What could possibly be more interesting than getting those crude theories you have read, to devise principles and implement things practically and of course taking a look at the stunning outcome. He was no reason for any change yet .. I saw what this guy experimented with and saw the results.. This day i stand in awe of him and his team, amazed at the miracles they do. It took him four months. They built Ounce. The team once so disorganized makes me smile for once this guy was pissed of, at the other times he learnt. His team taught him organization, leadership, governance, team work .. and here i share what he did.
Not a Phd thesis yet a real thing .. a unique blend of BOB's span .. read on .. Yeah .. His name was BOB. Let me become BOB for a while!!
You mind?? (Hehe, i am a lil confused with the active and passive voices of the English Grammar)
Another instance close to my span ends with a similar half lit room, a couple of students turned friends teamed for a Counterstrike match, and of course a couple other engrossed in some serious activity! Placements!! Few days from now this PRISM lab would just go lone. Young brains would be out there all turning into thorough professionals .. oriented towards career .. family .. responsibilities .. the human cycle .. probably shredding of their innocence with time as i have had. I had never imagined all this when it had started. Things haven’t changed much yet ...
I am reminded of a favorite dialogue from Forest Gump "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get" .. probably stands true for it all started that afternoon at about 3 PM. Chilled PRISM lab at the SIMSR building. 38 odd young minds, all seated in the sleek lab, some older than i am! all trying hard to complete their IT security lab exercise. That was nmap i guess. I had to share my knowledge of IS Management. Now that was quite a job! For some moments, time made me wonder, "hey .. what am i gonna teach these brilliant kids.. or may be i can make a difference in their understanding .. i dnt know .. lets c it tomorrow at 11".
Network security, hacking isnt that great or geeky as portrayed .. i have always believed in the simplicity of things. Yes our minds become complex solving the simplicity though. And yeah, hacking can scare the hell out of you .. Patience is the key .. hats of to the hackers out there... am just a newbie.
Probably all you got to do here is understand the rules of the game well enough to tamper it. You have a simple machine, the pc, and that has a processor, governed by the Instruction Set. It doesn’t and will never do anything more than the specified set of instructions. The machine has evolved with time and that is what has made it more complex, and that is quite evident from the way we often mess up white boards with crazy diagrams! Every machine is governed by the OS, responsible for forking processes here and there.. controlling actions.. and stuff like that .. an invisible being without which the systems you work on would naturally paralyze. Codes Codes Codes .... that is what makes up a single system which again can be equated to the boundaries of the Mprocessor instruction set. Now there’s lot more of the machines all networked together .. programs communicating seamlessly .. some serving and some being served! A beautiful digital-ecosystem, everything in sync. No Mess.
The inherent complexity that has creeped into these systems has been through evolution and time. I for myself am not quite aware of all the reasons that aggregate to the beauty yet i have a good realization of how they are all clubbed together and am constantly in a search to answer all my queries ... I had understood it only by time .. now standing on the other side with so many eager young minds it was not quite easy to get ideas across. Resistance was there!
It had all been screwed and most them were habituated to start the class at 2 PM instead of 11 AM. Interesting huh! It was all messed up. All that was needed was probably a change without prior knowledge that they were undergoing a change. Getting them all on toes at 11 was equally tough. Moreover their previous experiences had made them fall in love with CounterStrike on the networked environment. How would you get them focused on what you are teaching.. for without getting their attention on what you are telling would again be a worthless wastage of both their and my time.
On one side their stood Enterprise Security and on the other stood brilliant intellectuals engaged in serious gaming and not ready to accept what they were taught. A few exceptional’s did exist!
"For the next couple of days we would be learning a bit of security, and i am supposed to be your instructor! Before we start i would tell you some rules.. Number one, we will not study, Number two, you will never carry notebooks to class, Number three, you will not read anything at home, Number four, you will enjoy and lend me your ears for all times i speak ..." - There was silence and surprise though! I had my reasons for it. If you start doing what you love you just do it better because you put your whole and sometimes pressures are bad things! Thats what happens most of the time, for stringent rules eject you out of the study atmospheres of most schools. My idea was to make it a play ground and not a mundane study forum.
