Travelogue for the trip to Mahabaleshwar and Pune

We did a road trip from Hyderabad to Mahabaleshwar onward to Pune and back. We drove our faithful Tata Indica that had already done about 150,000 KMS. Fondly called the "truck" for its loud noise and clunky travel, it earned a new nickname through this journey - "Baby Jumbo" - for the laborious progress combined with a heavy appetite for engine oil, and ever so reliable for the long distance. I am starting to love the Tata's for their Indica and Nano :-)

Here is the journal and hopefully some useful tit-bits...

1. Start as early as possible - 4AM, anyone? - Not only do you avoid city traffic, you don't need to use the AC, thus gaining extra speed on a clunker like ours. Best of all, kids sleep for a few hours until breakfast stop and you hopefully have covered close to 1/3rd distance before their ranting starts.. On the flip-side, this is probably a dangerous time since most truckers are tired driving through the night and are yearning for a breakfast/chai (nashta-pani) stop. If this concern weighs heavy in your head, start a bit late (5 AM?). Needless to say, definitely go by your sleep cycle. If you are not a morning person, better safe than sorry !!!

2. The first 4 hours are probably the best. Cover as much ground as possible without a stop. Stop for breakfast @~8:30 AM. A road-side stall/dhaba will be a good idea to break all apprehensions. Carry your own bottle of water and stick to hot foods that are usually well cooked (Idli without the accompanying Chutney/Sambar is a safe bet). On the topic of letting loose, carry a portable-potty so that the kids can enjoy a free, clean and open "passing" :-)

3. NH9 from Hyderabad to Zaheerabad is perfect, but it becomes bad the moment you cross into Karnataka and then Maharashtra. It is painful to see a 2-lane "NATIONAL HIGHWAY" with trucks blocking traffic repeatedly. There are also tons of potholes throughout and it is a challenge to navigate them at high speed. You will learn to swerve around the big ones and "glide" over most. You will "dunk" through a few of them too.

4. We took a detour at Mohal (40 KMs after Sholapur) into State highway 74 to visit Pandharpur, the abode of Lord Vittal. Again, roads in Maharashtra are pathetic at best. I cursed the Maharashtra government constantly for its terrible attention to Infrastructure and Tourism. There are so many amazing forts, rivers, temples but the government has let it grow wild in a free-market style. Fortunately, the temple was relatively empty and we got a quick darshan and a nice lunch at the "sadguru sakahari" place in the temple road.

We also got some good pictures of the Chandrabagh river/ghat that flows through the town. This seems very much like the Ganga of the region.

5. We continued on State Highway 74 towards Satara and onbound to Mahabaleshwar. Again, TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE roads. Reached Hotel Valley View Resort at Mahabaleshwar around 8:00 PM

6. We had stayed at this place about 20 years ago and it was nostalgic being there again. Given the off-season, the place was still under renovation, but we managed to take good advantage of the Swimming pool, play area and most importantly the food (amazing personal service during breakfast, lunch, dinner)

7. We visited Panchgani the next day. Went to Table Top,took a horse-ride and climbed down a beautiful cave restaurant. Went to Rajpuri Caves, totally uninhabited but rich in culture. We also saw a few points along the way, the main one being Parasi point that has big play area for kids. Remember, you will be charged a small amount as a 7-day pass by the Municipal Corporation of Panchgani. Irksome as it is, you don't have a choice...

8. The next day, we visited Pratapgadh fort, Old Mahabaleshwar (Panch Ganga temple with its confluence of five rivers and temples for Mahabali and Athibali), Elphinston Point, Arthur Seat point. Elphinston point was awesome akin to the Grand Canyon. One can only imagine how tourism business in the West would have thrived on a natural wonder such as this. Again, the Municipal Corporation of Mahabaleshwar will charge you yet again for another 7-day pass. No amount of arguing helps !!!

9. The next morning we drove to Pune to stay with my cousin. We met a couple of friends and it was great catching up. Except for Harini's falling sick with viral fever, it was a great 2 days in Pune. One funny incident was that of a rat stealing my Dad's hearing aid and gnawing off the ear mold. We had a tense 1/2 hour while we searched for the missing device. It was indeed a humorous mystery.

10. We started the drive back on Tuesday morning and reached Hyderabad into its heavy evening traffic.

All in all, a wonderful trip - All kudos to the ever-faithful Jumbo and the kids for demonstrating patience to the best of their abilities.

Role of Leaders in building passionate teams

For the purposes of this post, I will focus on team-building in IT and Knowledge Engineering sector. Technologists exhibit a dominating trait that makes them different. They are driven by intellectual needs. They love to solve challenging problems. Subsequently, they only respect and admire colleagues, superiors, managers and leaders who they believe are intellectually competent in their areas of work. This is an important factor to recognize and it makes a huge difference while choosing right leaders for teams and organizations.

