Rolodexo makes managing contacts fun and effective!

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Dear Sir/Madam! We would like to introduce to you a revolutionary new way of keeping all your contacts in one place. Not only that but with the added benefit that your contact information always remains up to date. And not only that but you can also assert your identity in a multitude of ways by creating a Rolodexo Business Card of your own.

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Are you self-employed? A non-corporate job must not deter you from having a business card. Here's how you still can have a business card and that too for free!

You got it right! You can have your own Rolodexo Business Card like the ones shown above, for free! But don't forget that this is going to be your invaluable tool to keep all your contacts in one place and always up to date!

So, what are you waiting for? Enrol here, asap.

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Rolodexo makes managing contacts fun and effective!

See this mailer in your browser

Dear Sir/Madam! We would like to introduce to you a revolutionary new way of keeping all your contacts in one place. Not only that but with the added benefit that your contact information always remains up to date. And not only that but you can also assert your identity in a multitude of ways by creating a Rolodexo Business Card of your own.

Below are only a few sample ways in which you could assert your identity with your Rolodexo card:

You want a Business card! You want to replicate your company business card? We have everything on our site to make you the perfect business card, complete with your company logo.

Are you self-employed? A non-corporate job must not deter you from having a business card. Here's how you still can have a business card and that too for free!

You got it right! You can have your own Rolodexo Business Card like the ones shown above, for free! But don't forget that this is going to be your invaluable tool to keep all your contacts in one place and always up to date!

So, what are you waiting for? Enrol here, asap.

If you do not want to receive further email on this subject please click here to unsubscribe.

Entrepreneurship and me

I hope the spelling of the 'E' word was right :)

So, this year started very eventfully with my decision(no idea when it became concrete) to go on the E route. Where it came from? It came straight from the car-pool. Everyday for the previous two years we've been cursing the management and bosses for their ass-hat approaches and policies and how we were atrophying in this job. And then one day my home loan was all paid. Didn't have any other loan and had some money in the account to last us for sometime. And then this bug wouldn't leave me i.e. to put my money where my mouth is.

I started by looking for work on Elance. The response was encouraging. I was fortunate to get a couple of good projects. While working on these projects I realized how much I was working everyday! On a good day I'd be working 15 hours. Never less than 8 hours. I had the freedom to do whatever I want. I was learning what "I" wanted to learn. Never was I tired or sad that was working so much! That adage "You are not working when you do what you enjoy" is so true.

When I look back at the years I spent working for companies I wonder why I didn't work like this in the company I worked for. Not that I did not have spare time in the office to do things I like. It turns out that there are many factors:

• Unless you know what you are working towards you can't get the motivation to do the things that you need to do in the middle. Things like learning new technologies, knowing the intricacies of what it takes to make a product success, etc. When you are an 'E' you know what you are working towards, at any point of time. You will do what it takes to reach there. I remember that in the orgn. you will work hard to an extent and then raise your hands that I can't do more than this. When you are in the E-mode you will not rest till you resolve it. You will take some hard decisions like changing technologies mid-way but you will keep working towards your goal.
  
• Apparently, the surrounding negativity is a bad thing for productivity. When your colleagues are a demotivated lot and nobody has a good word for anything in the orgn. then it is a bad place to be in.
• Politics of the work place. You can't beat that. I can't imagine how much productive time we spent in the cafeteria discussing the politics being indulged in by bosses and colleagues.
  
• I think this one a big factor: Responsibility. When you are responsible to make your decision a success then you will slog for it.
• Motivation through discomfort! Or rather lack of motivation due to comfort. When you are getting your salary for just showing up and pulling your ass around, though at salary levels which are not at the killer levels of other companies but decent enough, where is the motivation to outperform?
  

People say that, maybe, I could've tried doing this thing that I am doing by stealing time from office hours or out of office hours until I get a good feel of it. Where is the time to do it when you spend 2-3 hours on transit, atleast 2 hours on socializing in office on lunch and coffee breaks, and 3-4 hours of ass-hat meetings and at home after a heck of day? You'd have to be extremely possessed to do anything fruitful in that model.

Well, I have started my company but currently I have no people working for me. Naturally, my next thought is on what to do or what not to do when I have to employ people. Motivation, motivation and motivation! That is the only way people will be productive in a company. Convert all the above points to motivate people in some way or the other.

• When someone hates you but they work for you do not expect them work more than what is expected out of them. If you demand performance out of their current abilities then listen to them and be on great terms with them. I hated my bosses from the bottom of my heart therefore I never worked for more than what was required from me. If the boss-employee are on such terms then there is a one big money leak in the organization, in these times of high salaries. No point in continuing to keep the relationship going.
  
• Can you make each employee feel like an entrepreneur themselves?? If you can achieve it then there is a model that's bound to succeed. One good example is performance driven sales-force which is quite common in IT sector. The sales force gets a major chunk of their annual take home based on how much they sold. If this model can be replicated to each and every employee at whatever level then you have a winner. I would like to name this thing with a term I have coined: Entrepreneurial-node(e-node for short). i.e. every employee in the organization is an e-node. So, the organization is a network of e-nodes.
  
