Cactuses @Workplace

In current IT scenario, there is virtually a rat race created by management where employees want to get the best in terms of appraisal ratings, hikes, recognitions and promotions. Some work hard and get it on their own merit. But some get by affecting the merit of others..Such people spoil the work environment.

Finally the work environment will be a quiet place without anyone except cactus and his supervisor..

Its the responsibility of supervisors not to encourage such scenarios and provide a lively and warm work ambience to increase productivity. The biased opinions of supervisors not just affect the work place but also individuals and their career path. So its important to handle things correctly and not to encourage cactuses who becomes thorny to others.

So Engineers be watchful of such cactuses with your words and actions and supervisors dont make work place a desert land by encouraging such cactuses..

Whats In a Pencil

I read this article about pencil.


A pencil maker taught 5 important lessons to pencils:

1st -Everything u do will always leave a mark.

2nd -You can always correct the mistakes you make.

3rd -What is important is what is inside you.

4th-In life you will undergo painful sharpenings which will make you a better pencil.

5th -To be the best pencil, you must allow yourself to be held and guided by the Hand that holds you

But is the hand called DESTINY??

A dotted line In a Relationship.........................

There are many people we come across in daily lives right from School to college and work place and even relatives.But we hardly keep in touch with so many of them. Few of friends will be in touch for a brief period of time and the contact vanishes later..

What may be the reason???

In every relationship, Sharing is important.Starting from Trivial things to important ones, its important to share the moments with a companion. Thts why Man is known as a social animal. Over a period of time, we tend to get cob webbed in our daily life and maintain relation with only those who we meet on day to day basis except few close friends...

Social Networking sites such as Facebook, Google plus do project to get back in touch with old friends who might be out of sight for a while now..but will those vitual connections bring back the spark in the relationship that once existed..( But if the relationship was strong, it wouldnt have faded). Momentatily happiness is definitely felt when the sight of long lost friend is seen on those sites.

But will this nurture a valuable relationship?..

This is what I call a dotted line because the connection exist but still there is no relation.Similar to dotted line hierarchy in a corporate sector. When a person reports to his higher manager in a dotted line, the higher manager do not decide his ratings or performance but still the person is expected to please the boss.

As I said, Relationship ceases to exist when there is no sharing..

Mild Tremors at ITPL today

I was reading newspaper post lunch today. It was around 2:15 PM. I felt the desk shake.I thought it was due to my head spin or something like that.As I walked back to my desk, there were discussions of tremors at many cubicles. After about 10 minutes

we were asked to evacuate the buildings.Fortunately no more tremors were felt.After  30 mins , I am back at my desk typing my blog :)

C ya...

Job-seekers join great companies but leave because of bad bosses

It happens...Encountering someone who bad-mouthed you, offended you is terrible. What’s even more terrible is if he/she is your boss. Then don’t be surprised, you are not alone: D .It’s just not enough if you get a good job in a good company, one needs to be lucky to get a good boss too... This is one of my realizations after being 5 years in the industry.

If someone (who is intelligent also) is in starting years of industry, one shall immediately quit the current job and get a new job. But as the years go by, one learns to tolerate bad boss around. There is no point in fighting back because that creates a hole in the resume.

But what makes a bad boss?

1.     Lack of Trust

Most often I have seen that these people don’t trust that a task can be delivered. It can be due to many reasons.

1.  Person lack skills-> Then provide him      sufficient        training and time and give him a chance
2.  Previous Failed Experience -> Point out the reason for failure and ensure the mistakes don’t happen as part of process. This is called Quality check. Provide another opportunity to boost his confidence and morale and provide more such learning opportunity instead of putting him/her down.
3. Biased opinions-> this ends up in giving the task to same old experienced people and curbs the new talent.

2.     Lack of communication:

When a junior employee commits a mistake, then it can be communicated to him explaining him what was wrong on his/her part. Expecting other person to be a mind –reader unnecessarily creates both technical and non-technical issues.

           

3.     Know It All Attitude:

Curbing ideas when they are to be generated is like killing a person’s enthusiasm at work. Yelling at employees only makes them feel reprimanded. One needs to be open minded and learn from juniors to create an innovative work environment.

Being a manager, one should know the skills of bridging the gap between higher management and engineers and create a positive environment to achieve the organization goal. Managers should handle failures in a positive way to make it a learning experience rather than a fearing experience. Everyone in the organization has their own role to play. A Manager is a manager as he has the experience to handle things and see the big picture and guide the juniors, not make their job miserable. One needs to understand that everybody is an employee first and their designations follow next, not the other way around...

An Inspiring Story of Anu Aga

Some people are born with Silver spoon, yet life does not spare them from facing the harsh difficulty. One such story is the story of Anu Aga.

Anu Aga, the ex-Chairman of Thermax India has been awarded the Padma Shri.

Her name featured on the list of awardees announced by the Government on the occasion of Republic Day 2010.

Here is a short excerpt from a 2005 article on Arnavaz Aga

Aga is always in her trademark cotton or silk saris, whether it’s for a talk on women achievers at a convention organised by the Indian Institute of Management (Kolkata), for the pages of the November issue in Business Today as part of the top 25 most powerful women in business, or while accepting the lifetime achievement award at the Financial Express-Electrolux Women in Business Awards, as she did last year. Just like the sari, the no-nonsense expression on her face, reflecting steely determination, is an intrinsic part of her.