Passion is accepted as the best productivity tool. A team driven by passion exceeds defined goals and creates new standards. True Passion is the ability to maintain intense emotions to positively impact the goal. It is something that happens within the individual. External motivators (like wind and oxygen) definitely helps, but the spark and the fire needs to keep burning within.

How did Mahatma Gandhi move massive populations towards non-cooperation objectives. How did Martin Luther King create passion amoung thousands of people to fight racism? How did Nelson Mandela fight apartheid? They practised what they preached. They walked hand-in-hand with general populace as the compassionate co-human-being. Had they restricted their actions to public speeches from atop a podium, there would not have been the enmasse movement.

"Passionate teams" is an abundantly used buzz-word in management today. "Building Passionate teams" is a cliche. Frankly, leaders of most organizations are far away from the tactical workings of their teams. They barely know their team's daily activities. They are shielded and separated from the ground realities that affect a project delivery. They simply cannot empathize with fellow workers since they lack knowledge of the process. Some people also go to the extremity of building hierarchical walls to shield themselves from potential failures that may impact their jobs. However, the same individuals are eager to present successes as their strategic and tactical leadership. A person who cannot make time to interact with his/her employees on a frequent and regular basis is definitely missing the pulse of the organization.

Building Passion is not a one-way street or a one-time event. True and continued passion can only be generated and exhibited by being inside the field of play. No amount of watching and lecturing from the side-lines will sustain this. A leader who believes in the "Hire and Fire" model will never be able to demonstrate or build passion. Passion requires an individual to weather numerous storms. One that jumps ship or passes the buck at the drop of hat, simply is not passionate. True leaders are battle-field tested continually and demonstrate their leadership in the trenches. For those leaders who prefer to preach rather than practice, leadership is only a nominal title. It is critical for Talent Managers to identify and nip such individuals before they create permanent damage to the organization.

Criticality of the Venture Team - An experiential observation

An online dictionary defines "Venture Team" quite simply as:

ven·ture team (plural ven·ture teams)

noun

Definition:

team to start up business: a management team put together to establish a new business, secure financing, and execute a business plan Investors focus on the Team, the Idea, the Market and the Proposition (ofcourse ROI). While rest of the critical factors can be triangulated and planned upfront with data and minimal gut instincts, the TEAM factor is least predictable (even if the team has worked together in multiple successful ventures). In my experience, key cause of team divergence is the varying priorities among team members. It is tough to expect all members of the venture team to have the same financial backing and propensity to face lifestyle and societal challenges. It is almost impossible that the team receives equal support from friends and family. Motivational factors are also critical - With changing conditions, motivational needs of the individuals may start diverging. Extended team members are also critical to the success of a venture. Every venture depends on a variety of advisors, promoters, champions, enablers to keep the machine cranking at all times. If any of the critical path individuals drag their feet, the whole team gets slowed down if not derailed. A resilient team is one that plans backup for all critical path tasks and people (although that eats up into short-term efficiency). A successful venture team is like a flock of geese, each member playing its role to perfection and continuously rotating the formation to maintain efficiency and consistency. Easier said than done, this requires a team with an "us" EGO not "I".

The Career Cycle Pattern - An Optimization Problem

Have you observed patterns in your career? This question assumes you are paying attention to your CAREER and not just on the job, pay or position :-)

Are you striving continuously to carve a career for yourself? Well, if you do, are there times you are disappointed at the path it appears to lead you into.

Despair not !!! If you step back and look at a 10-12 year span of your career, you will observe some amazing patterns. As you analyze and recollect the circumstances, you will actually notice whether you were consistent in your ambitions or not.

Your career is an NP-hard problem (*) (If you want to understand that gobbledygook, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hard). In order to analyze it, you need to decompose it into smaller temporal phases and make sense of each portion [That would be local optimization for your career planning]. Now, string together the themes from each of these smaller phases and voila... you have your global solution.

This pattern will tell you about yourself, your goals, perseverance, attitude and aptitude. It will also lead you to extrapolate what your future steps should be.

As an example, my career seems to follow a 3-4 year cycle. I see distinct themes in each cycle. The first four years went in building software applications, troubleshooting bugs, addressing customer issues. In short, the theme was "Down in the weeds". The second 4-year term saw myself taking on cross-geography initiatives and "building small, efficient and effective teams". The third was about setting up a new office location grounds-up and "developing the organization" in multiple dimensions. The 4th cycle saw me participate in the "Company-Wide Strategic direction-setting" discussions including mergers/acquisitions among other things.

