Archive for November, 2005
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 18 Nov 2005, 11:05 AM - 3 Comments
I am sure I caught the attention of some of the techies. Unfortunately I am not referring to “Cascaded Style Sheets.” as I don’t know of any traps there 
I am talking about “Continuous Spiral Syndrome” a fancy term for sideways movement in people’s career paths.
Let me explain. Imagine a coil (which is the form of a spiral) lying
horizontally a few inches above the ground. Most careers take this
shape after an initial upward movement – a sideways movement within a
band. The size of the band varies with people. The cascaded spiral
syndrome is tricky as when you are within this spiral, you won’t know
that you are within this trap.
The first few years on the job, there is an obvious growth in the pay
and the responsilities – sometimes within the same company and
sometimes because you switch for a higher pay or higher position or
both. Once you are a seasoned professional (more then 5-6 years of
experience) you are at risk of getting into the CSS trap if you don’t
distinguish yourself.
The pattern goes sometething like this:
1.
You acquire short term skills that will take you to the next level (2
to 3 years.) You get recognized (awards like employee of the month,
star performer etc.) and rewarded appropriately. This is the period of
rise in the spiral.
2. something happens (think
9/11, outsourcing, technology obsolescence etc.) and the value from
your knowledge of your current skills erode. This is the downward part
of the spiral. You justify this downward movement as something out of
your control – as ton of people are going through the same downward
spiral.
3. But your are smart and you don’t go down too far. You pick up new skills and you are on your way to the top again.
4. Time flies and you go back to point #2 again.
You get the idea. While this is all happening, think about the changes
in your life and the drop in flexibility that is inevitable (marriage,
kids, age etc.)
Repeating this cycle is easy in the initial years of your career but it
gets harder with time (especially after three cycles of 3-5 years each)
So, what could you do?
First,
be aware of the CSS trap and start taking personal responsibility when
things go down. You can always find external factors but that won’t
help you.
Second, during this whole
journey, continuously invest in yourself and your personal brand. This
is what will save you during the dips.
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 17 Nov 2005, 3:27 PM - Leave Comment
I got this from Navin Nagiah who took over my job as the CEO of CIGNEX a few months ago.
This little quote will explain the need to develop the power to watch the trends, anticipate and act accordingly.
“
I skate to where the puck is going to be”
- Wayne Gretzky
Posted under Great Quotes, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 16 Nov 2005, 10:09 PM - Leave Comment
If you want to be happier than where you are just try this – stop
comparing any scenario to ideal scenario. It will make a huge
difference and you will instantly become special in some way. Most
people have trouble with their jobs or relationships or colleagues or
– this is the best – with themselves because they start comparing one
or more of these things to an ideal condition.
An example – When someone says they have problem with their boss, I
always ask “Is there any one thing that your boss does right?” and the
answer, of course, is “Yes.” When I probe further, they say that there
are a lot of things that the boss does right but this one thing that he
does wrong is the troublesome one. So I ask “Why are you not happy
about all the other things that your boss does right?” and there is a
long silence on the other end. On a lighter note one of them said
“Well, if I focus on all the right things, what will I complain about?”
We can almost say that ideal scenarios exist only in our imagination.
In the above example, you really have to “manufacture” a boss that will
be doing “everything” right. If you change your job or the boss
changes, the situation might improve but only until you discover that
the new boss also has issues (may be not the same ones) when you
compare him to the “ideal” one.
It is good to compare to an ideal scenario when the objective is to
improve and perform better. However, most of us carry out this
comparison to complain or to feel miserable.
Good luck!
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 16 Nov 2005, 6:00 AM - Leave Comment
I have talked about the topic of simplicity before and the need for simplifying things in general. This is an extension to that topic.
