Author: JP

Adapted from, based on and inspired by…..

I’m a very lucky man. As I approach middle age, I have come to know and appreciate the incredible blessings and privileges I have. I was born into a warm and wonderful family: my parents and grandparents, my brother and sisters, my aunts, uncles and cousins, my extended family. I spent time at some fabulous educational institutions (Miss P.Hartley’s, St Xavier’s Collegiate School, St Xavier’s College). I’ve worked for some fantastic companies, and I’m now in my dream job, at Salesforce.com. I’m part of a lively and courageous church, Kings Church International. And all through those years, I’ve had the joy of making many fast friends, great friends, rare friends.

I’m a very lucky man. My wife of 28 years, an incredible woman, has put up with me and stayed with me through thick and thin, and has brought up three warm and beautiful children, occasionally with my help, often without, sometimes despite. I don’t know what I’d do without them.

I’m nearly 55. There have been a few glitches along the way: I was picked up at Red Square without a visa in 1982, and faced the consequences; I was beaten and kicked into a coma when I was 25, by a large bunch of skinheads; drowned in Greece a few years later, only to be rescued by passing fishermen as I floated serenely; was paralysed briefly in 1999 after an accident; turned white briefly in 2004, as I passed kidney stones the hard way; went very briefly into ventricular fibrillation in 2006, became bionic; and a few months ago, was found to have a walnut-sized growth in my colon, which has since parted company with me, to mutual satisfaction.

A few glitches along the way.

Yes, I’m a very lucky man. I know something about God’s grace in my life, and I’m grateful. I know a lot about the warmth and support of my family and friends, and I’m grateful. Incredibly grateful.

Besides my family and my friends and my teachers, there have been a number of people, places and things that have influenced me heavily. They number in their hundreds, if not in their thousands. Authors, playwrights and poets; cartoonists, illustrators and artists; singers and songwriters and musicians; comedians; thinkers and doers. Foods. Poems. Books. Films.

They’ve all bent me, shaped me, helped make me what I am.

I can’t share all of them: life doesn’t work that way. I can’t digitise and scale out my family or my friends: for one thing, not all of them are alive. Besides, it isn’t possible for me to replicate them, to clone them, to share them with you. [Yes, I realise I can share my memories, my learnings, my recordable past with you, but somehow I’m not ready for that right now. Maybe another time. Anyway, you get glimpses of those through this blog].

Some of the influences are shareable. Some of them have written things, performed things, participated in things, things that have been published at least in analog form, often in digital form. Influences that you can read, listen to, watch. Some influences that can even be eaten.

Influences that made me me, alongside my family and friends and education and experience.

Influences that I’d like to acknowledge publicly, because at least in some part the things I think about and share are adapted from, based on and inspired by the people on the list below. It’s not an exhaustive list — my intention is to publish them in what I expect are three sections, so here are the first 171.

I hope you find the list useful, I guess it’s a variant of what used to be called a blogroll.

 

It’s not an exhaustive list. And as I said it will be added to over time. I hope you enjoy finding out why every one of the 171 are on my list of influences. Let me know what you think.

Continuing to muse lazily about sharing at work

I spend a lot of time thinking about sharing, and sharing what I’m thinking. Why? I don’t quite know. Maybe it comes from having been born in Calcutta. Or maybe because I was (and still am) part of a large family. Or even maybe it’s because my father was a journalist as was his father, while my other grandfather was a professor.

Around eight months ago I wrote a post headlined Lazily Musing About Sharing. In it, I made the following assertions:

  • For anything to be social, it must be shared
  • Sharing, the act of making social, happens because people are made social
  • Sharing is encouraged by good design
  • When you share physical things like food, sharing reduces waste
  • When you share non-physical things like ideas, sharing increases value

Since I wrote that post, I’ve been spending time observing how people share: my colleagues at salesforce.com, our customers, our partners, my personal and professional networks.

And coming to a number of hypotheses which I intend to share with you over the next few months….. depending, of course, on the kind of feedback I get on this post.

Here’s the first hypothesis:

When the shared purpose at work is itself to do with sharing, collaboration becomes part of the DNA

Why do I say this? For a number of reasons:

When I joined Salesforce.com one of the first things I noticed was that there was a culture of sharing, above and beyond the architecture of sharing that services like Chatter provide. People felt comfortable sharing things, it seemed to be in their very spirit. Was it because of something about the way we hired people? Was it because senior management set an example in leadership? Was it because we were still a relatively young company? Was it something in the air?

It seemed to be something deep-seated, something systemic. So I kept looking.

It may have been all of the reasons I stated earlier. I don’t know the precise reason, I’m still learning. But more and more I’m coming to the conclusion that it has to do with the principles the company was founded on, the principles we’ve adhered to since, which involve a new business model (subscriptions), a new technology model (the cloud)…..