This calm determination has helped her family and company Thermax India tide over trying times. The death of her husband Rohinton in 1996 from a heart attack thrust her into the chairperson’s role of Thermax, an engineering company that was begun by her father A S Bathena three decades ago and later managed by Rohinton. Just as Aga, till then director of human resources, was finding her feet as the head of Thermax, she suffered another deep loss – the death of her 25-year-old son Kurush in a road accident.

At the time, Thermax’s growth curve dipped and share prices plummeted from Rs 400 to Rs 36. An anonymous letter from a shareholder accusing her of letting him down forced her to take stock of the situation. “I realised I wasn’t capable but was only pretending to run the business,” she says. Losing no time, she detached herself from day-to-day operations and brought in a foreign consultant to restructure the company – the move revived its fortunes.

Since its turnaround, Thermax, with its presence in 14 countries, has emerged as a leading manufacturer of engineering products and systems for industries. “Despite stiff challenges at work and crises at home, she succeeded in separating her ownership and professional responsibilities, so crucial in the leadership of a closely held family enterprise,” recalls P M Kumar, former head of human resources, under whom Aga had trained in the 1980s.

How NOT to BELL the (wild) CAT????

I have seen people slogging for CAT for months and years, solving all competitive booksand exams.Each year thousands of candidates appear for the CAT; only few make it totheir desired B-schools. I used to wonder, does solving CAT, getting to B-school makeone a good manager. But it’s my personal view point n don’t have anything about thosebanging the CAT.

Would like to present an interesting story of my friend and his tips on how not to prepare for the CAT !!!!

 Tip No 1: Join CAT classes

First step join a famous coaching institute which offers some 5-6 thousand pages of material and some 50 prep tests including mocks and other tests. Join weekend batch and pray for some good looking girls in your batch

Tip No 2: How to ensure the time spent in class is worthwhile.

On the first day of the class as soon as you enter scan for girls again and take a seat as near as possible to the hottest girl u find in the class and once done try to strike a conversation with the girl.. hardly people care for the class.. If the girl talks to u then u will be more than happy that the thousands u paid the for the coaching centers are not going to be wasted..

Tip No 3: Time Spent after class hours.

After the class, if u are lucky to have had the conversation wait for the girl to leave and follow her on the bike and offer her a ride... whole class goes on staring the girl and observing her tiniest moments hardly anything written on the book,

Tip No 4: First Mock Test

Weeks pass by mocks start; first mock would be a disaster at this rate of reading then get bit serious for 2 -3 days and then same time work increases at office and u end up staying late to meet releases deadlines, customer issues.

Somehow these things always come when cat is around.. When there is no exam there would be weeks at office when there was now work and suddenly whole lot of work comes.

Tip No 5: On Mock Test Disaster- Failures are stepping stones

You curse the coaching class for putting that hot girl in the same batch. You curse yourself for staring at her rather than not listening to the class and then you curse the coaching class again for not teaching well enough after charging so much fees and then u start to prepare and suddenly remember various online forums such as totalgadha.com or pagalguy.com which u never used for your prep. and then u realize just weeks before that it’s such a useful site where u would have got a lot of help and u again blame yourself for not seeing them earlier.

u see the mock scores of people scoring 120+ out of 180 and then feel bad that u wasted one year and still never crossed 60+ out of 180.

Tip No 6: Peaking at the right time as our Dhoni says!!

Rare mocks u feels happy when you clear the cutoffs for both the section. but in the same mocks there will be lot of people who would have scored almost out of out and even despite all this u convince yourself that anything can happen on the D-day. it all depends on that day doesn’t matter what u prepare n what u didn’t and then u also console yourself saying that AIMCATS are way tougher than actual CAT and thus your below par score in AIMCAT is equal to a par score in CAT finally Sept comes and then the forms are sold

Tip No 7: Some Time Pass to Relax already stressed mind...

Go to the axis bank on day one and think that by 9 if I go ill take the form n go to office from there but by 9 there will be a queue as long as one km in front of the bank waiting for the cat forms then call up your manager and tell him some reason that you will be late n will reach by noon. while standing in the line u count all the beautiful girls and wish that they worked with u and then scold your manager for not getting good girls in your team and once u get the form u book a last slot hoping that it will give u extra 2 3 weeks to prepare once the exam starts but essentially all those 3 weeks full end up reading the CAT experiences on pagalguy where people post their test experiences and invariably everyone who posts tells at the end 2 things

One that the CAT was lot easier than AIMCATS... Suddenly u feel happy that u had already came across that thought during your prep

Second that people who have not yet taken the test should not read the exam experiences

but invariably the only people who reads them are the ones who want to take the exam as the ones who finished with it will be either happy n partying that their exam was well or sad and still be partying that this would be their last party and that from next day they would start for the next season

Tip No 8: On days just before Exam

Two days before the exam the tension sets in and then u realize reading somewhere on the online forum that u should not read a lot just before exam so u stop it and then u start praying to all gods. Somehow people remember gods just before exams or when they are in trouble. u make all sort of offering pray to balaji that you will offer your hair if u get good score as if balaji would give u a better score for your hair..

Tip No 9: D-Day

And then on the exam day u go in eagerly and come back utterly disappointed. You come home after doing badly and eagerly see online if the exam was diff for others too.

Tip No 10:  Better Luck Next Time

Seeing others decent attempts one realizes that his exam was bad and that day u promise that the next year you will bell the cat. Prepare for the next week or so for the next year exam n then feel that u need break and stop it altogether.

Finally one last line is at the end of cat season neither one got the girl nor did he crack the exam except for losing the money 

So for guys all out there preparing for CAT, hope it was good lessons learnt J.. Good luck..