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All “risks” have some “uncertainties”, but not the other way around. A good example from Wikipedia is:

We can be uncertain about the winner of a contest, but unless we have some personal stake in it, we have no risk. If we bet money on the outcome of the contest, then we have a risk. In both cases there are more than one outcome.

Here is the second list of articles as mentioned by David Brooks as part of his Sydney awards giveaway. Read, enjoy, and get enlightened.

• The Rubber Room (Source: The New Yorker) – Education
• Shock Waves (Source: The American Scholar) – Iraq War
• The Goldstone Illusion (Source: The New Republic) – Israel Gaza conflict
• The Default Power (Source: Foreign Affairs) – Foreign Affairs
• The Decline of the English Department (Source: The American Scholar) – Education
• Keeping America’s Edge (Source: National Affairs) – Economics
• Is Food the New Sex? (Source: Hoover) – Behavioral Psychology
• Offensive Play (Source: The New Yorker) – Sports

David Brooks also mentions the following sources to get a daily dose of good and meaningful articles:

• Arts and Letters Daily
• The Browser
• Book Forum

Hope you enjoy the articles as much as I did.

This year, unlike before, I have decided to take a few new year resolutions and test my tenacity for sticking to them. They are quite modest but if I do succeed in following them I hope to develop a strong discipline and to experience a sense of achievement. These resolutions will be added as a separate page on my blog so that they are not lost in time and space. It is my hope that I will be able to take a quarterly check and monitor my progress. Any bit of encouragement will surely help. So here they are:

1. Practice my Pranayam, Kriya, and Meditation daily – I consider them very important to achieve a calm and serene mind and I am sure regular practice will help me deal with worldly issues in the best possible way.
2. Read at least one book a month – I am not talking about fiction here. There are so many good books out there that even a life time is less to accumulate all the knowledge. Reading good books does help broaden one’s mind and build different perspectives and that is what I seek to achieve. This will also ensure that my education continues even after my MBA is complete.
3. Blog regularly – Blogging has become a great way to share ideas and make good friends all over the world. I wish to build a platform through which I can share meaningful thoughts and learn from others in the process.
4. Start investing in the stock market with a disciplined approach – Soon my formal MBA will end and I will have no reason to avoid money management, one of them through building a robust long term stock portfolio. I have all the necessary tools and the knowledge so I will make the best use of that to invest intelligently. There will soon be a stock tracker on my site that you will see with my positions and related gains or losses.
5. Take photos more often and build a flickr portfolio – There are a few things that I really enjoy one of them being photography. This year I resolve to take more photographs and build a small portfolio of my photographs on flickr to share with all of you.
6. Do “Seva” (service) – As a citizen of this world, I have some duties towards my community. Hence I will try to find opportunities to take up some activities that will help me connect with people and help them in whatever way I can.
7. Use my time productively – 24hrs in a day should be well spent. My assessment of the previous years begs to remind me that I do waste a considerable amount of time doing things that are merely recreational with no productive outcome. I need to minimize that.

So, as you can see, my resolutions are quite simple and nothing extraordinarily out-of-the-box. They also have nothing to do with work or career. The above list consists of those items that I need to do anyways but I always find an excuse of not doing. But these are also the things that I really consider enriching and fulfilling. Surely, I have to do good in my work, build a great career, and I will definitely work towards that. But doing so is just an order qualifier. To be in control and being able to build a discipline to follow the above seven items will constitute, for me, an order winner.

VERY

HAPPY

AND

PROSPEROUS

NEW YEAR

~ 2010 ~

See you all in the new year!

This holiday seems to be zipping by and I haven’t really taken up anything very productive yet. Reading a few magazines here and there, catching up on a little bit of photography, searching for a birthday gift for my wife, looking for jobs, and well…not much. Then I came across an article in the NYtimes.com site – The Sidney Awards – by columnist David Brooks. In here he has given out awards to magazine articles (essays) that he feels have narrative drive and social impact. I decided to make it a project of mine to read all the articles he talks about. The reason is very simple – get acquainted with a few well written articles and built up on my repertoire of good editorials to access. Here are the articles that he has mentioned so far:

• The Cost Conundrum (Source: The New Yorker) – Healthcare
• How American Health Care Killed My Father (Source: The Atlantic) – Healthcare
• Fasten Your Seat Belts — It’s Going to Be a Bumpy Flight (Source: National Journal) – Healthcare
• Trial by Fire (Source: The New Yorker) – Judicial system and death penalty
• A Rake’s Progress (Source: The Weekly Standard) – Biographic portrayal
• Rediscovering Central Asia (Source: The Wilson Quarterly) – History and Geography

He will release a few more articles in the coming week. Let’s see what he has in store for me when he comes up with more award winners.

