From digital disruption to SaaS solution at The Washington Post: A Shailesh Prakash perspective

It was a pleasure to have my classmate Shailesh Prakash, EVP & CIO at The Washington Post, give a guest lecture in my class at IIM Bangalore a few months ago. “Amazon unbound” author Brad Stone calls Shailesh Jeff Bezos’ technology partner at The Post. When Bezos acquired The Post in 2013, Shailesh and his team were developing a content management system called Arc Publishing to manage functions like online publishing, blogging, podcasting, advertising, and e-commerce. By the time Shailesh addressed us last August, Arc was supporting 1.5 billion user transactions per month and powering 1500 sites across 24 countries. It has become a separate business division with 300 employees offering a SaaS (Software as a Service) product to clients like Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Toronto Globe and Mail, and some of the leading newspapers in Spain, France, New Zealand, etc.

The key question Shailesh explored through his interaction with students is – How does a newspaper company founded in 1877, focussed on excellence in journalism, having a little bit of chip on the shoulder, with the brand and the success that has come along the way then end up offering a SaaS product which is now with every large newspaper and many broadcasters? It was an excellent primer on how intrapreneurship can happen in an established legacy business. Here are a few highlights from his talk:

The digital disruption at the publishing industry: Shailesh began by telling us that at one point, newspapers like The Post were monopolies, owned railroads, paper mills, printing plants, logistics and supply chains, and much more. And they were very profitable delivering 2 editions every single day with deep and wide moats. However, over the last twenty years, the Internet and subsequently mobile revolution disrupted the industry. Many newspapers made the mistake of offering the content for free on the web and couldn’t sustain the business based on advertisements. Many newspapers went out of business.

Excellence in journalism and engineering: The first step in this journey, according to Shailesh, was to accept that excellence in journalism is not enough. Google, Apple, and Amazon have spoilt the consumers and they are demanding speed, beauty, and ease of access in whatever they consume. The Post had to become excellent in the other dimension - design, product, technology, and engineering in order to attract and retain its consumers. With this realization, Shailesh was hired by Don Graham, the erstwhile owner of The Post, and given the task of making the newspaper digital-friendly. With the arrival of Bezos, this initiative got accelerated further and the culture was infused with the spirit of experimentation.

Crawl, walk, run story of Arc: “It’s not that we had everything figured out,” said Shailesh, “and then we did marketing and boom!” The journey has been relatively fast but very incremental. The first step was to say that the content management system can be built in-house and doesn’t have to be bought from outside. Once some aspects of the stack were built, Shailesh got curious as to whether it can be delivered as a SaaS solution. So it was offered for free to some university newspapers like the University of Maryland, Yale, Columbia, New York University, University of Southern California, etc. The idea was to learn what it takes to run a multi-tenant architecture. Could it be ensured that the content of Yale is not seen by the student journalists in Columbia? What is the cost of running such a solution?

The next step was to offer it to a small newspaper and get paid for it. The newspaper was trying to support blogging on their site and that worked. The next step was Toronto Globe and Mail – a big newspaper in Canada. They were willing to partner at an early stage of the product development and were interested in influencing the roadmap. This was the first time two large newspapers – The Post and Toronto Globe were simultaneously using the product.

And slowly, other papers like LA Times and then broadcasters started to come in. Once supporting online subscriptions became an important feature of the platform the commerce piece, payment gateway mechanisms had to be worked out. Were there non-believers? Of course, there were. Even analysts and respected journalists were skeptical of this “side business”. Fortunately, the parent company of The Post went private during this phase and that helped. Over the years, the journalist mix in the newsroom has changed too. It now has a number of TikTok savvy native digital journalists. Now, questions like “How does one deliver stories with speed and still stay true to the brand?” have become important.

As major competitors of The Post started to come in as customers, the business agreements and associated liabilities especially for data breaches started to become nuanced. Mutual Funds wanted an ISO audit. All this pushed the boundaries for the technologists but it also meant building competence on the legal, finance, and consulting sides.

Overall, it was an enriching experience. Thanks, Shailesh for sharing your insights! I learned a lot and I am sure students did too. Wishing Arc a successful trajectory ahead!

Innovation at Amazon: a CTO perspective from Dr. Werner Vogels

How does innovation happen at Amazon? There are many perspectives available on the Net including that of Jeff Bezos. In this article, I would like to explore the CTO perspective as depicted in Werner Vogel’s interview by Kyle Corbitt (Nov-2018). But before I present my takeaways from the interview, let’s set the context.

Dr. Werner Vogels has been Amazon's CTO for almost 16 years. That’s a very long tenure for a CTO position and perhaps very rare. He was a research scientist for ten years before joining Amazon. He says, “I was hired along with five of my former students to put academic rigor into scaling (the platform) orders of magnitude more” (7:12). Not only did Vogels and the team achieve that goal but also created a technology – AWS – that is enabling others to do the same world over.

