Engage the heart to inspire action

Yesterday I was chatting with a colleague of mine about our new project. We both quickly agreed on the why the project is important and what a difference we can make by delivering on this new project. We also immediately noted that there is some deep disbelief in the organization of 200+ people if we can and will deliver on this project. There are many factors that drive the disbelief: clarity, commitment, collaboration required, meaning, etc. We knew that there is a great opportunity next week to pitch the project to the team at large. And felt that it is important to use that opportunity very well to engage the team.

As we discussed further, we felt it is important to engage the hearts of the team members and not just mind. Often folks come looking for logical answers to satisfy the mind. That is just the first or the second layer. It is the heart that is the inner core that drives our emotional engagement that often drives unconscious behaviors. So it is important for leaders to strike a strong accord with the hearts of others to inspire action.

We both recalled watching Simon Sinek's Ted talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action. Simon says that inspired leaders communicate from the inside out sharing the 1) Why, 2) How, and 3) What, or what Simon calls the 'Golden Circle'. Simon takes a examples from individuals and organizations to illustrate his golden circle concept. For example, Apple used to say "we make computers" which is a 'what' statement. And their 'how' was "we make beautiful computers". However the core driver for this durable mission over many years has been the 'why' which is "Think Different. We challenge the status quo. We make different computers.". And indeed that 'why' has been a solid reason for Apple's transformation in the past 15+ years shifting from the erstwhile "Apple Computers" to "Apple Inc" producing blockbuster products on a repeat cadence. Simon's other examples include the story about Wright Brothers inventive success and Martin Luther King's long marches to more freedom.

It is fascinating to understand the context and how various individuals approach engagement. I strongly believe that we need passion, clarity in purpose, and persistent drive to create fantastic products. I also strongly believe that it is the same passion and purpose that can also engage people to collaborate and hence produce fantastic products. I had seen this work in my teams when I had repeatedly attempted to solidify the mission, create 6-8 word missions for my teams and continuously engage the hearts and minds of my team.

Coming to the story from yesterday. My colleague and I later ventured into our project leader's office and chatted with him more. We were delighted to know that he had conviction, belief and passion for our new problem. We were delighted that he wants to get us all engaged deeply. We shared our inputs about the people situation and indicated that we are glad to help in shaping the speech next week to engage the team at large. Next week will be a blast!

CloudBox can improve flight safety with cloud analytics

Over the past two weeks there has been intense search for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 (#MH370). Every plane is equipped with the black box that often yields clue about what happened inside the flight. Usually after an accident or crash, the experts retrieve this black box and look for clues on what may have gone wrong. Ever since I learnt about this black box stuff, I had been in awe. However with this recent MH370 loss and long search for it, I wonder why are we not using real-time cloud (service) analytics to keep track of planes in flight?

There are likely several challenges with uplinking flight data and doing timely analytics. Over the past decades the cloud services industry has developed amazing computing, data, and communication infrastructure that can be used to solve problems. Let us assume that each plan can be equipped with a cloud box that can capture and feed diagnostics data and appropriate pilot + officer conversation data from the planes in flight to cloud analytics services. Let us look at the data processing capacity required. For now I will ignore the costs for cloud box and associated services. In the end, any cost can be ascribed to increased safety, reduced insurance rates, and worst case become a premium for flight charges across the board.

According to various Internet posts (one example here), there are about 100,000 flights per day.

Assume each diagnostics + conversational sample collected is compressed to 1MB per uplink.

Assume that each sample is uploaded to at least 3 satellites to ensure redundancy at 30-second intervals.

(And perhaps we may need adaptive algorithms to detect change in course, which can trigger faster uplinks at one sample every second.)

At 30-second samples, there are 2880 to be accurate, resulting in about 10 GB of compressed data per day per plane.

For 100K flights, that is about a peta-byte of data coming in per day.

 

 

Provided we have good distribution of satellites and good processing capabilities, there will be sufficient computing and bandwidth to handle such traffic. The data is very suitable for parallel processing which can be done through a variety of mechanisms. It is achievable, cost and fitting economics aside. On the ground existing and new receiver stations can process such data to provide feeds to the control towers and authorities to take action.

