Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Wednesday, December 17, 2014
Alumni Meet, Nostalgia and How It Connects
Last weekend was a very nostalgic weekend. Having graduated from the college exactly 9.5 years ago, it was deeply moving to meet some of my batch mates (2003-2005) again at the same place. A welcoming invite from the college alumni to attend the first ever alumni meet of our college - Canara Bank School of Management Studies (Central College MBA Department), Bangalore, made our weekend an awesome one! Thanks to some of our amazing bunch of seniors and our dear professors, the program was organized very well and it connected us all back in times that shaped our careers. All of us had something nice to look back and all of us had some nice stories to share. And of course it was fun to look at ourselves after 9.5 years and say oh man, you've changed a lot! ah, look at you - what happened to your hair?! how many jobs have you changed? what's your daughter's name? oh! so you're married!? and so on. We were absolutely thrilled to see some of our seniors whom we hadn't met even during our college days and there were representatives from every batch starting 1998-2000 batch.
We started our discussion with a very interesting question -
What connects us back to this institution and what comes to your mind when you think of this institution?
A very thought provoking question which tickled our brains to instantly produce some amazing answers. Some of those answers were absolutely hilarious and some were dramatically long. Moderator did his best to keep the answers short. But all of us were in absolute flow to connect back with those beautiful days that shaped our lives. It was absolutely exhilarating for me to connect myself back to those days because it was those 2 beautiful years that turned my life around completely. I certainly would be very different today had I not joined CBSMS and I can only say that I was very lucky.
There is one specific incident that comes to my mind whenever I think of my college. It was during my third semester examination. Harish and I wanted to take a bit of deviation during our internship and we had managed to work on a very interesting project for 3 months in a very big NGO. It was not a easy decision for us to make and some of our friends even tried convincing us not to take any such projects considering the academic interests and scoring pattern in the exams. But we decided to go with it and be different. It was our Professor, M. K. Sridhar encouraged us to take up such challenging projects and he even guided us through our internship project. So we completed our project and were fairly satisfied with the outcome. It was a project on assessing the Quality Management Systems' impact on BAIF Institute for Rural Development and their projects throughout Karnataka.
A few months after we returned from our project, our professor drew our attention to a competition called 'National Social Impact Awards' organized by the SP Jain Institute of Management Research in Mumbai. He recommended us to write a paper on our 3 month internship work. Both of us were quite thrilled to see the call for papers, we worked on the paper and applied for the competition. We were not sure that our paper would make it to the finals given our last minute preparations. To our surprise out of several papers received, the organizers had shortlisted 6 papers and ours was the 6th one. We were in shock and we were equally ecstatic. But we were not sure of participating in the final round because of our third semester exams. We had no time to prepare, go to Mumbai, present our paper and come back. Also the competition dates were in between two exams and we had only 3 days gap between the two exams. So we decided not to go and we started preparing for our exams.
Our professor called us to his cabin one day and asked us if we are all set for the competition. We told him we decided not to go given our examination dates and all the mess. He asked us when is the competition, we gave him the dates. He asked us if it is coinciding with our exam dates. We said No! but it is between our exam dates and is a 3 day gap. He asked us if we participate, will we miss the exam dates? We said not exactly, but we will barely make it to the exam just in time. He immediately said
so what's the problem here? It is very clear to me that you can write your 1st exam, leave for your competition, present your paper, come back and write your next exam.
Harish and I anxiously stared at each other, took a deep breath, and said, ok, we shall try and booked our train tickets!
We won the 2nd prize at the competition and were very thrilled to win against IIMA and other 4 premium B-Schools. We came back and wrote our exams and luckily we didn't fail either. Not that we did something very extraordinary, but the reason why I always think of this story is very simple. Whatever happened was possible only because I was at my college at the right time. My college gave me the platform to do the project I liked to do, my professor MKS inspired both Harish and I to take up challenging projects, he became our mentor for life; and our project enabled us to look at our own lives very differently; we made several friends for life; we built our professional network; we got into good jobs; we even started our own NGO and enrolled ourselves for a bigger cause; we learnt immensely and set ourselves a direction to move on. And I always think that all this would not have happened if I had not joined this institution. To me, my college was an ecosystem of infinite possibilities.
