Personal and professional development for technology professionals.
» Bringing Ideas To Life. With Love!
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 28 Feb 2005, 6:17 PM - Leave Comment
I am off from blogging for a couple of days as I am attending the leadership challenge workshop by Bluepoint Leadership in Sausalito today and tomorrow.
The program is amazing and we are enjoying every minute of it. Will write more after the sessions.
Posted under Leadership, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sun 27 Feb 2005, 6:34 AM - Leave Comment
Robert Cooper’s book The Other 90% is a brilliant piece of work. There are so many insights in the book. I have picked one that I have used for years (I must admit that I have not been consistent) and have hugely benefited. Here it is in a nutshell:
At the end of every week, you need to ask and answer two questions:
a) What is the most significant thing you did this week?
b) What is the most signficant thing you are going to do next week?
A slight variation that I propose is that you should get one like minded friend to help you out. If you and your friend can hold each other accountable to achieve the MST (most significant things) every week – imagine what would happen. You would have achieved 52 MSTs in a year. Do you remember any of your previous years where you were able to achieve 52 most significant things? Most of us don’t!
All the best for next year!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 26 Feb 2005, 6:21 AM - Leave Comment
No, I am not talking about what can we learn from using Google but what lessons can we learn from Google’s approach to make compelling offers. A lot, I guess.
First thing that comes to my mind is that when Google launches something it will be different. Way different from what everyone else is offering. Here are some examples:
Home page: The home page still has so much whitespace that it is unbelievable. When everyone else was using the portal approach, Google was clear that people come there to search for something and all that was required was the search bar. The simplicity is what won so many hearts.
Ad words: From the get go, Google made it clear that they would make money from relevant ads. It started with their own site but now there are probably millions of partner sites that use Google Adwords as a revenue generating engine.
Gmail: When everyone else was offering sub 10MB diskspace, Google did not open with a 100MB offer but a 1GB offer. There was no comparison. It’s hard for someone else to catch up
Maps: Maps and directions are a commodity now. However, zoom in feature in Google maps was the talk of the town.
Google Answers: The concept is similar to several expert marketplaces. The key difference is that the experts have been pre-screened and are top class. Ask a question and you will be pleasantly surprised by the quality of answers you receive.
Giving back: Read about the story of Google hiring a top notch Firefox programmer and allowing him to continue to work on Firefox (open source browser). Granted, there may be business interest underlying this but for now, they are giving a great gift to the open source community.
Google is one of the greatest success stories of the valley and I am proud of it. I was thinking about what could we learn and apply in our own lives from this story. Here are few worth mentioning:
Make your offers so compelling that people will take notice. Marginal improvements won’t help.
Scarcity builds value: Gmail is still an invitation only webmail. There are thousands on the waiting list.
Design for revenue and profit from the get go. Making this an after thought will be a mistake
Leverage others with win-win partnerships: Google didn’t stop with adwords on their site. They let it spread like wild fire through their partners.
Give back constantly: The more you give, the more you get
Something to think about.
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 26 Feb 2005, 5:43 AM - Leave Comment
Whenever we want to start something new – a project, a venture, a new friendship or anything significant, there are a lot of things that can go wrong. In fact for any new initiative to succeed there are lots of things that have to go right and a couple of things going wrong can make the whole initiative fail. So, if the possibility of failure is so high, should we try anything new at all?
I have seen so many people (including myself many times) putting off some key initiatives as the time may not be right or because of the fear that something could go wrong with their plan.
Now, whenever I am faced with such a dilemma, I have a rule to follow “You can’t lose what you don’t have.” Let me explain – let us say we need to make a cold call to a prospect. Right now, we don’t have that customer on our list. So, the first thing to know is whatever be the outcome, we are not losing this customer as he is not one right now. So, putting off making that phone call makes no sense as simply put – we have nothing to lose but everything to gain. Of course, you need to make a compelling offer that is relevant to the prospect to make him get interested but that is not the point here. The key is NOT to stop trying new things because of the fear of a perceived loss at a later time.
You can’t lose what you don’t have!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 25 Feb 2005, 8:57 AM - Leave Comment
We are a country filled with brilliant marketing people. Whenever someone thinks of a “gift” to give, the first thing that comes to one’s mind is something that he or she can buy at a store or online.
However, my thinking is that the greatest gifts that you give to others are intangible. It may be as simple as the time that you spend with your loved ones (no money, just time) or a note of appreciation that you send to someone who did a good job. Better yet, you can give the gift of a trusted relationship.
In some of the previous posts, I mentioned that to build a strong relationship it takes a long time. However, the process is shortened if an introduction was made through a very trusted source. If you can connect people and extend the trust (for the right reasons!) you are saving time for both parties involved. New connections are great gifts. They may not be valued that way or they may not be wrapped in color paper but the value that they bring is huge.
The key is to keep connecting people without worrying about what is in it for us. I learnt this from one of my mentors – Tim Sanders. You can read more about this and other insights from his landmark book Love is the killer app.
Quick best practices on connecting people:
a. Both parties should benefit. It should lead to a win-win relationship between them.
b. No personal gain to us. We are not in the brokering business when connecting people.
c. The connection should be relevant to both parties.
d. Introductory message (e.g. email) should clearly state what’s in it for both parties and also the fact that we have no personal interest in whatever is the outcome.
Thanks Tim. This lesson was a great gift from Tim Sanders and my life has changed forever after I learnt this.