Let me start with an example. Last week I was supposed to pick up two
folks from San Francisco Airport and both of these people sent me their
travel details. Both were coming from India so the itinerary was very
(very) long. One of them had forwarded his itinerary and I had to
search through the whole thing just to find out the flight number and
the arrival time in San Francisco. The other person though had a
different approach. He had forwarded the itinerary but had added a note
in the beginning with the following information
a) Flight Number (Singapore Airlines SQ2)
b) Time of arrival
c) Link to a site where you can track the flight arrival online
d) Telephone number of local Singapore Airlines airport office
What a difference it made. I just had to print this and keep it with me
for the day of his arrival. I am sure it took a while for this person
to compile all the information but it saved a ton of time for me. The
rest of the travel information was almost irrelevant for me so I didn’t
have to look at that. Time saved again.
Because we are so busy, we take shortcuts and send data and expect the other person to figure it out the real information from within this data. This may work well but imagine if one of your peers is always “Packaging information for easy consumption“, he or she will instantly differentiate and stand-out from the crowd.
How could you design any information that you send out is packaged brilliantly and in a manner that is easy to consume?
Something to think about.
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 15 Nov 2005, 11:53 AM - Leave Comment
Yesterday I was speaking with Bob Allard
and while I don’t believe in re-incarnation, if such a thing is there I
know Bob and I were connected in some fashion. Bob and I have a
strikingly similar approach to networking (actually I don’t even want
to call it Networking – it is relationship building)
The approach in its simplest form is to add enough value (care and
feeding) to people in your network and also connect enough people to
each other so that the whole network has higher leverage. Connecting
the right people (meaning both parties benefit) is the key to the whole
thing. In Bob’s own words, he gets joy in connecting people as
a) two people connecting with each other is pure positive energy
b) it shows that you cared enough about both people and you took time to make this connection happen.
c) it is selfless (if you do it right) and only good things can happen.
Bob has a proposal out on ChangeThis called “The Care and Feeding of your Network”
and I am excited about the topic. So if you like the topic, show your
support to Bob by voting for his manifesto on changethis.
Cheers.
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 15 Nov 2005, 7:35 AM - Leave Comment
It’s an exciting day for me as I get featured as “Blogger of the Day” by by Randy Charles Morin.
Thanks Randy.
Posted under Endorsements, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 15 Nov 2005, 6:41 AM - Leave Comment
If you are looking for inspiration, I guess you will find it everywhere. I was having coffee at Starbucks yesterday morning and found this little quote on a coffee cup.
“
The humble improve“
- Wynton Marsalis, Jazz musician
While humility is not the only characteristic that will help someone
improve, I have to say I agree with Wynton. If you lack humility,
chances are that you think that you don’t need help and may not be OPEN
to learning new things which in turn will limit your growth.
Posted under Great Quotes, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 14 Nov 2005, 10:31 AM - 11 Comments
[Update: Oct 21, 2006]
Welcome to new readers. This post is almost an year old and is seriously OUTDATED. I am not keeping this current. But I have created a lens on Squidoo on the same topic that is current.
You can read it here:
Squidoo lens: Blogging Starter Checklist
Many of my close friends are entering the blogging world. I am so happy
for them. I started blogging in Feb 2005 and I have learnt that we need
to do a few basic things (for starters) and I have put together a
starter checklist for new bloggers. I have used this list to help my
friends and now I thought I will make this public. This list is by no
means complete and all the items may not be relevant to everyone.
1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
My friend Munwar Shariff
wanted me to do this for a long time but I kept postponing it. Finally
when I got it done, it was amazing to find out how many people were
coming to the blog by typing in www.rajeshsetty.com. It costs probably $10 a year but it’s worth every penny.
2. Get a “Creative Commons License”
Creative Commons makes it easy to assign a license for your online content. I use a license called “Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0″
This means (in english)
You are free to
* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
* to make derivative works
Under the following conditions:
* by Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
* Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
Most probably your blogging software will automatically provide an RSS
feed capability. However, chances are that you may not be able to track
how many readers are subscribing to your feed. By burning your feed via
feedburner, you can get those statistics. Again, it only takes a few minutes to setup a free account on feedburner.
4. Implement subscription chiclets
People use variety of RSS readers and you want to make it easy for them to subscribe to your feed from those RSS readers. Feedburner
provides scripts to create those subscription chiclets. I suggest that
you should take a look at the available options and add those chiclets
to your blog site.