Days passed on .. and the most interesting part was I was undergoing one of the most important changes in my life. I was learning the ways of management which had been theory at one point. Management was always about getting things done .. and that its foundation lies in the 5 basic principles: Planning, Organizing Staffing Leading and Controlling. Wonderful to memorize that and reproduce it in paper yet applying it has been a different game!
For me it was all divided into six stages in four months:
1. Planning: Birth of ounce.pri - Break Rules
2. Leading by inspiring
3. Divide and rule - building teams
4. Aligning teams to business objective
5. Building Trust across
6. Letting it float.
Days: Planning .. birth of ounce.pri
You walk down to the class with all engaged in playing a network game (CounterStrike) least interested to what you got to speak. Would you leave them? Would you walk away?
What i had in front of me was a pool of intellectual resource and a designation of Professor which carried huge power; and of course my time. My task was to make them a bit comfortable with technology, enterprise, security, frameworks and of course management. The problem was their motivation and dis-interest. Now it was born because of the way it had been since. I thought to excite them by making a virtual enterprise with the sexy lab they had. For they I think had never imagined doing so! And making them work, learn and experiment as we moved on.
To learn how to secure an enterprise or build and ISMS in the longer run you need to have an overall understanding of how an organization is built up. The IS view of the organization which involves People Process and Technology. Furthermore today’s firms have become increasingly complex with systems lying around .. some dependent on legacy systems .. with mix breed of software’s from different manufacturers and governed by different rules. A techie could probably understand .. hey we have some xp clients and the email gateway is powered by the dell edge housing exchange 2003 .. and for that research lab we have a couple of xeons clubbed to form a cluster .. the sites have a stable network frame set up by the core switches .. blah blah blah. Certainly my dad would F**k me if i try explaining him. But what’s the point if it cant be made simple enough to understand.. Anyways, the problem was to get this thing on to their heads and enable them to secure complex environments.
What could be a better way of learning than starting out building the enterprise and then securing it?
An assignment was given. "We are going to build a fully functional hypothetical organization in this PRISM lab and if we build it up successfully we will be in a better state to implement security across. All theory you could possibly learn in the next four months could be made practical! no theories anymore.
How many would want to learn this way?"
This gave birth to an organization OUNCE.PRI
Marine, Shadow/neo, maxpayne, lara croft, sarkar, mack, bond007, ACP Khan, jack, salman, khalashshshsh, xaero, ronny, g, madhu, kata, rocker, doomster, dhoomk2, mayaaa, chap, queen elizabeth, maestroo, charlie, bachooo, baap, dj, sparrow, aryan, osama, baba - The Strike Team with so creative names all at play on the Networked CS Match. Imagine how much time each one would have put to think and choose a name. It only showed how dedicated each individual is and all i needed to do was redirect their dedication to something interesting.
Luckily the idea of Ounce (nonamed) was liked and most of them supported it. I moved up to the white board and asked "It starts with a name .. so suggest me a name ..". It was unbelievable, we struggled for an hour just to find out a name .. there was least coordination .. for some it was okay for some it was not .. and for me they had to pass this hurdle before we could start. When the decision is to be taken by a team it is messed up for everyone wants to put in his/her idea yet if we just brainstorm without a conclusion the project never starts! Management by force - Lesson 0. I stood up and said "Lets freeze on OUNCE". Some i bet had to accept it even if they never wanted to. For some it was just another thing and were pessimistic about the entire thing. They thought this is just another start and might not happen either. I never wanted to prove anything .. i just said "we will break up the entire organization to structure and services. It will be split up to teams and each team would be responsible for a particular service. I will design the entire network. Each team would plan and submit a report and present their service across the organization. The teams responsibility would also involve justifying the need of their service. Every team would have a mentor who is responsible for the making the team capable of deploying and supporting the service. In a weeks time these mentors with team will take a traige on technology they would be working with, along with the deployment checklist. In the second week we will start deploying the services one by one. By the end of 3rd week we will have Ounce.pri and this will be a managed environment. Beyond this i will tell you how to make all theory into practice". We freezed on ounce at 4:45 PM approximately. I can still remember the dark room with the dimming projector light and a strange fear within, for i was trying to make a change, which might just fail!
