Harmonious Homes

When there is harmony in the home, there is order in the nation. When there is order in the nation, there is peace in the world.” – A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

These inspiring lines of Dr. Kalam keeps reminding me that, when we are able to create a harmonious home, we indirectly contribute to world-peace.

How do we make sure there is harmony at home? Here are a few tips:

1. According to Dr. Kalam, practicing righteousness plays a vital role. When we are righteous, we support, preach and propagate the right ideologies to our family which will contribute to harmony at home.

2. Empathy is the key to strong and  successful relationships. Being empathetic means to understand  others and their perspectives, fitting ourself in their shoes and being kind and considerate to them. Strong relationships contribute to harmonious homes.

3. To be empathetic, the key factor is to listen carefully to others. Unfortunately we humans love to talk and hate to listen :) . Listening cultivates trust and it helps us move to deeper levels of relationships with others.

4. Words have power to hurt, as well as heal. So beware of what you say. Thiruvalluvar in one of his thirukkural says, words from your tongue can create permanent scars on someone. Similarly, Rahim in his doha says, never allow the delicate thread of love to snap, because when you try to join them, you will end up with a knot. 

5. A home filled with harmony is a home where every member of the family has utmost respect to each other irrespective of the age and gender.

6. People with high conflict resolution skills are vital for harmonious homes. Remember, it is okay to, 'Agree to disagree and move on'.

To sum up, a 'harmonious home' does not mean that it has people with no differences of opinions. It rather means that the people are smart enough to handle their conflicts and build deeper trust and relationships with each other, thereby contributing indirectly to world-peace.

Checkmate

Introduction 

How many of you have ever played chess? In the game of chess there are 2 types of players. The one who plays the attacking game and the one who plays the defending game. Who do you think will win? Yes the attacker.

Contest Master, Toastmasters and my dear friends, don't you think our life is also like a game of chess? Every time we play the attacking game, we win.

10 years ago when I stepped into the corporate world, little did I know that I was going to be thrashed. In school or college I was not taught about corporate politics or how to play the attacking game.

Those days, when ever I got an escalation email, the first thought that would come to my mind was to convince myself that ' Yes, I would have made that mistake.' I would not even check whether I really did it and send an apology email defending myself with the excuse on the amount of work pressure.

 Everytime I defended, I was attacked! What happens when you heat and beat a piece of metal? Yes. It becomes better and better. I learnt to play my attacking game. 

10 years later, I was moved to a new project where we were replacing a bunch of managers from Europe. Ofcourse they were of Indian origin. They were loosing their job due to cost cutting. It was a matter of life or death for them. Richard Dawkins in The Selfish gene says that humans or any species for that matter will go to any extent for their and their genes survival. One of the manager was finding fault it each and every task I did. You can imagine that he would say 'since Kavitha sneezed today at 3pm all our deadlines were missed. 

I looked naive and inexperienced in my Teams profile pic. He mistook me to be an easy target. 

The art of war Sun Tzu says,

"Appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak."

I kept quite and observed the project and the people for 2 months. From the third month I started off my attacking game with an email. 

I got an email from him stating that I had hardly done any work in all these days and whatever I did was all wrong. It was a great opportunity for me to start my game. It was like  Podra bgm ah moment. I immediately copied his manager and my manager and gave the complete statistics in a table of the work I have done and the work he has missed. In the last line I indicated that I am calling him for a battle. I wrote, "With all this data, do you think your previous mail really makes sense?" While I was typing and clicking the send button, I felt myself like a King calling for war. It gave me a sense of excitement, pleasure and an adrenaline rush. I could hear the bgm.....

After sending that email I was eagerly waiting for a reply. Till date I have not received it. Checkmate.

In management we call this as a dog chase theory. When a dog chases you, you keep running. When you stop, stare and start chasing the dog, it might run.  But there is no guarantee that it might run away. It might also come and bite you. It depends upon the courage possessed by you and the dog. This is why Sun Tzu says 'Know your enemy'.

The same is depicted in a movie where vadivelu raises his knife and says ' If my enemy is scared of this knife  I am his master. If he takes a bigger knife then he is my master.

Conclusion:

The most important lesson from the book The art of war is that 

"The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting" and 

"He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.”

So before playing your attacking game ask yourself these questions:

1.Am I honest and in the path of the righteous?

2. Is it possible to make your enemy your alley? Or is the fight inevitable?

In life the one who raises the sword first, wins the battle. If you think you are in the path of the righteous go ahead and raise the sword first. The world is for the righteous.

How to Treat Your People

"The Art of War" by Sun Tzu remains to be one of my favourite books and this quote keeps reminding me on how to treat my people.

The Art of War - Chapter 10 Terrain

"Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look upon them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death."

Note: The concepts discussed in this book are so precise, that you can complete this book within 2 hours. :)

Cross Cultural Awareness

Why is cross cultural training important?

We might consider a few aspects trivial, while interacting with colleagues from various cultures. But every small detail is important.

For instance, I have seen that addressing a colleague by his/her name works wonders in bringing that connect with them.

However, in certain cultures it is not appropriate to call them by their first name in a formal setup. It is interesting to note that, the positioning of their first, middle and last names also varies with culture. This is where cross cultural awareness comes into play.

#crossculture #crossculturalcommunication #crossculturalcommunicationskills #letstalkcorporate

Developing a Thick Skin

Developing a 'thick skin' is an important trait to master for a happy professional and personal life. 

It is often misinterpreted as enduring abuses that come your way. Infact it is exactly the opposite. Being thick-skinned means, to fight back aggressively, without an impact on your emotions. 

It is easier said than done :) . However, it definitely comes out of consistent and conscious practice.

