Democracy in America

August, 2011

The Statue of Liberty holds a promise that is realized in the United States in its democratic system of government where the fundamental governing power resides on the smallest of areas known as a town. For example, the town of ________.

Each town is responsible for drawing up its fiscal policy and balancing the budget. This is possible by the help of tax payers who own property and pay into the coffers of the town in lieu of property taxes or town taxes. In return, the town’s administrative authority is able to maintain rule of law, better roads, fine schools.

This smallest of administrative body, also known as local body government, through its symbiotic relationship with property owning tax payers represent the democratic building block of a country that spans 2,680 miles from coast to coast.

This basic unit of government represents the bare back independence ingrained in the democratic culture enjoyed by all Americans.

The faith that they are at the helm of destiny. That they have a stake in deciding the future of their children.

It’s not smooth sailing. There are towns who have gone bankrupt. They are unable to cope with law and order or to keep up their schools.

Worsening situations call for electing effective leaders who can make a difference. This leadership rises from the ranks of the community of tax payers invested in the good of their town.

A virtuous cycle is born.

When this virtuous cycle is just as real to democracies in Pakistan and Egypt, Ukraine and Slovakia, that the torch of Lady Liberty will shine on these lands as well.

Age Old Problem

July, 2011

Since job-loss crisis hit bread earners in the fourth quarter of 2008, the worst affected was the boomer generation. The obstacles to path of re-employment for this demographic have to do with high salary expectation, over-qualification, turn over due to retirement possibilities among others.

I got a wind of it back in 2009 at Right Management sitting in my make-believe office cubicle, while next door someone haggled with a HR Recruiter type. From the other end of the phone question veered on ‘How old are you?’.

The crisp and clear answer that I could certainly attest to was ’56′. The answer held a challenge, a note of defiance if not belligerency.

What lessons can I learn from this historical upheavel?

Don’t wait – that is my take away. Hedge against unemployment risk at all times to be sure. But never more so than when age creeps up on you as an old problem.

The solution is to stand out in one career choice. Be the software engineer, the marketer, this or that of this world. Make a name for yourself. Earn the respect of your peers. Envy of your enemies.

All along, diversify and develop skills and talents, connections and network that help you re-imagine yourself in related industries, new ventures if need be.

General Mccrystal, when he got fired, found a gig for himself in Yale University. That is, from the mess of a steamy battle field into the air conditioned class room of a genteel campus. If that is not diversification, developing a new talent, then what is!

When we have defined our earning potential in more ways than one, we negotiate job-loss from a position of strength. And that lets us get back into our career of choice. Age withstanding, we get back to being the software engineer, the marketer of this world.

Ship It

June, 2011

Two words, and the latest edition of Boston SPIN’s Summer 2011 newsletter was launched. How did it come about is the focus of this month’s blog. Because it almost did not happen. And therefore, the fact that it did, is what makes this story interesting.

With the softwares available for mass email distribution, including newsletters, sending one out is a no- brainer. Also available are newsletter templates that can be customized at will. So, why was failure an option here?

It turned out that ready-made templates could not be used in this case. The only other alternative was to create one using HTML for input. First reaction was that it just couldn’t be done. Only to realize after the smoke cleared, that I knew some HTML after all. So, off I went to design a template, albeit a modest effort on my part.

Another fog that mystified the process was how exactly to import the HTML document into the newsletter software. A quick email to Tech Support revealed that zipping it up along with images and other such essentials and importing the zip file would do just fine. Only to realize that I already subscribed to a web-hosting service.

The significance of this latter discovery meant that if I designed my template in the space provided by such a service, I could then import my completed work as a web link, a matter of a couple if not a few seconds. So, off I went to import the link.

In a nutshell, then, what appears to the naked eyes as a failed mission is achievable when we understand our potentials. It is not that our mission is a failure, but our inability to truly measure how resourceful we are, can thwart us from responding to challenges ahead. But when we do respond, our versatility wins over any remaining doubts.

Cut Credit

May,  2011

Cut up Cards.

Credit cards, debit cards, store cards.

Only if it was possible.

Face fact. It’s  no longer possible. In this day and age of on-line banking, on-line payment, it’s not possible to go back to cash only. For instance, the safest ID accepted by my local branch of Bank of America, is to swipe their debit card. I had to renew, that is pay for, my car registration under a deadline, and the quickest path was to pay online using credit or debit card. So, no, there is no going back from plastics.