Early on in the interview (5:30), Vogels mentions that CTO’s role is to “allow duplication and technical debt to happen as long as you know that you have to pay it off”. And he says this technical debt is built through “long pipeline of experiments.” Question is, what kind of experiments does he sponsor? Where does he get the big ideas from? Do he and his team approve of every idea at Amazon? Answers to these questions are my key takeaways from this interview.

Drive big programs: Vogels says, “Mostly the role of CTO is to drive big programs” (11:05). For example, he drove an initiative a whole year to address a single point of failure. It involved among other things pulling the plug out of a data center and see how the technology copes with the failure. As it became a practice, it got called “Game days”. Everybody is given heads up on what is coming. And still, it exposed holes in the implementation. Another year was spent on efficiency. (11:04)

Listen to customers: Where did the idea of AWS come from? Vogels says his role as an external-facing CTO “is to interact at a deep technical level with customers” and “look for bigger patterns among your customers, the bigger pain points they have” (14:40).  “We are in the business of pain management” (14:50). The idea of AWS came from such observations. There are many types of CTOs and an external-facing CTO is only one such role. However, I feel the importance of meeting and listening to customers isn’t generally emphasized enough for a CTO position. In this interview, Vogels goes into length in making this point.

Give autonomy to teams: It goes without saying that CTO will play a key role in managing the pipeline of big bet experiments. The question is, what role does he play in managing a relatively small bet pipeline? Vogels says that the teams such as “team for recommendation engine for shoes” are responsible for managing their own pipeline of experiments. The team would have a goal of minimizing the number of returns. He says, “95% of new features and services are delivered as a response to direct requests from customers” (32:55).

When asked to predict a future trend, Vogels says, “I think we all need to become extremely security conscious” (48:56). He feels that the kind of data breaches that are happening around “is embarrassing” (48:00). That is a good clue to young and established businesses.

Overall, I really enjoyed the interview and feel there are valuable insights especially for technical leaders.

Source:

A conversation with Werner Vogels, moderated by Kyle Corbitt, Nov 2018

Highlights of “Systematic Innovation” workshop for technical experts

I facilitated a 2-day workshop on innovation for technical experts at Hotel Grand Mercure, Bangalore last month. The participants were Senior Engineers, Architects, Product Managers, Engineering Managers and entrepreneurs. I have been facilitating such workshops for the past six years. However, this workshop stood out for following 4 unique things.

Challenge book from technology-trend: Unlike in the Design Thinking workshop where we build a challenge book through “pain”, we began our challenge definition journey from technology trends (“wave”).

Each participant identified a technology trend (s)he is excited about and then mapped it on the Gartner’s hype cycle (See the picture). Some of the trends that showed up were: brain-computer interface, geriatrics (early phase), Big Data (peak of inflated expectations), Video analytics (trough of disillusionment), cloud computing (slope of enlightenment).

Then each participant did a secondary research and made a presentation on: (1) What makes the trend interesting today? (2) What were the breakthroughs for the technology trend? (3) What are the key challenges? (4) What adjacent skills do you possess?

Prototyping through storyboarding: During this session, participants explored various forms of early stage prototyping. One such form was storyboarding – perhaps one of the simplest form of prototyping. Each participant presented his idea through a “Before” and “after” scenario expressed in the form story. You don’t need fancy drawings. A lot can be done just using the stick figures.

Idea socialization through blogging: During this session we explored blogging as a medium to socialize your idea. For most of the participants, they were writing a blog for the first time. We followed 3 simple rules: (1) curiosity before content (e.g. Is the problem definition clear?) (2) options before solution (e.g. have you discussed options and trade-offs before proposing a solution?) (3) Prototype is the best presentation (e.g. have you given a glimpse for the reader to experience the idea?) Each participant also commented on at least one blog. Here we followed a simple rule – bright spot before grey spot – i.e. do you have anything good to say about the article before you talk about improvements? Please check out the blogs we wrote.

Chat with industry experts: We were fortunate to have two informal discussion sessions with two industry experts: Dr. Milind Bhandarkar, Chief Scientist at Greenplum (EMC) and Hadoop evangelist and Dr. Dinesh Nair, Chief Architect at National Instruments. Milind graciously agreed to skype from Bay area and gave us an overview of his career from CDAC’s Param to SUNY Buffalo to UIUC to Yahoo to Greenplum etc. He told us what it meant to be part of the founding team of Hadoop at Yahoo and how it helps to have a competitor like Google to get internal buy-in for a new technology like Hadoop. As a leader of the Big Data consortium Milind also shared some of the key challenges and opportunities associated with the technology.

 

Dinesh heads the Center of excellence on vision and machine learning at NI Bangalore. He belongs to the rare species which has stuck with a single company in his career. A prolific inventor (holding over 30 patents) Dinesh shared his experiences on variety of topics such as role of patenting and prototyping, role of blogging in socializing ideas, how he tracks technology trends, how one needs to let go of an idea when the time is not right and a bunch of other things.