Days: Leading by inspiring
Take any project or any startup or any thing that has ever worked; it was always built by a team of people not just one. If you start looking at the grass roots its always directed by the one who leads it and directs everyone else towards a common goal. Of course for that this being has to have a greater belief in the thing they are trying to do. An organization is made by a collection of individuals. Looking at it, feels like these individuals are all infinite sources of energy directed by goals of self yet if there can be a binding force which would combine all of them and direct them to one it would certainly have an aggregated energy to make things possible. That’s what was required here as well.
The question was why will anyone follow you? Leadership as everyone thinks is one of the most important constituents of management. But what is that. Is it forcing people? Is it making people slog ... How does one experience and get results from it? Is it quantifiable?
Alexander was a leader, so was Hitler, so was the Mahatma. They were alone. Their deep conviction to what they thought was right, was far stronger than any force surrounding them. We lookup to them, their ways of working. Get inspired! basically. Yes inspiration!.. Now sit for a moment and think when was the last time you got inspired. By what? Could have been someone who did things differently, had a convincing idea, was more learned abt the ways .. most importantly who understood you! if i aint wrong. "Getting the work done" may not be complete .. "Getting the work done with a human touch" sounds better. And to get that touch, a leader has to touch. Touch each individual from within, and create that environment where in the team feels secure, powered and geared.
I aint no Leadership Guru.. BOB tried to show them a different aspect of how things could be than what their perception already was. Bob played CounterStrike with em.. saw them play .. let them free .. yet bound to time .. bob challenged each and every assumption they had .. be it technology, life .. Challenge for BOB never meant imposing his ideas on others rather working collectively. Evolving thoughts was the core mantra. Some had never seen such things before.
Some dreamt to build a domain based environment. Some were already aware of it and wanted to experiment with something new. But everyone in that room had something to share and some thing to learn. I think we became a bit more agile.
Days : Divide and Rule
Teams .. aint easy to build .. for managing the human aspect of any organization is a deadly task. Never realized it would be so difficult.. Hats of to the HR's .. :)
However heres an idea! ..
Evolution and progress happens better in a competitive space. Monopolistic markets soon get converted into competitive zones and that pulls on innovation.
Now if you want innovation there has to be a healthy completion. How will you do it given a single team at hand? Its ONE team!!! .. Probably by breaking them into smaller teams and giving each one a goal wherein each goal forms a subset of the ultimate goal!. The goal is spanned across a timeline and is tagged with handsome rewards for achieving the same. Its wonderful to watch the dynamics of the team as a whole as they try to achieve the goal. When the entire team was one they fought for their common goal what they believed in ... and were engaged in internal conflicts. But when spread apart they got to fight in an open space as teams.
This ensures two things:
1. They fight as a teams.
2. They are bound as a team.
What we did with Ounce was simple.
Ounce was a hypothetical organization emerging from the belief "I don’t see a class of 38 students, I see a beautiful company here. A company capable of competing with any existing business..". Now as an IS organization we ought have an IS Infrastructure. Some servers which cater to services, some people managing the Servers, some setting them up, some securing them! If you want to know it looked drop me a mail! …
Now, given that IS infrastructure in mind, we attached a timeline to it. Each one was asked to pick his/her area of interest.
Days: Aligning teams to Business Objective
For completing a task you need to get the right people on the job. And getting the right people is not interviewing them just. These individuals have to be driven from within and this would only happen if the are allowed to do what they love. Each individual inside the class I think was excited (now i haven’t asked them how excited they were ... but i hope ;P.. am sorry if am wrong and an OUNCER is reading it.. your change is welcome! :)) and each of them picked up a task. For those who weren’t able to make a choice i pushed them into the areas i wanted them to work on! .. Wonderful they were as they collaborated, prepared timesheets, worksheets, the deployment plans .. and the golive timelines.
Not all days were successful days!. Not all plans worked they way it was scheduled!. We shouldn’t expect that either :) .. There will be problems in every project, people will loose faith, they will fight, they will leave .. yet the game has to run. I was taught this. And since then its changed me. Days passed on, as I forced them to do presentations of their work in progress. Sat with them, and did it. Interestingly, what happened after due persistence, the team started turning into a help unit. Each member caring for the other in the team. Teams caring for the teams. I was not needed any more :) I think they were aligned to their objectives then .. They rolled it on.