This one story is a trailer of what happened to me since the day I joined the college and my life after that. And this was my answer to the question - 'What connects us back to this institution and what comes to your mind when you think of this institution?'
Cheers,
Srikanth
Tuesday, November 4, 2014
What's not on my LinkedIn Profile?
Originally posted on LinkedIn.
Till I joined LinkedIn, I was only worried about updating my profile constantly and make it look better. LinkedIn profile was more like a platform to showcase my professional deeds and make myself look better in the books of prospective managers/ employers. I was not really worried about what's not on my LinkedIn profile! But ever since the day I joined LinkedIn, one question that every new person I meet asks me is 'What's not on your LinkedIn profile?'.
As I entered my Day 1 orientation session, I was absolutely thrilled to listen to some amazing stories and witness abundant talent that a profile cannot showcase completely. It is a very important question that people don't miss asking during introductions. A question that probes people to think for a while and pushes them to share their hidden talent.
Few years ago I came across this interesting quote ~ "first thirty years of your life, you make hobbies; and the next thirty years, hobbies makes you!". I am not sure whose quote it is, but I guess it makes absolute sense. Come to think of it, hobbies are very critical and essential to our lives and they shape our lives as they mature. Cultivating a hobby is as important as acquiring a new competency. Acquiring new interests are even more fascinating. They lead our way for a constructive, meaningful and well balanced life across all the three streams of life - Personal, Professional and Social. More than the balance, they bring in fresh perspectives, different scales of imagination and unlimited learning to supplement our vision for life.
When it comes to things not on my LinkedIn profile, I do have many things to say. I have varied interests and I absolutely love spending time on them. Many people ask me how do I manage time with all the crazy interests I have. And my only answer is - because I am so passionate about things I do, I do not have to manage them. They drive me and they pick me up. There is a quote worth mentioning here, 'If you love your job, you don't have to work ~ Confucius'.
When I work on activities I like, I will be completely engrossed in them. And they define my state of happiness. It is absolutely thrilling to understand psychology behind what happens while performing the activity we like and why we feel high at that moment. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his phenomenal work 'Flow-The psychology of optimal experience', says that Flow is a state of involved enchantment that lies between boredom and anxiety. It is the joy, creativity and total involvement with life. And Sir Ken Robinson enlightens us in his inspiring work of 'Element - How finding your passion changes everything' saying being in our element is very important. He defines Element as the meeting point between the natural aptitude and personal passion. It is the place where things you love to do and things you are good at come together. And identifying interests, cultivating hobbies, therefore play a significant role in our lives and perhaps answer some of our self exploratory questions. Perhaps, with time and consistent efforts, some of them may even become game changers in our lives and transform our career.
So, while we are busy updating our LinkedIn profiles with our professional deeds and achievements, it is also important to focus on whats not on our LinkedIn profiles that can bring in plenty of cheer, joy and more power to our profiles! And on day 1 when I walked into the orientation session, I was in complete flow to share about what's not on my LinkedIn profile. To me, what's not on my LinkedIn profile is the driving force behind what's there on my LinkedIn profile. Absolutely!
So, now answer this ~ What's not on your LinkedIn profile?
Cheers, Srikanth
Wonder is the first of all the passions. - Rene Descartes
Friday, October 10, 2014
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Appreciate Growth, Focus on One, Be Compassionate
Actually this post is a long pending one and thanks to Jeff, who prompted me to post this without any further delay. One of the big wins in my life is to get an offer from LinkedIn and to be part of the awesome Talent Community. It surely has been one of the key decisions in my life considering the fact that I got an opportunity to work with one of the dream companies of mine. Having read both the books of Reid Hoffman, I was very tempted to work for LinkedIn for its inspiring set of culture and values. It has been little over a month at LinkedIn and right from the day one, I have placed myself in a ‘curiosity’ mode and I am truly enjoying the new phase.