As I analyze this data further, it demonstrates a certain course of progression. It gives a fair picture of my goals, attitude and aptitude. But, what does that tell me about the upcoming 5th 4-year career term? I have a choice - to continue through the trajectory or to make a disruptive shift onto a lateral career plate. I would start by listing the objectives for this phase as well as for the overall career progression. I would then look at some influencing life-style variables. Hopefully that will give me the necessary data to arrive at a logical answer...

In conclusion, the science of career planning and optimization is indeed fun and challenging. There are no proven answers for the problem. There are only approximations and educated guesstimations. Who would you trust to solve such a problem, if not yourself?

_________________________________________________

(*) At each point of time in your career you have multiple choices to make that will impact your next state.

1. Since there exists the possibility of multiple results for a specific action in a specific situation, this is classified as a non-deterministic problem

2. Evaluating each possible outcome for each situation and action has a "polynomial time" complexity

Does 360 degree feedback actually work ?

Personally, I am a fan of the 360 degree feedback process. It is a wonderful way to keep pulse on the team ecosystem and to ensure that individual behaviors that hamper objective progress are adjusted along the way. However, there are factors that make this amazing process meaningless. Here are a few...

1. Open and Trusted participation of individuals undergoing 360 is absolutely critical. Most 360 processes fail because of passive conduct from participants. Feedback receivers start building defense shields (with managers, peers and reports) as soon as this process is initiated. Feedback providers see absolutely no value in providing useful feedback and hence resort to filling the blanks as a checklist

2. Absolute trust and understanding between feeback receiver and manager is paramount. There could be some comment(s) (from reports or peers) that criticize certain action or behavior without full knowledge of the circumstance/situation that the individual faced. In these cases, manager and employee are the only ones who can fully understand the background and evaluate the comment appropriately. This assumes there is a good relationship and understanding apriori, a precondition that fails most often.

3. Process (not content, ofcourse !!!) needs to be transparent to the participating group. Feedback receivers and their managers must have a choice of selecting providers. The questionnaire should be unambiguous and allow for free-form provision of supporting data. This process can be run semi-annually to gather feedback and measure corrections

4. Finally, there should be substantial period (2 to 3 cycles) of consistency in teams and reporting relationships to get correct and actionable data.

Vinodh Soundarajan - Recommendations and Endorsements

Vice President of Global Engineering and Member of Executive Staff Sumtotal Systems

“Vinodh is a great R&D leader. He focuses a lot of energy on ensuring his team is productive and engaged. He has a creative mind that has produced numerous ideas that have benefited our customers. He is great to work with under challenging conditions.” May 21, 2010
Brad Crain, VP Software Engineering, SumTotal Systems reported to Vinodh at Sumtotal Systems

“Vinodh was responsible for the company's R&D team and developing and executing upon the product roadmap. While in the position, he managed the P&L, spent significant time with our customers and field teams to best understand the requirements for our roadmap, and was focused on both customer and employee satisfaction. His style is calm and he works well under pressure, always carrying a positive attitude and approach to challenges. He was able to deliver results, and identified critical success factors that needed to be addressed to keep the company's blueprint ahead of the competition.” May 20, 2010
Barb Stinnett, President, SumTotal Systems managed Vinodh at Sumtotal Systems

“Vinodh is as realistic as he is optimistic. It was a true joy to work with him in a high energy, high productivity environment loaded with top engineering professionals whom he is responsible for. His dedication to product quality and deadlines is matched only by his devotion to his team.” March 7, 2009
Dale Bonamie, Development Manager, SumTotal Systems worked indirectly for Vinodh at Sumtotal Systems

“It is very exciting to be working with someone like Vinodh. He has lots of energy and ever-willing to solve every problem that is posed to him. He is very detail-oriented manager and likes to get hands-on at every opportuntity. Since I am not so, our discussions become tough sometimes, but they are always insightful to me. I worked with him as a peer as well as his report and I didn't feel the difference, he was always open, friendly and candid.” December 19, 2008
Mrityunjay Kumar, Various director level positions in R&D, SumTotal Systems worked directly with Vinodh at Sumtotal Systems


“During my tenure at SumTotal, I had the pleasure and privilege of working under Vinodh's leadership and it was a wonderful experience, indeed. Vinodh not only had a deep understanding of the industry, but from an overall business perspective as well and led the PM product group through many successes.

I had the opportunity to directly work with Vinodh on few projects - I was amazed at his deep & broad knowledge of the product suite and his eye for detail & perfection was simply inspiring. His calm demeanor under stressful situation is a highlight of his working style and handles pressure with utmost ease.

As the Vice President of the Engineering division, he was a source of inspiration across different groups and his enthusiasm for work is infectious. Vinodh has utmost care for customer's success and ensured that different working groups integrated seamlessly to ensure customer satisfaction. Vinodh is instrumental in many initiatives that are targeted to reduce the turnaround time for customer escalated issues and improve product quality.