Ouncer's did log on to a centrally managed domain! .. One afternoon, Speakout.ounce.pri, the blog site was rolled. The next we had a streaming media server serving songs across the network. We had our own proxy server which rarely went down. We started using outlook and our own mail server. I had one admin@ounce.pri. :) ... yeah i configured my outlook and sent mails to all. I wonder how many would have read it!! .. hehe
We could see it. Every morning you come in let the servers go up, start working, once the business hours(class) finishes, the servers were put down formally before we would disperse. We had done a bit of BCP even!.. One server fails the other takes over .. And tested it like a real IS auditor, pulling out the wires…
Days: Building trust across
I dont like him nor does he. I cant work the way he does. I hate him. I want to work with that team only. Balls!!! .. I term it. Hahaha. I would have been a culprit of the same if was to be in a team. I couldnt have trusted anyone. For I feel i can do anything. Thats the human tendency we got to handle at times. With no belief amongst the team members nothing can be achieved. And getting that trust .. dude ..
I think you will have to figure it out! Go and experiment..... :) may be then you can come back and fill this section. I am but speechless.
Days: Letting it float
Its like creating a paper boat, which you have in your hands and that it looks so beautiful. But the question still remains as to whether it could survive the real waves, tides and still remain a boat or will it be destroyed with no reference to its original structure. How do you ensure that what you have created stays on?? Some geeks would probably pop up with the term "thought leaders" .. kudos. How do you create one? Its not about creating one!
May be a causing a severe impact on their self .. transferring a heavy load on them.. As simple as a question for which they seem to have an answer at one point and feel to be speechless at the other. This would probably ensure that every individual in the team, moves on searching for that answer eventually keeping the idea alive.
A thought leader created! .. who moves behind an answer!.. How to do it?
"This is it.. Finally we are at the end of the session. A few days from now you would be getting onto your jobs as managers for IS. Gradually you would progress to levels wherein the responsibility of the organizations IS will rest on your shoulders. I will see you then.. But I got some questions in mind before we part."
There was silence. Pin-drop silence.
As I strolled from one end of the room to the other alongside the whiteboard.
"I just need an answer to my question I have been thinking for a while now
- You walk down into an organization. On your first day you see there’s no proper facility, theres no chairs for you to sit or laptops to work. There’s something pretty basic. Theres no AC as you might have expected. Documents, clientele, process all scattered .. a mess. What will you do? Would you walk away? Would you stay?..."
... ... ... ... a long space..I never thought they would be silent for a long time.
A few said "i think i will stay" .. trust me only a few could.
"Heres your final lesson. Management is more about playing the best with the balls that you get and not with the balls that you want. For the balls that you want take you to the comfort zone. And at your comfort zone you will tend to play at your minimum potential. Our potential has to be maximized to win. You will take your lives to find out an answer possibly towards end you realize what it was and is all about. It was a great time being here .. with young minds like you .. having built Ounce... and learning things. A request, where ever we go, what ever we become in time, one should never forget the roots, the ones who created you. For whom you sit here, your parents probably. And make it a point to give things back to the society for it has given you all you needed and this will probably help you go a long way .. a very long way ... Thanks."
I cant say for sure if it has floated... What do you think? Have you? Will you give it back to the society? Will you remember your roots? Will you stay back?
Will you help me build one more Ounce? I cant have answers for you got em!
Its not that its all gone.. yes that was more than a year ago. Now when i happen to ponder around the Somaiya College, i see the benches so lone.. may be waiting for us to come back again over a cutting!.. i see him talking to me about the problems he faced .. his aspirations .. her small queries .. her confusion.. her negation to my offer for having a cup of coffee.. Nothing tangible has remained except for the memories of time.
Is this what we call experience!
Like you dear, who is probably sitting beside me .. holding hands together .. not as always .. its just that i cant sense if your hands are warm or cold, can comprehend but cant hear you talk.. a longing for a conversation. Nothing more... I had but learnt my 6 lessons ... I had but been with you ...
