The mythical productivity index

Before I even winked since my last blog post, I figured that it has been almost a month already. And all the while, I was thinking that we are "just" into the new year! So much for my new year resolutions of 2009 (not that I had any!).

This trimester I had made a resolution that I will be updated with all my readings, cases and submissions right from Week 1, so that at the end of the term I won't struggle any more. After all, haven't we all heard that "slow and steady" wins the race?

Yeah, so this time, I started working on all my assignments in and around Week 1 of my trimester itself. And if you guessed it right, I am still working on them (last 2 weeks of my trimester are left before the exams!). So much for starting early! Not only did I not get time to write blogs, day dream, and go about town, but also I spent days in front of the computer writing that one killer sentence in my assignment for days together!

After a lot of research ;) , I have come up with this "Productivity Index" of yours truly. Accordingly, I have figured that at the start of the trimester my Productivity is close to zero. Which means, if I have to read a chapter which I would normal read in an hour or two, I would spend more than 8 hours "ruminating" on it! Finally at the end of the trimester when I know that I have hardly a week to submit, my productivity magically goes up, and I finish loads and loads of documents; sometimes in a day!

Whew! So what's my resolution for the next trimester, you ask? Well, I am gonna start working on my assignments in the last week of the term :) and spend my earlier weeks pursuing the good things in life :) !!

The rationality myth

I have been studying Economics lately and every lesson in free markets, finance, and economics starts with an assumption that human beings are rational decision makers. We weigh all our options and always choose what is best for us so it says (and yes, we think at the margin :) !). But the current global crisis, the associated economy slowdown and the market panic seems to indicate otherwise! Reminds me of a funny rendition of the 10 Principles of economics by Yoram Bauman...

10 Principles of Economics Translated

So finally, after reading months of print media, this is my understanding of the markets:

Most of the times we are just crazy speculators, who like to follow the herd or the so called "analysts" who can never even predict what's gonna  happen an hour from the time that they write the article! We are overly optimistic with our investments, and always feel that the future is somehow brighter for our doomed investments. To substantiate this argument let me quote Bruce Schneier - "People tend to be risk averse when it comes to gains, and risk seeking when it comes to losses". To read interesting evidence about this argument read this and this article!

Most of us (read menial small time investors) have no clue of what actually is going on inside the organizations that we invest in! And most of us enter the stock market as short term investors with limited budget to make money. In no time our investments lose value, so we invest more and become long term investors :) !!

These are the things that I had learnt as "facts of life" which were proved wrong in 2008:

• Real Estate can never lose value, the world population is continuously growing, we will always need more land, so go ahead and invest all your money in a house!
• Oil is a scarce resource, in no time we will see $200 a barrel!
• Indian rupee will be so strong that the USD will soon lose value!

As 2008 comes to an end, I figured that I did some major changes in my life this year. Invested a bit in stock market and "safe" mutual funds (yeah, lost almost all that I invested!). Stayed in 3 different countries, quit my first job, took up education, made quite a few new friends, crossed the magical figure of 100 blog posts :) !! And yes, got older, fatter and more cynical. Thank you all for being with me for one more year :)! Catch you all in 2009....

Piece of art

My rendezvous with art and art forms started and ended in school somewhere around the time I learnt to draw stick figures. After that anything that I tried to draw from object drawing to beautiful scenery all resembled my definition of modern art (read incomprehensible!). Though I loved drawing, I figured that I spent more time explaining "what I have drawn" than actually drawing it. Yeah, I did a little bit of drawing in my first year of engineering, but it was much more pleasant as it involved drafters, rulers, compasses and dividers and did not require anything that remotely resembled art.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I got an opportunity to make "posters" for a business plan that we had to make in our Innovation class. Its funny that in this world of computer presentations and animation we do not ever think of portraying our ideas in any other form! I was blessed with team mates who along with me agreed that we do not use any print outs on our posters and make them all "by hand". They also made me in charge of the "art department" (or the lack of it!).

Now having unlimited flip charts and dozens of sketch pens in my hand reminded me of my "stick figure" days again and in no time I came up with some sketches of our business plan. (Did I tell you that before the age of 3 all my sketches used to be on the walls of our family home? And well, most of them would be in the living room, so that everyone who came home could see? Show-off ain't I? :) !)

Funnily enough, we were the only team who thought of being "imperfect" by drawing all graphs by hand, and not using any computer magic whatsoever. This kinda made our poster to stand out as the only one without any finesse! Huh, so that's the story of my tryst with art lately. And here is me presenting in front of our final poster and also a part of the poster that shows what I actually drew :) !!

  

And talking of Business plans reminds me that I have made 3 (totally unrelated!) business plans in the last 5 months. Ha ha, I figured that bull$..t comes to me naturally :) !!

