Thanks to Girish, I was able to explore wikimapia and mark my location on the global footprint 
Go mark your houses and nearest landmarks….
PS: The Wikimapia is powered by Google (Google maps). But the feature to define your location for everyone to see is cool!
Business Summaries, Compressed Knowledge, Book Abstracts, Executive Book summaries…These are all names given to the ‘concept’ of providing a brief summary of the book. This business mainly preys on the need to “Save time yet manage to get the fundamentals behind the book”. There are two ways in which these summaries can be useful. First, you can read through the concepts and if you are only really interested you can buy the book to read in detail. Second, you can use the summaries as a form of ‘key notes from the book’ to revise the concepts of the book. Either way you save time. If the summary does not excite you, you don’t have to buy the book. Well, there are prefaces/book reviews/excerpts available in the market. But they are either ‘opinions of others’ or simply ‘a slice of the book’. The Business summary on the other hand is a condensed version of the book lacking the ‘judgement of the reviewers’ and ‘a peek into the best portion of the book’.
The market for Business summary is quite niche [Executives and Business people]. But it is slowly gathering popularity among student community too.
I perceive this Business summary as a way of uploading the knowledge of a “600 page book” into your brain by reading just 5-6 pages! Somewhat similar to how Neo learns to ride helicopters, fight jujitsu, kung-fu etc in the movie Matrix Just kidding.
Websites:
http://www.getabstract.com/ [Get Abstract]
http://www.bizsum.com/ [Business Summaries]
http://www.summary.com
http://www.elementk.com
http://www.execubooks.com
Get Abstract is offering Freakonomics here.
If you come across any more good Business summary websites or free downloads of Business summaries, please let me know.
Some filmy dialogues…
I don’t remember which movie this was…But the boy talks with the friend of the girl. Then there is a scene in which the girl talks with the same common friend.
Common Friend: Can you tell the reason why you love her?
Boy: You can say 1000 reasons for not liking a person, but for liking a person you can’t reason!
The girl apparently is not interested with the boy.
Common Friend: Can you tell the reason why you don’t like him?
Girl: You can say 1000 reasons for liking a person, but you cannot say a reason for not liking a person!!
Wow…that’s Filmy!
I was watching a Telugu movie, when I was travelling in the very cosy volvo bus from hyderabad to chennai. The movie was entertaining to be honest. But couple of dialogues were very interesting:
Father advices to his daughter about the need for marriage:
“See, till the age of 10, a person is lost in his childhool games. Till the age of 20, a person is lost in his studies. Till the age of 30, a person is lost in his work/career. After that if the person is alone, he will lose himself!!!” The girl immediately agrees to marry…!
Girl: Why do you like me?
Boy: I cannot say why I like you…But I can say how much I like you!!! The girl literally floats after hearing the comment!
What the….? The script writers of Indian movies..especially Tam and Telugu movies are non-sensically creative Read Ram’s post on Captain…related to this and hilarious one.
I am thinking about how to make this post honest yet interesting I am thinking about how to realize my long term goals. I am thinking about how to manage the organizational politics. I am thinking about why I have stopped thinking about others and thinking more about self? I am thinking, so I am alive!
I said
“If my wife earns a good salary, then I would not mind sitting in home and pursuing the things I like.”
“People criticize generously and praise stingily. That’s how the words Aw’ful’ and Awe’some’ came into existence!”
I want to build a beautiful and spacious house. And yes, it should have a breath-taking garden. I want to be a fantastic orator who can capture the attention of audience and mesmerize them for long period of times. I want to contribute to the society, especially to the down-trodden [Astrologer has said that I will be doing lot of good to lower-rung people…I am yet to figure out that trait in me…For everything there is a time!]. I want to be a popular figure and as a role-model for others. I want to dress well. I want numerous other things..so I will stop here…
I wish always that everyone in the world remains happy with a sense of fulfillment..”Lokha samastha sukhino bhavanthu” [Sanskrit equivalent of the wish] is a phrase I utter to myself atleast 10-20 times a day.
I miss my child-hood days, miss the days when we had to spend each paisa after thousand thoughts, miss the days when I fought with my brother for petty things, miss the days when I had my first crush…Basically I miss the bad times as much as I miss good times…That’s the essence of balance to me.
I hear to my inner voice more often. On the negative side, sometimes I hear only what I want to hear [Selective hearing] and that puts me into trouble. I am still learning to hear the person across the table without any bias or preconceived notions. Believe me, it is not easy. Compassion and empthy are not the traits one can acquire easily.
I wonder about lot of things. In particular about my future. What will I be doing 5 years down the line? Am I doing the right thing? Reading the Freakonomics has made me to wonder a lot and ask lot of questions!!
