I missed to tell you…How much I admire your simplicity…
I missed to tell you…How much I respect your honesty…
I missed to tell you…How much I value your kindness…
I missed to tell you…How much I praise your knowledge…
I missed to tell you…How much I like your vision to grow…
I missed to tell you…How much I enjoyed your presence…
I missed to tell you…How much I love you…
… Miss you papa…
“I think I am still growing and learning. I have not achieved anything and I am not boasting because I feel there is so much to be done. I don’t delve into past. What is done is done. You have to move ahead in life.” – Excerpt from the interview of one of the most admired Indian hero Dev Anand.
Dev Anand - Movie "Guide"
Many times we become frightened of people, situation or the end result and stop doing things which our heart wants us to do. Dev Anand has done what he has thought of and what he has believed true without being afraid of the end result or people’s opinion/reaction. He was not fascinated by the results, but he has definitely enjoyed the journey to achieve the results by constantly growing and learning.
Everybody of us have dreams, however very few of us have courage to live what we dream. I have used the word “courage”, because it requires guts to live what you dream and not “chance”. As I firmly believe that world gives you lot of chances to live what you dream, however it requires your courage to step out and follow it.
In one of his other interviews Dev Anand has said that “Dreams should never die. When the dreams are dead, you are dead. After fulfilling every dream, I realize there is a new dream that dawn.” This is what makes life rolling, you achieve something and after that you move on to your next goal instead of just cherishing your current success.
The other thing which we should learn from Dev Anand is – “No Regret”. When you follow your dreams, it’s not necessary that each of your dreams come true when you expect it. As said in the quote “It’s not how many times you fall that matters, it’s how many times you bounce back.” Whatever you do in your life, do with utmost passion and commitment, so at the end you at least do not regret your efforts. Obviously the result is not in your hand, but you can always make sure that you make honest efforts for achieving the result.
There are many more things we can share and learn from this real hero’s life like being confident, strong decision making skill, being passionate & enjoying each moment of the life. Unfortunately he left this world on December 3.
Rip: Legendary hero of Indian Cinema…!!
Narayana Murthy
Mr. Narayana Murthy is the Founder Member & Chairman of India’s one of the highly successful & reputed IT company – Infosys. He started his entrepreneurship journey along with his friends in a 100-sq feet apartment with borrowed capital of Rs. 10,000/-. His strong vision & leadership skill has evolved infosys to one of the best IT services company having 28 million sq. ft. of world-class development centers across the globe.
He’ll be succeeded by eminent banker K V Kamath as Infosys’ chairman with effect from August 21. He would thereafter become ‘Chairman Emeritus’ of the company.
Following is excerpt from his farewell letter which can be a guideline & motivational factor to any startup or budding enterprenure.
Assembling a team of extraordinary people who have displayed outstanding capabilities through their value system competence, low ego and high energy is crucial to the progress of any institution.
The differentiation comes from ideas and ideas come from bright minds. Therefore, good people are the primary assets of a great organization.
infosys co-founders
It is essential to realize that even the best people may not be able to run the entire marathon.
Different people run out of endurance and intellectual horsepower at different points of time. Some people drop out of the marathon since they do not see any value in an organization when their own time under the arc light is over. Leader’s responsibility is to recognize this, provide them opportunities outside the organization, and usher in suitable replacements. Infosys’ journey is replete with many such examples.
Many intelligent people possess a high ego and low patience to deal with people less capable than themselves.
Leaders have to manage this anomaly very carefully; counsel these errant people from time to time, and allow them to operate as long as they do not become dysfunctional and start harming the organization.
If they do cross the threshold it takes courage to inform the individuals that their time in the organization is over and that they have to leave.
However, one aspect that marks out a truly superior organization is the ability of its employees at all levels to be driven by values and to ensure adherence and compliance under any circumstance.
No individual is high or important enough for an organization to put up with non compliance.
Leadership by example is what creates trust in people to follow a leader.