Formal Scare!

I hate attending meetings that require me to dress up in formal attire. Not that I hate the suits and the ties, but considering my body type (read the capacity to sweat), this kind of attire for me is very uncomfortable especially in a warm and humid climate like Singapore!

Today I spent almost an entire day dressed in formal attire and now that I am outta it, I feel at peace with myself! All because of following the westerners and their attire and being dumb enough to forget that they come from countries where it actually snows 6 months of the year!

I seriously believe that the warm humid countries should come up with their own definition of a formal attire which involves wearing a light cotton shirt and a pair of shorts with flip-flops. After all, if you are not comfortable wearing something at a formal occasion, what's the point in being there? (I spent half of my time fiddling with the tie and the collar as that was the only place from where I could release the steam building inside me). I could have easily cooked an entire meal for a family of 4 (boiled eggs, mashed potatoes and beans) by just keeping them in my shirt pocket for the entire day!

That was the grumpy sweaty me protesting :)

Tropical Paradise

5 months in my university and I have started liking the climate out here. Though insanely humid at times, it rains almost every alternate day. And once it rains, this place is lush green everywhere. The rain soaked trees make a beautiful sight, so much so that I sometimes feel I am in a tropical hotel rather than a university. I have to take extra efforts to get me outta this vacation mood and study :) !!

Its been raining like crazy since morning and I haven't felt like opening my books yet. Thought I post this and make myself feel guilty so that I start studying :) !!!

The art of swimming

Me writing about swimming is like a Hippopotamus teaching you to fly. But then, my kindergarten teachers taught me that nothing is impossible in this world, and I am exploring the limits of it. For those of you who know me well (yeah that means all of you :) !!) the only sensible physical exercise that I can do (other than left-click and right-click of course!) is swimming. This is all thanks to my tryst with a manhole 5 years back and my subsequent knee injury (remind me to write about that fateful night someday when I am sad and down in the dumps (pun intended) :) !!).

So for the greater part of this year, I have been desperately trying to swim. This routine involves me getting in from one end of a perfectly calm swimming pool, and then subsequently creating a turbulence in the water fit enough to cause a tornado. People swimming around me seem to suddenly drift away and I bet, I look like a drain hole as pictured by a Google satellite from above :)

But then, persistence, thy name is Girish, and my quest to reach the other end of the pool continues. At times I have seen the sun rise and set above me and people suddenly looking older as I desperately try to still reach the other end of the pool. Theory of relativity at play, I bet :) !!

Finally, I decided to improve my swimming skills by asking the Internet. Yeah, and I figured one major issue in my swimming. You are supposed to roll your body with every stroke that you take while doing a front crawl stroke. What that means is that all times you are on your side and not flat inside the water. So while your left hand is stretched out your body is turned to the right. This was a MAJOR tip for me. I have been trying doing this for the greater part of this week, and I somehow seem to make it to the other end of the pool before the dawn of the next millennium.

Singapore and Project Better Place

I have been closely following Project Better Place lately (I mean for almost a year now :) !!). So what is Better Place? According to them - "Better Place is working to build an electric car network, using technology available today. Our goals? Sustainable transportation global energy independence and freedom from oil".

Project Better Place

Sounds ambitious doesn't it? Well it sure is. But sometimes it takes more than guts to get things right, and somehow I feel this is the right time to venture into such risky projects. Only time will tell how their vision works out, but I sure wish that it turns out to be a big success! Also with some very solid partnerships (e.g. Renault-Nissan are building cars for Better Place) and some very novel ideas (the rechargeable batteries can be automatically swapped at their battery exchange stations to be spread out all around the country like gas stations today!) coupled with a novel business plan (pay for the service not for the car! If my understanding of the business model is correct, they are going to give the cars for (near) free and will charge for the service (number of miles driven?)) and the cost of charging the car at the charge spots) this project is surely a poster boy of innovative thinking.

After having lived in Singapore for about 4 months now and having spent a lot of time on the Singapore statistics and the Land Transport Authority of Singapore web sites, I feel .. Singapore is a viable place to have the electric car network that Project Better place is talking about.

First things first. Singapore is a small country (4.8 Million population - 2008) and total road lengths as given below:

• Total length of expressways: 150 km
• Total length of major arterial roads: 604 km
• Total length of collector roads: 468 km
• Total length of local access roads: 2040 km
• Total road length: 3262 km

The number of cars in this country are less than 515,000. That works out to less than 9 cars per 100 people. Singapore always has had the policy to restrict the number of cars on the island by means of the COE system. Couple this with the fact that the average journey distance for a car in Singapore is only 9.6 km and electric cars can go a distance of more than 120 km on a single charge this country is the hotbed to try out innovation in electric car technology.