I regret for being vertically challenged. I regret for not doing anything constructively to the society.
I am unassuming. No non-sensical. Not good-looking but pleasant-looking. I am someone who does not contribute a lot to the fun, but enjoys the fun. I am a great fan of kids…
I dance sometimes in my room when nobody is around. I play some “Ghana songs” with great beats and try to imitate the choreography performed on the silverscreen. I do dance in parties once in a while.
I sing in bathroom. I hum a lot. I do think that I sing well…but my talents have been long buried within myself
I cry. Yes, I have sometimes. But I would not cry before others. If I want to cry, I will go and lock myself inside a room and then cry. I can remember only one instance when I cried uncontrollably before others. Even now, If I think about the instance my heart gets heavier.
I am not feeling like disclosing my long list of weaknesses!
I write (well type) a lot of crap. I write so that someday I will become a great author. I actually ‘write’ to maintain my good hand-writing.
I confuse between What I want and What I need…
I need a perfect life-partner! I need a mentor in career!!!
I should learn a lot from books, from the experiences of others, from other culture. I should learn to maintain the smile on my face even during tough times…should learn many languages…should start writing quality blog posts…
I finish this post now…God, it has to come to an end..:)
I tag
Ramkumar
Ramki
Indian Blogger
Anuj Kadyan
Ankur Warikoo
Karthik Ramachandran
Vasanth Dharmaraj
It is almost 2 months since I cut my hair. I have to attend my cousin sister’s marriage this weekend. So decided to trim my hair to look neat and not shabby…Who likes the guy with shabby, ratty hair anyway? and that too in the marriage…it is a SIN 
Since two of my flat mates went to a nearby Men’s Beauty Parlour for dressing their hair, I decided to check out the parlour myself too…I was just entering the parlour and the door automatically opened itself from inside…I thought somebody is coming out and so stood away from the path..After some time, a local guy with 20 days old beard and colgate palmolive smile came out and said..”Come in sir!”. Gosh…then it struck..”it’s the damn customer service”.
I entered inside the parlour. The shop is fully air-conditioned. Not many customers. There were just two gentlemen utilizing the services of the parlour. One was middle-aged. He was reading his newspaper and one person was grinding his heels with a finely crafted saw like tool…and another one was polishing his fingernails..The other customer was just having a shampoo bath…A hair-dresser came to me and asked..”Sir..what do you want?”. I said..”Just haircut…medium..but short on the side and the back”…He understood and started his work..I was observing myself in the mirror and realized how much hair I have lost over the years…hmm…i think the supply will last only for few more years…I sincerely wish that a shining bald-head becomes a fashion by then…Just when I woke back from my good old memories, he disturbed me and said..”Sir..it’s done”!..I checked and said..”Ok”..I thought, I will have a massage..”How much for massage?”..”60 Rupees sir”..After few more conversations decided to have the massage.
He said..”Sir..use navaratna oil..it is good.” As I did not have any preference, i said..”ok”. He then began his massaging operation. He used my head as Drums, Mirudangam, washing stone, and what not…But I closed my eyes and enjoyed my massage…I have tried to do the same techniques myself but somehow don’t get the same relief, when a seasoned masseur does it..He then proceeded to massage my neck, shoulders, back till lower back. I got that tickling feeling when he massaged my back. I started reacting just like a person who is being tickled does. The masseur started smiling and continued his massage in the same place… it tickled more…more…and then I leaned forward….forward and fell in to splits of laughter…Even the masseur started laughing…I felt weird and awkward!! I signalled him to stop…he understood and proceeded back towards the head region and finished his job. By now my hair was a holy mess…So, I asked him..”How much for shampoo?”..He said, “Rs.60/=”..”So, that includes drying also?”..”No sir, Rs.60 for drying…”…What a way to extract money…”Ikkada anni aravai rupaila?” (Everything is Rs.60 here?) ..Paid for the hair-cut and massage. I then had to walk back the distance to my home and had to bear the strange looks of people who were wondering what happened to my hair…:) But the massage left me energized for the whole day…
Courtesy: Lack of ideas to blog about…! will enjoy free-wheeling for some days….