Highlights of the Tech Reach program, April 12-13, 2012

I co-facilitated the Tech Reach program held at Hotel Grand Mercure, Bangalore this week (April 12-13). The participants had 7 to 15 years of experience as technical experts and had designations like: Architect, Principal Engineer, Senior Lead Engineer, IT Manager, Program Manager etc. The objective of the program was to learn 3 levers that increase your sphere of influence as a technical leader. These levers were: communication, innovation and mentoring. Here are highlights of the program:

Destination postcard: As a first step, each participant went through a self-assessment exercise to answer the question: “Where do I stand?” Next, he reflected on what he would like his brand to be one year from now. Here is what we got (click on the image to see each card):

Communication: Taking and communicating a position on a technical issue is an important attribute of a technical leader. In this session, each participant wrote a 300 word position blog and got it buddy-reviewed using a simple framework. For example, we checked if the problem definition is clear. To add a fun element, some of the ideas were presented through a 2 minute skit.

Innovation: We were privlieged to have Lakshman Pachineela facilitate the session on Design Thinking. Lakshman is the Head of Innovation at SAP Global Delivery and also a visiting faculty at School of Design Thinking at Hasso Plattner Institute, Potsdam, Germany. Design Thinking is rooted in the three core elements of systematic innovation: multi-disciplinary teams, iterative process and variable space. Participants got a glimpse of the design thinking process through an exercise of re-designing the wallet of their partner.

Mentoring: When a junior engineer comes to you for help – either as a sounding board for an idea or with a technical issue – how do you react? Through role plays we explored the 3 different helping roles we take on – expert, doctor and catalyst. And various traps associated with these roles. We also assessed what role Gokhale played in this meeting with Gandhi as depicted in the movie: expert, doctor or catalyst?

Panel discussion: As one of the participants has mentioned in the feedback, the panel discussion with senior technical leaders was “icing on the cake”. We had Dr. Sanjeev Krishnan, Founder Director of Magic Lamp Software (earlier a Senior Architect at Sun Microsystems), Balaji Rangaswamy, CEO of Sooktha Consulting (earlier Chief Architect at Nokia Siemens Networks) and Abhijit Tongaonkar, Director, Software Development at Cisco to discuss the topic: Role of technical leader in Indian technology industry – today & tomorrow. Questions that got clarified were – Does a senior architect code? How do you innovate in a delivery / offshore organization? What does a senior manager value? How to overcome fear of failure? How to find a mentor?

Registration has begun for the next Tech Reach program scheduled on May 17-18 at the same venue.

Technical Leadership: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

I was invited at an IT services company in Bangalore to give a talk on technical leadership last Friday. During the talk as well as in the Q&A session several questions were raised. I realized that there is a need for a platform where engineers transitioning from being a technical expert to becoming a technical leader can turn to for raising doubts, discussion and guidance. I also realized that there are several people out there, some of whom I know personally, who are in a better position to answer the questions than me.

With this background, here is an attempt to create an FAQ forum for questions related to technical leadership. To get started let me use following definition of a technical leader - we can always question the definition later. A technical leader is someone whose sphere of influence due to his technical expertise is significantly greater than his span of control. As per this definition, engineers on the technical ladder (Product / Solution Architects, Principal / Chief Engineers, Technology Consultants, Scientists) are technical leaders. Moreover, managers who are able to influence people beyond their team with their technical expertise are also technical leaders.

Please give your views by clicking on any specific question and then adding your comment. You can also raise a new question.

FAQ:

1. In IT services companies, one needs to move from project to project - each lasting only a few years. How does one balance breadth vs depth?

2. I like to work alone and not worry about other peoples’ salary / leave etc. Does it mean I should opt for technical career path?

3. I am a Java person with 6 years of experience. What can I expect to be doing 4 years from now? Where do I begin?

4. Will the IT industry in India need more managers or more technical leaders in future?

5. Technology such as .Net or Java changes very fast. How do I cope up?

The marvels and the flaws of expert intuition: story of Ramanujan’s first letter to Hardy

Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink” presents the marvels of expert intuition and Nassim Taleb’s “The Black Swan” highlights the flaws of expert intuition. Well, Srinivas Ramanujan’s first letter to Hardy exemplifies both – the marvels and the flaws of expert intuition. Let’s see how.

Genius or fraud? “I beg to introduce myself to you as a clerk in the Accounts Department of the Port Trust Office at Madras on a salary of only Rs. 20 per annum.” Thus began the letter sent by 25 year old Srinivasa Ramanujan to Hardy, the then renowned Cambridge professor of mathematics. It was dated 16^th January 1913. The nine page letter contained around fifty mathematical results claimed by the Indian clerk. Ramanujan had explained in the letter “I have had no University education but I have undergone the ordinary school course.” What struck Hardy at the first glance was the strangeness of the theorems, not their brilliance. His first reaction was: is he a genius or a fraud?

The letter: The letter contained theorems in number theory, calculus, infinite series etc. Some of the formulae were familiar to Hardy, while others “seemed scarcely possible to believe”. For some reason, Hardy decided to consult his fellow mathematician Littlewood to reach a verdict on whether the author is a genius or a fraud. The duo spent three hours – from 9pm till midnight – going through the manuscript. At the end they concluded that its author is “a mathematician of the highest quality, a man altogether exceptional originality and power”. Some of the results Ramanujan sent to Hardy in his letter belonged to breakthrough category – Hardy was to conclude later. Hardy persuaded Ramanujan and the government to bring him to Cambridge.

