I Can Has Shortstory? – Warren Adler via SecondLife

Who needs fiction when blogs are there or when truth is stranger than fiction? Warrren Adler Short Story writer was at Amazon Island in Secondlife to share some of his Short Story writing tips. It is natural to understand his lament that “short story has gotten a bad rap during the past few years and many outlets for this medium have closed”. Well, when some doors close, some other doors open. As demonstrated by his SecondLife presentation itself. Hey, when an 80+ year old non-techie uses any form of digital it is worth celebrating, when he uses the edgy SecondLife to talk about literature it is a landmark event.
In this first of the five part series, Warren and others discussed about three short stories of Warren. The theme of the discussion was to illustrate the structure of a short story. And what really makes a short story come alive. The stories were: “Good Neighbors,” “The Mean Mrs. Dickstein” and “The Cherry Tree.”

As I unserstood from the session, the story has a start, the middle and the climax. Purpose of start/build up is to set the context for the middle. And in the main, there must be conflict. Make the characters as plausible and keep the conflict logical. That is the way to make the reader relate. Once this tension is built, climax is the way to release the tension in any particular way. Climax is an opportunity to infuse your unique point of view to the situation. This creative high is what authors live for and Warren Adler is no exception.

Of the three short stories discussed, “The Mean Mrs. Dickstein” was very hilarious, here we go from the chat log:

WarrenAdler Aeon: In this last story a nice older woman sits on her favorite bench in central park reading a novel;.
[12:58] WarrenAdler Aeon: Another woman sits next to her and beging to annoy her by using her cellphone to change the venue of a fancy party she is having.She is particular loud and annoying and after awhile this nice lady asks her to please lower her voice. She tells her to go away.and continues to bew loud and obstrreperous.The nice lade is motified by her behavior. After she changes the venue of the party to another restaurant she says something nast and leaves. The mild mannered nice lady who has never hurt anyone in her life and has overheard the woman, calls the new venue and cancels the womans’ new party. What do you think?

If you have missed the first session not to worry, there are four more sessions in line(from Jeff-Barr’s blog):
Session Two (Feb 28)
Tragic events and how they resonate Mr. Adler will discuss two of his short stories that deal with the aftermath of 9/11 and how these tragic events linger in memory and trigger ideas for stories. The two stories are “I Can Still Smell It” and “That Horrid Thing.”

Session Three and Four (March 6 & 13)
Short Story Contest Mr. Adler will discuss his short story contest and why he decided to start it. He will also announce the winners and discuss each story and why he chose them. If possible, contest entrants will convey their story lines or read the stories.

Session Five (March 20)
How to put “life” into stories
Mr. Adler will talk about his novel FUNNY BOYS and how it took shape. He will describe the era that is described by the term “Borscht Belt”, how it came about, what life was like then (1937) and the brutal gangster era at the time when Murder Inc., a group of Jewish and Italian killers, was in its heyday.

Join “Warren Adler Fans” group in SecondLife for notifications.
If not anything, you can watch unleashing of the digital age – see how Amazon Shorts or SecondLife is able to collapse geography!

C K Prahalad on Innovation Next Practices: N=1, R=G

I got invited to the CII Member Fellowship Evening organized by CII Southern Region.
Three speakers representing varied background and interest were lined up.

C K Prahlad was first to go. He started with ‘I’m going to disappoint many of you – I’m not going to talk about BoP’ instead CKP talked about his upcoming book to be released in April.
C K Prahalad wasted no time drawing the audience towards Next practices rather than Best practices. Underlying theme being: Innovate the innovation process itself. Fundamental shift in paradigm from Firm Centric view to customer centric – dealing with customers one at a time. He made a powerful illustration citing the case of Build a Bear – a specialty store where children can custom build their teddy bear. Where the ingredients of making a teddy bear are assembled Just in Time with the ultimate end user fully involved. Very Agile indeed. The teddy is Given a Life by the child with a heart, a sound effect and an external style with whole nine yards of birth certificate and a promise to be the best friend to the teddy. For the parent and the child pair, it is not the product, it is the experience -an opportunity to co-create is central to the experience. For the store, there is a significant reduction in total SKUs and the SKUs in the inventory are in synergy. Further there is opportunity to up sell merchandise like sports tees and accessories enhancing the experience for the child and revenue for the store with very high profit margins.

With this, C K Prahalad asked the industry captains: Why are you not pitching your biz this( customer experience centric) way? Why pitch by cost, quality and response time efficiency?

C K Prahalad went on to illustrate the point with more serious/life critical example – pace maker expert monitoring. With pace-makers, there is not much point in arguing about quality. Here the opportunity for value creation is outside the product as such – ability to monitor state of your heart by remote expert, totally personalized. [Alluding to how Medtronic - long time market leader in pace-maker woke up to effect CareLink]. Under special circumstances, different service partners are to be activated( articulated as CKP likes to put it) to deal with the situation. Sometimes the local hospital is involved, some times an ambulance is involved and of course some times the priest gets involved! Reinforcing the concept of customer centric, fulfillment one customer at a time personalized to fit his/her context well.

