Phew! I have completed six months of blogging a few days back. It seems I embraced blogging just before the bubble burst. Just as well :-)
There might be slow blogging for the next two weeks. From yesterday I am on vacation with family and they are already resentful about my plan to spend time on a “professional” blog. Let’s see how it goes. In any case, I hope to keep up with my Linkroll.
Every month I share some traffic numbers in the monthly roundup. I am stopping that practice since the blog now has a healthy readership. The only thing that I really care about anyway is reader participation through comments. Please comment when you feel you can add to the conversation.
These are the most popular posts of April. Check them out if you missed any…
Passion, Happiness, Work, Play and Life
Work-life balance is about ditching the Deferred Life Plan. Not only shouldn’t family be deferred, Randy Komisar suggests that passion also shouldn’t be deferred. He describes passion as something that pulls you towards something you cannot resist while drive pushes you towards something you feel compelled or obligated to do. “If you know nothing about yourself you can’t tell the difference”. This ties in very well with Martin Seligman’s research on happiness. He suggests that true happiness doesn’t’ happen unless you know your own strengths. After all, it’s playing to your signature strengths that brings passion alive. Read on…
Cultivating Intercultural Competence
An IHT story about Dutch soldiers in Afghanistan brings out the cultural difference between Americans and Dutch people. On Geert Hofstede’s masculine/feminine dimension Americans are staunchly “masculine” while Dutch society one of the most “feminine” in the world. This difference has created problems in the past as well and is emblematic of the problems businesses face in managing truly global knowledge workers. Developing intercultural competence is now critical for the new multinationals to succeed.
Fighting the Innovation Hype
Hype has surrounded the word innovation and a backlash is underway. Although Clayton Christensen has introduced a useful framework around disruptive and sustaining innovation, a commonly understood taxonomy hasn’t taken shape. So let me take a shot at proposing a layman’s terminology…
YEGA IS Rising!
I like Vinnie Mirchandani because he doesn’t beat around the bush. He responds to Paul Graham’s article “Microsoft is Dead” by simply stating that its not just Microsoft but also IBM, SAP and Oracle (see his post “MISO is dead”). In a way he is right. They are all part of the fading edge. What’s rising in place of MISO is YEGA. The yahoo, eBay, Google and Amazon are part of the leading edge. But if truth be told, my respect goes to GET-IN, a slight twist on letters that represents GE, TI and Nokia…
Copyleft and Higher Education
For me the real battleground between the copyleft and copyright movements is not music but higher education. This is why I am really interested and emboldened by MIT’s Open CourseWare program. This has implications for India as the hiher education system undergoes some serious reform.
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