Break the rules

Albert Einstein says:

Man tries  to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligent picture of the world; he then tried to substitute this cosmos of his for the world of experience, and this overcome it.

Rules are like religious sentiments that have been built and nurtured over a long period of time and having being passed over generation to generation without the context.

Einstein again says:

Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.

Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.

 

We all want to

We forget that a ripple in water is created because something happened, something was disturbed, something broke…

The silence of the water was broken

To create ripple one must

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Digsby - The Best all-in-one Social Media Organizer and Integrator

  I recently installed DIGSBY on my XP powered machine and completely forgot about it, till today. I got a notification about the recent new release of the software and went ahead to test the various claims that its making.

I was actually surprised and happy to find that the claims were really true and not just blasphemous axioms. Here is all that you can do with it:

1. Configure GMAIL, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Twitter, GTalk, YTalk, LinkedIn - all in this single client.
2. See all the feeds real time from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn right on your desktop.
3. Edit your status on them right from your client.
4. Set different status for different networks.
5. See incoming unread mail right there in the client window.
6. Delete, Archive the mail right from the window.
7. Send mail right from desktop.
8. Sweet black theme.
9. Dockable on right side of your desktop.

The performance is highly satisfactory and I have not encountered any issue since I installed it.

I would say Digsby is THE BEST All-in-one IM Social Media Organiser and Integrator Client available so far

Some of the features that can be incorporated:

1. Group chat enabling
2. Mail preview feature/ Mail open feature in a separate window rather than opening the mail box in the browser which it currently does.
3. Allow comments for facebook feeds right from the window.

P.S.Its beauty lies in the fact that your use of left clicks (and right clicks for the left handers) is reduced tremendously thereby saving your hand and your mouse.

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"Personality Not Included" by Rohit Bhargava

Came accross this book "Personality Not Included" by Rohit Bhargava while searching for SMM (Social Media Marketing)

This is his presentation about the making of the book.

[slideshare id=773629&doc=makingofpersonalitynotincluded-1227226837853151-9]

Did you notice the simplisitic nature of this presentation and yet so powerful it is!!

I personally am looking forward to reading this book soon.

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Yahoo Big Thinkers Series - Automated Economy and Prediction market

At the 2nd of the lectures in the Yahoo Big Thinker Series, which happened yesterday at the Hotel Leela, Dr. David Pennock talked on how the internet and search engines have developed and are developing to make the economy more automated.
http://bangalore.yahoo.com/bigthinkers/events_09/event_june12_09.html

David is Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo. More about David is here:
http://research.yahoo.com/David_Pennock

What David discussed was about how search engines have evolved from being just word searchers to being auctioneers for what people are searching.

There are people who are willing to sell products, services and information, other people are searching. One of the key areas that David talks about is Continuous Double Auction.

Prediction market utilising CDA was also discussed. weatherbill.com gives insurance to customer against bad weather, and the cost of which is calculated based on the prediction that the customer does. There are levels of severity of prediction that can be chosen from, and the website provides options to calibrate your prediction.

Intrade.com is another success e-commerce that is based on predictions. You trade the predictions about events happening around the world, you can buy and sell them based on what your current take on them is. To know about how it works ->
http://www.intrade.com/jsp/intrade/help/index.jsp?page=howitworks.html

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A variety of questions were raised as to would this really work, if someone trades on a prediction like
"Would terrorists attack on ___ time?".
Such kind of predcitions themselves are not worth enough to trade about.

But the amount of intel such a model generates is enormous. Karthikeyan Iyer ( Director, Crafitti Consulting Pvt Ltd, www.crafitti.com ) asked me how would one monetize such kind of a model.

The prediction market is generating info about what is the current mind set of people and whether the prediction that is in hand is on the right lines of not.

Take an example : A hybrid car which generates more power than it
consumes will be ready in an economically viable state by 2015

The amount of response to this prediction gives a rough estimate how many people like this idea. If the P-value is > 50% it means there are fair chances of people buying such a product and companies like Toyota, Honda can basically utilise this intel to know where there target markets are.

Take another example : A Red coloured shampoo which is not harmful,
if eaten accidentally, will be a big hit

Now clearly an example of radically different idea that can be worked upon, especially from the point of view of children. But if the market is not positive about this prediction, this might be because of any of the things -> color, edible nature etc. This is a simple example, but complex predictions can be formulated to make sure that the intel generated is good enough to find out if a particular product is viable or not.

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Point to ponder :

How prediction market concept can be utlized inside organisations to improve productivity of processes as well as employees?

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P.S.:
See the image at the top of the post.
Me and my friend Vishal were discussing about the various interpretations of it when this is what came up:

How big can YOUTH INK?


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Books I am currently reading

These are the books I am currently reading

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Six Thinking Hats - Visual Map

A Visual Map of the Six Thinking Hat framework that I made sometime last month.
This is helpful if you want to quickly find out what are the faces under each of the six hats.

Great Lies in Management - My take on Dilbert Principle

Currently reading The Dilbert Principle by Scott Adams.
Cutting the crap, would say that this is one bible for fun for all the managers out there.

A slap on the face of corporate culture, this book runs us through the lies and truths that we encounter or rather we have already encountered in our time serving a company.
If you think, you are not an asshole with a big mouth and small brain (and even if you are of this category) read this book.

Quoting from chapter 4 : Great Lies of management

"Your input is important to us"
For a manager, the following equation...
Employee Input = More work = Bad

As a ... powerless employee ... its fun to give a suggestion like this :
"If you care about the health of the employees, you should ask the CEO to fund research on the effects of fluorescent lights on fertility"

...thouroughly impractical but the manager cannot discard it offhand....

Now look how this sentence can be dissected part by part
If you care (FEELING) - about the health ( FEELING about what?) - of the employees (for WHOM?) - you should ask the CEO ( WHICH UPPER LEVEL? ) - to fund research ( DO WHAT?) - on the effects (what EFFECTS) - of flourescent lights ( effects OF what?) - on fertility (effect ON what?)

Ever heard of the PIP kind of programmes in a company (hey if PIP is something one the leading IT firm in India has) and one of the items in the performance appraisal goal sheet sometime back was -  how many PIPs have you raised in the last 6 months

So what you can do is to list down possible items for the above dissected parts and create various valuable(?) suggestions for the manager to show.

So we can do some exemplary work here:
FEELING:
care, empathetic, sympathetic, feel, are interested in improving,

FEELING ABOUT WHAT?
health, morale, emotions, food, productivity, proficiency, efficiency, attendance, absence, physical appearance (hot topic eh!!! :) ), etc etc

WHOM?
employees, staff, non working staff(?), furniture, cubicles, computers (:-)), dogs...

WHICH UPPER LEVEL?
CEO, HR head, Policy Head, Recruit Head, yadda yadda yadda

DO WHAT?
fund research, set up a committee, hire professionals, create a team to tackle..., brainstorm ( managers love it), hold a meeting, increase or decrease something(?) of something(?), bla bla

EFFECTS?
(F.O.=find out)

EFFECTS OF ____ ON ____? ( this is the funny part)
OF increased level of sugar in the apple juice being served as a part of the free promotional campaign for the newest sponsor for the company ON level of blood pressure
OF unwanted lices on the old chair ON lowered level of sleep
OF ever changing format of goal sheet ON stability of thinking of the employee
OF bad spam detector ON productivity since most of the time goes in deleting the spam mails in outlook
and so on....

A smart combination of these will definitely give you a horde of suggestions that the manager will outright won't be able to reject on the grounds of incompetent, as they are very much valid when it comes to those buzzwords you shall be using.

Give it a try...

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