C K Prahalad formulates serving one customer at a time as N=1. In order to service this one customer like this, a whole lot of reliably working partnerships are to be forged. It invariably will have to scale globally like it or not. This if formulated as R=G( Resource = Global. Or simply as I see it – Radius of operation = Global ). This is what OnStar by GM did to high end cars monitor special conditions and articulate service partners to respond to customer’s specific situational need. To a lesser extent by Dell to assemble a computing hardware of your choice by N=1 and R=G.

The key characteristic of a The Firm serving N=1 with R=G are:
Node within a global web.
Personalized Experiences
Co-creation
Celebration of Individual
Thematic experience.
Delivery Network.
Li & Fung is an example of 100 year old US$10b trading company illustrative of ‘Platform Play’ success. Netflix, Google, Amazon are other examples cited.
Obviously this is going to be capital intensive and highly IT intensive says CKP. Thanks to the India growth story, capital is within reach. And IT is abundant in India. Why are we just using it to make others rich and competitive? With that challenge, he went on to question if Science is the way to do Innovation?
There was a quick run-through of palletized biomass fuel powered smokeless stove. The stove will free the rural women folks from smoke and soot exposure. IISc folks pitched in with ceramic coating. Like that a whole lot of resources were used to assemble the stove and the supply chain around it. Millions of pieces are deployed in India and it is getting deployed in other developing markets. BP the sponsor of the project got entry into consumer space that too at the base of the pyramid. The R=G is kind of obvious here but the N=1 eludes me. Perhaps I need to check the case study in detail.

For me, with Social Media familiarity made me easily relate to what C K Prahalad was talking about to the point of wondering if the YouTube like democratization( N=1 + Affordable = Democratization, unlike say OnStar) play out in physical space more intensely and much faster than anticipated.

PS: I attended an Agile event on the same day. I found it bit ironic that Old School industries are emulating user centric Agile like tech success stories. And in Agile the good old manufacturing best practices are gaining new currency.

Of Agile, Shopkeepers, Continuity and Agile Adoption

Agile is exerting a pull on me, what ho with involvement in Agile events in Chennai, the pull is easy to explain. Learning about Agile were intermittent with a few “Aha” light bulb moments – here is my attempt to connect them dots.
Agile for me is injecting a good dollop of Vishnu(Maintenance, Preserver) nature into the whole software development conundrum.


Let us detour into traditional Indian Trinity – Bhrama(creator), Vishnu(preserver maintainer), Shiva(Destroyer) nature that manifest and explains subject under study.

The Bhrama way of software development is to approach it as unique one off activity – never done before never to be done again. Obviously, this attitude is not going to cut ice with business software. One of Hit games and other software as entertainment could use this model. And reflecting this one off nature, there are very few(much less than handful) temples dedicated to Bhrama in contrast to 1000s dedicated to Vishnu and Shiva.

The Shiva style of software development is clean-room rewrite – throw the old code away – baby with the bathwater. This style is particularly useful for system software and new protocol code. A lot of opensource software is written this way. And yes, the result invariably disrupts and challenges the mainstream. The counter culture tendency does not go well with Enterprise software and so the style is destined to the edges.

Agile is the Vishnu way of software development as I understand it. Vishnu is the deity of Maintenance or preservation. A diligent shopkeeper is a good example of Vishnu nature in action. As I see it, a humble retailer’s rituals has lot in common to Agile software process:

Keep the shop neat and tidy. Ask any successful retailer, they will have very meticulous process for hourly, daily, weekly monthly and annual cleaning rituals. Rather don’t ask – just observe – the practice is so ingrained in them they will not know to talk about it. Agile is clutter elimination!

Move the inventory, Serve it with smile. Retailers keep what the customers wants, give it when they needs it. Retailers constantly engage with customers and building intimate relationship with their customer base to know their needs and wants. Stakeholder centric approach of Agile is exactly that.

Irrespective of actual customer walkins, keep the shop open and functional. Much of retailing is building capacity and waiting for customer with total readiness. Agile software development is successful when capability to handle customer requests is built ahead of actual customer request. The minimalism and prioritized under delivery of Agile is credible only when the capability to over deliver is there but not activated. Just like how the modest retailer creates a virtual abundance for the customer, the (modest)Agile team will have to create a virtual abundance of software development services. Virtual abundance is non-trivial and this is where (In my Opinion), Agile adoption gets tricky.

