Some awesome use of Social Media by Skittles. Will be writing something here with these things (will make a good blog pos) – no time nowadays! uff!

Where does twitter go from here?

Skittles’ twitermania!

Twitter as a search engine?

Home Page

GobbledyGook

Twitter Chatter

Integrating Facebook

If you are born in 2002

TwitPoll

Well, the dream search of doing what I love is on and this break (yeah I have been chilling for the past 50 days!) made me go through a soul searching process and here is what I am by default excited about or I would love to do when I am at work:

• Design Things (I love the entire design process and the icing on the cake would be mixing technology and art together)
• New experiences and thence learning
• Helping People directly &
  
• Emotional Story Telling

I would like to do the above so that it leads to change or impact and enables wealth creation I would love to do that with a great bunch of people in a lovely environment. I think if I am actually doing this work will no longer remain work.

My Mantra at a Job is Work, People, Learn and Play. Whats yours? I will follow this up with my learnings of working at different places. If you have already given some thought about this for yourself then the post: Finding the work you love at Zen Habits might be helpful.

Epeus’ epigone points to an amazing quote by David Foster Wallace that resonated in me completely:

TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

The blog post also takes inspiration from nature in terms of how applications can be viral. Something I personally subscribe to. We have a lot of learn simply by just observing nature!

This post was coming for sometime but never got around to write. My value add in this post is close to zero, just wanted to list again what Puneet compiled on Incubators in India. Its just a bit more detailed (lazy to write the entire post – Just putting it up for my reference!). But I guess I will have actually find out what they have to offer – need to do some research. If you really have any first hand knowledge about them do add in your comment.

• IIM A: CIIEIndia
  

• IIM B: NSRCEL
  

• IIM Lucknow

• IIM Kozhikode

• IIM Calcutta

• SP Jain Institute of Management and Research

• BITS Pilani

• IIT Kharagpur

• IIT Madras

• TENET – IIT Madras

• IIT Bombay

• IIT Kanpur

• IIT Guwahati

• IIT Delhi

• Nirma Labs

• FMS Delhi

• Entreprenership Development Institute of India (EDI), Ahmedabad

• K.J. Somaiya Institute of Management Studies and Research, Mumbai

• The ICFAI Center for Entrepreneurship Development, Hyderabad

• Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad (MICA)

• Wadhwani Center for Entrepreneurial Development, Hyderabad

• JSS Institutions

• NITIE

• Erasmic

• NIT Trichy

• Technopreneur list

Someone whom I know very closely, met Subroto Bagchi and has instantly become a fan of him. Mr Bagchi had a similar impact on me when I met him during my stint at ICICI. He had come as part of a presentation team for the consulting assignment Mindtree was involved with ICICI’s Rurual Initiative. My friend then mailed me one of his articles titled ‘Defining Success‘ – quotes from there:

It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that defines success.

Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense of larger connectedness.

Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will live in it. That is the essence of success.

To me, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.

There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what is the limit of inclusion you can create.

In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and continuum.

Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.

Kalam speaks out his thoughts about a Leader …

• First, the leader must have vision. Without vision, you cannot be a
  leader.
• Second, the leader must be able to travel into an unexplored
  path. Normally the tendency is for people to travel along well-laid out
  ways.
• Third, the leader must know how to manage success, and even more
  importantly, failure.
• fourth trait is that the leader should have the courage to make
  decisions.
• Fifth, the leader should have nobility in management. Every
  action of the leader should be transparent.
• And finally, the leader
  should work with integrity and succeed with integrity.

I got this mailer from NI, read the did you know in that email. Feelings changed from oh no not a spam to going and knowing more about their new products. BTW, if I had money I would love to buy their stuff and start playing around like a kid (miseries of being a engineer living in India who has seen state of art by Indian Standards )

Did you know…?

• Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying
• Statistically, people are more afraid of spiders, than of dying
• Its impossible to sneeze with your eyes open
• It’s physically impossible for you to lick your elbow
• The color BLUE has a calming effect. It causes the brain to release calming hormones
• That ni.com is an award winning website
• That making ni.com your home page can make you aware about the latest hardware and software technologies for test, control and design applications!

Add it to your favourites by clicking on ni.com/india and Ctrl D after you land on the page.

Then saw this at Micrsoft Skydrive site and I was flat out impressed

Understanding customers, at least getting into their minds and acting in a pleasing manner to solve the problem, I have to give credits to them.

Jeff talks about distributed university, I am not happy that he titled the post Google U. He writes on the topic of collaborative education – the new category: openguru I have opened in my blog. This post very clearly elucidates my thoughts (still abstract) on this topic:

Once you put all this together, students can self-organize with teachers and fellow students to learn what they want how and where they want. My hope is that this could finally lead to the lifelong education we keep nattering about but do little to actually support. And why don’t we? Because it doesn’t fit into the degree structure. And because self-organizing classes and education could cut academic institutions out of the their exclusive role in education.The real problem with this for society is that it cuts out the core business of the university, which also produces research and scholarship.The problem here is that the internet is unforgiving of needs to preserve old models and methods. It disaggregates ruthlessly.

