Reflections from a rainy evening...

Thanks to few kind souls who have enormous faith and belief in me, had an opportunity to talk to around 600 people in a software company.

• Felt too good and too proud to know a truly global standard product is being built out of Chennai. It is really world class cause in a way it is beating the leaders in a particular geography. In a way much more than bigger than Zoho, cause their competitors are much more serious companies. Think of big enterprise software companies selling to bigger companies!
• Good, growing companies invest in people and think of ways to engage and nurture their people
• Despite being an entrepreneur for 15+ years and having such a large company, which definitely requires a lot of hard work and perseverance,the founder was very humble and his thoughts were much more humbler. (Not the typical stereotype ones that we come across in today's hyped up media)
• It is all about being in the right place at the right time
• One should not be too emotional and attached to their venture. Should not hesitate to kill it if it doesn't work
• Ventures are like family. One way or another, they sustain themselves and outlive the founder 

N.B

• The world is truly a small place; 
• No, I am not very sure how good my talk was. I think, it wasn't that bad cause, I saw many people going back to their workstations and continue working
• Nevertheless it was a very good personal learning experience

Two Tortoise Stories

Story 1:

Once there was an angry young man. His peers used to call him reckless because he would always speak his mind and shoot off his mouth without worrying about consequences or giving a damn!

He was worried about the inefficiencies in the organization as a result of the reporting structure and the training/skill development program launched across the organization. He would go on to explain how it could be fixed to anyone who would listen!

One of his colleague said, "You have an ambition to play in the big leagues and you are also so convinced about your thoughts and ideas.Why not write to the highest authority of the organization."

His time in the organization too was ticking away. His another principle was to do something and regret about it rather than regret about not doing it. He decided to give it a go and wrote it to the third highest authority.

To his surprise, he even got a reply later from the highest authority copying one of his top commandant to look in to it and assigning a lieutenant to track and make his ticking clock go away!

If you are wondering, I promised a story and tale should have a twist, and where the hell is the surprise? Well, wait for it!

The first reply started off saying, "Could not download the attachments". The note on issue was sent as PDF and  by then iPhone 4 was already in the market for an year and 4S was about to be launched. Even in top major Indian IT companies,shareholder and chairman are the first and second highest authorities of an organization respectively!

Story 2:

After working for a very large organization, the protagonist wanted to work for a startup. Rationale was he could work across different functions, make a mark and be recognized for his efforts. Considering his MBA plan, he reasoned, it would be good to have experiences from both extremes.

The startup CEO assigned him few employees, and tasked him with a primary function of training them and set up a new services offering unit! Those were the days, where people were worrying about the screen resolution and browser types than the Android/iOS and form factor challenges.

Once he asked his team member to find the version of IE in his computer. Having not heard from him he went to the place of teammate to see what he was up to.

In the IE, he was googling, "What is the version of IE in this computer?"

Disclaimer:
Any resemblance to real life characters are purely coincidence!