The marvel of intuition: Ramanujan’s Indian friend in Cambridge, Mahalonobis who later went on to found the Indian Statistical Institute once asked him how he got a startling result. Ramanujan said, “Immediately [after] I heard the problem it was clear that the solution should obviously be a continued fraction; I then thought, which continued fraction? And the answer came to my mind.” The answer came to my mind sums up how Ramanujan got many of his results. Question is: How did answers come to Ramanujan? Did they get handed down by the goddess Namagiri of Namakkal in his dreams as some believed?

Ask yourself “What is 2 x 2 = “ and now ask yourself “What is 19 x 37 =” An answer would come to your mind immediately in the former case while nothing comes to your mind immediately in the latter case. Daniel Kahneman explains in “Thinking, fast & slow” that there are two different modes of thinking: a fast mode and a slow mode. The fast mode (called system-1) is intuitive, effortless and automatic while the slower mode (called system-2) is rule-based, effortful and controlled. You could choose to start the computation of “19 x 37” using the rules of multiplication learnt in school and also stop in between if you wish to do so (slow mode). You had no such control for “2 x 2”. The answer came to mind automatically (fast mode).

For an expert, such as a chess master, when he looks at a board position, several patterns and associated offensive and defensive moves come to mind immediately (like “2 x 2”). They come from a vocabulary of 50,000 to 100,000 patterns stored in memory. Psychologists believe that it takes 10,000 hours (about 6 years of playing chess 5 hours a day) to reach this level of expertise (or active vocabulary). Had Ramanujan done this kind of practice?

By 1900 (age 12) Ramanujan had mastered S. L. Loney’s Trigonometry. However, the year 1903 was a turning point when he found a book written by Carr containing 5000 equations related to algebra, trigonometry, calculus, analytical geometry, differential equations. From this point, life of Ramanujan who graduated from school that year with a reputation of being “off-scale” went off-balance. He didn’t do anything other than mathematics. He failed four attempts to pass in college in 1904, 1905, 1906 and 1907, lost scholarship and didn’t do well even as a math tutor. And yet, this five year period of 1904 to 1909 was the most productive time in his life because, in all likelihood, he was at home manipulating equations in all of his waking hours – on a slate, on a paper and in the mind. It is also quite possible that his fast mode of thinking was so active that during sleep it continued to work on the half-solved problems. The fast mode is known to be working even when we are not conscious. Ramanujan had easily finished his quota of 10,000 hours well before 1909.

Did his intuition ever trick him? Yes, it did, occasionally and it showed in his first letter to Hardy as well.

The flaw of intuition: In his first letter, Ramanujan had written that he had found a function which exactly represents the number of prime numbers less than x. After Hardy demanded a proof, Ramanujan sent one. And Littlewood figured out that it was wrong. Well, Ramanujan’s formula wasn’t bad. It was off by only 53 for calculating primes up to first nine million (which are 602,489). However, the difference became bigger as numbers grew larger. And this is what Ramanujan failed to see.

Checking a sketchy proof rigorously, at least partly, is a responsibility of the slow thinking mode. As Kahneman observes that the slow thinking mode is inherently lazy. If an answer given by the fast mode looks fine, it just endorses the verdict. In Ramanujan’s case the slow mode was not just lazy, it was weak. Because he never formally learnt how to write a rigorous proof until he reached Cambridge. The upside of this characteristic was that the fast mode was freerer than usual in its meanderings – making him highly creative in his approach.

What was interesting about Ramanujan was not that his intuition was sometimes wrong. Even a great mathematician like Andrew Wiles also had a serious hole in his first proof of the Fermat’s Last Theorem. What was different about Ramanujan before coming to Cambridge was that he was equally confident when he was right and when he was wrong.

Two key learnings from this story: One, a rich vocabulary of several hundreds of thousands of patterns resulting from a prolonged practice and timely invocation of appropriate patterns by the fast mode of thinking creates expert intuition. Two, knowing when not to trust the instincts is an important characteristic of a true expert. Ask yourself, "Which are the possible situations in which my instincts could be on a slippery ground?"

Sources:

The man who knew infinity by Robert Kanigel, Washington Square Press, 1991. (Thanks to my friend Ramprasad Moudgalya for recommending the book to me).

Conditions for intuitive expertise, Daniel Kahneman & Gary Klein, American Psychologist, Sept 2009.

Related articles:

My most favorite YouTube video and the marvels and the flaws of intuition, Sept 19, 2010 (On Kahneman's lecture at Berkeley on the same topic).

Impossible problems and successful approaches: story of Fermat's Last Theorem, Oct 28, 2008 (On Andrew Wile's successful attempt at solving 350 old most famous open problem).