….. and a new philanthropy model. 1+1+1.

I’d read about the Salesforce Foundation before I joined the company. I’d seen how people set aside time and effort and money to support the Foundation. I’d been very impressed by how central a role Foundation activities played in corporate life, not just at corporate events. I’d been pleasantly surprised by the level of enthusiasm shown by staff, customers and partners alike when it came to participating in Foundation events and activities.

More recently, I’d been overwhelmed by the support given to an initiative very close to my heart, Byte Night. 20 of my colleagues sleeping out with me. Over 300 individual donors supporting our team. Colleagues, customers, partners, the lot. All underpinned by the advice, guidance, support — and generous matching funds — from the Foundation.

And when I was awake, cold, dripping wet, that night, accompanied by my colleagues, I realised how deep the bonds were between those colleagues. How deep the bonds were between all of us as sleepers that night, regardless of where we worked.

Those shared experiences of altruism, of philanthropy, of giving, matter. They are analogous to the social objects that Jyri Engestrom conceived of, that Hugh MacLeod popularised.

The relationship between the level of collaboration at work and a collaborative worldview is by itself not new:  Howard Rheingold has written about this many times; in his latest book he speaks of what Mimi Ito called “genres of participation”, some interest-driven, some friendship-driven. When people work together on philanthropic activities, I think these two genres come together, dramatically increasing the level of energy in the activity. Amy Jo Kim, in Community Building On The Web, emphasises the importance of giving people tools to build and operate their own subcommunities, to embed rituals in what they do, to have cyclic events. Christopher Locke spoke of the importance of shared pursuits like “organic gardening” in Gonzo Marketing. John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davison talk about the importance of shared purpose in The Power of Pull, particularly when it comes to designing “creation spaces” in order to get the increasing-returns value from the “collaboration curve”.

What I didn’t realise deeply enough was this: when the shared purpose is itself about sharing, then collaboration becomes part of the DNA.

Life is never smooth; that holds true at work as much as anywhere else. Historically, reinforced by hierarchical structures, information has been seen as power, and as a consequence collaborative attitudes have been weakened. Often this has been exacerbated by individual rather than team-based incentive systems, opaque performance management systems and, sadly, not infrequently, rampant briefing-blame cultures.

As the saying goes, character is not about the problems you face, but about the responses you make to those problems. The time when problems occur at work is probably the most important time for people to collaborate. But it isn’t easy to do.

Of course it helps if leaders set an example.

Of course it helps if, as Tim O’Reilly stated, there is an “architecture of participation“.

Of course it helps if performance management and reward mechanisms are tuned to recognise and reward collaborative activity.

My gut feel, however, is that these are all necessary-but-insufficient conditions for true collaboration at work.

The economic climate, the pace at which markets move, the consequences of the Big Shift on barriers to entry, competition and margins,  the nature and complexity of the problems we face today as humans, as a society, as humanity — all these militate towards a greater need for collaboration.

But then we have to go beyond the necessary-but-insufficient conditions, towards the kind of model Marc Benioff talks about, where philanthropy becomes a shared value at the heart of the company.

Then and only then will true collaboration take place within and beyond the firm.

That’s what I think. Let me know whether you agree, what needs changing, what I’ve got wrong.

[A coda: Just saw friend Don Thorson of Swipp share a John Maxwell quote that I thought was relevant to this post: People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.]

Room With A View

A few weeks ago, Luke MacGregor of Reuters captured a series of fabulous photographs of Tower Bridge, seen from the South Bank of the Thames, with a full moon behind it. My personal favourite is shown below; you can see the whole set here.

 

 

Can you imagine looking through your hotel window and seeing that? An amazing view, one of my all-time London favourites. You would expect a view like that to come with a price tag.

In a month’s time, on 5th October 2012, I shall be staying in a hotel for the night, on the south bank of the Thames, with that precise view. It won’t quite be a full moon, though — that particular event would have taken place five days earlier, on 30th September.

The hotel I’ll be staying at is somewhat unusual. The bedrooms don’t have any minibars or TVs. No attached baths or showers either. No beds. No walls. An unusual hotel indeed.

The hotel does have some attractive features, nevertheless. Ceilings that look amazingly like the sky at night. Very realistic. Because they are the sky at night.

It’s a hotel where the homeless stay. In the open air. On the banks of the Thames. With no mattress in sight. And traditional English weather. In October.

I’ve been going to this hotel once a year for some years now, with a bunch of good friends. We spend one night every year underneath the stars, whatever the weather, to raise funds for Action For Children, and more particularly in their drive to help homeless youth. It’s easy for us, because we only do it for one night. And we all know we have warm beds to go to later, hot food, running water and the company of family and friends.