Now something,
Thanks to all the Ouncers, who now should be in beautiful places! ... working with wonderful firms.. turning managers.. if it was not for you BOB's ounce would have been on paper just. Cant thank you much for it. Wished the SPEAKOUT.OUNCE.PRI speakout.ounce.pri server was still working and that I could publish my article there
Not a Phd thesis yet a real thing .. a unique blend of BOB's span .. read on .. Yeah .. His name was BOB. Let me become BOB for a while!!
You mind?? (Hehe, i am a lil confused with the active and passive voices of the English Grammar)
Another instance close to my span ends with a similar half lit room, a couple of students turned friends teamed for a Counterstrike match, and of course a couple other engrossed in some serious activity! Placements!! Few days from now this PRISM lab would just go lone. Young brains would be out there all turning into thorough professionals .. oriented towards career .. family .. responsibilities .. the human cycle .. probably shredding of their innocence with time as i have had. I had never imagined all this when it had started. Things haven’t changed much yet ...
I am reminded of a favorite dialogue from Forest Gump "Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get" .. probably stands true for it all started that afternoon at about 3 PM. Chilled PRISM lab at the SIMSR building. 38 odd young minds, all seated in the sleek lab, some older than i am! all trying hard to complete their IT security lab exercise. That was nmap i guess. I had to share my knowledge of IS Management. Now that was quite a job! For some moments, time made me wonder, "hey .. what am i gonna teach these brilliant kids.. or may be i can make a difference in their understanding .. i dnt know .. lets c it tomorrow at 11".
Network security, hacking isnt that great or geeky as portrayed .. i have always believed in the simplicity of things. Yes our minds become complex solving the simplicity though. And yeah, hacking can scare the hell out of you .. Patience is the key .. hats of to the hackers out there... am just a newbie.
Probably all you got to do here is understand the rules of the game well enough to tamper it. You have a simple machine, the pc, and that has a processor, governed by the Instruction Set. It doesn’t and will never do anything more than the specified set of instructions. The machine has evolved with time and that is what has made it more complex, and that is quite evident from the way we often mess up white boards with crazy diagrams! Every machine is governed by the OS, responsible for forking processes here and there.. controlling actions.. and stuff like that .. an invisible being without which the systems you work on would naturally paralyze. Codes Codes Codes .... that is what makes up a single system which again can be equated to the boundaries of the Mprocessor instruction set. Now there’s lot more of the machines all networked together .. programs communicating seamlessly .. some serving and some being served! A beautiful digital-ecosystem, everything in sync. No Mess.
The inherent complexity that has creeped into these systems has been through evolution and time. I for myself am not quite aware of all the reasons that aggregate to the beauty yet i have a good realization of how they are all clubbed together and am constantly in a search to answer all my queries ... I had understood it only by time .. now standing on the other side with so many eager young minds it was not quite easy to get ideas across. Resistance was there!
It had all been screwed and most them were habituated to start the class at 2 PM instead of 11 AM. Interesting huh! It was all messed up. All that was needed was probably a change without prior knowledge that they were undergoing a change. Getting them all on toes at 11 was equally tough. Moreover their previous experiences had made them fall in love with CounterStrike on the networked environment. How would you get them focused on what you are teaching.. for without getting their attention on what you are telling would again be a worthless wastage of both their and my time.
On one side their stood Enterprise Security and on the other stood brilliant intellectuals engaged in serious gaming and not ready to accept what they were taught. A few exceptional’s did exist!
"For the next couple of days we would be learning a bit of security, and i am supposed to be your instructor! Before we start i would tell you some rules.. Number one, we will not study, Number two, you will never carry notebooks to class, Number three, you will not read anything at home, Number four, you will enjoy and lend me your ears for all times i speak ..." - There was silence and surprise though! I had my reasons for it. If you start doing what you love you just do it better because you put your whole and sometimes pressures are bad things! Thats what happens most of the time, for stringent rules eject you out of the study atmospheres of most schools. My idea was to make it a play ground and not a mundane study forum.
Days passed on .. and the most interesting part was I was undergoing one of the most important changes in my life. I was learning the ways of management which had been theory at one point. Management was always about getting things done .. and that its foundation lies in the 5 basic principles: Planning, Organizing Staffing Leading and Controlling. Wonderful to memorize that and reproduce it in paper yet applying it has been a different game!