As long as a leader is able to show his or her sacrifice and commitment to a cause others will follow him or her I am glad we decided on respect from our stakeholders (customers employees investors vendor partners government of
the land and the society) as the primary objective of the company I have seen hundreds of instances of such leadership-by-example at Infosys.
Generosity is an essential part of a leader. It is the foundation on which teamwork is built.
The ability to share the limelight with ones colleagues, the ability to step aside and give opportunity to younger people when they want that fame, power and glory: and the ability to provide a safety net of advice for them is an important aspect of strengthening the future of an organization.
I have been saying for many years now that the factors that differentiate a corporation from its competitors are an enduring value system open mindedness, pluralistic and meritocratic approach and practicing speed, imagination and excellence in execution.
Leaders have to focus on creating such an environment.
Leadership is about taking bold and firm decisions with incomplete information in an environment of uncertainty: Leaders who waffle do not inspire confidence in their people.
It is important to use as much data and modeling as possible to eliminate clearly.
A sense of ownership among employees is extremely important to build a long term future for a corporation.
Such ownership comes from fair merit based and generous sharing of wealth and perquisites among each member of the company.
This is my answer to many of my friends who wonder why when Infosys was founded I took a small percentage of my earlier salary while every other cofounder’s salary was increased by at least 10 per cent.
The same friends tell me that they do not know of any other instance where as much as 10 to 15 per cent of the company equity was given to co-founders who had just 12 to 18 months of work experience.
My decision to walk away from a Fortune 10 company when they contributed 25 per cent of our revenue was one such example of decision making under uncertainty.
It was a tough decision that was taken so calmly and firmly that the head of sales at Infosys at that time thought I was not bothered about the future of the company.
I had to explain to him that I did indeed agonize over it but that as a leader I could not be driven by panic since such an important decision required a calm and composed mind.
Scalability is the true test of the endurance of an organization.
The ability to grow successfully without losing quality productivity employee investor and customer satisfaction and the spirit of a small company is what makes Infosys a great company.
We have grown from 50 customers to 620 customers from 10 projects to 6,500 projects from 100 employees to 130,820 employees from 100 sq ft to 28 million sq ft of built up space and from 100 investors to over 450,000 investors.
Such a scalability exercise has been successful thanks to our PSPD model of operation.
PSPD stands for Predictability of revenues, Sustainability of such predictability, Profitability of such realized revenues and Derisking.
Predictability happens because of a good forecasting system that derives realistic data from the trenches and tempers it with the wisdom of senior business leaders.
Sustainability refers to the systems that help the efforts of sales people beating the pavement and meeting customers to make the prediction true, the efforts of our delivery people to deliver quality products on time within budgets, and to the efforts of our finance people raising the invoice on time and collecting money on time.
Profitability refers to the systems that help our people make value-based sales, follow rigorous budgeting exercises, control costs, get best value for money and ensure the agreed-upon profitability.
Derisking refers to systems that identify risks in various dimensions of our operations – people, geographies, technologies, application areas and services – collect periodic data, review the risk levels and mitigate them.
Innovation is the best instrument for creating sustained differentiation.
However it must be accepted that revenues for a corporation come from well understood ideas and business models.
For example, most of a bank’s revenues will come from borrowing money at a certain rate and lending it at a higher rate. Part of the profits from such models will be used for research and development to generate new ideas.
A few of these ideas will be seeded and some of them will become mainstream revenue earners. Therefore, it is very important for a leader to focus on innovation particularly when the times are good.
Customers put food on our table.
Therefore, we have to have a laser focus on exceeding their expectations, being open and honest with them, and ensuring that they look good in front of their customers.
Employees are the only instruments we have to make our customers and investors succeed.
Therefore, we have to create an environment of openness, meritocracy; fairness, transparency, honesty and accountability amongst our employees.
Our investors understand that businesses will have their share of up and downs.
They want us, the management, to level with them at all times. Therefore, “when in doubt, please disclose” is a good policy for a corporation.
Society provides customers, employees, investors, bureaucrats and politicians. Therefore, earning the goodwill of every society that we operate in is extremely important for us.
Global benchmarking is a powerful instrument that helps us to improve our self-confidence, compete with the best global competitors and serve our customers better.
