Thinking out of the box

I came across few interesting pictures while going through some of the blogs. And this reminds me of "Thinking out of the box". Not many of us will come up with such imaginative answers :).

Out of the box work

Most of us might have come up with out of the box thought, but what about out of the box work.

I still remember one of the teachers asking our 4th standard class what they want to be....I wanted to be fighter jet pilot then, some wanted to become businessmen, some scientists, some wanted to be in merchants navy, some wanted to join army, some wanted to be farmers, some wanted to be artists.....everyone came up with some different answer. But now each of us is either an engineer or doctor. Why ?

We all have heard of out of the box thinking....your professor in college will want you to think out of the box, your boss will always want you to give out of the box thoughtful answers. But no want us to work out of the box. Why ?

May be because we dont know what to do and we all follow the crowd, may be because we dont have the courage to do something different even if we want to, may be we have different priorities, priorities that dictates what we do and what we want to do. May be all of them. But the bottomline is that is it really required to work out of the box, why to work out of the box, would it be any better, would it serve any more puporses. Frankly we dont know, unless we work out of the box or come across people who have worked out of the box.

I thought of this topic after I came across couple of guys who have worked out of the box.

Yesterday I went for a hair cut. In Taiwan most of the people dont speak english but there was this guy who spoke pretty good english and he communicated to his beautiful colleague, how I wanted my hair cut. I was wondering how come this guy speak such a good english, Taiwan does not have english medium schools or universities, all sorts of communication everywhere is in Mandarin. But this guys knows english...this made me talk to him after my hair cut and I came to know that this guy had done his four years of engineering from Australia in Information System. He told that he didnt like working with computers and enjoyed what he is doing more than a IT job. From IT to entrepreneur that too with no work ex. I was really impressed with this guy.

Before that I went to a restaurant and again I met a girl who spoke english quite well. She told that she used to work with a trading company and had a good job. But she wanted to open her own business with her family members and she enjoys what she is doing now more than what she used to do. I was again impressed.

May be Taiwan has many more such talented people and may be that is the reason why Taiwan is amongst few developed asian country.

India definitely needs people who can work out of the box. I guess for our growth and deveopment it is not enough to have employed engineers, doctors, bankers, consultants......we need engineers, doctors, bankers, consultants, businessment who can generate employment, and more importantly those who can work out of the BOX.

Information : Part II

It was a hectic but a very good week for me :) Got two of my important projects completed in a week, 3 weeks before deadline, that makes road for me to travel to Taipei, over at our biggest client in Taiwan. I might move to Taipei next week and hope to see the tallest building of the world .... Taipei 101, and meet some of my friends.

Anyhow, I want to dedicate this blog as a sequel of my last blog "Information".

Gone are the days when the board decides that we should launch a product in India because it is a huge success in US. Gone arethe days when the meteorologist predicts rain or storm next week based on behaviour of birdsand animals and winds.....In todays world all the decision are based on information. But if we dont have that information then what ? Look for it :) Gather the information or have it gathered....else you are going to be turtle and this time rabbit wont sleep.

So the world is going to be with information gatherers and definitely information needs to be combined to make a story, meaningful story. So if someone can provide right information and also do a meaningful analysis then...you have a jackpot. There would be lot more factors to be a winner but atleast you are not a turtle.This would mean lots and lots of consultants, market research firms etc. Yes they would be in demand atleast inIndia, where we have a crunch of information and the market is huge. For example for software industry, we definitely need people who can make software's, but we need more people who can tell what software to make, for whom, when and where to make.

Well why I like this topic is because job is same :) Tell my clients that they have a problem, and they need information and they need to analyze the information and they need to implement something or change something. If they can do all these things, then I will be job less.

Information !!

