them who are only intrested in making money till their tenure lasts.

Possible Solutions:

Kra’s defined and monitored

There needs to be some sort of KRA defined for the govt. An approach needs to be taken similar to the Right to Information act where in anybody can get any information from any public govt body . The govt officials are liable for penalty if the required information is not given.An independent authority also needs to monitor the various points in the KRA and publish the results to the public at regular intervals.

Predefined Priorities

The authority could also define the order of priorities the govt should consider.

Eg. A minister might be so obsessed with the late night disco pubs being open that he does not even remember that the police in his state do not even have basic things such as a bullet proof jackets, modern weapons which they need in case of a terrorist attack .

Mumbai 26Nov terrorist attack was a classic example of wrong priorities set by the govt where in security was given the lowest possible consideration whereas it should have been the highest.

Performance Monitoring

The performance of the govt needs to be monitored by an independent authority which needs to work transparently and should be accountable to the public. The results of the performance of the ruling govt should be made public. An explanation needs to be given to the public if any minister has been scoring low for a year for his KRA. If there is no improvement in the performance the minister should be replaced immediately without any delay. This will put in pressure on those ministers who think that this country is their dad’s private property and they will screw it up in any way they want.

Once the KRA results are available to the public it would not be too hard to guess who will win the next election. This will ensure that all political parties do not sleep after the elections and try continuously to improve their performance.

Final word

As Arindam Chaudhry in his book “Count the chickens before they hatch” says that “We Indians tend to be complacent given an opportunity .”

We do have many examples in front of us to prove Mr Arindam Chaudhry right. If Indian Inc can benefit by this methodology then the govt can surely do.

PS. I did wanted to talk about SLA (Service level agreements) for the govt but i guess that would be a different post in itself.

Most of us have already worked or are working under a managerial species called the “Pressure Managers”. These type of managers believe that every output can be derived by applying pressure. They follow the simple theory …More output ..More pressure ..Tight Deadlines..Even more pressure. This “quality” is seen in higher management guys who generally work only with word processors,Spreadsheets and mail programs. From that point every problem in this world seems easily solvable by just altering few numbers on the spreadsheet. Here is a simple picture what a pressure manager might look in some other circumstances.

A line of disclaimer: The above qualities are not necessarily possessed by every manager 🙂 so if you are my manager reading this there is no need to get disappointed.

indiavolunteerportal.org is an initiative mainly supported by Mastek Foundation. Here you get an opportunity for both type of volunteering, financial as well as non financial where in you donate your time and support the required activities which is listed out by every NGO. This is ideal for many of us who wanted to put some “actual” effort instead of just writing a cheque out although there are many who would prefer that option and leave the rest to such type of foundations/organizations who do the execution part. Whatever may be your choice you can check it out at http://www.indiavolunteerportal.org and help in bringing happiness to somebody in the world who deserves it .

I have been reading Eric Sink’s weblog for some time and i must say he is one of those guys who know what they are talking about. The ‘been there..done it’ ones. He has an excellent post about how to start your own company . The post with not too much business jargon is so well written that even an dumbo would easily understand it . The post is available at http://www.ericsink.com/bos/Starting_Your_Own_Company.html .

This would surely benefit many people like myself and many of my friends who keep on thinking about this topic but later lose interest due to insufficient pointers in the right direction.