Just another of my random thoughts. We make so many choices in our life which takes us in a particular direction and by making these choices we are closing the options on other routes that our lives could have possibly taken. Does the concept of hyperspace and the 4th dimension really exist where an image of us actually is making those choices and taking a different route. If so, this would mean there would be a an infinite number of hyperspaces all existing at the same time, cos we make a choice every other second of our life and sometimes its not just a yes no choice but a fuzzy one. Imagine the permutations and combinations, kinda scary. But interesting. Would be good if at the end of this life, we can get a DVD of the various hyperspaces and the routes taken and choices made and determine the best one. Well, just a crazy thought, but maybe such a possibility does exist?

p.s: am not drunk. just watched the movie Cube II the hypercube. thats all :)

Thats 8 days since i have touched alcohol of any kind. Not even beer. Thats a new record for me if you consider the last 12 months. Neither do i believe i am a drunken asshole nor am i a alcoholic. Atleast i tend to think so. Who cares what others think anyway. When i am right everyone is wrong. end of story. yeah yeah am an egoist. atleast i accept it alrite. Now back to what i was talking about. no alcohol at all. you know beer has its advantages, it kinda gives u courage or u may call it vanity to do all kinds of crazy things that you might have not done if you were'nt drunk. It helps you shed that uptightness or maybe the fear. For instance, whenever i am drunk in a bar, i end up getting atleast one or two numbers from the girls there. But believe me i actually delete these numbers the next day. cos i am like if whoever gave me the number didnt realise i was drunk, then, they must have been drunk or they must be too easy. maybe am judgemental, but i dont like it when someone is easy. maybe i get a kick when i am kicked around by them lol. Well maybe they are not, but then, i dont believe in meeting someone in a bar. or maybe grapes or sour.. whatever!!!

When they told me being an entrepreneur or working for a start up is no joke, i did believe them. yeah of course, its no joke, you get paid less and you are bettting on the upside and that is just the big picture. The detailed view is more horrific. you have to be a real master of all trades when it comes to execution. You ofcourse have a team around you but everybody is multitasking. Multi tasking.. now thats a big word!! They said, you have to multitask. but what they didnt say was multitasking would also involve taking up support calls at 2 am in the night and then again at 4 am.

man, i am getting screwed. not enough sleep and productivity is being affected cos i need to go down to the cofee shop every 3 hours :) well all this happenned cos the guy who was supposed to be here quit and now i am not only spending time doing the bullshit bingo work of strategists but the hardcore implementation work of taking support calls from some non internet savvy clients in the middle of the night.

guess its time i outsourced this work.

Finally finished reading the latest harry potter. The plot is becoming darker and the latest story doesnt have the same charm as the previous ones. Stayed awake till early morning of Thursday to complete the book. It was worth it i should say. Apart from harry potter, my life last week has been boring as ever. Just too much work. had a couple of beers on thursday night and ended up running a temperature on friday and the weekend has been screwed.

I just got additional responsibility at work. Financial management of two business units. I kinda love this new responsibility but its gonna totally stretch me out. lets see how things work out the next few months. meanwhile, on the home front, mom and dad are not convinced about my bald head is the new fashion and are demanding a photo where i have some hair. I am like, mom, where am i gonna grow hair overnite? its not my problem that my genes were programmed to lose hair when i was 27. And how can i grown hair overnite. This sucks, no one wants to take the blame..The buck in this case is stopping at me where as i was the last person responsible for some genes that were just passed on. I swear, life is really unfair at times. Well i have had enough of this, i am going to get a blonde wig tomorrow and send them a pic. They didnt specify that the hair had to be natural,. they just wanted hair on my bald head, so problem solved.. :) i am sure next they are going to look at my tan lines which i got cos of spending hours on the golf coursem and say i have become dark. honestly, if the girl doesnt even know what a tan line is, i wouldnt wanna talk to her in the first place. So thats my sad update on the finding wife saga in kanags' life. wonder what is next!

Ballet under the stars...

I am not an artistic guy. my friends would definitely vouch for that. I mean i like to have a good time and i dont think going to a carnatic music concert or a traditional dance was my idea of having fun. For one, i didnt understand what they were singing or what they were dancing about. It is different when you go to a rock concert. well u dont understand half of what that guy on stage is singing anyway, but u are half drunk and you are head banging so much to really not give a damn about what he is singing anyway. I have been to a few classical music concerts and i kinda like the violin, sax and the acoustic guitar. But i dont have the patience to sit through 4 hours of tabla. Anyway, i have been to a ballet show last year and kinda liked the dance so decided to go once more.