For me it was all divided into six stages in four months:
1. Planning: Birth of ounce.pri - Break Rules
2. Leading by inspiring
3. Divide and rule - building teams
4. Aligning teams to business objective
5. Building Trust across
6. Letting it float.
Days: Planning .. birth of ounce.pri
You walk down to the class with all engaged in playing a network game (CounterStrike) least interested to what you got to speak. Would you leave them? Would you walk away?
What i had in front of me was a pool of intellectual resource and a designation of Professor which carried huge power; and of course my time. My task was to make them a bit comfortable with technology, enterprise, security, frameworks and of course management. The problem was their motivation and dis-interest. Now it was born because of the way it had been since. I thought to excite them by making a virtual enterprise with the sexy lab they had. For they I think had never imagined doing so! And making them work, learn and experiment as we moved on.
To learn how to secure an enterprise or build and ISMS in the longer run you need to have an overall understanding of how an organization is built up. The IS view of the organization which involves People Process and Technology. Furthermore today’s firms have become increasingly complex with systems lying around .. some dependent on legacy systems .. with mix breed of software’s from different manufacturers and governed by different rules. A techie could probably understand .. hey we have some xp clients and the email gateway is powered by the dell edge housing exchange 2003 .. and for that research lab we have a couple of xeons clubbed to form a cluster .. the sites have a stable network frame set up by the core switches .. blah blah blah. Certainly my dad would F**k me if i try explaining him. But what’s the point if it cant be made simple enough to understand.. Anyways, the problem was to get this thing on to their heads and enable them to secure complex environments.
What could be a better way of learning than starting out building the enterprise and then securing it?
An assignment was given. "We are going to build a fully functional hypothetical organization in this PRISM lab and if we build it up successfully we will be in a better state to implement security across. All theory you could possibly learn in the next four months could be made practical! no theories anymore.
How many would want to learn this way?"
This gave birth to an organization OUNCE.PRI
Marine, Shadow/neo, maxpayne, lara croft, sarkar, mack, bond007, ACP Khan, jack, salman, khalashshshsh, xaero, ronny, g, madhu, kata, rocker, doomster, dhoomk2, mayaaa, chap, queen elizabeth, maestroo, charlie, bachooo, baap, dj, sparrow, aryan, osama, baba - The Strike Team with so creative names all at play on the Networked CS Match. Imagine how much time each one would have put to think and choose a name. It only showed how dedicated each individual is and all i needed to do was redirect their dedication to something interesting.
Luckily the idea of Ounce (nonamed) was liked and most of them supported it. I moved up to the white board and asked "It starts with a name .. so suggest me a name ..". It was unbelievable, we struggled for an hour just to find out a name .. there was least coordination .. for some it was okay for some it was not .. and for me they had to pass this hurdle before we could start. When the decision is to be taken by a team it is messed up for everyone wants to put in his/her idea yet if we just brainstorm without a conclusion the project never starts! Management by force - Lesson 0. I stood up and said "Lets freeze on OUNCE". Some i bet had to accept it even if they never wanted to. For some it was just another thing and were pessimistic about the entire thing. They thought this is just another start and might not happen either. I never wanted to prove anything .. i just said "we will break up the entire organization to structure and services. It will be split up to teams and each team would be responsible for a particular service. I will design the entire network. Each team would plan and submit a report and present their service across the organization. The teams responsibility would also involve justifying the need of their service. Every team would have a mentor who is responsible for the making the team capable of deploying and supporting the service. In a weeks time these mentors with team will take a traige on technology they would be working with, along with the deployment checklist. In the second week we will start deploying the services one by one. By the end of 3rd week we will have Ounce.pri and this will be a managed environment. Beyond this i will tell you how to make all theory into practice". We freezed on ounce at 4:45 PM approximately. I can still remember the dark room with the dimming projector light and a strange fear within, for i was trying to make a change, which might just fail!
Days: Leading by inspiring
Take any project or any startup or any thing that has ever worked; it was always built by a team of people not just one. If you start looking at the grass roots its always directed by the one who leads it and directs everyone else towards a common goal. Of course for that this being has to have a greater belief in the thing they are trying to do. An organization is made by a collection of individuals. Looking at it, feels like these individuals are all infinite sources of energy directed by goals of self yet if there can be a binding force which would combine all of them and direct them to one it would certainly have an aggregated energy to make things possible. That’s what was required here as well.
