Technology Trends: Back to the Future I & III January 26, 2009
Posted by kbalamurugan in Technology.2 comments
Spending the Christmas and the new year holidays at home in a Catholic country like Spain has its own advantages (if it can be called so) of forcing me to take solace from watching flicks that I encountered on a FIFO basis. Yes I did spend my holidays watching a host of movies and that included “Kadhal Kottai” (the original version of Sirf Tum). The plot involves two introvert souls falling in unconditional love without seeing each other till the climax.
I was tempted to think how this movie would have panned out, if it was taken now, when it is impossible for anybody not to stay in touch with each other, thanks to the ubiquitous proliferation of communication mediums like email and mobile. This prompted me to go a little backward to think of technology trends that were not present 20 years ago in India (for readers outside India from the western world, the scribbling in this blog is still relevant, only that they have to recalibrate their timeline a little more earlier). There should be a thousand options for me to mention but I would like to choose to select only the few trends that caused tectonic shift in the society. My personal choice will necessarily include: Internet, Googling and Mobile phone.
Internet: Internet access was a preserve of the geeks studying in IITs and a few reputed institutions and I could vividly remember paying about 100 Rupees in 1994 for accessing Internet for 30 min. Turn the clock 4 years later; I could see that Cyber cafes had mushroomed like STD booths in every corner of the city that one could hardly escape from it. Slowly but steadily the internet crept into our life to a point of new return and India was entering the digital world. Mails always mean e-mails and not the letters carried by our beloved postman, addresses contained domain names (like hotmail and yahoo) instead of street names, chatting involves talking to with faceless friends across the other corner of the world (literally).
Googling: For a purist, this is essentially an offshoot of the internet revolution, a careful introspection will reveal that googling merit a separate mention. With googling, information (not knowledge) was easily indexed and pulled out from the web world. Googling is kind of a leveler in the sense that anything that is recorded in the web world can be accessed by anybody who wants to know it without going through the grind of combing through multiple web pages.
Mobile Phones: It is no longer “Roti, Kapada and Makkan (Food, Cloth and House)” the triumvirate necessities, the basic ones. The latest addition to this exclusive club in the 2000s was the Mobile phone. Thanks to the democratization of mobile phones (where the receiver doesn’t have to pay for the incoming calls), anybody can be reached anywhere. This simple gizmo which once was used to only to make or receive calls, has now replaced may other traditional toys like cameras, walkmans, calculators and in future will also replace the laptops (the first step is taken in the form of blackberry). With this and the its first cousin “internet”, the thin line between work and personal life is getting diminishing in astronomical proportions.
While it is always easier to do retrospective analysis, I wanted to take advantage of the article (www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html) that I read during the last few weeks to predict the content of a futuristic blog that I could write 20 years later. The article I was referring above was prepared under the aegis of National Intelligence Council to walk us through the key global trends that can shape the world in the next 15 years. The best part of the article is left to be read by diplomats, academicians and prospective authors; I was particularly intrigued by a table “Technology breakthroughs by 2025″ in Page number 47 and 48. I definitely will not vouch for the certainty of these breakthroughs, but the Jules Verne in me was working overtime trying to fantasize some of these trends. I am outlining my top two favorites here:
Biogenero technology: Imagine a doctor writing the prescription of the medical history a new born child could have over its entire life span based on the holes in its genes. This coupled with low cost healthcare boosted by advances in biotechnology will definitely revolutionize our lifestyle where entering 50s no longer means retirement for most of us.
Clean Water technology: In addition to quenching the thirst of new inhabitants of our planet, this will also avoid the creation of another cartel, WPEC (la OPEC) with its headquarters in the middle of the Amazon forest and delay the transition of another free commodity that is getting monetized rapidly.
I will sign-off to leave my readers to go “Back to the Future” and let me know the technological trends they believe can shape the next generation.
Who is a Leader November 1, 2008
Posted by kbalamurugan in Leadership.2 comments
The other day I was travelling from work to home with one of my colleagues and we started a discussion on Leadership (or the lack of it causing the current economic crisis). When queried, I was not able to give a convincing definition of what Leadership is. I promised to give a coherent answer to this colleague in the forthcoming days.
A search of Leadership in google or any other engine will give us a whole bunch of definitions, some of which are truly eye-catchy. Browsing through a few of these definitions gave me a sinking feeling that Leadership is one of the more abused word in English if not the most.
I tried to gather a few words that came to my mind when I think about the Leaders whom I admire the most, and was trying to put together a framework that will cover the necessary traits of a Leader. It also helped me that I attended a program on Leadership and Organization Development in the recent past, to channelise my thoughts on this topic. Some of the words that I could associate with my leaders are: Setting Vision, Trustworthy, Caring, Developing People, Creativity, Innovation.
Stringing together these words, I tried to form the definition as follows ”Leader is responsible for setting a vision; somebody who develops the team by being trustworthy and through caring; to realise the vision through creativity and innovation”.
Voila, I have managed to add another to the ever growing list of the definitions of Leadership. Like any hypothesis, I wanted to test this definition with an example that most of us are familiar to begin with. Then started my dilema, should I choose Mahatma Gandhi the eternal torch bearer of non-violence, or Stephen Rodger Waugh the legendary captain of the all conquering Australian cricket team, or Napoleon Bonaparte who dared to defy the might of England which was at its invincible best to name a few. Obviously we have the luxury of quite a range to choose from. Each of one of them has been better than the best in their own space leaving a defining imprint that cannot be erased in the sands of time.
Being my first blog I did not want to stretch it beyond the patience of the readers, I decided to leave it to the judgement of the reader to test this definition with their examples; giving me a fruitful lead time to mull over my confusion of who can best fit this definition of a Leader.
