USA’s founding fathers are recognized as pioneers and visionary leaders. On the eve of Fourth of July, USA’s independence day, FastCompany published an interesting article about what lessons can be learned from them. The article lists 4 lessons
– the courage of convictions
– the sanctity of sacrifice
– the fulfillment of faith
– the power of purpose.
The article is quite insightful and can be found here.
Jeff Bezos, who has taken the place of Steve Jobs as the leading tech CEO, is one of my favorite leaders, mainly because of his long term vision and strategic focus. His willingness to ignore the Wall Street and its dangerous obsession with quarterly earnings is legendary and helps him focus on his long term strategy for Amazon.
In this interview with Forbes, he details 10 Leadership ideas that he practices to keep Amazon.com on top. Two of ideas that I found very attractive are
a. “Obsess over customers” (everyone will agree that this is a cliche, but is very fundamental)
b. ” We are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time”.
The full article can be found here.
The cover story on Amazon.com could be found here.
Which one is your favorite leadership idea?
More than 2.5 years have passed since the last time I blogged. To say that these 2.5 years were eventful will be an understatement. Lot of non-favorable and favorable events crossed my path, but as Shakespeare said” All is well that ends well”.
The existence of this blog was completely forgotten till the day I got the mail from godaddy.com, reminding me that my web domain name is set to expire in a couple of months. Not wanting to let this happen, I duly renewed the domain name and then pondered over the future of this blog. A “Mad thought” helped me decide that I should share interesting/funny/insightful/great thoughts and ideas that I come across periodically with others. In the process, I am sure I will enlighten, entertain and annoy my readers.
So, without further ado, off I go!!
After finishing our trip to Locarno, we arrived in Bellinzona. This town is the capital of Ticino, the Italian canton(state) of Switzerland. This small little town of 18,000 people is pretty charming, with its tree lined streets and the city center.
The church is in the city center and is surrounded by restaurants, open-air cafes and shops.
The tree leaves were turning yellow and it was great fun walking through the city.
The most famous tourist attractions in Bellinzona are the Castles. Three castles – Castelgrande, Montebello, Sasso Corbaro – dot the landscape of the town and are part of the UNESCO World Heritage list. We decided to visit one of the castles, the Castelgrande. The picture below is taken from this placem, and includes the other two castles.
Below is a picture from inside the Castelgrande.
We finished our trip here and set off for our final destination of the day- Lugano. The trip to Lugano from Bellinzona takes about 30 minutes. Lugano is close to the Italian border(Milan is less than hour from Lugano) and is situated on the banks of Lake Lugano. (Trivia – a Lake is called “See” in German, “Lac” in French and “Lago” in Italian). It is surrounded by several mountains, that provide great views of the town, the lake and the alpine scenaries. Boating in the lake is a popular activity here.
The Lugano cathedral is one of the most most famous landmarks.
The train station is on a hill and we walked downhill towards the lake. On the way, we got another view of the cathedral.
As we arrived in the city Plaza, we could see that the place was bustling with activity. The sight of people playing chess in the Plaza was quite interesting.
The view of the lake was awesome, despite the fact that it was cloudy. We walked around the lake enjoying the sites and sounds.
Soon after, we were tired of walking and found some place to sit and enjoy the lake views.
After enjoying the views, we had dinner and the famous Italian Gelatos before heading back to our homes. A nice journey with some good moments.
Will be back soon with my next trave”b”logue 🙂
Twitter is rapidly changing the way we communicate, and different people use it in different ways. A few days back, as I was going through the some tweets, I was quite impressed by the way Anand Mahindra (Managing Director of Mahindra&Mahindra and an MBA from Harvard) was using it.
Anand was participating in a CEO conference and asked twitterers to send him some ideas regarding some plausible and implausible developments in business over the next decade. He got several ideas which prompted him to say “Prolific&excellent inputs fr which I’m grateful…It’s ‘cloud’ brainstorming lk cloud computing.Will retweet some….” (I like the expression “cloud brainstorming“)
One plausible idea that he retweeted was “barriers fall completely using real-time translators revolutionizing 1-to-1 commerce”. This caught my attention, as language translation is part of my daily life and fired up my imagination. Image what would happen if I could talk in my mother-tongue to anyone, anywhere in the world.
I lived in a multi-lingual atmosphere in India till a few years back, but technology was not available for real-time translation(RTT) at that time. Even though I had seen my East Asian classmates in US using the translators to aid their studies, my most interesting personal RTT experience came during my apartment hunting days in Shanghai.
During my apartment search,for some reason, my non-Chinese friend accompanied me to a property agent. My friend knew only basic Mandarin, and we were getting stuck at several points, unable to communicate our thoughts. We even tried sign language with limited success. Fortunately,the property agent was very internet-savy. She quickly typed something on her computer and then pointed to the screen. We realised that she was using Google translator to communicate with us. Even though many of the translations were hilarious, from the context of the situation we could understand what she wanted to tell us. Once I understood that, I typed in my response in English and used the tool to translate to Mandarin – Real-Time Translation at it’s best.
Currently I am in a German speaking environment and I use some of the online translators daily – Yahoo Babel Fish, Google translate. But the difficulty is that I have to type in each word in these translators. This cannot be avoided while reading a German book, but hated it when I had to copy and paste whole webpages to one of these translators. That was till I learned about the features in Google tool bar.
What Google tool bar does is to automatically translate the entire webpage to the desired language. This comes in very handy when I have to get some information from a German website that doesn’t have an English version. Take an example of the official Switzerland Weather website – http://www.meteosuisse.admin.ch/web/de/wetter/detailprognose.html . If you are on a German page and have a Google Tool bar, the toolbar will ask you which language you would like to translate it to. There are several languages available, including Hindi, Chinese and Greek. 
In fact, Google’s subsidiary YouTube is also using this tool for translating the titles and descriptions of videos. Even though the translation is not perfect, I believe that it is rapidly evolving.
This brings us back to the idea that came out of “Cloud brainstorming” – will language barriers fall? I believe that it has already started falling and if technology can be developed for Real-time voice translation, the “linguistic barriers” will one day be completely demolished. The same way internet demolished the “information barriers“. The implications of this will be enormous. What do you think?
PS: Will someone design a face mask that prevents “Swine Flu” and also do voice translation?