Do What Matters

Today is a big day for me, I have been given responsibility to manage a high performance team. For me, it is very important to understand what makes a team highly performing and intrinsically motivated. Creativity is a product of Intrinsic Motivation. Theorists Malone and Lepper define intrinsic motivation more simply in terms of what people will do without external inducement. Intrinsically motivating activities are those in which people will engage for no reward other than the interest and enjoyment that accompanies them. Malone and Lepper based on their research put together a list of factors that create  intrinsically motivating work environment: Challenge - people are best motivated while working toward personally meaningful goals whose attainment requires activities with optimal level of difficulty. The goals should align with people's self esteem. Curiosity - Simulating sensory (introducing abrupt changes) and cognitive curiosity (wonder about something) ...

On May 23, 2010 I blogged about 3 Gmail tricks  , today I would like to post some new Gmail features which have made me productive and more secured. First thing, you may have noticed that the gmail url is https:// now. This gives users extra confidence as far as security is concerned. Now about features: Insert Invitation in email: when you compose a new gmail, you will notice Insert: Invitation link beside Attachment link. This is a nice piece of work for gmail calendar integration. If your friends use google calendar, you will be able to see their availability, when you pick a time for the event. Also, your friends will have your even added automatically to their calendar.  How many times you regretted sending an email in hurry because you either click Reply All where as you wanted to tell the secret to just one person or just sent to wrong Larry. The undo features under Gmail Labs  let you correct your mistakes in 5 seconds. Its too short but much better th...

A last couple of days, we were trying to come up on some innovative and creative solutions to a problem at work. Being distracted by myriad of things, I wanted to pause and take help from some of my favorites self help books. I have said before that I am a big fan of self help book like 59 Seconds by Dr. Richard Wiseman. He claims through various studies done in the past that when it comes to innovative ways to look at the world, there goes a lot more to your unconscious mind than you can imagine. When it comes to getting solution to the challenging problems, he suggests taking a break and let your conscious mind fully occupied by some word puzzles or Sudoku game. Before starting to play word puzzles or sudoku, just jot down the problems you are trying to solve. Once occupied by the game, simply without thinking too much, jot down possible thoughts and solutions to the problem. Dr. Wiseman also provides some tips from his another book about ...

I am a regular reader of Jason Fried's column in the Inc. magazine. In general, I like his idea of sharing his work ethics, his best practices and his entrepreneurial skills with the readers. It provides him a FREE advertisement for his company 37 signals and his products and establishes him as a credible business leader.In the current issue of Inc. he wrote about how a smart business can utilize invisible by-product to generate a hefty sum of income. He explained, just like the lumber industry can sell its sawdust (a by-product of saw mill) a knowledge based business can sell many by-products which can generate money. He always makes his case by telling his own story with confidence and this time, he explains about how he started using his own company's rented space to conduct training and seminars for his customers and partners and got the entire year rent covered by running few of these seminars. I have practiced this myself when 13 years ago, I was asked by my employer ...

As the barrage of data grows - tweeter feeds, diabetic test(insulin meter) upload, billboard face recognition, website visits, facebook activities, traffic and weather information. Today businesses want to extract value from these data and the raw data itself  is becoming a key commodity. According to the Beuro of Labor Statistics estimate, there will be 20% job growth in the area of statistics and predictive analytics. IT companies are looking ahead and spending tons of money in this space. Recent acquisition of Unica by IBM($480 million ) proves that IBM is committed to lead in the area of Business Analytics. In March of this year IBM closed aquisition of NISC (National Interest Security Company) which strengthened IBM in public sector specially in the area of health, energy, defense and homeland security.  In June 2010, IBM announced IBM SPSS Decision Management product which was an upgraded SPSS analytics product.  Unica acquisition...

start3d.com  morphs a couple of your still images taken at 3" apart into a lifelike 3D picture at its website free. You can view your pictures online for free and also order 3D prints online. Take a look. 3D is everywhere now but this website is one of the kind and was also awarded " Best website of the month " by Popular Science magazine.

I am a big fan of self-help books that offers tips and techniques based on solid scientific study. Richard Wiseman is no stranger for readers who relate personality, luck and human psychology. I have read his famous book The Luck Factor and when his latest book 59 seconds became available on Amazon, I didn't have to order it, my wife did before I could. In this book, Dr. Wiseman offers very helpful distillation of pshycological research that can be applied by anyone. He is a master in presenting scientific studies on humans to convey very tough concepts in a language that everyone can understand. The book is divided into the chapters: Happiness Persuasion Motivation Creativity Attraction Relationships Stress Decision Making Parenting Personality Here is a good one from Chapter 10 - Decision Making: How to decide whether people are telling you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth Dr. Wiseman points out that in his recent survey conducted with The Tele...

Software quality has always been a concern and bottleneck to enabling change in business. It is belived that software has not been able to keep pace with improvement in hardware and services, even though it is the biggest part of the the total IT cost a business has to  bear. There has been a lot of research in the area of software reliability and measurement in academics and industry. ODC or orthogonal defect classification is one of such schemes that came from IBM research almost 10 years ago. To understand ODC better lets understand the two proven way of measuring software reliability, Statistical defect model and qualitative causal analysis. Statistical defect models are used to predict the software reliability by classifying the defects in the field, its severity and growth rate and detection rate. This is sort of defect report card which keeps track of whats happening but has very little value to the team that is developing the product. On the other hand, Root Cause Ana...