Before joining LinkedIn, I had watched several videos of Jeff and have been his fan since then. He is one of the coolest CEOs I have ever seen and listened to. I am fortunate to join him and his efforts of creating a world with immense economic opportunities. I was awe-inspired watching his talk on creating the global economic graph and his vision for LinkedIn for the next 10 years. And after reading Reid’s new book ‘The Alliance’ I was convinced that LinkedIn, with its inspiring set of culture and values and an energetic CEO like Jeff, is one of the coolest companies in the world. (By the way, I had read the book before I joined LinkedIn)
What prompted me to write this post is the recent ‘Fire Side Chat’ with Jeff happened at our LinkedIn office in Sydney, Australia. Jeff answered a lot of questions and one of the answers that got me hooked onto is for the question on ‘fun’. It was absolutely interesting when he said that he likes ‘growth’ everyday and ‘growth’ is fun for him. Jeff went on to the extent of explaining how he likes growth by giving examples of him getting up early in the morning, going to his garden and deeply appreciating the growth of the plants, flowers, the whole garden etc., he likes to see them grow and likewise he likes to see growth around him all the time (everyday, every minute). It was particularly interesting for me because I could easily relate to what he said. Me being a nature enthusiast, what I observe in nature is the same. It is a natural phenomenon to grow everyday. Nature does not wait for anything; it just follows its cycle. We all see growth all around us and no one can stop it. It takes some effort to appreciate the growth around us and to understand the philosophy behind the same.
All of us expect ourselves to grow everyday; we like little improvements in everything we deal with on a daily basis. We always like to see our gardens giving more flower blooms every year; we like to see ourselves moving higher in our career graph; we are always ecstatic to see our bank balances progressing north and we never like to see any graph seeing south. But calling it ‘fun’ takes a lot of courage and craziness for anyone. And Jeff is surely as crazy as he sounds for sure.
The next thing he spoke about was focusing ‘one thing at a time’. He said those who have read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs knows the story of how Apple flourished because of Steve’s philosophy of ‘focusing on one thing at a time’. Even though Apple had started working on iPad before the iPhone, for a good reason, they had to stop everything they worked on iPad for a long time until they shipped their first iPhone. They never did work on both the things simultaneously. And they became successful and working on ‘one thing at a time’ became their mantra. Investing the whole energy on that ‘one thing’ is the key for any business to flourish. And for that matter, (I should not be saying this given the gamut of things I am part of) every individual will succeed by doing ‘one thing at a time’.
The next thing that was very enticing for me was when Jeff spoke about this interesting topic ~ ‘managing compassionately’. Drawing his experience from his ‘Yahoo’ days, he gave good examples of how he evolved to this philosophy of building a culture of compassion. It takes a lot of courage and honesty to share transformative stories and having heard some of the examples Jeff gave us, made me think that we seldom realize the fact that without ‘compassion’ or ‘being compassionate’, it is very difficult to work with people around us.
Well, I already like this new phase of mine and thrilled to have listened to some awesome stories from the people I admire. I guess the three interesting points listed above are absolutely cool to reflect upon and they are much evident in every success story we come across everyday.
Cheers,
Srik
Friday, August 15, 2014
welcome
It was a very humid morning when I started from home yesterday to give invitations to the guests attending our NGO's camp - Free Health Camp for Differently Abled - happening this weekend. My first visit was to invite Ms. Pavithra Y.S, CEO of Vindhya eInfomedia. I had spoken to Ms Pavithra early in the morning and because she was traveling, she asked me to drop off the invitation at her office. Also it was a chance for me to visit her place and witness the kind of work they do.
I troubled one of the senior person who was coordinating with me in her absence to make sure I get the route map to their office right. After 2-3 calls, I finally reached the building and parked my bullet in the parking area. As I reached the reception I started observing a lot of different things that gave me very positive energy. As I took my visitor pass and reached the 2nd floor reception, I opened the door and I was welcomed into the office. The person who welcomed me looked very confident, dynamic and a well trained person to take care of the guests. I was so moved by the welcome that I did not for a moment think that the person was disabled. He was differently abled. It is just that he did not have both his hands. I think that was the most inspiring moment and the most inspiring welcome I got till now in my life. I just came out of the building and cried.
Vindhya eInfomedia is into IT Enabled Services company based out of Bangalore and gives employment to differently abled people. They are an inspiration!
More power to them.
Cheers,
Srikanth
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