Finally, Better Place is trying to have the recharging stations powered by renewable energy. Singapore being a tropical country, has an average of 6 hours of bright sunshine everyday. A viable option for setting up solar panels to supply electricity for the charging stations! I wonder, as I am writing this article, if there are talks already going on between the Singapore government and Project Better Place :) !!

And why am I making you, my reader, go through all this? Well, I felt I needed to talk to someone about this, and like always I figured I can blabber only to all of you ;) !! Thank you for your patience :)

Outsourcing done right!

I have been using Sify Mail well over 8 years now, and lately their web interface was really getting completely outdated. Added to the constant spam I was getting, it was really a frustrating experience to open up my inbox anymore!

This week I noticed a sudden change in my inbox. Though I am no expert at webmail, I have a feeling that they migrated their email to "Google Apps for business". Suddenly my inbox is a lot cleaner, my spam gets filtered properly, speeds have improved, mailbox size has increased and over all my Sify Mail experience is cleaner and richer again.

I bet they must have done a lot of research before they got to this decision. What really impresses me is that despite being an IT company, they did not continue developing and supporting a service like webmail in-house, but they outsourced it to a third party that could do the same a lot better (and I bet it must be much more economical for Sify too!).

Being an ex-IT company employee, I have seen many such in-house applications developed by in-house experts which do not stand up to the ease of use and feature set of easily available third party applications (both commercial and open-source!). However they continue to be used and supported (at the expense of a complete cost-center of talented employees supporting an aging application!). Supporting an application which has no future outside the 4 walls of the company is definitely a boredom inducer for the employees and very few of them stick around to support it! Not only are you making your other employees lose their productivity by using applications that simply suck, but you are also losing good employees in the team that is supporting this dead application! I bet investing in an alternative would be much more productive and economical!

I feel that all businesses should stick to what they can do best, and not waste their time and energies on things that others can do better!

The Open book exam fallacy

My MBA first Trimester is over. Three months 4 subjects and 90 days of sleep deprivation! So what all did I learn in this trimester you ask? Well, I learnt a little bit of Marketing, a little bit of Operations Management and a lot of Financial Accounting and Financial Management. The finance courses involved more math than I did in most of my Engineering courses! For those of you who thought that MBA was for the "management kind" (read - mathematically challenged!) you are in for a rude shock!

This week I had exams for all the subjects that I just mentioned. And believe it or not all the exams happily proclaimed that they were "open book" exams!! Yippee, open book, you can actually "officially" cheat in the exams? Yeah! Get whatever notes, text books, periodicals, comics, magazines you want and write the damn paper!!

I was all happy. I carried like a truck load of books in the exam and there came the paper. First time in my life I figured that the appendix in the book is actually very important. It helps you track down words in the examination paper that you have never heard of before in your life!

That's not all. I opened all the books that I carried, but opening the books doesn't mean that you can make sense out of it right? So next 1 hour was spent trying to "comprehend" what the open book I was seeing actually meant :) !! All said and done, open book exams are like an open challenge in your face. They tell you that bring what you want, you are still dumb enough to not crack the exams :) !! Anyway, I am happy that I got over with my exams. This was like the first major exam I wrote after 5.5 years of merrily typing away everything on the computer. The first time that I picked up the pen to write, I felt like a 2 year old kid practicing his A,B,Cs!! By the fourth paper I scribbled words that didn't make much sense to me when I tried to read them back (Trivia - I had won in the handwriting competition that was conducted in my school ... 21 years back :) )!! Computers have crippled us in more ways than we can imagine!!

Anyway, I have this short 3 day vacation before I get on with my second Trimester...

Time tourist!

Hello fellow earthlings from a different era. Today I did the stupidest mistake of my life. I got into an innocuous looking enclosure that looked like an ordinary elevator and 40 seconds later, I came out 30 years into the future! To be precise, today's date is 7th January 2038.

Now I am old, tired and have lost the will to perform! Well for those of you who are interested in knowing about the future here is what it is:

• The world is on the brink of a recession yet again (yeah like it happened in 2008) its the sub-prime and derivates crisis again! (History always repeats itself! We are on a sinusoidal curve!)
• People still use computers, cars and other non-biodegradable pollutants
• Students still have to study for exams

So what you ask is the evidence that I time traveled? Elementary my dear friend, see the time and date in the elevator's display :) !!

Moral of the story: Before you get into an elevator see that its not taking you into another dimension.

If none of you found this post funny, its okay, with my exams less than a week away, my brain can only think so much :) !!

And now that I spoke about time travel, I would like to conclude my post by this particular statement by Stephen Hawking:

"Time travel might be possible, but if that is the case, why haven't we been overrun by tourists from the future?"

Isn't it like the most convincing statement against time travel? Keep thinking...