Management Musings

Having been part of a mid-size Multi National Company for the past many years now, I have had the incredible opportunity to grow and understand the decision making of the leaders within the organization. More and more, I have come to appreciate the dynamics that go into taking key decisions and how they eventually impact the direction that the company takes. We have had many different CEOs over the years - at least 4 that I can think of right away. Each and every one of them has had a distinct style and method of execution and decision making. As part of the R&D org, most of the changes over the years have been through the offices of different leaders of the Business Units, Engineering heads and now obscure titles that were created at the time for different reasons. It is quite telling that change has been the one constant factor over time. It probably reflects on the overall revenue and stock price of the company, which have both remained largely flat over the years. There has ...

Coming from a Hindu family, rituals have been a constant through my life. Not necessarily happening with any defined frequency, these ceremonies take up different forms and ways. My father was never a person who necessarily believed in God, or at least he did not make his feelings known to us. My mother, on the other hand, is as pious as they come. Her ultimate, argument-ending dictum on every topic where we push her to do something is "If He is willing, it will be done", or "I have put my faith in Him. He will make it happen". Once that is said, there is no force on earth that can budge that immovable stone of faith. So, in all the cases of rituals and religious ceremonies, my mother has been the driving force. She, of course, firmly believes that she does not know enough to perform one, so she would simply say, "whatever we do, is for Him", thereby justifying the innumerable short-cuts taken during these occasions. We would celebrate all the festivals w...

My earliest memories of travel outside of the city involve bus and train rides. Bus rides would be in the ubiquitous "Red Bus" or "Semi-Luxury" or "Super Deluxe" out of the city. In those worry-free days, the travel plans were out of our hands and minds, as was packing and logistics of the journey and destination. We were expected to show up, stay in sight and out of trouble. I never had a problem with meeting those expectations (at least as far as I can recall, my mother may have a different story to tell). The Red Bus journeys were the most adventurous - finding a seat and retaining it was always atop priority. As a kid, I was happy to help. Squeeze in among the rush to get inside, put a handkerchief on a seat and spread the hands out wide as far as I could, waiting for the family to join in. I can only imagine the thoughts in the parents' heads now. I used to enjoy those journeys as the bus would make a stop at every town along the way to the desti...

As the aftermath of the ball tampering saga  continues, today marked the day that the lead protagonists of the episode, Steve Smith, Cameron Bancroft and David Warner, all made public statements for the first time after the day it all began. Over the course of the past few days, the outrage from Australia has been vocal and sustained, by all accounts. I can't imagine the Prime Minster of India taking upon himself to make a public statement over a ball tampering/ cheating incident on a cricket field! The Prime Minister of Australia, however, did. He was among the first to react and even used his office status to push Cricket Australia into action, not that they needed any pushing, of course. I made a reference to the Aussie way of cricket in my previous blog post and had highlighted the blurring of "the line", wherever it may exist, for them. Soon after, the ball tampering scene exploded and while I have no sympathy for either Smith, Bancroft or Warner, the reactions do...

Those following the South Africa v/s Australia test series , would have heard about the now infamous incident involving Quinton de Kock and David Warner. De Kock is alleged to have said something unmentionable about Warner's wife to him, which resulted in the latter's angry reaction and having to be physically separated from the former. The Australian players have been remarkably direct in their support for David Warner's reaction to the slur. In their view, De Kock crossed "the line" when getting personal and bringing family into sledging. The South African cricket team coach, Otis Gibson, was almost poetic in his response . Sharada Ugra commented on the Aussie way with sledging and  I could not agree more with her. From the time that I can remember, the most famous sledges, on-field "banter", flare-ups, etc. have involved Australian players. Michael Slater having a go at Rahul Dravid in a test match in India, Stephen Waugh's sledges to Ambrose ...

One of my favorite essays during school days used to be about Television. I still remember writing about the TV in Hindi. Invented by John L. Baird, if my memory serves me correctly. Looking back in the last 30-40 years, we have moved from no TVs, to TV being a novelty, to CRT TV sets being the norm (who can forget Dyanora?) and nowadays, to LED TVs. What next? Of course, 4K Ultra HD TVs are already here. We will move away from the cable TV or even the need for a satellite Dish enabled TV set in the future. It may sound alarming, but it is going to be the reality sooner or later. No more TV shows, a dime to the dozen, repeated in multiple languages and broadcast over an untold number of channels. Early age TVs used to have 12 channels and a remote control was unheard of. Within a few years now, we have hundreds of these channels all vying for viewership and advertisement revenue. Almost every channel has programs running 24/7. For how long, I wonder? Video can be, after all, transmi...

Over the past couple of decades, the Computer networking industry has seen many trends come and go. Looking at how things stand today, the core skill sets of Routing and Switching look likely to become dated as the number of experts proliferate the market and the task of routing the packets through the Internet has become a commodity for so many deployments. Fundamentally, the core job of routing remains the same, from the perspective of a device. For it, a packet (or data) comes in and it needs to make a decision on where to send it out to. The USP for any device resides in the speed with which it can make this decision and the speed with which the packet can be forwarded out another interface, towards its ultimate destination. As with so many other technology industries that reaped the benefits of Moore's law, it was the same with the High Performance Networking industry. Shrinking space for the transistors used for switching meant that so many more operations could be performed...