It was supposed to be a ballet under the stars. Well things didnt start of quite as planned. Whatever you plan, mother nature has her own game and soon it started drizzling. and out came all the umbrellas. And then it was a full rehearsal of the singapore national day parade and while we were waiting for the program to start, we were treated to some really cool display by the singapore F5s and some choppers followed by fireworks. And by now the rain stopped but this stupid chopper kept howering overhead. Although we ended up having a good time it was a ballet not under the stars but under the rain, with sound of the chopper setting the background music.

wastage - a simplified view

Finally, I finished the Sambar i had cooked last monday. Well I actually did intend to cook some extra sambar when i prepared it last week so that i can have something to the next couple of days but then some bad timing and ratios created this fiasco where i had to endure the same sambar for 8 days. Why didnt i just empty it down the drain, no i am not a miser, but then i dont believe in wasting things. If there is one thing that i really really hate that is wastage. Everyday we seem to just waste tons of stuff. Order more than we can eat. i have seen guys going to buffet lunches and taking all that they can fill their plates with saying value for money and in the end waste more than 30% of what they took. Paper, tons of papers are being printed out each day in office and i doubt if atleast 50% of them is recycled. I mean, how many of us use the features in the printer to print double sided or print 2 sheets in a page? Water.. how many of us have set our flush to the optimal level, how many of us turn the tap off when we are brushing our teeth? Electricity. why is there a necessity to keep Air conditions on when you are not at home.. reason. oh i want the house to be cool when i enter. SUVs, and HUMVs.. guzzling gallons of gas.. i swear, i hate wastage.

Well i dont believe in starting another greenpeace or save trees organisation. there are enough out there and half of them are hardly effective. This all has to take place at grassroot level. How many of us can make resolution to not let water run when brushing teeth or shaving. How many of us can make a resolution to not waste food. how many of us can make a resolution to not waste paper when printing and even if we do, atleast put them in the recycle can. i am not perfect so i dont preach about things i cant follow. I read so much about animal farming and the pollution it causes and the wastage of resources in the farming, i pretty much bought into that and i tried to stop eating meat, I could not. So i wont be a hypocrite and preach about animal farming. but i dont let the tap run, i am judicious about what i print and i eat my sambar for 8 days instead of just throwing it in the drain.

Road to Baldness...starring me..

An ode to myself.. I am definitely a narcissist!!! Well, someone in this world has to appreciate the fine things in life such as my receding hairline. Shouldnt they? :)

p.s: Am not stoned!

Strategies, Levers and Growth

Strategies, Levers and Growth

It has been 7 months since i started as a senior management at this organisation. My job was increase revenues of products and solutions sales.. simple task. 7X7 is what i called this project. Cant get into details on this 7X7 project without breaching confidentiality laws. So i will avoid the details. The project seemed simple and easy. But it is not. I have spent hours and days and weeks understanding this market and the way my company has been functioning. The market is growing in double digits year on year. The company over the past two years has also grown in double digits actually close to triple digits. So growth is not much of an issue. The question is is this growth sustainable? We need to sustain this growth for the next 3 years to reach where i want it to reach. With the current model, this growth is not sustainable. So one big question is of sustainability of current growth.

Second question is the internal processes and operations. They are far from optimised leading to higher overheads and sometimes unprofitable projects. This is a huge issue and needs to be addressed now. However, this is being addressed from a bottom up approach rather than from a top down manner which is not good because this operations and process will have to be tied into the top line growth else we are going to have a disconnect when the organisation grows. How do i change this?

Third question is the organisation's infrastructure and resources. and this is by far the biggest stumbling block. organisations culture is very different. Some people i find are happy with status quo. This should not be the case. I had come up with some radical ideas of growth and repositiong the company which were given the boot because it deviated or created a new marketing category instead of a brand within a category. Well i understand that this organisation had in the past made some radical decisions and had almost gone bankrupt but we had biunced back and so people are being risk averse. So decided on a new strategy, use existing positioning and stretch it a little. This covers a little more space giving us extra value to capture. I sent a mail out to my colleagues yesterday proposing a new set of solutions that we can sell and new positioning, got to see what the feedback is going to be and i have to work on convincing them that this is something we ignore at our own peril.

Xbox Weekend

It actually worked. I didnt go out partying and i spent 5 hours yesterday trying to move ahead in Halo2. Thats 100 bucks saved. Why am i being such a miser. well the story about why i bought the xbox is two posts down if u are interested.. the Game is not bad. although i am getting tired of all the shooting. Shooting the wrong bullets on a saturday evening.. man this sucks. but well the clubbing scene sucks anyway. yeah u guessed it rite, it sucks for losers and who the hell said i wasnt one anyway. assumptions are the mother of all screw ups if u ask me. never assume that the girl in the bar is smiling at me. dont ask me if i had got into any emabarassing situations, well i dont assume anyway

Spent 3 hours this afternoon on the XBOX again. have got stuck in this one checkpoint where these stupid oktopus looking things keep killing me. damn. its getting annoying. Wel i gotta figure a way out. till then adios amigoes.