• Make your employees an integral part of the profit-sharing. Stock options,etc had started with that motivation but as the companies grew the benefits diluted that much more. How can you make a grass-root level worker motivated to put in those manifold delta efforts when his share is going to be 0.0001% of the profit taking??? Most of the big companies these days are top heavy. The takings rise exponentially as you climb up and so do the profit-sharings. It's an age-old debate on who is more instrumental in making a company profitable, the grass-root code-warrior or the meeting-maniac management. I think that if a company can work out a package structure that doesn't alienate the mass workforce which are at the bottom of the rung then they've got a winner.
• Stop creating vertical heirarchies! Can't stress this enough. This was a one big problem for me. I admit that I got carried away with the managerial suffixes and pursued streams in the company that didn't appeal to me. But this is a real employee killer in companies. Rather than creating new and improved heirarchies encourage employees to take up streams that they like and attach equal importance to all positions or rather don't provide any importance to any position. Once again, stop the managerial position mongering.
  

Phew! That was an hour or so of productive time spent on an even more productive job. That is to put down in writing what my thoughts on work culture are.

More on how it's going for me, very soon. I need to tell you why I am pursuing a product than pursuing consulting.

Blood is thicker than water

If there's one truth of life that comes in the top ten it is this. Well mostly.

I might've think that I had the worst ever quarrel with my wife or my mother or my sister. But after we have cooled down, we get back together. Not because we have to. But, because we feel it our right to open discussion lines with them, because we don't feel ashamed in saying sorry to them, because we know they won't bitch about us outside of the circle. I don't restrain myself from approaching my mother when she's not talking to me because it's my right. I know I will talk to her freely again.

Moral of the story? It is too late in the night and I must stop thinking :)

This is a true incident

Rachna and I were on our home mac downloading the pictures I had taken on my mobile. I had connected my mobile to the mac with the USB cable to download all the pictures I had taken on my mobile during the vacation. After downloading all my pictures onto the computer, I right-clicked on the drive icon that was my mobile and selected the "Eject" key, so that I can unplug my mobile safely.

At this point, Rachna jumps out of her seat and looks under the table at the drive bay of the mac and asks me "How did you put the phone into the cd drive?" To the puzzlement of my wife, I couldn't stop my laughter for a few minutes.

It's our 9th anniversary today..

..aur baar baar mere zehen mein ek hi gana aa raha hai:
"Nau saal pehele mujhe tumse pyaar tha...aaj bhi hain aur kal bhi rahega"
Toh kya hua agar Sau ko Nau banaya...gana toh theek baith raha hai na?

It's been a heck of a journey, these nine years and more. Here's how we met against pretty strong odds: http://rachnasays.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-knight-in-shining-armor.html
I mean what are the odds for two people to meet, one from mumbai and one from hyderabad, studied in different B-schools and worked at different places. Imagine, had I met her before the ad in Jeevansathi and told her that "u, yes U will be marrying me. So I am going to put arm around your waist like this" what would her reaction be? I'd be getting a resounding slap, right? So, what's the way to be able to do this rightly? It goes through Jeevansathi.com :)

What can you say about a simple cosmopolitan Mumbaiite girl who loves her family unconditionally with the same fervor as she loves her alu-badiya dishes :) She is a UPite but she has the sophistication and polish of a British royal. In my 9 years of marriage I must've heard her fart(more of a whimper, if u ask me, which needed to be confirmed that it was a fart), maybe, 3 times. I haven't seen her pick her nose ever. English and hindi are probably the only languages she know but her knowledge of them are impeccable. I still discover new hindi words from her even to this day :) She might not know why the 3 pin plug is not going into a two pin socket but she knows how and why our body functions. She is a walking-talking human encyclopeadia but she also admits that she discovered a lot of amazing human features only after marriage, which she feels is super-human ;)

She always know what is the right thing to do in any given scenario. No wonder that she has never had any problems with her in-laws ever! That doesn't mean that we haven't had our share of tiffs. But that is only because I am the most stuck up, boorish and tactless person in an area 50 kms around me. She's the kind of tension difuser the sorts which I haven't seen before her. She'll be the one to open up conversation lines with me even if she's mad at me, of course for bad things said/done by her due to my misbehavior(read above) ;) She's the darling of the kids because she's the best mom that is ever possible, unless, of course, if they step on her nerves on a wrong day.

I do injustice to her beauty by taunting her with my innumerous-virtual-hot-girlfriends :) But somebody has to be there to do the clowning around and keeping up the giggles in the marriage, right? Jokes aside, I take this day to tell her that she's the most beautiful woman I know inside and outside and I can't imagine life without her. This must the be the most romantic thing I have ever said even secretly ;)

Formula to get your own state

Very nice! KCR has evolved a Do-it-Yourself-at-Home formula to get your own state. Following is the formula:

1. Purchase student leaders in the major cities with promises that they'll get leadership positions when their state forms. The destructive..er...disruptive force that students wield during protests can never be too underestimated. Police cen't use excessive force against them too for the fear of escalating tensions into a civil war.
2. Make the regional leader go on a fast-unto-death amidst a sprinkling of violence/arson/loot from the students you have purchased. All the while escalating the protests cum violence levels a notch more everyday.
   
3. Nearing the 6th day of the fast put the region on a complete halt with our well-known protest called Bandh.
4. Use our 24X7 media as a catalyst in the whole process by showing the ever increasing protests on TV and the regional politicians unleash venom on the government.
5. As soon as the doctors attending the fast-unto-death politician declare that he is in mortal danger of slipping into coma/death the center will blink and say "Yes" to the new state.
6. There is going to be a lot of rejoicing and also demands for pardon to the "patriotic" students who had indulged in arson/loot during protests.
7. Profit!!!!

Already Gorkha Jagran Morcha(GJM) has stepped up its demand for a separate state using the above formula. Waiting for Vidarbh, Poorvanchal, Bodoland,etc to go on similar paths soon.