All posts by Madhavan

P.R.E.S.E.N.T principle

Books, Personal Development,

Acronyms, acronyms, acronyms. They are all around us. LOL, ROFLOL, TGIF, WTF(Winning the Future – coined by Obama, but also has a different expansion!!). Some of them are fun, some horrible and some really good. I would add P.R.E.S.E.N.T to the “good” category. So what is this P.R.E.S.E.N.T ?

I am an avid reader of the ” Influencer Posts” in LinkedIn and today LinkedIn sent me a post titled ” How to Hack Your Daily Routine” . Being an early bird myself, the title of the post aroused my curiosity and I open it to find Claire Diaz-Ortiz, Manager of Social Innovation at Twitter. Well, it turned out that it was not about getting up early, but more about how to start a day irrespective of when one gets up. Without taking away too much of what she has to say, here is what she has to say. Once you are up in the morning, you can do the following.

P — PRAY (or PAUSE)
R — READ
E — EXPRESS
S — SCHEDULE
E — EXERCISE
N — NOURISH
T — TRACK

Curious to know how it works? Here is her LinkedIn post and download her ebook for free here or click on the image below.

P.R.E.S.E.N.T

Epic Fail…

Professional Development

“Epic Fail” – This is what Seth Godin calls his first speech in front of an audience 40 years ago. Coming from someone who is hailed as a masterful public speaker, this gave me a mild surprise. I am saying mild, because Seth is not the first one to have started off as a poor speaker. Winston Churchill had an even worse problem, a lisp, and he would rehearse his speech several times before delivering it.

The bigger point is that such initial failures are inevitable. Let Seth have the last word

“It (the first speech) was an epic fail. Friends and relatives agreed that I wasn’t engaged or engaging, certainly a performance not to be repeated.

I ignored the part about not repeating it, but I definitely learned some valuable lessons about confidence and engagement.

Just about anything worth doing is worth doing better, which means, of course, that (at least at first) there will be failure. That’s not a problem (in the long run), it’s merely a step along the way.

If you’re not willing to get your ‘worst one ever’ out of the way, how will you possibly do better than that?”

PS : Want to know why Seth is considered a great public speaker? Click on the video below.

Nadal – The history maker

Sports,

Winning 8 times on clay – Did anyone ever even think it was possible? Well, Nadal has indeed proven that it is possible. If Roger Federer was a demi-God for many, Nadal is proving to be no less of a demi-God either. While Federer seems to be slowly fading away, Nadal is still going strong.

What explains the phenomenon called “Nadal”? The answer, according to Nirmal Shekar of The Hindu newspaper, is “The Art of Attention”. In this beautiful piece of sports writing, Nirmal writes about Nadal’s victory over Djokovic  “Down 4-3 and deuce, Nadal responded to the mighty Serb’s challenge with typical emotional intensity, functioning in a Zen master’s vacuum. Navigating masterfully around his own shortcomings, of which there aren’t too many, the great Spaniard found a way out of the abyss.

Courage, valour, common sense, patience and, most of all the willingness to bleed to his bones…Nadal showcased all the old-world virtues of the sporting arena as he conquered the No.1 player in the game.”

He further writes ” To do what he is doing in the age in which he is doing it, is incredible. Cyber-invasion has shortened our attention spans as never before and many of us may be suffering from attention deficit disorder to some degree.

This is precisely why patience, perseverance and deep reflection are at a premium. And so are the rewards that come with them — the joy that fills you after a whole day of reading and re-reading The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky) or Albert Camus’ L’Etranger.”

Can I even dare to write better than this? No way..

Salutes to Nadal!!

Big Data & Analytics – Some insights

Business, ,

I had the opportunity to attend a workshop today on “Big Data & Analytics” organized by TiE(The Indus Entrepreneurs), Chennai. There were 3 speakers, two from the industry and one from the academia.

The first speaker, Mr. Kumar Narayanan, Adomita, spoke on the topic “New business models around Big Data / Fast Data and Analytics“. He shared that Singapore is spending $500 million in developing the Big-data ecosystem in the country, with the goal of achieving revenues of $200 Billion in the next 10 years. He also gave the differentiation between “Big Data” and “Fast Data”. He also shared some of the business models around Big Data. What really caught my attention was some statistics that he shared – 80% of the unstructured data is video and voice, and the rest is text. So, any company which is into the analytics of video and voice has a big upside potential .

The entire speech by Mr. Narayanan can be found here.

The next topic was “Why your unstructured data is a blessing, not a curse” by Mr. Venkat Viswanathan, LatentView. He highlighted the fact that unstructured data is created at an unbelievable pace through social media, blogs, etc. The amount of user driven content like photos, videos,etc is mind-boggling. He spoke about the future of Big Data and how the unstructured data opened up tremendous opportunities.

Click here to access the speech by Mr. Viswanathan.

The speaker from Academia was Prof. Rangaraja P. Sundarraj, DOMS, IIT Madras, who spoke on the topic “Big Data and Predictive Analytics Opportunities.” He explained that Analytics depends on 3 pillars – Big Data, Cloud and Frequency of Requirements.He explained the applications and models for Big Data.

His speech can be found here.

The 3 speeches were followed by a panel discussion and a Q&A, which was quite insightful . Overall, the key takeaway for me was that there are lot of opportunities in this space and quite a few companies that are working and making great progress in the space. Now, the question is how to capitalise on the Big Data.

Any ideas?

Seth Godin’s 5000 blog posts

Leadership, Random, ,

I became a fan of Seth Godin in January 2012 after I read his blog, which was shared to me via Facebook or LinkedIn. I immediately subscribed to his blog expecting to read some articles occasionally. But I was pleasantly surprised when I realized that he blogs daily. Some of the posts were short, while some longish. But what was remarkable was that he blogged daily.

I learned lot of new things from him like “Permission marketing”, “purple cow” and “tribes” to name a few ideas. Being a marketing professional myself, I soaked myself in some of his insights. Apart from blogs, he has also published several books. The titles of his books are quite intriguing – “Purple Cow”, for example. I could not stand the suspense of the purple cow, and promptly bought it and read it back-to-back in a few hours. It was fully worth it. (I will share a review of the book sometime later). The title of another book – ” All Marketers are Liars”, raised an eyebrow and I am very keen on reading  it, because I want to know how I, as a marketer, am a liar.(Apparently the title has been changed to ” All Marketers Tell Stories“). “Tribes” is a book I have purchased last week and intend to read soon.

Coming back to blogging, I passingly wondered how someone is able to consistently do that, but did not think of it further. But today, when I got his 5000th blog in the my email, I was awestruck. This is one persistent guy. I did a math – if he blogged everyday, that would be 365 blogs a year which would mean that he has been blogging for more than 13 years or from the year 2000. Turns out he has been blogging since January 2002.

So far so good. As a I read through the blog, he mentions something that seems to be addressed to me. He says ” My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.”

Yes, I can!!

Or can I? I had blogged in this space only thrice in the last year. But I have been blogging about solar 2 times a week. That still is a not a lot. But I have decided to try to emulate Seth. Let’s us see how this one goes…