Archive for April, 2006
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 08 Apr 2006, 12:07 AM - Leave Comment
I got this in my email box. I thought this was from an ISP but after reading all the acronyms (most of which I didn’t understand) I did not understand what this company was famous for. It also contained a link of the company’s Network Maps (??)
<snip>
I can also provide you any quotes that you may be looking for.
Some of the solutions/services we provide are:
Voice (Local PRI T1’s, Multi-Market PRI’s, Basic Phone Lines, Long Distance), Integrated Access Voice & Data T1’s, Toll Free IVR, Dedicated Internet Access (DSL, T1, T3 to OCx), VoIP, Point- to-Point Private Lines, Point-to-Multi-Point Private Lines – with DS3 Hubbing, MPLS, Collocation & Web Hosting, IP VPN, Conferencing, Local Access, Metro Fiber and Metro Ethernet, Intercity Ethernet, Type 1 and Type 2 Ethernet Solutions, and most other Wide Area or Metro Area Data Networking Solutions.
If you would like a specific price quote or detailed proposal, or you would like to arrange a meeting in person, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly, either by phone or by email
Additionally, I am including a link to our Network Maps.
<Link to Network Maps>
<snip>
I am from a technology world and most of what was written went over my head. God save the decision makers who are from a non-technology world receiving this email. It will be a total waste of time for them.
While we can laugh at this, I am sure each one of us has sent one or two emails without thinking a lot about the recipient of that email. Communication is a two-way street. Transmission and reception are two key components (the third one is the “medium”.) While you can’t control the reception at least we can take care of the “transmission?”
Have a great weekend all of you.
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 07 Apr 2006, 11:56 PM - 2 Comments
Look at the following words:
1. xanthosis
2. vivisepulture
3. euonym
4. chiaroscurist
5. logorrhea
6. demarche
7. succedaneum
8. prospicience
9. pococurante
10. autochthonous
11. appoggiatura
I am sure most of you would have guessed what these words are. These are the winning words for the National Spelling Bee Contest from 1995 to 2005. Forget about the spelling, I don’t know the meaning of these words and most important, I don’t plan to know the meaning of these words. Even if I did and I used them in a sentence I am sure others won’t know what I was talking about.
May be I am naive. I don’t know why we have to get our kids to go through all this rigamorale (there I used something odd already) to learn a set of words in preparation for the contest. We know that they will rarely use these words again in their life except when they participate in another contest like this one. Granted, there are side benefits in learning the spellings of such words. But what is the price that you need to pay to get the side benefits? Is it worth it?
Time and energy are not available in excess for anyone in this world. You can spend time on these kinds of activities only if you feel that alternatively you would have spent that time watching mindless shows on TV. There is an opportunity cost for everything and we should just know that we may be missing something when we are pursuing dreams that may not have a long-term value.
IMHO of course!
Posted under Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Fri 07 Apr 2006, 8:12 PM - Leave Comment
Today I had lunch with four VERY smart people and one of them was Brian Sommers who was the longest running and most senior director of Accenture’s Software Intelligence Unit. The credit for this blog post goes to Brian.
We all know how important it is to innovate in these tough times. Innovation is no longer a luxury. It is mandatory for enterprises to survive and thrive. However, there is another aspect that seems to get overlooked. It is a company or a person’s ability to exploit innovations. Xerox PARC was famous for innovating but not very good at exploiting their own innovations. Dell, on the other hand not only has many process innovations, it also is a fast follower exploiting innovations at a breathtaking speed. The biggest example will be of course Microsoft. They were not the first in many things but boy, when the followed – they followed fast and exploited innovations to the maximum.
If you think about it, there will be a physical limitation on how much you can innovate. However, there will be hundreds of innovations by others that you can exploit for your or your company’s benefit. What would it take for you to be ready to exploit innovations for your or your company’s benefit? Here are some things:
*
Curiosity: If you have the curiosity of a child to observe and learn from innovations that are happening around you and across the world that may be relevant to you, you have an edge.
* Humility: If you think you already know everything that you need to know, you may not be open to learning. If there is no new inputs into your head, the outputs may not be very different from what it has been before
* Power to associate: Or in other words, the ability to connect things that are seemingly unconnected. The ability to making something
If your competitor is not innovating but is great at exploiting innovations you are still at a disadvantage.
What innovations could you exploit this year for your advantage this year?
Posted under Business Models, Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Thu 06 Apr 2006, 11:23 PM - 1 Comment
I don’t fully understand the name of Guy’s blog but I call it GKU or Guy Kawasaki University. If you have not enrolled in it yet, please do so. It is only a few months old but a few years worth of courses have already been dished out 
I am sure there is more to come.
Here is the link to the post where Guy provides his view of “Influence” one of my all-time favorite books.
GKU Link: Influence: Science and Practice
Happy reading and happy learning over there!
Posted under Compelling Offers, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Wed 05 Apr 2006, 11:05 PM - Leave Comment
Without a solid purpose, there is no point in rushing through life or trying to save time. Here is a great perspective on time.
“Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save”
- Will Rogers
Posted under Great Quotes, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 04 Apr 2006, 7:43 PM - Leave Comment
Ramesh Rajamani of TechMasala sends me this gem from Goethe. Leaders play a very important role in shaping the lives of people that they lead.
“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them and you help them to become what they are capable of becoming”
- Goethe
Posted under Great Quotes, Leadership, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Tue 04 Apr 2006, 8:48 AM - 2 Comments
Let us do some introspection. Think about all your interactions with people in the last one month. How many of them do you vividly remember today? In fact answer the following questions:
* How many of those interactions will you remember next month?
* How many of those interactions will you remember next year?
* How many of those interactions will you remember throughout your lifetime?
In Other words,
* How many of those interactions were memorable?
Not many you might say. May be you didn’t meet with a lot of interesting people last month. Not many people took their time to create memorable experiences for you. One of your reactions may be that you should aim to meet other people who might be able to create those memorable experiences. That’s the easiest thing to do.
Now, think about all the people that interacted with you last month.
* Would any of them remember that interaction next month?
* Would any of them remember that interaction next year?
* Would any of them remember that interaction throughout their lifetime?
In other words,
* Did you create a memorable experience for any one of them?
Everyone is busy in their own lives. Unless you work very hard to create significant value in that interaction for the other person, there is no reason for that person to remember that interaction. Very few people worry about creating memorable exerpiences for others. If you are one of them, you are on our way to distinguishing yourself.
Good luck!
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 01 Apr 2006, 9:53 PM - 4 Comments
Sometimes new entrepreneurs think that they have such a brilliant idea that nobody else in the world is doing anything similar to what they are doing. In other words, they say they don’t have any competition. Think about it. One reason there is no competition is truly because you have got something so unique, nobody else in the world thought about it. That is one possibility, of course. However, there are other possibilities as well. Here are some of them:
• Someone else thought about it and realized that some flaw in the business model
• Someone else thought about it, conducted market research and found that there was not a big enough market for that product or service.
• Someone else thought about it, executed and failed in that attempt.
• Someone else thought about it and is currently executing on the plan but you don’t know about it. That someone may be in a garage or part of a department in a large organization.
In the VC world people silently laugh when they hear “We don’t have competition.” It may be a possibility but the chances of that happening for the right reasons are the same as the chances of you winning a lottery ticket.
Posted under Business Models, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 01 Apr 2006, 9:56 AM - Leave Comment
This can happen anywhere at work or outside of your work. Let me take a simple example of what might happen at work. You are working on a very interesting project. When you complete it, you decide to create a powerpoint presentation (although that was not part of your job) and present it to your manager. You download some templates and put together some slides. You complete about fifteen slides and have ideas for the other five and before you finish them you get sucked into another project and get very busy. After sometime you forget about the presentation.
A few days later when you are having a casual conversation with your manager, the earlier project comes up and you mention to him about a presentation that you were preparing. Your manager wants to see it. After the meeting you go back to your desk and send the incomplete powerpoint presentation.
This is a simple example of “0.9 Extra Mile Syndrome” in action. When your manager looks at the presentation which is incomplete, his first reaction will be that you have not done a thorough job on the presentation. The fact that this was in addition to your job is not always on his mind. What comes up glaringly is the last few slides with only titles. Here is an analogy: Take a white sheet of paper and put a black spot on it somewhere on the paper. What people see is not the white sheet but the black spot. That’s the way life is. You can complain about it and question the logic. It is not worth an argument. It is YOU who has to change and learn to work with it. When your boss looks at your incomplete presentation, typically what he will remember is the fact that you sent an incomplete presentation.
What I mentioned was ONE simple example of this syndrome. Remember the times when you tried to walk the extra mile and you gave up in the middle. You wanted credit for the few steps you walked. The perception you left behind was completely different – that you leave things half done. You usually don’t get credit for partial “extra mile” journeys that you take.
Here is what you can do. Every time you want to walk an extra mile, consider the following:
* determine what exactly you want to do and see if you can REALLY complete that journey. If not, re-assess your situation and see what other extra mile you can walk.
and/or
* See if someone else is walking the extra mile. Help the other person in completing that journey.
Posted under Distinguish yourself, Main Page.
By Rajesh Setty on Sat 01 Apr 2006, 8:59 AM - 4 Comments
I’m participating in an innovative campaign called “Get in Their Shoes.” This is a description of the program:
“The Get in Their Shoes Campaign is a call to action by successful business leaders, athletes, entertainers, and politicians to rally youth and aspiring leaders to lift themselves out of their limiting circumstances by proactively interviewing successful professionals within their own communities. Some of the most successful professionals in the world have donated a pair of their actual shoes and a 30-minute phone mentorship to be given-away or auctioned-off as part of this campaign.”
My shoes, book and a thirty-minute phone mentorship are part of the give-aways:
Link: Rajesh Setty: Shoes that I was wearing when I wrote the book, the book and a 30 minute mentorship
Have a great weekend.
Posted under Main Page.
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