So I think that education has a rude shocking coming unless it gets ahead of this change and figures out how to become less of an institution and more of a platform.

To top this, put it in context of India. 2 years down the lane – mobile is where most of the Indian population will be accessing online content, 3G hopefully will be up and running (regulation is throttling it). The desire to learn is very much there in the Indian culture. Name the city (rural or urban): education is valued irrespective of the social strata. And finally  demographically, a young population which needs & wants to learn and will learn how to use the tools pretty damn fast irrespective of cost.

The only barrier according to me is TIME.

Do check out Bill Gates’s speech (transcript) at his Harvard Commencement last year. Just came across it. Starts off very humourously . Some of the topics he talks about are finding solutions to make the most of our caring and also how one can cut through completexity to find solutions. Quoting for my reference.

I’ve been waiting more than 30 years to say this: “Dad, I always told you I’d come back and get my degree.” I want to thank Harvard for this timely honor. I’ll be changing my job next year… and it will be nice to finally have a college degree on my resume.

But taking a serious look back… I do have one big regret. I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world—the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair.

We can make market forces work better for the poor if we can develop a more creative capitalism—if we can stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities.

The barrier to change is not too little caring; it is too much complexity. But complexity makes it hard to mark a path of action for everyone who cares—and that makes it hard for their caring to matter.

Cutting through complexity to find a solution runs through four predictable stages: determine a goal, find the highest-leverage approach, discover the ideal technology for that approach, and in the meantime, make the smartest application of the technology that you already have—whether it’s something sophisticated, like a drug, or something simpler, like a bednet.

Pursuing that goal starts the four-step cycle again. This is the pattern. The crucial thing is to never stop thinking and working—and never do what we did with malaria and tuberculosis in the 20th century—which is to surrender to complexity and quit.

The final step—after seeing the problem and finding an approach—is to measure the impact of your work and share your successes and failures so that others learn from your efforts. But if you want to inspire people to participate, you have to show more than numbers; you have to convey the human impact of the work—so people can feel what saving a life means to the families affected.

Re-read these lines again with India in mind. With Telecom, Micro-finance, Health and Education in mind …

Managing Emotions in the workplace article from Knowledge@Wharton puts together what I feel and believe in. Being more of a people person and preferring to work in ace teams – emotions do play a important role in my life at work. I personally feel there is never an end to learn how to manage them. Just quoting those lines I feel were important for my reference. Go read that link if are reading this …

“We engage in emotional contagion,” says Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor who studies the influence of emotions on the workplace. “Emotions travel from person to person like a virus.”In the paper, Barsade and Gibson consider three different types of feelings:

• Discrete, short-lived emotions, such as joy, anger, fear and disgust.
• Moods, which are longer-lasting feelings and not necessarily tied
  to a particular cause. A person is in a cheerful mood, for instance, or
  feeling down.
• Dispositional, or personality, traits, which define a person’s
  overall approach to life. “She’s always so cheerful,” or “He’s always
  looking at the negative.”

All three types of feelings can be contagious, and emotions don’t have to be grand and obvious to have an impact. Subtle displays of emotion, such as a quick frown, can have an effect as well, Barsade says.

The researchers’ paper discusses a concept known as “emotional labor,” in which employees regulate their public displays of emotion to complywith certain expectations.

Part of this is “surface acting,” in which, for instance, the tired and stressed airline customer service agent forces himself to smile and be friendly with angry customers who have lost their luggage.

That compares to “deep acting,” in which employees exhibit emotions they have worked on feeling. In that scenario, the stressed-out airline worker sympathizes with the customer and shows emotions that suggest empathy.

The second approach may be healthier, Barsade says, because it causes less stress and burnout, particularly emotional exhaustion from having to regulate one’s emotions and “play a role.”

Barsade says research suggests that positive people tend to do better in the workplace, and it isn’t just because people like them more than naysayers. Positive people cognitively process more efficiently and more appropriately. If you’re in a negative mood, a fair amount of processing is going to that mood. When you’re in a positive mood, you’re more open to taking in information and handling it effectively.”

While you can’t necessarily change your coworkers, people can take steps to avoid catching a negative mood, according to Barsade.

Barsade’s research has taken her into a variety of workplaces, most recently long-term care facilities. Her research found that in facilities where the employees report having a positive workplace culture — she calls it a “culture of love” — the residents end up faring better than residents in facilities with a less compassionate and caring work culture. The residents reported experiencing less pain, made fewer trips to the emergency room, and were more likely to report being satisfied and in a positive mood.