Much of Lean manufacturing principles celebrated by Agile are covered by shopkeepers. More importantly, the humble retailer smooths out and bridges the rapid changes in both supply and the demand side. This bridging and welcome attitude towards change makes retailers the constant or continuity in the change. Retailers earn this privilege being prepared and waiting – generally considered boring activity. [An aside – in Tamil language Waiting is Kaatal which also means to preserve. A related word Kaaval - denotes Police - that carry out one functionality of Vishnu i.e., maintain law and order. Retailers wait diligently for/on customers and realize profit on each one of them. Thus Diligent Wait is same as Profit which indeed is Lakshmi the consort of Vishnu.] Agile teams indeed welcome and effect the change and strive to be the continuity/constant in the equation. Agile teams achieve the discipline of the retailer with the aid of Scrum or other process – the systematic breaking up of the work into rhythmic routine with incremental improvement built into every cycle of routine.

Agile introduces method in the madness of software development. Now suddenly, software development with all its challenges and quirks is tractable as retail – and unsexy as retail!. Let us face it, Agile takes the maverick shine out of Software Development/IT. The maverick streak ingrained within everyone involved in Software will resist Agile adoption tooth and nail( again. need less to say, in my opinion). However attractive the Agile goodness of Individuals and interactions or Working software or Customer collaboration or Responding to change are – the maverick streak will weigh them all down.

NASSCOM e-Gov, Walking the talk, and Leadership

Generally I don’t pay much attention to NASSCOM as they champion the big league and cater to different segment of Indian IT. Yesterday, I was led to the NASCOMM Leadership Forum’s blog via Kiruba’s twitter stream. I found the blogpost on “NASSCOM Chairman’s Wishlist for the IT Ministry” and spontaneously left the following comment on it:

Balaji Sowmyanarayan:
Kiruba,

All this while, when the grass is( was?) green on the other side(US and developed markets), what was the celebrated NASSCOM doing? Busy pitching for easier visa regimes? And looking down upon domestic market. Why this sudden love for e-governance now?

Somehow the intent is not very convincing.

-Balaji S.
Chennai.
twitter: http://twitter.com/labsji

Today when I casually checked up the blog for updates, I was surprised and amused to find the comment was ‘Moderated’ – read no where to be seen in the blog.

I might be totally wrong in my opinion, but how will I ever get a chance to update my opinion if discussion on it is curtailed before it got started? NASSCOM is respected to be the trend setter on IT matters that affect the IT industry and IT in India at large. If this is how NASCOM encourages participation, I have doubts about their Leadership on IT matters. Very ironic, the conference is titled India Leadership Forum. Here is the #1 objective of NASCOM listed under Objective( NASSCOM web site):

Maintaining close interaction with the Government of India in formulating National IT policies with specific focus on IT software and services

Purpose of e-governance as I understand it is to make wider participation accessible to larger set of people, and also encourage/include contra views in the governance process.
I’m hoping that the ‘Moderation’ was a oversight, otherwise I really really fear e-governance entrusted under NASSCOM leadership.

Chennai Open Coffee Club + NEN Entrepreneurship Week = Freshness!

The Feb08 edition of Open Coffee Club Chennai, was very different. Instead of the usual rant about not able to hire developers and such, we welcomed student Entrepreneurs and wannabes.

As part of Entrepreneurship Week organized and celebrated by NEN(National Entrepreneurship Network), the students form different educational institutions attended OCC. Proto.in is the link that actually connected the OCC with NEN. OCC regulars were surprised and amused by the concept of taking a pledge part of the NEN E-week awareness campaign. After taking the pledge, it felt good and you need to start somewhere!
Call it Abdul Kalam effect, here is how it goes( with a badge to wear too):

Today, I renew my pledge to an Entrepreneurial India. I WILL…
Break Barriers between Industry and Academia.
Regularly include Entrepreneurs, investors and professionals in the campus programs.
Find innovative was for students to experience industry before graduation.
Facilitate Faculty interaction with the industry.
Work to bring the discoveries of the lab into society.
Innovate in my work.
Consider working for startup companies.
Change my thinking from “Why” to “Why not?”.
Continue always to dream big and work to bring those dreams to reality.
Encourage and support others so that we all might live in richer, better India.

I happen to interact with students from National Institute of Fashion Design specializing on retail management. They amazed me with aspiration to build a retail chain brand. They were pretty clued and listening. For example Neha one of them, was very clear that she does not want to get into the production aspect but want to get into the branding and brand building. I was bit surprised that their blogging awareness is low and hands on experience with social media near zero( at least as a biz tool). I was too happy to point to Thomas the Saville Row tailor that leveraged blogging and other social media tools to expand his biz of making $4000 suits.

In another interaction, there was this question, “If you are a Startup, if by helping me to succeed as a Startup, are you not creating competition to yourself?” which stems form inexperience. Outlined the virtues of sharing, and how sharing is the best networking tool that will attract the right complementary pieces of your biz’s jig saw towards you like a magnet.

It was good to re-connect with the regulars. Surprisingly I did not talk about SecondLife to any of the newbies. There were questions/interest about next AWS meetup.

The meeting took place at the Woodlands DriveIn. Overall it was fun and refreshing.