10:15 p.m. Not much traffic on the road. I was walking back to my room after purchasing some food stuff. An autorickshaw fled past me. I felt a sensation of something being sprayed on my body. Since it was dark, I could not realize what it was. When I closely observed, I saw dark droplets spread all over my right hand and pants. They were ink drops. I looked around and saw a plastic ink bottle lying on the ground, completely deformed in shape, literally road-rolled. Those ink drops are not something that goes away. The ink is meant for ballpoint pens. I was so enraged…that I shouted…”S..H…I..T..”! on the empty road and it echoed in the empty roads…By this time, the autorickshaw had already transformed into a mini-dot in the distant…
I was so pissed off by the thought that my pants have become useless…I blamed my friend for bringing me along with him to the shop inspite of my resistance…I blamed the autorickshaw for driving on the bottle…I blamed the person who threw the bottle on the road…I blamed the corporation worker for not doing the clean-up job properly…Blame, Blame, Blame was all I did…The more the parties I tried to blame, the more I was enraged…I was atleast lucky that I was wearing an old T-shirt…
Only when I came to my room did I realize that I did not kick the bottle away from the road..Now, I am responsible for someother good pant getting spoilt…and I will be part of somebody else’s blame…! Next time, I will try to maintain calm and see how I can control the damage…and when will all our citizens co-operate to maintain the cleanliness in public places is a question that needs to be answered…and thought upon…
PS: I bought the pants only 20 days ago…I tried to clean the pants..but to no avail.
Some notes from ‘Maverick’ book….
Hepatitis Leave
When people tell us they don’t have time to think, we ask them to consider what would happen if they suddenly contracted hepatitits and were forced to spend three months recuperating in bed. Then we tell them to go ahead and do it.
Self-set Salaries
Why not let our managers set their own goals and, when the year was over, decide the extent to which they had met them. From there it would be a relatively simple matter to award themselves the appropriate bonus. And no one would dare complain about the fairness of the system, since the managers would determine their own salaries.
“How much money do you need to earn to live comfortably’, I asked her, watching her face flush and her brown eyes cloud over with bewilderment. “How much money do you need so that you will leave for work in the morning with the feeling that you are fairly paid; so that you won’t be tempted to look for another job.” A few days later she told me she wanted to be paid $20,000 a year, which was a shade higher than she had been making!
Semco refines the criteria further:
We asked them to consider four criteria: What they thought they could make elsewhere; What others with similar responsibilities and skills made at Semco; What friends with similar backgrounds made; and how much money they needed to live. To help them with the first two, we gave them a salary survey from Semco as well as national surveys compiled by leading consulting companies.
At the end of the exercise, Except for half a doze people, everyone set salaries that were in line with our expectations. In five of six exceptions, people set salaries lower than we had projected. It wasn’t easy to get them to raise their figure, either!
As a matter of corporate philosophy, we try to keep our top salaries within ten times our entry level pay,which is in stark contrast to the rest of the country, where a top manager’s salary can be 80 times as much as a worker’s.
Our people know salaries account for most of our operating costs, and they thing about our six-month budgets when they set them. It is easy to solve a budget problem by eliminating a salary that seems too high, and no one wants to stick out.
Obviously, our people are keeping their salaries in check because of their concern about Semco’s welfare. In good times and bad, self-set salaries have encouraged our workers to take that rarest of corporate perspectives, a long-term view. And they have the added virtue of eliminating complaints about pay, which are always among a company’s most contentious issues.
When business is good, people in the programme make a lot more money. When it isn’t, they are helping us cut expenses and lowering their profiles in case cost-cutters are called out.
Lost in Space:
Every year, we choose at least one young person from among our applicants from business or engineering schools or even high schools. These extremely fortunate souls have no job description, no boss, no responsibilities. They are free to roam through the company for a year, so long as they work in atleast 12 departments and try to generate enough revenue to cover their salary. At the end of the year, they are free to negotiate a more permanent arrangement with any of the departmens in which they served.
You don’t believe me? Try this test at your next meeting. When some important item comes up, say that it’s better not to discuss it now because a related issue was decided that same morning that will change things considerably. Then after a few moments of apprehensive silence, say that you just can’t discuss it now. I’d be surprised if you haven’t become the most powerful person in the room. You know something the others don’t - atleast that’s what they think!
Time Management:
1. Begin at the end. Set a certain hour at which to leave the office and obey it blindly. If you take work home at weekends, establish a 60-day programme to halt this insidious practice.
2. Sift through that stack of papers on your desk and decide which are most important. (Deciding that everything is important is cheating. Start again). As you go through, divide the papers in to three categories:
- Priority items, which require your personal attention and represents matters of indisputable importance. Don’t put more than five documents in this.
- Items that can only be handled by you, but can wait. Think hard about whether you are really the only one who can deal with the item. Practice “Test of seventies”. Ask yourself: “Is it possible that someone else could do this task at least 70% as well as I could?”. If the answer is yes, then let him.
- Items you think would be good to look at, but never quite get around to.
3. The key to self-management is self-esteem. You must maintain it even though you may not be as well informed about some essentially meaningless report or arcane issues as your associates. You must be prepared to got a meeting and endure comments such as, “You mean you didn’t read”. Better to suffer the humiliation of saying you didn’t and ask someone else to be kind enough to summarize it than to have had to read all the articles that cross your desk.
