What The Dog Didn't Tell

I think Malcolm Gladwell slipped up; or whoever in charge of publicity of his latest book What the Dog Saw has.
They only had to leak out the information that one of the essays in the book is on Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
That alone should have ensured a good readership - I am going by his followers on twitter (@nntaleb); they number 9035 at the time of typing (not a huge number but considering the fact that he has people like Tom Peters (@tom_peters) and Rosabeth Moss Kanter (@Rosabethkanter) as followers). Not that Malcolm Gladwell needs to beg for readership. His books always have been best seller. But a little extra always helps.
In his essay, Blowing Up, Gladwell has done a wonderful job of bringing to life Taleb's personality.
If you have read Fooled By Randomness or The Black Swan, and have wondered about the man, then you must read this essay.
By the way, I had blogged about Gladwell's and Taleb's connection some time ago. A lot of it was guesswork. Seems like one has been studying the other more closely that I thought. Check out Black Swan Tipping Over and decide for yourself.

5 Steps to Better Tweeting

This is tiny list on how to be a good tweeter. Am I a good tweeter. You can make that out by following me @Mgmnt_secrets. ;)
Anyways here's what I do.
1) Bothered by the 140 character restriction? Well, do not be. First type out whatever you want to. Then see how to reduce it to the 140 (or less; see next point) characters. The quality of your tweets will go up.

2) If you wish your tweets to be re-tweeted then you do not have 140 characters available with you. What is available to you is (140 - RT @your_tweet_id). In my case, it is 122 characters. I try to stick to this restriction.

3) Do not tweet to tell what you are doing at a mall or what are you eating for dinner. Your close friends may want to know that. But if you wish to build a good number of follower, use tweet-sense. Pick up a domain that interests you and tweet on that. Unless you are a celebrity - then you will have a HUGE following irrespective of what you tweet.

4) No typos. Use good grammar. And oh! avoid those silly acronyms please.

5) This is important: before pressing the send button, just pause. Does the message seem right? Are you proud of it? Yes? Then what are you waiting for? Send!

When life gives you lemon

"Ten days of physio-therapy," said one doctor.
"Physio-therapy wont work. I want you to take this very seriously. 3 weeks of complete bed rest," said the next.
"Bed rest does not help. We need to first remove the pain. Take these medicines for a week and then we wil ltake a decision whether to operate or not," said the third doctor.
Two MRI scans and almost a month later I am still confined to bed.
It is supposed to be a small "herniation of L5-S1" (aka slip disc) that is impinging slightly on a nerve that gives me excruciating pain down my leg every time I get up and sit down.
What can you do ... except wait for the doctors to take a decision.

Well, not exactly true. You can do a lot.
With all the time in the world here's a list of things I have done

(i) Aggressively pursue completion of the Spanish Course I have purchased from the US Institute of Languages (Learn Spanish Today)
(ii) I never managed to start of French. Dedicating one hour a day to a French Course (Rapid French). This is my last attempt to learn rudimentary French. If this does not succeed, nothing else will. This one claims that they implant to words in the auditory cortex. Well let's see.
(iii)Re-re-reading The Black Swan.
(iv) Watched Sachin Tendulkar play that gem of an innings at Gwalior (it had to be Gwalior :D). Always knew he would be the one to do it. (Yes I am a die hard fan - I am happy when he makes a century irrespective of the match results)
(v) Started a new twitter dedicated entirely to management, called mgmnt_secrets. Already have some 140+ followers. Active twittering is fun.

So as they say, when life gives you lemon ... yeah right ... throw it right back at her. So says, Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes.

Pithy Management Wisdom

Want to learn management secrets in 140 characters or less? Start following http://twitter.com/Mgmnt_Secrets

Husbands beware! Buddyping is here

I discover more Internet via books. I had blogged about this here => Discovering Internet Through Books

The books I referred to in the above-mentioned post were books on Internet. But to find something new and potentially as powerful as twitter in an economics book, now that is serendipity.

The Logic of Life has a delightful chapter that is a play on 'The World is Flat', called 'The World is Spiky'. In this Tim Harford goes on and on about Buddyping.

Now what is Buddyping?

The idea behind BuddyPing is simple and the execution deceptively simple, making something quite complex appear effortless. Text your location to BuddyPing and it will text you back with the location of your friends (if they’re BuddyPing members) and what they’re doing. When your friends login to the system via text, you get a text if they’re nearby, and they get a text back saying you are nearby. The number of friends is limited to the 5 closest friends and “nearby” in Buddyping terms is 10 miles.

For more information go to BuddyPing: The new wave of MoSoSo

Uh oh! I see a danger already: wives can now keep a tab on their husbands 24 x 7.

All this noise about twitter

Looks like I am totally taken by web 2.0 applications. Twitter being the latest in series.

The idea of mini-blogging is sweet. You keep in touch with others and they with you by simple typing out the answer to: what are you doing now? If it is worthwhile, that is.

And if you have large fan following you may also divert traffic to your website. But why am I saying this when there is fantastic lens (unfortunately not by me) on twitter:


50 ways to use twitte

twitter applications

But what I find most fascinating is the limitation of 140 characters. It takes an effort (at least for me - unless it is something mundane) to confine your thoughts to such constraints. But it is fun.

Go tweet!

Picture courtesy: George Popa

5 Achievements That India Really Needs

Piggy-back Oscars and Beauty crowns ... is this India's claim to fame.?

You may disagree, but I think this is a shame (Wow! Poetry: Fame ... Shame!)

Now here's what I would like to see India /Indians to achieve...

Pot full of Olympic golds in every Olympics till it ceases to be front page news any more.

At least one Fields Medal in the next 5 years. (I could even settle for a Millennium Prize or two)

A Nobel prize in any one of the sciences every few years till it becomes a habit.

An Oscar for a Mainstream Bollywood masala movie.

At least one world class software product or application. Just to make myself clear here ... No! Infosys is not a software product! I am looking for something like MS Office, SAP, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Linux, ... I could go on and on. Let's say something like Hotmail.

A technology company that rivals Apple or Intel in innovation.

I think I will be satisfied with 5 :-)

Would you like to add to this list? Name your country and go right ahead.


Picture courtesy: Svilen Mushkatov