We’re trying to make it a little bit easier for those kids who leave home, often without choice, and suddenly have to fend for themselves in an alien and usually hostile environment.

 

The event is called Byte Night, and it’s been happening for fifteen years or so now. I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of the people who’ve been helped by the charity over the years, and each one of them had an incredible story to tell.

As a whole we in the IT community have done well out of being part of the community, and events like this give us the opportunity to give something back.

So if you’re reading this, and you feel the urge to help, we’ve made it very simple.

Just follow this link. And donate whatever you can. Give, and give generously. Please.

Since it began, Byte Night has raised over £4.3m, and it is our collective goal to hit the £5m mark this year. You know what the economic environment has been like these past years, and you know the likely impact on youth homeless.

So give. Give as much as you can. Please.

Thank you.

 

On S-O Simon and related things

Music has its mondegreens, something I wrote about here and here. Now radio jingles may not be universally accepted as music, and for good reason. Nevertheless, they too can be misheard, misunderstood, mangled.

We never had a television set at home. I left India in 1980, around the time that TV was beginning to enter the household; my formative years were therefore spent listening to the radio, and to the gramophone.

Until about 1970, the only radios I’d seen and heard were valve radios. Main-operated, unlike the portable “transistor” radios that were just beginning to make an impact.

So the first sensation I associate with radio is the ceiling fan, signalling the presence of mains electricity, something that I could not take for granted as a child. “Load-shedding” was rampant.

If we had power, then we could switch these things on, and bring about the second sensation of radio: the orange-red filaments of the valves. That was soon followed by sensation number three, that of smell. It was a wonderful aroma, the heating up of the valves.

We were usually incredibly eager to switch the radio on, usually for something like Musical Band Box (on Sundays) or Lunchtime Variety (on all other days). Sometimes the station was just coming on stream then, so the first thing we would hear was the All India Radio Signature tune.

Seems like such a long time ago. But I digress.

Jingle Mondegreens. They do exist.

For example, every child in our family grew up believing that “S-O Simon means happy motoring”, and we would sing it at the top of our voice. We never cared what it meant. Standard Oil, on the other hand, were trying to tell us this.

 

That was fifty years ago, and I have no difficulty figuring out why we thought the song went S-O Simon. Easily done.

Some ad or the other appeared to use the old Scouting song “It isn’t any trouble just to S-M-I-L-E”. How that became S-L-Om-Buddy I have no idea. But it did.

Sometimes the jingles had other unintended consequences. For example, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Beiersdorf used to advertise in Indian cinema with a clip that started “Winter’s here”; it then went on to show you the ravages that your skin would face in the cold, and how all that could be avoided “thanks to Nivea creme”. Most of us just cut the middle bits out, and every time it felt cold, we would say “Winter’s here….. thanks to Nivea Creme”.

Did you have radio jingle mondegreens in your childhood? What were they?

On Uru ahim be-lev sameah and stuff like that

My first memory of school dates back to sometime in 1962, I cannot be sure precisely when it was. In fact it’s one of my earliest memories full stop. I was 4. And I was at a place called Hindustan Park School, a couple of minutes walk from my home, 70C Hindustan Park, Ballygunge, Calcutta 29. It wasn’t my first day at school, but it was early-ish. It had maybe 10 students. Some of the other students were more established there, and had worked out how to irritate newcomers like me.

Their ploy was simple. They would take turns at sitting behind me; then, when the teacher was in mid-flow, the person seated behind me would squirt water on the seat of my shorts using his plastic water bottle, and then they’d all laugh, pointing at the wet spot. I asked them nicely to stop, but to no avail. So, after a while, when it came to break time, I felt I had no choice. I ran after them, deciding that fists would do what words had failed to do.

This running took place indoors. In the classroom. The only classroom the school had. The only room the school had. And in that enclosed space I caught the miscreants one at a time and helped each one remember why he should change his ways. All bar one, who was somewhat faster than the others. He was so fast that I managed to run eye-first into the corner of the nearest desk while trying to catch him. And that was the end of school for me that day. Blood everywhere. And a scar on my left eyelid that remains an identifying mark today.

Sometime soon after that, I moved to my second school; the move was not related to the incident, but to my turning 5. Miss P Hartley’s Private School, Lansdowne Road, Calcutta 16. A converted stables, laid out as a quadrangular set of classrooms around the house in the centre. Each stable stall was a classroom. No doors, no window-frames. Just a cemented half-wall on three sides adjoining the boundary wall, with an open doorway in one of them. I was there from 1963 to 1965.

In 1966, soon after turning 8, I went to my third (and final) school. St Xavier’s Collegiate School, 30 Park St, Calcutta 16. I was there from 1966 to 1975, and then stayed on at the college till 1979.

14 years with the Jesuits. A wonderful school, a wonderful time, a time I remember with love and joy.

