Jayakumar Balasubramanian

Last week was very special for me as I got an opportunity to attend the ‘Art of living part –I’ course. Last year I attended the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course organized by the same organization and you can find more details on my blog titled ‘Yoga – An integrated solution’ . In this blog I am going to share my experiences and learning from the AOL course. Before getting into the course details, let me give some background information. Dr.Stephen covey in his ‘seven habits of highly effective people’ talks about four important dimensions for human development. They are physical, mental, spiritual and emotional (social) dimensions. He had arrived at these dimensions based on his thirty years of research in the human development, psychology and character building. In order to have an ‘inclusive’ growth, human beings need to develop themselves in all four dimensions. In his book Dr. Covey strongly advocates for having a strong character in order to be effective. This character centric growth wi...

Some time back I wrote a blog about ‘Muhammed Yuguf and Microcredit’ where I gave my perspective on the excellent work he has done. This December 10 th he received the Noble peace price for his revolutionary micro-credit implementation in Bangladesh . I got a chance to read his inspirational noble price speech, which is really wonderful. The total speech was very good and I personally liked the following points: On poverty: “World's income distribution gives a very telling story. Ninety four percent of the world income goes to 40 percent of the population while sixty percent of people live on only 6 per cent of world income. Half of the world population lives on two dollars a day. Over one billion people live on less than a dollar a day. This is no formula for peace. Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society. For building stable peace we must find ways to provide opportunitie...

This weekend I went to have Pizza and learned what the word ‘differentiation’ of employees exactly means. If you closely observe, guys out there would be wearing some interesting badges and symbols in their shirts. This time I couldn’t control my curiosity and asked what it means. The answer the bearer gave was pretty interesting. Each new joiner is put into a particular department (customer service, delivery, phone service, pizza preparation, pasta preparation etc...) and they have a strict evaluation system in place. When an employee becomes an ‘expert’ in a particular department he gets a badge with the particular name. Then I observed closely and it was fun to see badges like ‘pasta expert’. Apart from this when an employee reaches ‘excellence’ in any domain they get other special batches like ‘customer maniac’. Of course this is truly based on performance of the employees. This also explains why a bearer who is not ‘assigned’ to your table doesn’t hesitate to serve pizza or...

As we all know India is a ‘diverse’ country with various languages, culture, food, customs and geographical nature. In fact we proudly say ‘Unity in diversity’ and it’s really a miracle that how this complex system called India is working. The roots of ‘diversity’ traces back to Indus valley civilization times, which are explained very beautifully in Nehru’s all time classic ‘Discovery of India’. I have not yet completed this book, but following two points are very important to understand. First, let us compare Indus valley civilization (where India ’s origin belongs to) with Egyptian and Greek civilizations. The Egyptians worshipped their forefathers and preserved them as ‘mummies’. These mummies served them as a guide and everything revolved around them. In case of Greek they worshipped the ‘kings’ as their centre of attraction. Whereas in Indus valley civilization they couldn’t find any symbols like mummies, which bound people in a single thread. So early traces of ‘democrac...

Author: Subroto Bagchi Price: 395 INR For years I have been a sincere reader of Mr. Subroto Bagchi’s writings starting with his ‘Making of Mindtree’ write-ups. I have read his articles in Business world (Arbor Mentis), Times of India (Times of Mind) and attended ‘Ping-me’ sessions organized by Mindtree. I can very well say his writings are excellent almost everyone would have read his famous speech ‘Go kiss the world’ . For quiet some time I was not able to see much of his writings in the media and really concerned about it. But Mr. Bagchi came up with a ‘bonus’ by writing this book ‘The high performance Entrepreneur’ where he shared his learnings which he got from building Mindtree. This book is truly awesome and gave loads of insights into Entrepreneurship. To start with, Mr.Bagchi coined the ‘high performance entrepreneur’ in this book and talks about how ‘high performance’ entrepreneurship is different from mere self employment of small scale. High performance ‘rain making’ entr...

Author: Varghese Kurien as told to Gouri Salvi Price: 395 INR Translation in Tamil: Mu. Sivalingam Price: 150 INR (Tamil version) This is one of the best auto-biographies I have ever read so far. It is about the life and work of Dr. Varghese Kurien. For people who don’t know who is Dr. Kurien is, just think about the famous advertisement: ‘Amul – The taste of India ’ . He is the man behind the Amul brand and the key person who envisioned, carved and executed the blueprint for the ‘White revolution’. This book consists of his experiences, which is truly inspirational, amazing and mind-blowing. I can easily compare his achievements with Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam’s contributions to strategic and defense sector. The story starts with Dr. Kurien finishing his Master of Science in Metallurgical Engineering from Michigan State University , which was sponsored by Indian government. As the government sponsored his scholarship, he is supposed to serve the government in return. Because...

Last week the HP Asia Techcon 2006 was held in Bangalore and one of my papers got selected for the same. It was really an exciting experience to be part of the tech-con and had loads of learning. I am not in a position to elaborate on them because some of the information is company confidential. So I am just placing my photograph in the blog.

The month’s ‘The Smart Techie’ magazine has come up with a cover story titled ‘the road ahead’. The cover story about the career roadmap for techies and the problems they are facing. Since I know some of the folks in the magazine, they asked for my opinions and it published it as a part of their story. The complete cover story can be accessed from the link: http://www.thesmarttechie.com/magazine/fullstory.php/ZDRE117725379 I am giving the questions they have asked for their cover story and my answers below: Can you explain in detail, how do you factor the big trends in technology into your career strategies? Along with your explanation kindly give us a specific instance of how you have done it. To be very honest I feel the big trends in technology don’t have much impact on individual career. Even though technologies change very fast, the fundamental learning process remains the same. So as long as I have the learning mentality it only had positi...

It’s been almost a year since I have started performing yoga. My journey of yoga started off with taking up the ‘Sri Sri Yoga’ course thought by ‘Art of living’ foundation. Also I got some theoretical knowledge by reading the book ‘yoga and prayanama for health’ . Performing Yoga has become part of my life now. Even though benefits need to be experienced rather than writing it, I thought of share my personal thoughts about yoga in a series of blogs. I am not going to give a ‘spiritual’ explanation of yoga but more of ‘common sense’ approach in this blog. Human system can be classified into three parts namely body, mind and subconscious mind and it is important to understand these things before getting into understanding of yoga. The mind is the ‘active’ entity which helps us to think day to day activities. The subconscious mind is a ‘passive’ and responsible for ‘non-rational’ behavior of human beings. It is always active and keeps recording the happenings around. This recording metho...