Articulation

This was an interesting conversation with my 11 year old and 5 year old daughters about 'articulation'.

Younger one: I was bullied in school today. Do you also get bullied akka (sister)?

Elder one: Bullies are scared of me because I can convincingly articulate the sequence of events that happened with the bullies, to the teacher. So they never come near me.

Younger One: You are a tattle tale.

Elder one: No. I confront them first. Only if it doesn't work I use my articulation technique.

Me: That's interesting! In corporate,  we use our  articulation  skills not only to deal with bullies, but also to build a good rapport with our sub ordinates, peers, management and customers. The better we articulate our ideas/concerns honestly to them, the better relationship we build with them. 

To sum up, you are a typical corporate material 😂

Elder one: No thanks!

Dreams - Part 1

Here, I am not talking about the ambitions or goals. I am talking about the real dreams we see when we are asleep. To be honest, most of the times, I end up forgetting my dreams, when I wake up.

However, there are dreams that will never slip out of my mind. Whenever a problem runs deep within, and I am unable to solve it for a few days and it keeps troubling me, the solution appears in my dream. This has happened several times and I will talk about one such instance here.

Ping Fails!

Many years ago, when I was an entry level automation engineer, I joined a new team with not many seniors, who could help me technically. I was good at scripting and automation, but not familiar with networking. After writing all my scripts, I saw that there were a few failed test cases due to the ping failure to a server. I explained my problem statement, to as many people as possible including my mother :).  All of them gave me emotional support, but my journey was lonely. It was me and my problem and there was no body else in that world. I had sleepless nights sitting alone with my problem. One night, when I happened to sleep, I dreamt of getting lost on my way home. I called someone to ask for the 'route' to reach home (I have called my husband several times in real life asking for the route after getting lost, and I still do it. Lol).

The Route

When I woke up, I could recollect each and every thing that happened in my dream. I felt like somebody hit my head hard with a strong hammer and said the word "Route". I got up and shouted, "Perhaps, the ICMP packets lost their way to the destination server, because they did not know the 'route'." ; thereby waking up my husband who was terrified (lol). I ran to my computer and connected to the VPN. Working from home was not common those days. My husband was wondering what I was upto, during such early hours, even without brushing my teeth :). With the little knowledge I had about networking and lots of research on the internet, I found that the "route" to the destination server was deleted by a script that caused the issue. When I added that route, 'ping' succeeded. I was on cloud nine. I did not invent anything new. I was not going to get a 'Nobel Prize' for this. But it was definitely my small 'Eureka' moment. 

Eureka Moments

Perhaps, we all have felt our own small Eureka moments resulting from our dreams. When I think about it, this doesn't happen every time. It happens only when a problem enters deep into our subconscious mind, that it tries to fetch the data from some where within and gives it to us through our dreams.

Has the data always been there, deep within and we had missed to pick it up, that it comes out through our dreams? Or is the universe conspiring to bring the data to us because of the strong intensity of our thought? I do not know. But it definitely feels good.

It Is No More The Book I Knew

This interesting conversation between two characters, from an inspiring Korean series about books, authors and publishing, made me reflect a lot about the books I had read in the past.

Character 1 : It is an old book, a very good one. I kept reading it again and again, when ever I was happy, sad, tired etc. I had even gone to the extent of memorising the lines from the book. But off late, the book looks different to me. It is no more the book I knew. I started realising that I had missed a lot of lines or even missed to read between lines that conveyed strong meanings. Why does the book behave strangely off late?

Character 2 : The book has always remained the same. Perhaps, you (the reader) have changed. That is how good books are. 

This conversation was so relatable that, it reminded me of several good books. But the one that stood out was, "Tuesdays with Morrie" which struck different chords when read during different times in my life - 20s, 30s, and almost 40s. Do you remember any such book?

Root Cause Analysis and Empathy

 

Table Review

It was a post lunch session and I was one of the reviewers in the table review with the development team. The purpose of the activity was to find out how a bug escaped our development and testing process and reached the customer and also to find out means to prevent them in future.

My 11 Year Old's Observation 

We reviewed the 5 why analysis done and discussed in detail about the bug that slipped. When the meeting was over, my 11 year old who was keenly observing the conversations told me, "I will never enter the corporate world". I asked her, "Why?". "You are making developers feel guilty for a bug that slipped. They are already guilty. Why do you ask so many 'whys' to them? Imagine how they would have felt."

Paradigm Shift

Suddenly I could feel the heat on the other side of the table. How much offended they would have felt, that they even become defensive at times. They put their heart and soul into the feature. A customer bug would have pierced their heart and this exercise would have hurt them more. 

Purpose

However the purpose of this activity is not to blame a team or a person, but to come up with innovative methods to prevent similar issues in future. Continuous improvement is not only applicable for software development, but for everything under the sky. It is the only way to keep up the quality. Innovation and improvement are the keys to quality and success. 

Taking the Developer's Side

But wasn't it my duty to make the developer feel at ease and explain the purpose? When my 11 year old could empathize with the developer, why didn't I? The reason is that, my daughter is a recent developer herself and it has been a long time since I was a developer. She would always request me to test her coding projects, and a bug in her project is the last thing she would want to hear from me. :)

Lessons Learnt

Finally I learnt these precious lessons from my 11 year old. "Understanding the purpose of an exercise by all involved parties is more important than performing the exercise itself. Also, empathizing with our colleagues is an important trait to master while working in a team, to get the best results." 

Later, I explained to her the purpose of this activity and told her that this is not specific to corporates. I went ahead and told her that  'Continuous improvement' is applicable for everything under the sky. 

I am not sure if my little one ("What?? I am almost a teenager and you call me your little one?" lol) agreed with me, but I definitely learnt a lot from her :)