The other two schools were brilliant as well, it’s just that I didn’t spend as much time in them. While each school was individually fantastic, they differed in many ways.

Hindustan Park School was primarily about nursery time, drawing and learning to form letters (on small personal slates with pink and green lines on them, using white chalk). And we played. And we sang. And we ate. And we went home. At Hindustan Park the classroom was the school, I can’t remember the teacher’s name, she was the sole member of staff. And she was Indian.

Miss P Hartley’s was somewhat different, five different years of schooling, maybe a dozen students in each year. Some of the teachers were local, but the majority were white “staying-on” relics of the Raj. Relatively young relics at that, my teachers were primarily in their twenties and thirties. They all appeared to come from England. And the focus was very much on language and grammar. Ronald Ridout’s name comes to mind. I can only remember one teacher’s name, she had us call her “Miss Pamela”, and she was probably the first person I had a crush on. I can still remember how she looked.

And then came St Xavier’s. I started off in “Small School”, flanked by Hungerford, Short and Wood St. Fr Sassel was the Prefect of Discipline and Studies, effectively the headmaster of the junior school. It ran from Class 1 to Class 5, with each “year” having four sections. And each section had at least 35 students. While it was referred to as Small School, it seemed huge to me. The whole ground floor was like a car park under the building, and we would assemble there and take our meals there, dry, in the shade, away from the heat and the vultures and hawks and kestrels ….and the monsoon. The only other things on the ground floor were the music room and the sports kit room; there was also a scout hut on the other side of the grounds. The first floor had the school offices (Fr Sassel, the treasurer, the stationery department) and Class 1. Classes 2 and 3 were on the second floor, 8 rooms in all, and classes 4 and 5 were on the top floor.

The teachers at Small School were a motley crew, some white stayers-on, some Anglo-Indian and fully integrated into local society, some Goan, the remainder local. Our PE teachers were an incredibly tall couple called the Deefholts, I think they were from South Africa. The rest of the teachers were English, Belgian or Goan/Portuguese in origin, or Indian. But in a sense they were all Indian. They’d settled there, made India their home. And they were doing wonderful jobs teaching children there.

Three schools. Completely different. Different geographical locations in a very large city; different sizes, different teaching styles, different teachers.

Yet they had one thing in common. A diverse, and sometimes completely incomprehensible, list of songs taught to the children.

Here are the ones I remember:

When Johnny Comes Marching Home: Published 1863, based around the American Civil War.

Oh! Susanna: Published 1848. A minstrel song bridging four continents

The Happy Wanderer: A post-WW2 German folk song

Alouette: 1870s French-Canadian children’s song

Oh My Darling Clementine: 1884 American Western folk ballad

Molly Malone: An 1860s Irish ballad now apparently the trademark for Dublin

There’s a Hole in my Bucket: 18thC German song westernised in the 195os

It’s A Long Way To Tipperary: early 20th C English music hall

And then the impetus for this post.

Hava Nagila. A Hebrew folk song based on a Ukrainian melody.

Yes, Hava Nagila.

And there you have it. What a completely random collection of songs to be inflicted on a bunch of young Indian lads, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Parsee, Jewish and everything in between. I’ve tried to reason why, and the best I can come up with is that many were made popular in the fifties by people like Harry Belafonte and Burl Ives.

But what a strange collection. I’ve left out the obvious children’s nursery-rhyme songs like My Grandfather’s Clock and Lavender Blue and Yankee Doodle and Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush and London Bridge is falling Down. Because you would expect children in such circumstances to learn them and sing them. Even Teddy Bear’s Picnic and How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?

But Hava Nagila? And Oh Susanna? and Happy Wanderer?

A strange collection. But the songs made me travel to different places and different times and different cultures. And you know what? I loved every minute of it. I wouldn’t have changed a thing. And I still cherish those memories.

Uru a?im be-lev samea?.

I’d learnt the words to Hava Nagila in 1967. But I’d never seen them in print till today. Hence this post.

As I write this, it is Independence Day in India. 65 years since we were an independent country. A country where such cross-cultural, time-bridging antics like these are commonplace.

The songs aren’t the same. The languages vary. Children probably learn them off mobile phones. But the songs continue to mesh together amazingly diverse people. Long may it continue.

A coda. I was in Austin, TX, recently. I took a cab. The driver was Ethiopian. We had nothing in common. Except we both knew the words to some of the best Hindi film tunes of the 1960s. Apparently everyone in Ethiopia watches Hindi movies, the older, the better. They get them every which way, share them every which way. And laugh and smile and build bonds with strangers.

Music. It’s a social thing first, an artistic thing second, and a commercial thing third. The commerce is important. Artists can and should be paid. [In this context, maybe it’s time to have a law that publishes the breakdown of each song’s price in terms of where the money goes to. More on this later].