Building creative confidence: Insights from Sukumar Rajagopal of Cognizant

When you ask the question, “How many of you are creative?” to either students or employees in India, very few, perhaps only 20%-30% of people typically raise hands. Why is that? There is a school of thought which says that it is primarily a confidence problem. Ability to be able to speak up your idea in a meeting with managers / senior managers without fear of failure / ridicule is what is called “creative confidence”. Mr. Sukumar Rajagopal, Senior Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Innovation at Cognizant, shared his insights on how to build creative confidence based on his experience of running a managed innovation program at Cognizant. He was one of the guest speakers at our workshop on innovation management at IIMB last month. How do you build creative confidence? Let’s look at a few of the insights Sukumar shared.

If you want to build creative confidence, breakthrough innovation is not a good place to focus

Organizations need all kinds of innovations: breakthrough, enhancing, sustaining etc. However, if you want more people to feel confident about how they can contribute to innovation, then breakthrough innovation is not the right place to focus. Why? First, breakthrough innovations are rare, they don’t happen very often. Second, breakthrough ideas create cognitive dissonance and hence early reactions are usually negative (see a study from Cornell). Robert Goddard, the father of modern rocketry was ridiculed in New York Times in 1921, “Professor Goddard does not know the relation of action to reaction and seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools”. Note that this does not mean that breakthrough innovation is not important.

Each of us is empowered to implement ideas within our own area of work

When people suggest ideas related to areas where they don’t have any control, then most of them get ignored. This leads to frustration. Lack of empowerment to experiment is a major hurdle in moving ideas forward. Hence, ideas within your own area of work are excellent candidates where the employees can experiment without asking for anybody’s permission. Perhaps one can fail and still continue without worry of any punishment.

When small ideas are implemented, the idea authors build credibility

If you want people take your big idea seriously, you need credibility. How do you build credibility? One way to do it is by implementing small ideas first. If you say that over the last year I have implemented 7 ideas, chances are high people might take your potentially big idea seriously.

Direct creative energies at problems that have stakeholders & sponsors

When we go to people and say, “Give me all your ideas”, we will be inundated with thousands of ideas like “Cafeteria food should be like this” or “Give all of us laptops”. These ideas don’t go anywhere unless they address problems that have stakeholders and sponsors. And when nobody looks at your ideas, the idea authors will get frustrated. Hence it is better to launch idea campaigns with sponsored challenges and make sure that you will implement top 5 / 10 ideas.

Sukumar derives a lot inspiration from Toyota’s kaizen, a system through which employees implement millions of ideas every year. Percent of people who have submitted one or more ideas last year is a good indicator of the creative confidence in the organization.

Related article:

40 years, 20 million ideas: The Toyota suggestion system

Maganlal Gandhi: Mahatma Gandhi’s innovation partner

"He [Maganlal] was, in my opinion, a genius... He laid the foundation of the science of Khadi by writing his Vanat Shastra” said Mahatma Gandhi at the inaugural ceremony of Magan Museum of Khadi (pdf) at Wardha on Dec 30, 1938². Ever since I read this, I became curious about Maganlal Gandhi. Where did Maganlal learn the science of khadi? Was this science backed up by rigorous experiments? If so, where did Maganlal perform those experiments? I wanted to find out. Finally, I got a peek into the story when my friend Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan connected me to Prof. Shambu Prasad of XIMB Bhubaneswar. Shambu has done extensive research on science of Gandhi. I found answers to some of my questions in an excellent article written by Shambu “Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist”. Here is a short summary.

Maganlal Khushalchand Gandhi (1883-1928) was Gandhi’s nephew (a grandson of his uncle) and 19 years younger to him. Maganlal met Gandhi in 1902, two days before Gandhi was to leave for South Africa. Maganlal was then on the lookout for a job in his native Kathiawar. Gandhi asked Maganlal to come to South Africa offering it as a land of opportunities with ample scope for growth. Maganlal was immediately put into business and was running a family shop of the Gandhis. When Gandhi quit his practice and decided to set-up a farm and take to farming as an occupation, Maganlal was the first to join him unconditionally knowing it involves self-imposed poverty.

In a short time, Maganlal picked up several skills at Phoenix Farm - composing and running the machines in the press, farming, carpentry and tailoring, keeping accounts of the settlement and teaching the children Gujarati and Mathematics. It was Maganlal who suggested the name Sadagraha to Gandhiji when he solicited a better term for “passive resistance” in the local newspaper Indian Opinion. Gandhi later modified Sadagraha to Satyagraha.

Later in India, Maganlal set-up and ran the khadi laboratory at Sabarmati Ashram as he was the head of the Technical Department of the All India Khadi Board (later the All India Spinners Association). Maganlal traveled to Madras Presidency to learn the art. The technical department of the Ashram, tested several samples of yarn (over 300 every month) and gave feedback to the Provincial Congress Committees. These results were widely reported regularly in Young India and Navjivan. As a resource centre in the field of khadi the Ashram used to send its staff, spindles, specimens of yarn, and charts explaining the effect of the wheel to exhibitions all over the country. Gandhi relied on Maganlal to test the various machines and always wanted Maganlal’s opinion on technical developments whether it was Mirabehn’s discovery of the soft spindle, Shankarlal’s Gandiva spinning wheel or the Ramachandra lift pump.