Again going over the previous blog on internet, it striked me that internet is nothing but information.All kinds of information ..... good, bad and the ugly. But then again if google can provide all the information, then why do I have to call the call centre at times or have to go through some books ? Again, all these call centre executives are trained from some documents and always refer to some kind of documents, which means that there is information somewhere. Yes, there is information somewhere but probably not compiled or do not have a access to. Wait a minute, this means if somehow access is provided to all these kind of information then we dont need any human being to disseminate information no call centre jobs, no libraries, no book stores.

Well if we look over time, thirty years back my professors, then students used to go library, search literally page by page through abstracts of hundreds of journals, choose one that seemed relevent and call the call centre or send a letter to whereever and wait for it to arrive. Total time may be a month. After thirty years, key in a letter on the website of journal and download the relevent journal, take a print out and you are all set. Total time, may be 15 minutes. Take another example, I recently ordered a laptop from lenovo. What you have to do is go to the website choose what ever you want, key in your credit card information and thats it. No human interaction,information dissemination is perfect for decision making and executing the process. This means that this process has eliminated thousands of jobs related to call centre, the purpose of of all these jobs was to disseminate information. So as we move forward, I can see that most of the information can be obtained from internet. No more calls to customer care, where you have to wait for 30 minutes at times to get hold of a customerrepresentative. Probably we will have printers which can download the book we want, print it and generatea copy similar to what we get in a book store.

Call centre being a big industry in India will be non existent as compared to today, sometime in future.

Well does that means we sit in office and we will have all the information right in-front....quite not right.


I will go through in my next blog, what kind of information we wont be able to get on internet. And I guess that information would be worth a lot.

The graph below depicts the whole blog in one graph ie as we move forward information dissimination time would decrease

Trip to Taiwan : Part II

Very asian, Taiwan is a great place to be at. Though its been just few days for me over herewhat I have observed so far is while going to office in a cab. It takes me 45 minutes to reach office andsome of the things that I have noticed so far, which kind of strikes me are

1) Most of the taxis are Camry, Merc, Galant...infact I guess they have the best maintained taxis in Asia or as compared to US.
2) All the two wheelers are scooty like (not even like kinetic honda which has much better power, there are almost no bikes. I wonder whether it to reduce the average speed of two wheelers.
3) Helmets are like a oval bowls turned upside down :)
4) On narrow streets with a speed limit of 40km/hr, taxi driver drives at 80-90 km/hr
5) They introduced Bullet train couple of days back just like what Japanese have, and it passes by one of my clients site. This makes bring them in the elite list of 6 countires having bullet/HiSpeed train.(Thier typical speed is around 240Km/hr)
6) They have Mandarin versioned name for everything, even for English company names. For example if you tell taxi driver that you want to go to UMC (United MicroElectronics Corporation), he wont understand, you have totell him that you want to go to "Lien Tien", which is the chinese version of UMC.

The very first thing that I needed in Taiwan was a cell phone, the US sim card showed signal, but I wasnt able to make any calls. I searched for local GSM service providers, but the problem was visitors cant get a cell phone sim card, unless they have ARC ie Alien Resident Certificate. Inspite of reading this on the websiteI went to the office of a GSM provider known as Chunghwa. It looked like a typical BSNL office lil bit betterbut the problem was no one knew English. Finally they managed to get one lady who pretty much understood what I wanted and she told me that I need a ARC in order to get a SIM card. I gave them my passport with an expression "THATS WHAT I HAVE". Instead of looking at my Taiwan Visa they kept on examining my US visa , and finally gave me a SIM card. :)Well this solved lot of problems for me.

Again no graphs for this blog.

Trip to Taiwan

After travelling continuously for 12 hours, I was again somewhere in Tokyo at a place commonly known as Nagoya Airport, but this time I am just transiting on my way to Tainan, a city located in southern part of Tawain, which separates, Nagoya with 3 hours of flight and 3 hours of drive.

Pilot anounced to fasten seat belts and after a while it was just few meters above sea level, it seemed like we are landing in the middle of the ocean. I thought after all its Japan anything is possible :) It was really an amazing view, it might be just my seat location whick resulted in the affect, but for a while it send jitters from the very thought that you are gonna land in the sea.