 Perhaps the cloud box is already in action for non-civil purposes. If not, new installations will come up in the coming years. Technology can help us tame problems.

 In the future skies, we can expect air travel to be more safer.

I loved OneNote; and now One Note is free!

Wow! OneNote is one of my favorite pieces of software. It is now free from Microsoft - see http://www.onenote.com for details. And better yet, there are a lot of apps featured as well at http://www.onenote.com/apps.

A minute of pause here: why do I like OneNote? Why would I want to share more information?

I like OneNote, because it is simple and easy to use. It has powerful search functionality. It connects well on the internet and enables shared notebook access. I can house my notebook on the internet and reconnect to it from any machine. BEST of all, I do not have to keep pressing 'save button' anytime. And of course it rarely crashes. OneNote to me is the best piece of software that tells me more about what a 21st century software can be.

Certainly OneNote is not a panacea for all problems I have :) There are many features I desire that it makes it easy for me
a) Scan documents - coming soon. I need to try the Office Lens with OneNote.
b) Write blogs - I have not find the magic connector for me to use OneNote and have a copy of the messages posted as blog to my favorite blog site
c) Auto-compressor - often I get OneNote notebooks from others that are big and long. I would like to see a compressor that do its magic to show me the relevant parts, to reduce the time it takes to wade thru all details
d) Separate note creation from note walk through. Again to consume other's post it is useful to separate what is the input detail from the output detail.
e) Heatmap of the content in OneNote, so I can manage out old notes. Often it is easy to accumulate turds and I do not go back and clean up old notes. Having a heat map can help me to weed thru the old stuff that is not relevant
f) An integrated change log that can show me changes to various Notebooks that I am connected with (one can turn this into a form of feed engine)
etc.

There are plenty of app opportunities atop OneNote. For now it is great that this is free that more users can enjoy. Nice!

Values to guide in Project Leadership

In the past two decades of professional employment in the software industry, I had learnt a lot from working on various projects (mostly software projects in teams). I  hold three values and continued to invest in these: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Besides the project related values, I also hold high regard for some personal values: Integrity, Honesty, and Initiative. Finally, I like people values of: Trust, Respect, and Appreciation. Today I will discuss just the values related to projects.

Briefly the project values are:

•  Innovation - bringing new ideas to life - both on problem solving and process engineering to create product value. Innovation does not mean just a big bang effort like creating the next big electronic gadget or building the next big software development tool, though those are the things that I help with. Also there are numerous occasions where small innovations are very useful as well. 
•  Collaboration - working with people cross boundaries and cross-teams to solve problems. Bringing ideas to life is a big task. Attempting to doing it alone is not easy and sometimes can be just plain boring. Instead working with teams can be fun and rewarding experience. And for this collaboration to work, it is important to listen, communicate, clarify, and engage in joint sessions to solve problems.
•  Execution - is the art and science of completing the project on time and on budget. No idea has value unless it has been shaped and delivered for users to experience it. Execution includes rigorous focus on nuts and bolts details to ensure all parts of the project progress well. The 99% perspiration happens here: budget and tracking schedules, fixing bugs iterations, testing, etc.

Most times, I value the Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution on an even keel. On occasions, I modify the order in which I want to exercise these values depending on the type of project I am working on. Most times it is clarifying the teams I work with. Though some people may find it hard to adjust when we change the project and accordingly I update the values. In those occasions I resort to repeat education within the team about the rationale.

For instance, over the past year, I was doing a startup project to develop a novel set of ideas to market that had the potential to change our business moving forward. The effort required a lot of focus on shaping the new ideas and refining it deeply. For this project the order I used was: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Accordingly, we spent the first part of project schedule prototyping and defining the architecture. I formed teams and updated the teams 4 months later once we learnt more. I also found parts that I can borrow and reuse from elsewhere - hence I applied the collaboration aspects to discuss and leverage others solutions. The team also produced parts that are to be used by others; we delivered collaboratively to others. About half way thru the project I started emphasizing the Execution aspects more. Accordingly I focused the team on reduced times to deploy and test our software, improve customer feedback, fix bugs and reach zero bug bounce, etc. Net-net, the values did not change, the order helped us focus the efforts.