In 1922, a ‘Khaddar Information Bureau’ was constituted to provide or collect information on khadi from the provinces, to inform congress committees and selected workers on reports from the centres. Maganlal edited its ‘Khadi Bulletin’. A syllabus was formulated in 1923 for the weaving school with a regular six-month course. A khaddar service scheme was also instituted under which 600 instructors were to be trained in home carding.

Maganlal passed away while at work in Bihar due to typhoid on April 23, 1928, at the peak of his life and that of the khadi movement. In a moving tribute, titled ‘My Best Comrade Gone’ Gandhi remarked that: ‘The world knows so little of how much my so-called greatness depends upon the incessant toil and drudgery of silent, devoted, able and pure workers, men as well as women. And among them all Maganlal was to me the greatest, the best and the purest.’

Source:

1. Gandhi and Maganlal: Khadi science and the Gandhian scientist” by Shambu Prasad, Presented at the Seminar ‘Gandhi and his Contemporaries’ held at the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, April 13-15, 1999

2. “Mahatma: Life of Mohandas Gandhi” by D. G. Tendulkar, volume 5, page 6.

3. Maganlal’s photo is from "Magan Nivas" at Sabarmati Ashram.

Innovation in Railways: story of how Jaruhar enabled wagons to become heavier

I got an opportunity to meet Prof. Ramnarayan, an authority on change management, at the Innovation Educators’ Conference in ISB last week. When I asked him about his favorite organizational change story from India, he modestly pointed to his book – “Changing tracks: Reinventing the spirit of Indian Railways” which he co-authored with V. Nilakant. I bought it in the ISB book store and started reading it in Kacheguda Express on the way back from Hyderabad. It is by far the best book I have read on an organizational transformation in the Indian context. After all we are talking about a 150 year old organization whose trains cover a total daily distance greater than the distance from earth to moon and back and support 1.1 million pensioners. Here is one of the fascinating innovations from the book on how Mr. Jaruhar, member (Engineering), broke a fifty year old myth on how much weight the trains can carry on Indian rail tracks. This was one of the key levers to bring the Railways back to profitability from close to bankruptcy.

Soon after taking charge as Railway minister in 2004 Lalu Prasad and his partner Sudhir Kumar launched the campaign – “Heavier, faster and longer” trains. The first part of running “heavier” trains was based on the observation that the Indian Railways ran trains carrying about 4,700 tonnes while the comparable figure was 15,000 in the US, 30,000 in Brazil and 20,000 in China. In railway jargon, this was based on a parameter called axle load – the maximum weight of a train per pair of wheels allowable for given section of tracks. In 2004, the permissible axle load was 20.32 tonnes and it was unchanged since 1960s. The axle load ranged between 25 and 35 in other countries with rails comparable in quality.

On 4 March 2005, three days after he took charge as member (Engineering), Jaruhar called a meeting of his directorate. He posed them the challenge, “Railway needs to carry additional 350 million tones of freight in the short term and much more than that in the long term. How do we meet this demand?” His staff responded enthusiastically and within a week ideas started flowing. A number of technical objections were raised on the proposed solutions and the consensus was that this was difficult to do. Jaruhar realized he needed to challenge the engineers in a different way.

Jaruhar proposed that first they needed to investigate how the original value of (20.32 tonnes) was arrived at. Second, they needed to find if there was any permissible tolerance. How come the train becomes suddenly unsafe after the axle load goes beyond 20.32? Jaruhar knew that he was entering a forbidden territory. The laid down procedure for modifying axle load was complex and time-consuming. It involved detailed trials and studies and required the approval of independent bodies such as the Commission of Railway Safety, a non-railway body. It is no surprise the permissible axle load wasn’t modified for several decades.

A turning point came when Jaruhar realized that the existing codes and provisions allowed him to conduct experiments. He decided to experiment with running higher axle loads on trains. In consultation with traffic department, Jaruhar selected routes which had mainly freight traffic and very little passenger traffic. He increased the axle load on freight trains running on these routes. He engaged independent agencies such as Structural Engineering Research Centre, IIT Chennai and Railways’ own Research, Design and Standards Organization (RDSO) in Lucknow to measure the forces and stresses on rails.

The pilot began on 7 May 2005 and ran till August that year. The train load was increased from 4,700 tonnes to 5,400 tonnes. Extensive data was collected both by his own teams and the neutral independent agencies. Jaruhar organized a seminar in Delhi in August 2005. Each zonal railway that participated in the pilot project made presentations based on the data they had collected on rail tracks, bridges, locomotives and wagons. Two other members of the Railway Board also attended the seminar. There were no adverse reports.

Additional questions had to be answered before moving ahead. Would it increase the frequency of renewal of rail tracks? By how much? At what cost? Would it result in increased rail fractures? What if something goes wrong? Subsequently Jaruhar’s experiments addressed these issues systematically and demonstrated how axle load can be increased safely resulting in significant revenue growth. Lalu Prasad acknowledged the contribution this project in his 2006 budget speech.