Soon I recognized the Nagoya airport, with a long open air, caged concourse, where you can sit for hours and enjoy the specular view of flights taking off and landing. I like Nagoya airport amongst other few asian airports for the fact that it has very good choice of food at the airport, from indian, thai, japanese to all american cuisines and that too cheap. You can get a good meal in 1000 yuan ie roughly 10 USD. The restrooms are impeccable with state of art technologies.

Let me list the the international airports I have visited and which one I like and why. So here goes the list

1) Chatrapati Shivaji - Mumbai

2) Indra Gandhi - Delhi Int

3) Chennai int

4) Changi Airport - Singapore

5) SFO - San Francisco, USA

6) JFK - New York, USA

7) Newark Liberty - Newark, USA

8) Dulles - Washington, USA

9) Swiss (I dont know whats the name of the airport)

10) Hong Kong

11) Incheon - Korea

13) Boston - USA

14) LAX - Los Angeles, USA

15) Nagoya - Japan

16) Chagni - Taiwan

17) Dallas Fort Worth - Dallas, USA

Particulalry I like Changi (Singapore) Airport, for the following reasons

1) Aesthetically well designed

2) Very good service.

3) Very Good transit hotels, but need to book atleast 2 weeks before

4) Best value for money for liquors and smokes

5) Free foot massagers located throughout the airport, so just relax

Other airport that I like is Nagoya - Japan, for the reasons mentioned before.As such American airports are not that well maintained, probably due to high high labour cost. In asian countries airports in general are well maintained atleast in developed asian countries, again probably due to low wages.

During the privatisation bids of Mumbai and Delhi, airports I was hoping that Changi Airport gets the contract :) Anyhow, I hope the new international airports at Mumbai and Delhi would be one of the best in the world, people can say that they want to transit via Indian airports, those are the best in Asia !!!

PS: Today I dont have time and also dont know how to include a graph or a chart. Your suggestions are welcome.

Internet Part II

We all make decisions and judgements based on some data in the form of experiences (own or of others), preconceived notions, or at times based on intution or gut feelings. As far as I am concerned most of my decisions are based on experiences, now since I cant experience everything, the best way is to get to know the experience of other people and assume that my experience would more or less be aligned to those of others in normal circumstances. For example suppose I want to buy a camera, I will go and read some reviews/blogs/articles etc, again the more reviewers agree that a particular camera is good, the easier it is for me decide since increased data set reduces the effect of fliers which might skew the evaluation. For instanace if I read two reviews and one reviewer evaluates the camera with positive note and the other with negetive note. Now for me its difficult to decide since I dont know whom to trust, but suppose I read reviews of 50 people and 45 approves for the camera and rest 5 disapproves of it, then it is easier since I can mark those 5 as fliers.

So I always prefer lot of data, and internet to a great extent helps me with this. I am sure soon, google or some company will come with a review software where you key in a product name and it will tell you how many people like that thing and how many did not. It will also categorize it into different region, so may be in India people like canon camera and in Japan people like Sony camera, etc. All these statistics will make our life easier and also it will help the companies to evaluate and customize thier products.

The underlying phenomena, that would help this happen is internet. More and more people are spending more and more time on internet, that means more and more reviews/blogs/articles/orkut communitites etc. and therefore our decision making process would be faster.

Yesterday just for fun I thought of asking people how much time they spend on internet and the results were really amazing. Though I dont have much data, based on 15 people response it seems that on an average every person spends 8 hours on internet. That means if you remove the the time one is sleeping (lets say 7 hours), he/she is spending 50 % of time in internet. And I guess if you remove the time one spends for food/daily activities/travel, rest of the time is spent on internet. This is really amazing. Imagine the internet was born in 1991 and probably it came to India somewhere in 1996, so within 10 years it has become an integral part of one's life (Again data set is small and taken from engineers/students who always have internet access).

Lets see how the data set looks like for those 15 people who have responded with thier internet usage.