Vinodh is a leader who has the vision to lead large, diversified groups to success and the ability to execute it with utmost sincerity. I would welcome the opportunity to work with him again.” September 4, 2010
Ram Arunachalam, Senior Lead, Software Quality Assurance , SumTotal Systems worked indirectly for Vinodh

Director - Product Development JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“Vinodh is the best person in my professional life. The way he solves any problem is different and he is a dynamic, and we can consider him the best example as a lead. He is having very good knowledge in JDA (formerly called Manugistics) products. He is very strong in all areas (including technical, functional and managerial). His attitude and approach towards problem solving was awesome. All professionals are very happy/lucky working with him.” November 22, 2009
Murali Choudari, Project Manager, JDA Software worked directly with Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“I feel the time which I have spent working with Vinodh was one of the best time of my professional life. I had lot of close interactions with him for close to 2 years when manugistics India office was getting set up. He is a dymanic and result oriented leader, his sheer presence make the atmosphere energetic and charged. Looking at him we used to say that our product Transport was in his blood. His attitude and approach towards problem solving was awesome.” November 21, 2009
Vinay Sharma, Project Manager, JDA Software reported to Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“Vinodh has been a great mentor and guide to me, he is a team person, always ready to help on both technical and functional level. A hands on person with great leadership skills, his legacy continues to be there on the floor.” July 21, 2008
Hemant Shergare, Development Manager, JDA reported to Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“I worked with Vinodh directly for many years and have seen him taking on various roles and challenges during the period I have known him. From the very beginning , Vinodh has been extremely customer focussed. He has on many occasions dealt with critical customers and helped them by providing solutions to their difficult problems. He has excellent people skills - got along very well with various teams in Manugistics. He always maintained a positive outlook and approached any situation with a can do attitude. It was a pleasure working with Vinodh.” June 24, 2008
Sundar Arunapuram, Sr. Director, Logistics Solutions Product Development, Manugistics managed Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“Vinodh is top-notch at all he does. It was a pleasure to work with Vinodh!” June 18, 2008
Srini Rajagopal, Technical Director, Logistics Solutions, Manugistics managed Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“Vinodh is the ultimate doer - he is energetic, committed and results-driven. I worked very closely with Vinodh at Manugistics and was thoroughly impressed with his ability to understand and deliver complex functionality while working with a diverse group of people with varied interests and expertise. He is an excellent mentor and never hesitates to roll up his sleeves to get things done. His strong development background coupled with his management education and global experience makes Vinodh incredibly valuable for any organization that is part of the new economy.” June 8, 2008
Suresh Acharya, Director, Manugistics/JDA worked directly with Vinodh at JDA Software(formerly called Manugistics)

“Vinodh goes above and beyond the typical definition of a 'developer' as he understands and considers the business side of building applications. He provides great insight into design and can translate difficult concepts into simple terms. He is a pleasure to work with and was highly regarded at MANU. I would work with Vinodh again without hesitation.” November 29, 2006
Gregg Lanyard, Senior Product Manager, Manugistics worked with Vinodh at JDA (formerly called Manugistics)

“I've worked with Vinodh on-and-off throughout his years at Manugistics/JDA on various projects and releases. He is conscientious on how decisions effect the whole, a friendly co-worker and peer, eager to help where help is needed. He will take on most any challenge, and I found him to be a honest and goal-driven individual.” September 13, 2006
Chuck Heck, Principal Engineer, Manugistics, Inc worked directly with Vinodh at JDA (formerly called Manugistics)

The lucky generation

The generation of adults born in 70s and 80's are indeed lucky... Let me explain my reasoning....

This generation has a unique experience of watching the past from the sidelines. Their parents and close ones had to carry a lot of "baggage" to fulfil social and family obligations and to build a basic quality of life. Needless to say, the journey was arduous for the previous generation. Having gained passive experience, this new generation had the luxury of building and watching some of the latest developments in science, technology and basic living. This generation also has the diverse experience of working in, with and for diverse cultures and peoples in a positive manner. The act of managing time, people, resources has been getting fine-tuned through this experience. This ability to prioritize values has allowed the generation to gain a upper hand. All this leads to highly balanced decision making abilities, driven by reason and passion. Wouldn't we call that lucky !!!!

In this continuum, the next generation (individuals born in 1990s and 2000s), has started off watching these advancements. They have not seen the challenges life can pose, but, that may indeed be a boon. They dont have to feel the shackles and start soaring right at birth. Yes, they may face some tough situations in their life, but I am sure their confidence and abilities will guide them through.

Three Cheers to Darwin and Evolution !!!!