Three years back, I was asked to develop Windows Phone Application Store. There were several app stores in the market by 2010. So novelty was not high, but getting the store services out was definitely very important. And there was strong possibility to create small innovations along the way. The order I used was: Execution, Collaboration, and Innovation. Focusing on execution to build up a high quality app store with rapid progress to get the store for windows phones was critical. Certainly there were many teams to work with to reuse technology from. The team adopted collaboration as next step. Finally we found new ways to do things and new features (ex: build on Windows Azure, optimize app package for faster load, Personalized search for apps, etc.) with our focus on innovation. Net-net, I led three versions of the app store development using the same value priorities and helped us get the app store up and running well.

I had learnt that having a few values that I repeatedly use helps me focus in my work and lead the teams. I appreciate the guidance I received from many leaders I worked with for guiding me to develop and refine my values.

OLED lighting

Over the past month I am using an LED powered reading lamp. It is simple, cute, and powerful. Use of LED also means the lamp is 'cool', really I mean it. The entire lamp is powered by 3 AAA batteries. Wow!

I wondered how we can get bigger lights using the same technology. The first thought is to get an array of LEDs strung together to bring the effect. However such an array looks ugly. They would look like a corn with little bulbs projecting out. Instead what we need is a nice flat surface.

There is all this rage about LED TVs in the market. See
1080p 120 Hz LED LCD VA Panel HDTV, Black for an example. These LED TVs are supposed to offer high quality display at smallest TV size. Indeed they do. The display is cool. I am writing this blog using a computer that uses one such LED screen. The screen offers dynamic control of colors and images to provide better lighting. It is late night. And I also had turned off all lights in the home relying mostly on the LED Screen's backlight to help me use the computer. It is powerful and bright. Voila, we should use this.

Imagine having LED lights for our entire home. In theory these should reduce energy consumption while offering rich ability to project light - colors, patterns, intensity, etc. Imagine if we can have programmable lighting inside the house. Imagine the lights dancing to the moods, music, and people in the house. That will add a living personality to these lights. What may be required for the same. Need to think about this further.

A quick search through the internet revealed that there are nice panels on the way making to the US market. OLED Light Guide Panels are bright ideas that provide rich way for us to add brightness to our lives. I am committing to buy more LED based lighting products. And of course that means there is more delight waiting for me.

Domains, domains, ...

Who would have thought that one can sell just electronic records and make money. That is precisely what godaddy.com does. They sell registration records for internet hosted domains. It is simple, easy, and cool to have a domain of our own. and of course it is simple, easy, and profitable for godaddy.com. I have a few domains with them. I like the domains because it allows me to host dedicated content easily.

You can get your own domain too.
Go Daddy $7.49 .com Sale!

KIN - friend to phone!

Yesterday I caught this announcement about KIN.com. Wow! that is a very short name. How in the world do folks find domain names with such small names. I started digging into this. Aha! KIN is well funded - it is coming from one of the billion $$ software companies - Microsoft. No wonder, they can afford to find such nice domain names. Why am i talking about domain names - observe that I had difficulties getting the domain names sorted out earlier today.

Dictionary.com has excellent meanings for this more than 1000-year old word - Dict: KIN (see dictionary directly to avoid any copyright issues). KIN is a nice word to use for friend ... it sounds poetic, romantic, and melliflous. A stronger meaning includes 'descendants of the same family'. Perhaps the hardware devices being marketed by KIN.com belong to such a definition. If I indeed buy one of these phones, i would rather load it up with more friends than family. Famliy have a way of becoming friends too (see facebook!)

Switching to the real KIN.com message - the announcement is for a new kind of phone. It comes out as a couple - Kin1 and Kin2. Or perhaps corporate speak - i should say - Kin One and Kin Two. In these days of application filled hyper phones (read iPhone) what does Kin have to offer? Social Connectivity they say. Yes, the primary purpose for my phone is to interact with my friends and family (barring a few marketing calls that i have to handle). More than applciations, i definitely want to know if my friend's son went swimming, or the daughter won the chess tournament, or better yet if the weather was great at nearby ski resort (because one of my friend went there over the weekend). Kin does make sense.

For now i am awed by the name - short, sweet, and meaningful. Nice job Microsoft. Is the product that good too?