I recently read about what a “bullet graph” is all about and I really liked what it conveys in a concise graphical manner. This type of graph is slowly finding its way onto corporate dashboards as a replacement of infamous gauges. Gauge takes up a lot of space, provides very little information, and guess what, takes practice to read. Shouldn’t graphs be intuitive to read and interpret. Bullet graphs help to do just that. Take a look at the graph that I have created below and try to understand what it is trying to convey. Remember, it is for dashboard purposes.

You can download the excel file here to play around with the chart and make your own variations. Another website to get a much better detailed version of the template here.

As I finish my “SDA Application Portfolio” series I think about the utility of the knowledge gained in this class. It was one of those classes where you are not taught how financial instruments work, how brand management is done, nor how profitability is calculated. There were no formulas to memorize, no equations to be remembered. It did not go into the world of marketers or traders, it did not made me analyze a country’s economic growth, it did not teach me how to increase ROI. Yet, it taught me all that and more.

You may ask – What was this course? How does it fit into the MBA curriculum? How will it help you in the long run? Answers will follow.

This course was called “Strategic Decision Analysis”. It was a course that harnessed the power of analysis and thinking in order to take decisions and increase your chances of success. The course introduced many concepts such as Negotiations, Prisoner’s Dilemma, Voting, and Auctions, among others. But more than that, this course provided insight into how a human mind works and what it thinks. You don’t need to be a CFA, a Six Sigma black belt holder, or a Statistics major to understand all this. All you need is common sense thinking and more importantly what the other person is thinking.

It fits well into an MBA curriculum because it is expected of us to go out and take decisions. Difficult decisions. Decisions that will affect companies, people, nations. Decisions that will alter the way you live, you eat, you sleep, and all that in between. How can you take such decisions and maximize your chances to take the right kind of decisions? Note that when you are taking the decisions there is always someone else taking a similar type of decision. You have one goal – to win in this duel of decision making. Because if you don’t win, somebody else takes all the glory or the pain associated with the decision. This course, in part, was about maximizing your chances to win.

With knowledge comes great power. But also comes with it the “curse of knowledge”. It is dangerous and can be applied dangerously. An incomplete assessment of your own understanding of the knowledge can actually lead to disaster. So it becomes important that we become competent in the use of this powerful knowledge and how we apply it.

The reason I am stressing this is because the knowledge is not just limited to the world of business. Your understanding of six sigma will not make you a great husband, a great father. But this knowledge is different. It spans our daily life and our relationships. Thus it becomes more important to understand the subject matter closely and intimately. The most important piece of this knowledge is – knowing what the other person is thinking. Not what you know and think. Bluntly speaking – you need to drop your ego from the equation to apply this knowledge. You have to stop force fitting because there are ample opportunities to do so. One formula to apply this knowledge is this –> First, you need to drop what you know. Second, know what the other person knows. Third, apply what you know and what the other person does not know. What you know is what you have learnt from this course, from your observations, and from the uncommon common sense that has been bestowed upon you.

Final thought – Always remember – Cooperation is better than defection! It will become all too apparent for you to defect with this knowledge. With this toolkit in hand, you will take decisions that go against the grain of this thought, that of cooperation. Recognize such tendencies, observe your thought process, re-evaluate the knowledge, and then apply it again.

I was hungry the other night and decided to order pizza. When I arrived at the Domino’s site, I was greeted by the graphic above. And a bulb went on.

Fairness principle applied at its best – Order any three (or more) items for $5.55 each. For a family or a group of friends this is a great deal provided we need fairness. Lets look at the distributive principles at work here:

• Parity – Every member is free to choose what they want. Difficult to be jealous of one another.
• Proportionality – 1 order per person or if more than more, proportionally higher price paid.
• Priority – Not applicable in this scenario. Any person can choose any item in any given order.

We, as in SDA graduates at Goizueta, have studied “negotiations” and “auctions” to a certain degree. Some of us have even had advanced training in negotiations. Now Harvard professor Guhan Subramanian has come up with Negotiauctions. According to him there is a strong interplay between negotiations and auctions in real life situations. I certainly felt the truth in his statement, based on my experience in the various assignments during the course duration, and am looking forward to get my hands on the book during my MBA so that I have the time to read and ponder over his thoughts.