For anyone serious about leading organizational change “Changing tracks” is a must read case study.

picture source: business.rediff.com

3M’s innovation storybook: A time-travel experience through a culture-capsule

We have a natural bias to focus endlessly on the problems with our culture and in the process ignore what is working well already. What can we do? Perhaps 3M’s “A century of innovation” holds the key. This innovation storybook not only brings out the success stories like Spencer-Fry’s Post-It and Okie’s waterproof sandpaper but also learnings from some of the failures like Thermo-Fax copiers or magnetic audio-video recording. Here are the three things I liked about the book.

1. Stories behind the pithy wisdom: Like every organization 3M’s culture would carry a number of pithy sayings many of them still active in some form or the other e.g. “Patient money”, “15 percent rule”, “Look behind the smokestacks”. When KcKnight was appointed sales manager in 1911 he knew that 3M’s sandpaper product was no better than competition. But rather than just talking to the front-desk of the furniture manufacturers McKnight asked if he could step into the back shop to talk to the workers. The usual front office answer was, “What for?” McKnight’s reply was, “We are new that’s why we are anxious to learn what you need”. Luckily some “gatekeepers” let McKnight into the factory’s inner sanctum and men on the production line told him what they thought, including how sub-par some 3M products they had tried actually were. This information went back to the product team. This is how the practice of sales folks “Looking behind the smokestacks” and going right to factory floor was born.

2. Company’s defining moments: Every company has defining moments where its core beliefs get tested. Stories of such moments as to how the company responds during such moments are quite inspiring. One such story relates to “Three-M-ite cloth” which became 3M’s first profitable product, after 12 long years of wait since 3M was started in 1902. But the glory was short lived as their biggest competitor from New York, The Carborundum Company charged 3M with patent infringement and demanded that they stop making Three-M-ite cloth. 3M hired a tough Chicago lawyer, Paul Carpenter, decided to fight. Ultimately, Carpenter argued that Carborundum’s patent was invalid: his argument was so strong 3M prevailed. This incident educated the young company about the importance of patents, a philosophy that endures today.

3. Celebrating the heroes: In 1951, James Hendricks, a manager in Tape Research, a tall man with a professorial style, invited every technical person at 3M - 400 in all - to join a forum called “Technical Forum”. An organization in which participation was purely voluntary, its original goals were to foster idea sharing, discussion and inquiry among members of the 3M technical community, while educating technical employees. In 1971 the forum had its first female chair, Julianne Prager and the forum started its Visiting Technical Women program in St. Paul area schools during 1970s. Marlyce Paulson, coordinated Tech Forum activities from 1979 to 1992. Paulson says, “The forum pulled specialists like polymer chemists across the divisions to share what they know.” I like the way this storybook highlights the work of non-CXO people like Hendricks, Prager and Paulson.

I hope more organizations use storybook as a way of communicating its values and legacy to employees, customers and other stakeholders.

Vinay Deolalikars proof of P=NP and the power of "web-test"

There are several ways of making a million dollars. One way suggested by Warren Buffett is to start with a billion dollars and invest them in an airline company. Unfortunately, for most of us this is not a practical way. There is another way which surprisingly needs no investment. Well, it needs a pencil and a paper which you can borrow from your friend. And of course, it needs your time which you can steal from your employer like Einstein did at Swiss Patent Office. Or better still, like Srinivas Ramanujam, you can make your dreams work for you. But here is the catch – you should be able to solve one of the six open problems in mathematics called the “Millennium Problems” defined by the Clay Mathematics Institute. The original list contained seven problems but one was solved by Grigory Perelman of Moscow in 2002. Three weeks back, on August 8, an HP researcher Vinay Deolalikar put up a draft of a proof sketch for one of the six Millennium Problems called “P=NP” on the Internet. Will Vinay get his million dollars?

I am supposed to have studied ABC of complexity theory in my undergraduate and graduate schools. But I pretty much don’t remember anything except for what “P” and “NP” means. Class P contains problems like sorting and searching which have fast computer programs. The other class NP contains problems which don’t have fast programs yet but if someone gives us an answer, we can write a program that can check its correctness quickly. Nobody has been able to mathematically prove whether P is equal to NP or not equal to NP. The problem is around 40 years old and was proposed by Steven Cook in 1971.

For an abstract subject like complexity theory, Prof. Richard Lipton writes amazingly lucid blog titled Godel’s lost letter and P=NP. In the months of May, June and July Richard wrote 8 blogs every month and averaged 17, 20 and 33 comments respectively on each blog entry. That’s very high for an abstract mathematical topic like complexity theory. But something even more extraordinary happened earlier this month. From Sunday 8^th August till next Sunday 15^th August Richard wrote 6 blogs on topics related to Vinay Deolalikar’s proof. Here is the list of blogs and the number of comments on each blog:

8-Aug A proof that P is not equal to NP (188 comments)

9-Aug Issues in the proof that P not equal to NP (121 comments)

10-Aug Updates on Deolalikar’s proof that P not equal to NP (184 comments)

11-Aug Deolalikar responds to issues about his P not equal to NP proof (129 comments)

12-Aug Fatal flaws in Deolalikar’s proof? (311 comments)

15-Aug P=NP “Proof” is one week old (257 comments)

That’s an average of 198 comments, roughly 8 times his average over the past 3 months. Some of the comments came from students and amateurs. But many comments came from what Richard called “The group”: Timothy Gowers, Gil Kalai, Ken Regan, Terence Tao, and Suresh Venkatasubramanian a powerful collection of top experts in the field. The Group found out three major gaps in the proof which Vinay has worked on and sent a final version for publication to a journal. Only time will tell whether his proof can fill the gaps but at this point odds are stacked against him.