In fact for years, I have used plastic like a religion. Not having the patience to count dollars and change (pardon me!). When one after another, every other businesses made functionality to use cards available, such as paying for movie tickets at the door, which seemed such a relief at the time, I shunned cash in favor of credit. Oh, no! Correction. Debit! Yes, I took a stand against using credit, a kind of funny money which puts you into a hole, in preferrence to debit, which withdraws from the real stuff.

So what has changed?

Let’s put it this way, say I had 5K in my account (zoinks!), and then it was gone within the month. Did I really crash and burn through the entire lot within so many, or in this case so few, days?  Not OK.  It was time to reevaluate my habits and subsequently I decided to put debit away, too. In short, it’s harder to track your spending when using debit because seemingly small purchases like buying two dollar coffees and one dollar candies has a big way of adding up pronto.

I’m rediscovering how to use cash. For instance, I’m realizing that paying for gasoline aside, every day I’m needing at least twenty dollars just to get through the bare essentials like stopping for a coffee. If I have more in my hand, I just find a way to spend it like running out to get a pedicure. How did this habit develop? Because I’m not used to having a limit perhaps. Hmm…

The Blues

April, 2011

What is an antidote to the Blues?

Blues in Americana means a sad melancholy. It is a quieter that masks a cheery soul with despondency. I equate this with a type of false fear Seth Godin speaks of in his book the Linchpin (2010). Our lizard brain sniffs negatives the like of danger, uncertainty and wa la: turns into a Blue Lizard that sabotages Nature itself.

Nature doesn’t suffer from the Blues because it always gets it own way. Nature is a survivor with zero self-doubt. We go against Nature when we doubt ourselves and welcome in the Blues. Nonetheless, fall victim to it we do.

The antidote lies in action. To slay the Blue Lizard, we must jump up on our feet and spring into a sprint with the gale force of a hundred meter dash. Action items like anger cuts and burns and cleanses cobwebs of old. When we lose sight of action, we fall into the Blues.

Three soothing lines for a Blues Owner:  “Take the first step.” “And then?” “Then you’ll be somewhere else, and you can take the first step from there.”

Dream Merchant

March, 2011

Tweeting up with Nick Noorani at HEBS breakfast brunch at Harvard Square’s Om Restaurant was a wish fulfilled. As serendipidity would have it, he was his same engaging self, re-enforcing the Twitter persona with gusto.

Nick Noorani is from Canada with a mission.  Top-most in his mind is to make every immigrant experience a success story. How is he making a difference on this hot-button issue of immigration and assimilation?

After India, Nick took his chances in places such as Dubai and Muscat. A serial immigrant, about twelve years ago, he with wife and family made it to bountiful Canada. Fluent in English, he also brought with him other critical skills such as business know-how, alongside middle-class values of thrift, education, and aspiration. Long story short, after much toil and labor, not to mention uncertainties, he made it. Want proof? For one thing, he got rich!

Nowadays he wants to make the Nick Noorani brand of success a Manifest Destiny in Monroe’s America. I call his message to immigrants The Lucky Seven and they are:

• Fall in love with your adopted country
• Learn English
• Have a Plan B
• Take risks
• Venture outside of your community
• Stay positive
• Volunteer, Mentor & Network (VMN)

He calls it the seven success secrets.

In the informal discussion around the table where we met, he brings up VMN when he asks someone if she volunteers?  Nick, in his own life,  had as many as twelve mentors.  Shaking his head, he emphasizes the impossibility of success without one.

The Success, however, doesn’t lie in the measure of English learned, or networking done. The Success is quite something else altogether. It’s measure is in dreams realized. In coming to Canada, Nick realized a dream of giving his children a Western upbringing with opportunities to follow. It is only to be hoped that he can be a Dream Merchant for many following into his footsteps.

Twitter Chatter

February, 2011

Tapping into a Twitter transcript makes for interesting scoops, both business and personal. Made of hopes, frustrations, achievements, failures, transcripts are a colorful repository of souvenirs and mementos outliving the living.

As such, they imitate the fabled tablet of Jove no less. Those not sure what is recorded on that particular Tablet only need peruse through the thousands of tweets over days, months and years for a likely answer.

What inspires the silent majority? 

What to tweet is a common man’s quandary. For this Third Estate, the Needs Must paradigm supplies the necessary wherewithal. It sets a pattern to tweet away at events the like of #sidibouzid and #Jan25. In so doing,

• Tweeples  gravitate towards a community to call their own. 
• Similarly, they curate lists and buy into silos that bring sanity to an otherwise topsy-turvy sea of cacophony.

In Seth Godin speak, this effect creates tribes. A tribe is a closed whole. Then someone like you and I peep into this whole. Use a Twitterer as a hypertext to access another and before long find ourselves embedded in a nexus of Twitter Chatter with its unique cadence, the range of sounds running anything from strange to familiar, warm, even distraught to our ears.