We Indians must recognize as we have done at Infosys that we are our main enemies.
There is no external enemy. Our failures are because of our lack of commitment to our cause, our inability to accept meritocracy and our indifference to honesty and want of a good work ethic amongst our leaders.
Performance alone is the key differentiator. This stems from my belief that performance leads to recognition brings respect and respect brings power.
Therefore if India wants to be a superpower as we keep hoping the only instrument we have is performance.
We have demonstrated that businesses can be run legally and ethically that it is possible for an Indian company to benchmark with the global best and that any set of youngsters with values hard work team work and a little bit of smartness can indeed be successful entrepreneurs.
This way we have enthused millions of young men and women in India. This in my opinion is Infosys’ greatest contribution.
I have realized that humility grace and courtesy are genuine only when you have power and glory. That is why the leaders at Infosys have practiced this time and again.
Humility provides us the strength of mind to learn from people better than us. Grace and courtesy make us worthy competitors.
They also remind us that such glory and power are ephemeral and give us the strength to handle the days when we too could lose our shine.
The crucial things we have to do in the future are to recognize our weaknesses; be open-minded about learning from people better than us; learn from our mistakes and not repeat them; be humble, honest and courteous; benchmark with the best in every dimension; use innovation to perform at global levels; and create a worthwhile vision and improve every day.
This is how our mantra of focusing on speed imagination and excellence in execution will take this company very far.
Letter Credit – Infosys Annual Report 2010-2011
Article Link – http://www.rediff.com/business/slide-show/slide-show-1-what-narayana-murthy-said-in-his-farewell-letter/20110518.htm
Few days back we have done some survey in our organization – SufalamTech, one of the question asked in that was – please pick four words that describe the term “entrepreneurship”. My team has given good thought on it and given really relevant and different words for this term. Some of the words they defined for entrepreneurship are “good leadership”, “having new dream everyday and try to achieve it”, “taking risk”, “managing resources effectively” and many more.
I agree with these answers as they define entrepreneurship in one way or other, however for me entrepreneurship means one big word and that is “PASSION”. I have a passion to get succeed not even in business, but in every aspects of my life and that motivates me to give best output.
Every morning I start my day with new challenges, problems, deadlines and issues; believe me sometime these challenges are really very big for me to tackle. However at this time only one thing motivates me to fight back and get out of all these and that is my “PASSION”. I just recall my dream, my vision, my inspirations, my god and then I just do my work with best efforts.
Anyway, so from my point of view I would like to describe the enterprenurship with following words.
1. Dream
You need to have some dream, some vision for yourself. Without dream there is no way you can make progress.
2. Passion
If you are starting your own venture, you should have burning desire for success, to make a difference, to achieve something.This passion only helps you in fighting the odds and move ahead.
3. Take calculative risk
If you want to do something on your own, then you should have a courage to take risk. But, this should not be a blind risk. You should always calculate positive and negative side of it and after that start with something new.
4. Never afraid of failure
One obvious thing is if you don’t try then you won’t achieve. So, best thing is to try out new things, without worrying about failure (yes, but it should always be calculative risk).
5. Think ahead
Always, think for future and work in presence. Have a good vision for yourself and try hard to achieve that.
6. Association
In this competitive word, there is nothing like one man show. To achieve the best in your business/life you have to make association with the best persons, who can improve your strength. Have a great team, best advisers and lots of well wishers. All these can really make a difference for you.
7. Progress
You should always think for the progress of your self, your team and your organization.
There is very popular quote from Paulo Coelho – ““When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping…”, I believe that it’s 100% true. If you really desire for something from your heart and if you really make honest effort to achieve that, then all the things in world will favor you.
Well, these are my thoughts and I welcome all of you to comment on it and share your thoughts.
Thanks,
PranaV
Hi All,
After a very hectic schedule finally I got the time to re-setup the blog (we had moved our hosting server and after that I didn’t get a single day free to setup the blog again). Now it’s ready and I have decided to put my hands again on it.