The question was why will anyone follow you? Leadership as everyone thinks is one of the most important constituents of management. But what is that. Is it forcing people? Is it making people slog ... How does one experience and get results from it? Is it quantifiable?
Alexander was a leader, so was Hitler, so was the Mahatma. They were alone. Their deep conviction to what they thought was right, was far stronger than any force surrounding them. We lookup to them, their ways of working. Get inspired! basically. Yes inspiration!.. Now sit for a moment and think when was the last time you got inspired. By what? Could have been someone who did things differently, had a convincing idea, was more learned abt the ways .. most importantly who understood you! if i aint wrong. "Getting the work done" may not be complete .. "Getting the work done with a human touch" sounds better. And to get that touch, a leader has to touch. Touch each individual from within, and create that environment where in the team feels secure, powered and geared.
I aint no Leadership Guru.. BOB tried to show them a different aspect of how things could be than what their perception already was. Bob played CounterStrike with em.. saw them play .. let them free .. yet bound to time .. bob challenged each and every assumption they had .. be it technology, life .. Challenge for BOB never meant imposing his ideas on others rather working collectively. Evolving thoughts was the core mantra. Some had never seen such things before.
Some dreamt to build a domain based environment. Some were already aware of it and wanted to experiment with something new. But everyone in that room had something to share and some thing to learn. I think we became a bit more agile.
Days : Divide and Rule
Teams .. aint easy to build .. for managing the human aspect of any organization is a deadly task. Never realized it would be so difficult.. Hats of to the HR's .. :)
However heres an idea! ..
Evolution and progress happens better in a competitive space. Monopolistic markets soon get converted into competitive zones and that pulls on innovation.
Now if you want innovation there has to be a healthy completion. How will you do it given a single team at hand? Its ONE team!!! .. Probably by breaking them into smaller teams and giving each one a goal wherein each goal forms a subset of the ultimate goal!. The goal is spanned across a timeline and is tagged with handsome rewards for achieving the same. Its wonderful to watch the dynamics of the team as a whole as they try to achieve the goal. When the entire team was one they fought for their common goal what they believed in ... and were engaged in internal conflicts. But when spread apart they got to fight in an open space as teams.
This ensures two things:
1. They fight as a teams.
2. They are bound as a team.
What we did with Ounce was simple.
Ounce was a hypothetical organization emerging from the belief "I don’t see a class of 38 students, I see a beautiful company here. A company capable of competing with any existing business..". Now as an IS organization we ought have an IS Infrastructure. Some servers which cater to services, some people managing the Servers, some setting them up, some securing them! If you want to know it looked drop me a mail! …
Now, given that IS infrastructure in mind, we attached a timeline to it. Each one was asked to pick his/her area of interest.
Days: Aligning teams to Business Objective
For completing a task you need to get the right people on the job. And getting the right people is not interviewing them just. These individuals have to be driven from within and this would only happen if the are allowed to do what they love. Each individual inside the class I think was excited (now i haven’t asked them how excited they were ... but i hope ;P.. am sorry if am wrong and an OUNCER is reading it.. your change is welcome! :)) and each of them picked up a task. For those who weren’t able to make a choice i pushed them into the areas i wanted them to work on! .. Wonderful they were as they collaborated, prepared timesheets, worksheets, the deployment plans .. and the golive timelines.
Not all days were successful days!. Not all plans worked they way it was scheduled!. We shouldn’t expect that either :) .. There will be problems in every project, people will loose faith, they will fight, they will leave .. yet the game has to run. I was taught this. And since then its changed me. Days passed on, as I forced them to do presentations of their work in progress. Sat with them, and did it. Interestingly, what happened after due persistence, the team started turning into a help unit. Each member caring for the other in the team. Teams caring for the teams. I was not needed any more :) I think they were aligned to their objectives then .. They rolled it on.