5. Enable search
Again, search should be a standard feature for any website. Your
blogging provider would normally provide the feature. You just have to
find out how to enable it for your blog.
6. Claim your blog at Technorati
By registering yourself at technorati and
claiming it, you have an ability to put your photo with your profile.
When people search for stuff on technorati and your blog comes up in
the search results your thumbsize photo appears with the search result.
Every single thing helps.
7. Allow users to get your blog via email
You will be amazed how many people want to read your blog via their
email. It’s easy to set that up. You can get a script to do that by
registering at Feedblitz.
8. Link to your profile
Write up your introduction “elevator pitch” and link it from your blog.
People want to know who you are. Celebrity bloggers can ignore this
comment
9. Link to your photo album
If you have an online photo album with a service like Flickr, put in a link to that as well.
10. Announce your blog to the world
The first thing that you can do is to use a service like Pingomatic to ping a few servers. Of course, best would be to write compelling content that would make others link to your site.
11. Provide a way to contact you
Other than posting comments on your blog, provide a way (email, phone
or both) for your readers to connect with you. I have made quite a few
new friends from all over the world.
12. Link to your bookmarks
If you have an account with del.icio.us and are tracking some interesting websites, you can link to your bookmark page.
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content
Very soon you will have a lot of content on your blog and your readers
will get confused where to go. One option is to create meaningful
categories and file content appropriately. That will be a great service
for your readers.
14. Put your photo on the home page
Blog is a conversation that you are having with your readers and it becomes more personal with a photo.
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK
Simple way is to subscribe to your own feed in your RSS readers. Other way is to use FeedValidator to check if everything is OK
[Update Nov 3, 2005]
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap
Feedmap provides a simple way of
associating your physical co-ordinates (city, zip) to your blog. As
more people sign up for this service, your blog will appear in the
“bloggers nearby” for your neighbours blogs.
17. Include a blog link in your email signature
Even people who you know may not know that you have a blog. Best is to include the link to your blog in the email signature.
[ Updated on November 14, 2005 ]
18. Claim your blog at Feedster
You claimed your blog at Technorati. Now, please go ahead and claim it in Feedster as well. If you do well, you might even get into the feedster elite club “Feedster Top 500” You can add an icon or your photo to personalize the search results
19. Register at Findory
Findory aggregates some of the
finest blogs and they recommend content based on users’ interest. So if
a user is reading an article in another blog that has similar content,
he or she may be presented with your blog to consider reading.
20. Register at blogwise
Blogwise is a directory that is
created manually by a bunch of cool folks. You can submit your blog for
inclusion and someone over there will add it to the directory if they
find the content appropriate. You can check out the listing for Life Beyond Code and may be leave your comments on this blog there.
Also, don’t forget to check out Stephan Spencer’s extended checklist on the same topic. Great stuff there.
I am sure there are many more but this should give you a start!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Mon 14 Nov 2005, 7:39 AM - 1 Comment
This is a question for those who have already achieved something
significant in their lives and become remarkable as people – “Before
you reached where you are now, way before you had those accomplishments
- do you remember anyone recognizing your potential?”
Every time I ask this question, I get a positive answer. People always
remember those that they recognized them for their potential. Most
often, there is a story behind every achiever – of someone in their
life who recognized and encouraged them way before the world recognized
them. In fact, without the help of these “special” people, some people
would not have made it big.
Those that recognize us early
have a special place in our lives. They are special because not
everyone takes the time to the see the potential in people. Others are
so busy and most important – they need evidence from history that you
can “make it happen.”
You want to make a lasting impression on someone’s life? Start
recognizing and respecting potential in those young people way before
someone else does. You would have secured a permanent position in their
hearts and minds.
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 11 Nov 2005, 7:50 PM - Leave Comment
The father of modern management Peter Drucker (1909 – 2005) is no more. I have learnt a lot by reading the masterpieces of Peter Drucker over the years. I will always be indebted to him.
May his soul rest in peace!
Raj
Posted under Main Page.
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