Whenever you meet a person next, what if you start thinking about all the people that you can connect this person to – to create more win-win relationships. What if a few thousand people start doing this. The world would be a better place.
Thanks and all the best.
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By Rajesh Setty on Thu 24 Feb 2005, 7:31 PM - Leave Comment
Whenever I ask the question – “What is your dream?” I get a variety of answers from people. Some dreams are grand, some are funny, some lack logic and some are unreasonable and so on. This is expected. However, what is interesting is most people have vague dreams such as “I want to be more happy” or “I want to be financially independent” or something of that sort. More interestingly, most dreams are very small – they could almost be goals two or three years out. That is so sad.
Here’s my $.02
If it is anway a dream, why not dream BIG?
Why do we have to put a limitation on the dreams. It’s not real life, it’s dream world. There are limitations in the real world but we don’t have to extend it to our imagination. Let the imagination be imagination and let the dreams be unreasonable and seem unrealistic. Watch people who have achieved significant milestones and their dreams were not reasonable when they were first conceived in their minds.
How do we see it in reality if it’s not vividly imagined in our dreams first?
Go dream BIG and good luck with your dreams!!
PS: Once you dream, if you need help to make them come true, read my friend Marcia’s book on that topic – Make your dreams come true
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 24 Feb 2005, 12:34 AM - Leave Comment
What is one thing that takes a long time to build but can be destroyed in no time?
There are many answers to the above question. My favorite answer is Trust.
Trust is the bedrock of solid relationships. As you would have
observed, it takes a while for you to trust someone 100%. For almost
the same reasons, there is no overnight solution for
building strong relationships. It just take a long time of sustained
efforts where each party is cautiously building trust one step at a
time.
In my opinion, there are only two types of relationships (1) long
term and (2) very long term. Rest are casual transactions. Very long
term relationships provide an unfair advantage but not without an
investment (long term explains it all.)
Relationships will sustain only when there is mutual value addition.
One sided relationships will end sooner or later. Why is this
important? Here is one reason: Our tendency would be to go and find
people that are more powerful than us and try and build a long term
relationship with them. The value to us from such relationships is
clear and direct. The key questions are: What about the reciprocal
value to the other party? What’s in it for them (WIIFT) in this
relationship?
One trap that most of us fall into is entitlement. Relationships don’t happen by entitlement or hierarchy or position. It happens by design of healthy value exchange. There are no accidents here..
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 23 Feb 2005, 10:38 PM - 1 Comment
Tim Carter is an expert on home building, remodeling and repair. There
are millions that are out there who know this stuff. But Tim is
different. He has taken his trade to the extreme and built an empire at
Askthebuilder.com. Tim’s
eBooks on these topics are sold like hot cakes. His radio shows are
popular and his columns appear in 42 news papers. Tim gets in
excess of 350,000 visitors per month on his site. Talk about Passion
for his work!
In a completely different setting, take the case
of Denise Meyers who carves native american icons on gourds. Denise
sells them for $6k or more a piece. Each masterpiece is a demonstration of passion at work!
Can we do anything similar in the technology business?
It’s
hard work if we are one among the millions of Java programmers that are
out there in the world. The question to ask is not how many java
programmers are there in the world but to find out how many of these
java programmers are going about their jobs with true passion. How many
of them really are determined to make a difference to this world via
their jobs?
Our work will never be the same once we bring PASSION into the equation!
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 21 Feb 2005, 10:49 PM - 2 Comments
Most of us remember Newton’s Third Law in Physics – “Action and reaction are equal and opposite”.
I get a feeling that we use this law more often than required. I have
been trapped so many times and I see many people around me getting
trapped into this. Let me explain. There is an insatiable desire for
instant gratification at work and in life. Most of us want instant
results. Turn on the TV and you will see weight loss programs promising
to slash off a few pounds in days or over a weekend.
Many of us have tried to apply this at work and probably over extended
this law. While we want be revolutionary, in life and in work, things
mostly happen in an evolutionary fashion. It takes nine months for a
baby to gestate and sometimes a few years for a tree to grow. Things
take time and we need an extra dose of patience to wait for things to
happen (in this fast paced world).
Many times, Newton’s third law still applies but with a time lag.
Take for example – public speaking. We can start learning this art and
it would take years to master. If we take a public speaking class and
expect miracles to happen on the next day, it would seem a bit odd.
The cure for addiction to Newton’s third law:
a) Have a long term view and
b) Increase our patience level
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 21 Feb 2005, 10:20 PM - Leave Comment
Late last year we were looking to move into a bigger office space and I
was asking my friends for some referrals to good commercial real estate
brokers. One of them asked me to contact Jeff . I asked “So who is Jeff
with?” This person interestingly did not know where Jeff was working
and almost didn’t care about the company Jeff was associated with. He
said “I have no clue there. But I am confident that he will take good
care of you” and handed Jeff’s number.
Long story short. We met Jeff Ramirez (who is with Cornish and Carry)
and from day one, we had a pleasant experience. We could see that he
really cared. He asked a lot of questions about our business and what
we were looking in the new office space. After a couple of
meetings, we could feel that Jeff almost had a complete understanding
of our business and our needs. In the next couple of weeks, he showed
us three office spaces and not surprisingly, our management team liked
all the three of them. Talk about hit rate – he had 100%. This wouldn’t
have been possible if he didn’t care!!
Jeff is now a good friend I will have no hesitation to do business with
him again or to refer him to someone else that is looking for office
space.
Thanks Jeff – By caring and taking care of us, you have distinguished yourself and set an example for others.
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
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