Ouncer's did log on to a centrally managed domain! .. One afternoon, Speakout.ounce.pri, the blog site was rolled. The next we had a streaming media server serving songs across the network. We had our own proxy server which rarely went down. We started using outlook and our own mail server. I had one admin@ounce.pri. :) ... yeah i configured my outlook and sent mails to all. I wonder how many would have read it!! .. hehe
We could see it. Every morning you come in let the servers go up, start working, once the business hours(class) finishes, the servers were put down formally before we would disperse. We had done a bit of BCP even!.. One server fails the other takes over .. And tested it like a real IS auditor, pulling out the wires…
Days: Building trust across
I dont like him nor does he. I cant work the way he does. I hate him. I want to work with that team only. Balls!!! .. I term it. Hahaha. I would have been a culprit of the same if was to be in a team. I couldnt have trusted anyone. For I feel i can do anything. Thats the human tendency we got to handle at times. With no belief amongst the team members nothing can be achieved. And getting that trust .. dude ..
I think you will have to figure it out! Go and experiment..... :) may be then you can come back and fill this section. I am but speechless.
Days: Letting it float
Its like creating a paper boat, which you have in your hands and that it looks so beautiful. But the question still remains as to whether it could survive the real waves, tides and still remain a boat or will it be destroyed with no reference to its original structure. How do you ensure that what you have created stays on?? Some geeks would probably pop up with the term "thought leaders" .. kudos. How do you create one? Its not about creating one!
May be a causing a severe impact on their self .. transferring a heavy load on them.. As simple as a question for which they seem to have an answer at one point and feel to be speechless at the other. This would probably ensure that every individual in the team, moves on searching for that answer eventually keeping the idea alive.
A thought leader created! .. who moves behind an answer!.. How to do it?
"This is it.. Finally we are at the end of the session. A few days from now you would be getting onto your jobs as managers for IS. Gradually you would progress to levels wherein the responsibility of the organizations IS will rest on your shoulders. I will see you then.. But I got some questions in mind before we part."
There was silence. Pin-drop silence.
As I strolled from one end of the room to the other alongside the whiteboard.
"I just need an answer to my question I have been thinking for a while now
- You walk down into an organization. On your first day you see there’s no proper facility, theres no chairs for you to sit or laptops to work. There’s something pretty basic. Theres no AC as you might have expected. Documents, clientele, process all scattered .. a mess. What will you do? Would you walk away? Would you stay?..."
... ... ... ... a long space..I never thought they would be silent for a long time.
A few said "i think i will stay" .. trust me only a few could.
"Heres your final lesson. Management is more about playing the best with the balls that you get and not with the balls that you want. For the balls that you want take you to the comfort zone. And at your comfort zone you will tend to play at your minimum potential. Our potential has to be maximized to win. You will take your lives to find out an answer possibly towards end you realize what it was and is all about. It was a great time being here .. with young minds like you .. having built Ounce... and learning things. A request, where ever we go, what ever we become in time, one should never forget the roots, the ones who created you. For whom you sit here, your parents probably. And make it a point to give things back to the society for it has given you all you needed and this will probably help you go a long way .. a very long way ... Thanks."
I cant say for sure if it has floated... What do you think? Have you? Will you give it back to the society? Will you remember your roots? Will you stay back?
Will you help me build one more Ounce? I cant have answers for you got em!
Its not that its all gone.. yes that was more than a year ago. Now when i happen to ponder around the Somaiya College, i see the benches so lone.. may be waiting for us to come back again over a cutting!.. i see him talking to me about the problems he faced .. his aspirations .. her small queries .. her confusion.. her negation to my offer for having a cup of coffee.. Nothing tangible has remained except for the memories of time.
Is this what we call experience!
Like you dear, who is probably sitting beside me .. holding hands together .. not as always .. its just that i cant sense if your hands are warm or cold, can comprehend but cant hear you talk.. a longing for a conversation. Nothing more... I had but learnt my 6 lessons ... I had but been with you ...
Now something,
Thanks to all the Ouncers, who now should be in beautiful places! ... working with wonderful firms.. turning managers.. if it was not for you BOB's ounce would have been on paper just. Cant thank you much for it. Wished the SPEAKOUT.OUNCE.PRI speakout.ounce.pri server was still working and that I could publish my article there
1 comments:
you know, for once I thought you are talking about THE OUNCE LABS.. :) heheheeh.. don't know where all these people are.. but hope they don't do a bad job.. and live to talk about it..
Post a Comment