This topic “Qualities of Good Software Developer…” was presented by me in my company. I believe that these are the qualities which any company should look for in a job aspirants.
Love to code
“Screw it, Let’s do it” approach
Keep on improving – code & knowledge
Follow design patterns
Believe in re-usability
Always thinks about end user
Write a maintainable code
Don’t bother about programming language
Know fundamental very well
Believe in perfection
Effective Communicator
Please note that above are my thoughts only and you might have better thoughts/ideas on this. I really welcome all of you to share the same on this blog post.
– Pranav Thakker
¢ Lack of reusability in the software causes for failure
¢ Design and follow architecture
¢ Reuse existing code, functions and classes
¢ Understand the power of Service Oriented Architecture
¢ Instead of writing new, try to improve existing one
¢ Incorporate client specific changes as such that it doesn’t affect future upgrades
I can write separate posts for each of above terms – Goals, Vision, Attitude, Passion & Success and I will write also in coming weeks. But, I can’t resist expressing my thoughts regarding this; hence I am writing something about it in a single post as of now.
I believe that every person set some goals in his/her life…these goals should be set such like that it leads you to your vision. Many times I say these words to my colleague, friends and relatives that “Find your vision…”, but unfortunately many people are unable to identify their vision for life and hence get failed or become unsatisfied. I would suggest all of you that think peacefully with calm and stable mind, take some time for yourself and find the vision for your life. If you are a business man than you should have clear vision for your business, if you are some professional than you should have clear vision for your work. You should be able to visualize yourself after next 5 or 10 years. Once you decide your vision, you will automatically able to identify your goals to achieve that vision.
May be you already have some goals and vision towards your life/profession. However, if you are not making honest efforts to achieve that goals than there are better chances of failure. And you can make good efforts only if you have correct attitude towards that. So now what we mean by term “Attitude”? Well, attitude is “the way of looking at life”. Achieving success in your life/career isn’t just about brains, talents, emotions and connections. But, what matters most is your attitude, your belief. Following are three major pillars of positive attitude.
And mark my words that once you build positive attitude in yourself, word will automatically notice you and your efforts.
Sometime I had got the excuses from people that “I had tried, but…”, may be they have tried it with positive attitude. Than what stopped them from achieving success? Well, that thing might be is “Passion”. You might have goals, you might have vision, you might have positive attitude but unless and until you build a passion/a desire to achieve that you might not get success. Here, I would like to quote Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam.
“Dream is not what you see in sleep, Dream is the thing which does not let you sleep.” – Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam
I have a burning desire of setting up reputed IT services & Solution Company and it keeps me awake day and night for achieving my goals. So, the bottom-line is to have some burning desire/passion for your goals and try to achieve that in any situation.
At last about everybody’s favorite word – “Success”. Success might be a relative term; hence it can have different meaning for different person. But ultimately each one of us is working for that only. Here, I would like to quote one joke, which has been told to me by one of our “Spiritual Mentor”.
One day a bagger was standing in front of a big car, asking the car owner to give some money. The car owner got annoyed by bagger’s look and clothes and he pushed away the bagger from car. However, unexpectedly bagger started laughing towards the owner. This time the car owner asked to bagger “why are you laughing?” The bagger replied politely “Sir, maybe we are at different level, but we both have same desire and we both are working for that only”. Shocked by bagger’s answer, car owner asked him again “How can our desire be same? I am the millionaire person and you are one bagger, how can you compare me with yourself?” The bagger replied “Sir, you might be working for your second million and I am in the process of making my first”.
Hence, the idea is everybody is working here for achieving their goals, but only those got succeed who have correct attitude and passion towards that. However, sometimes after making all those honest efforts, once gets failed due to any reason. In such situation one should not get disappointed and stop trying to achieve their goals.
Well, I was not planning to make above post so much serious and full of advices (really sorry for that :(), but I had just written all those qualities which I have observed in successful people and which I expect from anybody – (Friends, Relatives, Associates, Colleagues, Clients).
Thanks for reading such a lengthy post and understanding my thoughts. I hope I will deliver some short and easy posts ahead. 