What it leaves us is with a sense of the voyeur.

Relationship Matters

January, 2011

Relationship matters in LinkedIn.

Hence the dictat: Only connect to those you know well and who know you.

How can that boost our network? Especially when the world is full of strangers we haven’t met yet! If only LinkedIn could believe this, it would change its view of networking.

As it is, trust deficit is the raison d’être for the dictat. Relationship building it’s unintended victim.

Provided with a database where to park our business contacts, as in a 21st century rolodex, hardly makes for relationships to matter. Using these tips from the limited resources of LI, users can still make a modest effort at reaching out to their network:

• Send congratulations when a new role is added
• Like a pic
• Add a comment
• Share a link
• Send Happy- B Day notes
• Participate in Q & A
• Visit profiles
• Send out mass mailings 50 at a time

Scope of interactive interaction is limited. That is not to say that a surge in demand won’t move the supply-side to act! For now at least, these simple steps prevent entropy and saves the misguided dictat from a kiss of death.

Misguided, because once we put relationships to matter via building them, then we can trend the quality of our network towards a future where to form new ones, no past or present is needed.

Inspiration is all.

Change Agent (II)

December, 2010

It is that time of year again, a time of reflection and fresh commitments. For the Connector web-log, a year’s journey was completed. As the web-log’s athour, I’m indebted to two change agents, Robert Kiyosaki and Seth Godin, who fueled my passion in writing each post.

The two thought leaders both weigh in on many ways our living experience have shifted gear from old to new in the space of a few short decades. Despite differences in subject-matter expertise, are there any common grounds where they share a meeting of the mind? Here are three of my take-aways that say Yes.

New American Dream:

• Robert Kiyosaki in his message to the generation Y sounds the alarm that the values of his pre-Vietman era poor dad: work hard, live below your means, save money, get out of debt, invest for the longterm, far from being an enabler are actually an impediment to get financially ahead in America today.
• Seth Godin picks up the baton when he sets the clock forward from the last 200 hundred years. The old American Dream, Godin tells us, was defined by the Industrial Age values that taught us to keep our head down, follow instructions, show up on time, work hard and suck it up. He contrasts that with the new American Dream which is to be remarkable, be generous, create art, make judgment calls and connect people and ideas.

Built upon Innovation in Education:

• Kiyosaki points out a weakness in our education system where teachers, and not mentors, teach a subject to the student. Mentored learning, on the other hand, focuses on the life long development of the student, inspiring young pupils to see through the mentor’s eyes unseen worlds, ideas, possibilities.
• Godin, too, questions the teaching system that rewards bureacrats and punishes artists. He challenges that many successful people got that way despite their advanced schooling, not because of it.

With Character as Strength:

• Kiyosaki finds in military education the elixir of leadership values, adherence to a mission, ability to pick a team to carry the mission forward, which are key conditions to becoming successful as entrepreneurs.
• Godin agrees. He says that schools should teach us only two things: solving interesting problems and leading.

Both Kiyosaki and Godin put their final bet on our human potential. While Kiyosaki wants us to look for questions instead of answers, Godin urges us to regain our human achievement in the form of being linchpins, which is to be artists, to expend emotional labor, make interactions that produce change.

Let us start 2011 with a set of values that makes us indispensable in these changing times.

Change Agent

November, 2010

As a young man working in his first job for the Xerox Corporation, Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad (1997), realized that it was not an environment in which he could get ahead financially.

Our weaknesses are many. What Kiyosaki highlights for us  is the lack of a supportive environment. In his words: Many people who want to get rich fail simply because they are rich people in a poor environment.

What environment should we be in right now?

Professional sports is an example of a winner-driven environment. On the opposite spectrum, the combination of job security and a steady paycheck is an environment for people who are afraid of losing. An employee, for example, is working not to lose.

Yet a third example is made up of entreprenuers who create environments albeit with job security and a steady paycheck.  Attracting and retaining good employees is never an obstacle here.

What to do when an environment is an obstacle in the path to success?

For instance, Kiyosaki’s parents valued education, public service and low pay. Their underlying belief was that the rich were evil who exploited the poor. That investing was gambling. In this financially poor environment, living below one’s means and saving money was the accepted way.

In his own household Kiyosaki changed certain fundamental home-rules. Now getting rich is fun and investing is a game. Keeping financially negative people out, the Kiyosakis constantly work on expanding their means, increasing their income, building assets and serving as many people as they can.

The fastest way to improve is by changing our environment. Let us choose one in which we can thrive.