Straight from the Gut

Once in a while, you come across a book that has a profound impression on you - and stays with you for the rest of your life. The "One Min Manager" was one such book I read half a decade ago, and played a big role in shaping my career.

Another is Jack Welch's "Straight from the Gut", which I am reading right now. Highly recommended for anyone wanting to "get out of the pile", it's been a huge reassurance for me that being a rebel is OK! That differentiating is OK! That rocking the boat is OK!

Here are some very inspirational passages from the book...

On being a rebel:

What I was trying to do was "get out of the pile". If I had just answered his questions, it would have been tough to get noticed. To set myself apart from the crowd, I thought I had to think bigger than the questions posed. I wanted to provide not only the answer, but an unexpected fresh perspective.

On differentiation:

Gutoff's recognition - that he considered me different and special - made a powerful impression. Ever since that time, differentiation has been a basic part of how I manage. That standard raise I got over four decades ago has probably driven my behaviour to an extreme. But differentiation is all ab out being extreme, rewarding the best and weeding out the ineffective. Rigorous differentiation delivers real stars - and stars build great businesses. Everybody's got to feel they have a stake in the game. But that doesn't mean everyone on the team has to be treated the same way.

On confidence-building and handling mistakes, this is particularly something I need to do much better:

When people make mistakes, the last thing they need is discipline. It's time for encouragement and confidence building. The job at this point is to restore self-confidence. I think "piling on" when someone is down is one of the worst things any of us can do.

And this is the most reassuring, because I believe my own appraisal would probably read something like this:

"On the other hand," continued Johnson, "he is somewhat arrogant, reacts (or overreacts) emotionally - particularly to criticism - gets too personally involved in the details of his business, tends to overrely on his quick mind and intuition rather than on solid homework and staff assistance in getting into and out of complex situations, and had something of an "anti-establishment" attitude towards General Electric activities outside his own sphere."

While being a strong motivation and reassurance, the book is also making me think: am I a misfit here? Will my company allow me to be me, the way GE allowed Jack to be Jack?

PS: Check my other blog for an analysis of his handwriting :)

Office 2007 - First Impressions

OK, I am in love with Office 2007, and I am not ashamed to admit it!

What I like best about it:

1) The on-the-go updates feature is cool.. way too cool! Just move your mouse over the formatting options, and you can see the document/chart changing in perfect sync. Must have taken a lot of hard work to get it implemented too!

2) Save as PDF - now you can easily send across those really cool documents and charts in PDF without begging for a Adobe Writer license!

3) Context-sensitive menus where and when you need them - on demand, or those really cool fade in fade out menus - I love the whole experience of writing a document now!

4) Multi-level Undo - including a nice, clear list of actions that you can choose from and decide to undo in one go. Very convenient!

And yes, check out Groove - very very groovy - a common, shared workspace concept that allows individuals to work on a common copy of a document, with real time updates from every contributor being applied at all local copies at the same time! Nifty! Cool! Awesome stuff! Can you imagine - you are writing a document, and your boss is reviewing it at the same time... or you and your team mater collaborating in REAL time on a presentation or an Excel sheet - no more sending across "latest" versions...

Somethings that could be better:

1) The UI is completely different now - kind of a culture shock! Irritates you a bit when you cannot find what you were so used to finding - like Properties (go ahead, search for it - not THAT difficult, of course!). Will take some time adjusting to...

2) The fade in fade out menus seem to be a little inconsistent and don't always come when you expect them to.

All in all, yet another very big step in user productivity from Microsoft!

Head Rush Ajax - Part 2

When I wrote my first Ajax article, I had promised to write lots more on it - however, after covering the first 130 or so pages in that one article, the rest of the book really looked at DOM, XML and POST in a lot of detail - and I didn't find much to write about.

However, one small thing at the end of the book that caught my attention - JSON.

JSON is just Javascript - a way of representing data in Javascript, a cheaper, and much faster alternative to XML. Since it is pure Javascript, you do not need any additional parsers etc to work with it, it is plain text too, and it is much simpler, and hence much faster to process!

Here's a simple data structure in JSON:

{ "totals": [
{ "location": "Pune", "shirtsSold": 1710, "shoesSold": 315, "pantsSold": 1256}
{ "location": "Mumbai", "shirtsSold": 3310, "shoesSold": 415, "pantsSold": 456}
]};

Here, the "totals" data object contains two array, each containing four pieces of data with names and values. To access a particular piece of data, you use the jsonData object as follows:

var shoesInPune = jsonData.totals[0].shoesSold;

A quick note: The [] brackets contain ordered data elements (an array that can be indexed into) while the {} brackets contain unordered pieces of information that need to be accessed through names.

JSON is still in it's infancy , but could just end up challenging the undisputed leadership of XML in web applications...