I estimate that the ratio of useless to relevant reading material is about 20 to 1. With that in mind, my advice is to reduce the literary inflow to a maximum of two newspapers a day, two weekly magazines, and two publications in a specialized field. Start being proud of not being aware of everything. The reward will be an opportunity to THINK.
4. Think hard before accepting that invitation to lunch or to visit a supplier or to make a speech.
5. Rationalizing time during meetings:
- Begin on time.
- Don’t start a meeting without first setting a time to stop.
- Go over the agenda in front of everyone.
- Delegate to one or more people any item that might take more time than is allotted for it.
- Don’t have meetings that last longer than 2 hours.
- Be a bear about interruptions. The only excuse for breaking into a meeting is a customer with a problem.
- Transform as many meetings as possible into telephone calls or quick conversations in the hall.
Couple of websites I would like to talk about…
www.bharatbloodbank.org: A “Corporate social Responsibility” initiative by BharatMatrimony.com. Since one of my colleague’s father is undergoing open-heart surgery, she was seeking for blood donors. We received a suggestion from one of the employees to check out this website. I registered and found that significant number of people have registered as donors and there are donors from many parts of India. I am sure there are other websites available for blood donation, but I was impressed with the service.
www.dhamma.org: Vipassana Meditation website. Vipassana is one of India’s ancient mediation techniques. This organization is driven by Mr. S.N. Goenka. This organization runs 10-day courses throughout the year, during which the participants will learn the art of meditation and practice it rigorously. There are no charges for this course. Yes, it is absolutely FREE. They will provide you accommodation, food and will take care of your entire stay. But you have to follow the guidelines and timetable that is instituted. During the 10-days, you should not communicate with any other person in the course, not even communication through body language [Using mobile phone is out of question!]. See yourself the course schedule to understand the rigour of the course.
THE COURSE TIMETABLE
The following timetable for the course has been designed to maintain the continuity of practice. For best results students are advised to follow it as closely as possible.
4:00 a.m.———————Morning wake-up bell
4:30-6:30 a.m.—————-Meditate in the hall or your own room
6:30-8:00 a.m.—————-Breakfast break
8:00-9:00 a.m.—————-GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
9:00-11:00 a.m.—————Meditate in the hall or your own room
11:00-12:00 noon————–Lunch break
12noon-1:00 p.m.————–Rest and interviews with the teacher
1:00-2:30 p.m.—————-Meditate in the hall or your own room
2:30-3:30 p.m.—————-GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
3:30-5:00 p.m.—————-Meditate in the hall or your own room
5:00-6:00 p.m.—————-Tea break
6:00-7:00 p.m.—————-GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
7:00-8:15 p.m.—————-Teacher’s Discourse in the hall
8:15-9:00 p.m.—————-GROUP MEDITATION IN THE HALL
9:00-9:30 p.m.—————-Question time in the hall
9:30 p.m.———————Retire to your own room–Lights out
Huh!
Some of my colleagues have/are going to this course. They have very good words to say about this course. They say “I am mentally clear….and have absolute peace of mind”. Why did I write about this course, because my superior believes that taking a 10-day break for this course brings lot of productivity gain to the individual..and he recommends everyone to go through this course…Well, after seeing the schedule, I cannot make up my mind as of now…but definitely will try it sometime..This course might be an answer for what some of you might be searching for…”Away from the outer world, deep into your own world”!
Wow…! My first mobile blogging effort
Still enjoying the ‘free’ days….
Watched the movie “Ice Age-2″ in Satyam movie complex yesterday. For the same price of Rs.90/=, the quality of movie watching experience is lower compared to PVR or Prasad’s in hyderabad. The pricing scheme was funnier…”Satyam Budget”, “Satyam Premiere”, “Satyam Elite”!!!
Purchased couple of books. One was “The Greatness Guide” by Robin Sharma (The author of The monk who sold his ferrari). I wanted to buy another book “The undercover Economist”. But decided to postpone the purchase after seeing the price tag of Rs.500/=. There are some more books that I want to read once, but I don’t want to possess. “How Opal Mehta got a kiss, got wild, got a life”, “5 point something” and “11 minutes”. Will borrow from my friends or from a library…
Couple of chennai friends are beginning their Post-MBA career today. One in Cognizant and other in TVS. Many others are starting on May 2nd/3rd. Life will be on high speed track once I join work. Will relax for 5 more days
Bobbie Carlyle's 'Self-made man', a statue I greatly admire and a principle I strongly believe in. "...left to his own devices, man will use his God-given talents to be creative, productive, and prosperous. Using free will, he will better his own situation and that of those around him, thereby influencing in a positive way his own destiny..."