Following sample comment gives us an idea of what Richard’s blog meant to readers:

I also want to thank Dick Lipton for the monumental effort. I am very thankful not only for the things already said (things learned, putting N != NP in the spotlight, etc) but also for something else that many researchers here take for granted: this was a public showing of the rigorous peer-review process that many people, specially aspiring researchers, non graduate students and amateur scientists, are unfamiliar with. For somebody attending a good university in his/her country of origin but where top notch research is not conducted, this whole exercise provided a glimpse about what’s like doing cutting edge work. Hopefully that might be a motivation to pursue a career in math or science later on.

Peer review in scientific publishing is undergoing a shift. “web-test” is becoming a powerful alternative to traditional “it-may-take-a-year” kind of review. Will review of this kind happen also in literature & social sciences? I guess so. Shakespeare Quarterly a 60-year old prestigious humanities journal is going to open its review to the web. “web-test” is still in its infancy but holds a great promise.

I would like to thank my friend D. Sivakumar for sending me the link to Richard’s blog. It is because of Siva that I can claim – I have a friend who is an expert in complexity theory!

Lessons from Einstein’s career progression at Swiss Patent Office

Imagine you have got a game-changing idea. You prototype it in your spare time and the demo get appreciated by a few people including a VP and a product manager. Then comes your performance appraisal and your boss rates you “above average”. He tells you the reason for the “above” part of the rating – it is because you got the Six Sigma certificate during the appraisal period. He doesn’t mention anything about your idea. Sounds surprising? Well, what happened here is similar to what happened to Einstein at Swiss Patent Office. The game-changing idea was that of “Special theory of relativity” and the certificate was the PhD degree from University of Zurich. Let’s see how the story unfolded during Einstein's six year tenure at the patent office.

In August 1900 Einstein was the only student among his friends to graduate and not get a job in spite of a respectable 4.91/6.00 average. He felt “I was suddenly abandoned by everyone standing at a loss on the threshold of life”. He had yet to publish any paper and had no credibility. After two short teaching stints in schools lasting a few months each, Einstein got called for an interview from Swiss Patent Office at Zurich in early 1902. In the interview “Albert was examined for two full hours. The director placed before him literature on new patents about which he was required to form immediate opinion. The examination unfortunately disclosed his obvious lack of technical training.” Einstein was offered a job in spite of the interview because of the good word put in by, his friend Marcel Grossman’s father Herr Grossman with the institute director Herr Friedrich Haller. The position offered, Technical Expert class III, was provisional and one level below what he was interviewed for i.e. Technical Expert class II and the salary was 3,500 francs a year. Einstein took up the job within a week of getting the formal letter sometime in the summer of 1902.

After two years, in September 1904, Einstein’s salary was revised from 3500 to 3900 francs when Haller wrote to Federal Council, Einstein had “proved himself very useful.” He should, however, remain class III rather than promoted to class II since, “he is not yet fully accustomed to matters of mechanical engineering”. The next revision happened in 1906 when his salary was increased by another 600 francs. Haller then wrote, “Einstein had continued to familiarize himself with the work, so that he handles very difficult patent applications with the greatest success and is one of the most valued experts in the office. He has acquired the title of Dr. Phil. from the University of Zurich this winter and the loss of this ma, who is still young, would be much regretted by the administration of the office.”

It is interesting to note that in the 1906 appraisal, the director did not even mention the three papers the young employee had published in the single issue of Annalen der Physik in 1905, his annus mirabilis – one important enough to take him to the history books (on Brownian motion), one which brought him the Noble prize sixteen years later (on photoelectric effect) and the third containing the outline of Special Theory of Relativity.

Moral of the story? If you have a game-changing idea, don’t expect to get “excellent” rating from your boss, at least not in the next appraisal cycle. Even by the turn of the decade (1910) there were only a handful of people in the world who had understood the impact of relativity. Einstein had to be extremely lucky to have a boss to be one of them.

What did the patent office job mean to Einstein? Three things: One – “Besides eight hours of work … eight hours of idleness plus a whole Sunday”, second, "He (Haller) taught me to express myself correctly", and third, what Einstein mentioned on his seventieth birthday, “It gave me the opportunity to think abut Physics. Moreover, a practical profession is a salvation for a man of my type; an academic career compels a young man to scientific production, and only strong characters can resist the temptation of superficial analysis”.

Source: Einstein: The life and times by Ronald Clark