In my experience, I had seen many resumes of various professionals from recent college grads to Senior Enterprise Architects and Business Consultants.  I also conducted many interviews – technical, situational, personal etc. I also attended many interviews – both client interviews (I work for an IT Services Company) as well as other job interviews.  And in almost every resume I ever saw in my life, including mine – there are NO failures.  This, to me, sounds like a paradox. Here is my explanation.

We know that in any endeavor – project goal or individual goal – a realistic or a stretch objective will be defined. Though there will be some ambiguous projects like when customer doesn’t know what he wants, but still will adapt some Agile methodology to iterate over some vision until it gets concrete. Just for theory sake, let us assume, there is clarity in what needs to be achieved.  What is the probability that every such endeavor, an individual is part of is an astounding success?

Sometimes in interviews, to keep the conversation honest,  I often ask about some lessons learned from different professionals. Many people share interesting lessons learned ranging from team politics to technology failures, but almost never, I encountered anybody who told that they goofed up something and they did learn something valuable.  I think, I rather hire a person, who had ample set of failures, who is self aware, who learned a great deal during the crisis, than someone who thinks never made any mistake.  I am perfectly aware that a resume is not a memoir and need not publish everything. But it should give some pointers that the candidate is a balanced person and a great individual.

Imagine how much, we all appreciated Amazon and Facebook when they explained the root cause of failures and remedial steps that are undertaking to prevent them.

Now my confession – sometime back I was in control of production. It was late in the evening and I was “Wired-In”. I was debugging one production issue using an SSH window. I also opened another SSH window to release a feature into Staging where I had to shutdown App Server . After few minutes, suddenly, phones started ringing like crazy. oops – I realized the mistake – I shutdown production during a peak usage time from west coast. The story ended well, we had some data loss – in flight transactions, but nothing major. So damage control was done.  Next time onwards – I never open  production window and multi task. I also changed the background color of production connection in SSH client to be Red.

Here are some questions, I would like to hear from the community

1) What is the best and subtle way to reflect some lessons learned in resumes (or is it an insane idea)?

2) When we interview, what is the best way to understand a person’s overall profile – accomplishments as well as some mistakes?

3) In your experience, have you encountered anything that you would like to share with the community regarding these resumes, goof ups,  interviews etc that can be safely shared with all of us?

Yesterday’s world cup match and the last over given to Nehra by Dhoni.

Personally I am disappointed at what happened yesterday. Lot of us would say the last over should have been given to Bhajji because:

1.He a tried and tested bowler.
2.He is the in bowler in form with wickets in the match.

Let me think for Dhoni (obviously speculating here.):

1.As a leader he thinks differently and wants to back his team players. He did give Jakati a chance in World Cup T20 finals who came out with flying colours.

2.Does not mind losing the battle (match) to win the war(World Cup). He wanted to try out his option and willing to take a chance. Imagine Nehra coming out with flying colours we could have had a strike bowler at death for the Super8 stage.

3. Give your struggling team member a chance and bet on him to do it for you.Really believing in him. In my arrogant opinion I don’t think he is stupid.

The question that comes to my mind is “As a leader would I be able to take a chance than play safe?”

Full disclosure :

I do have a personal bias to Dhoni as a person I like him for the following reasons:

1.He came up in cricket without god fathers. He used to ask his room mates to drop him at Ranji stadium for matches as he did not have a bike. He was working as a train ticket examiner at that time.

2.He will take his 2000 CC bike for a spin early in the morning (his passion bikes )and not wake his body gaurds as he did not want to disturb their sleep for his personal wishes.

3.He does a victory huddle with team ( Chennai Super kings lost in finals to Rajasthan Royals ) after “losing” to celebrate the team efforts.

4.Plays music  on DVD for marriage no fan fare whereas he could have had stars performing live bands – Humility.

Prolog

I made this presentation on Change Management at the KCommunity Chennai Chaper meeting No.10 (#KCC10) which was hosted by Cognizant. The organizers had videographed my preso – special thanks to Manikanda Pisharody of Cognizant’s KM team and our external vendor agency for the recording.

Epilog

Typically, i do my own audio recording and then upload it into slideshare with synchronized audio. This time i have imbedded the video. Don’t know if the effect is worth replicating? can you guys please comment if audio only is better? That will enable me to decide which format people like better.

Prolog

Hope all of you are having a great Diwali 2010. Sorry i haven’t been able to update this blog as frequently as i would like [I am actually having a great time with my internal blog that this blog has taken a bit of a hit].

Last friday, i made a presentation on KM to the HRD Network. Per the organizer’s request, the slant is more towards Social Media. Here is the slidecast with voice [please post the comments here on this site, i am not able to respond to comments on the slideshare site.

I tweeted sometime ago that “if a template is all you offer, you really don’t have much to offer”

Let me explain.

For the purpose of this post, the term “customer” can mean anybody you interact with – not just money-paying person seeking products/services.

Too many times, we get locked into this mode of supplying a template somebody comes to us for an answer. This could be in a business transaction or employee motivation or anything for that matter. No emotions, no empathy, no niche, no expression of desire to help. “Here, please fill up this template and send it back!” And by the way, templates don’t always come in spreadsheets. They take many forms, but usually have a rigid set of solutions around the “if-then-else” logic. But life and business hardly present us problems that can be resolved with templates or templatized mindsets.

Why is this gesture bad?

Whether it is a person-to-person transaction or a multi-million dollar deal, all of us have the need to be heard and understood. By giving somebody a template, we are basically telling them we’ve empowered ourselves to not spend any time thinking about your problem, instead try to fit it into a set of rules.

Are templates evil?

Templates are not bad. In fact, they are great. Templates are a checklist for the person providing the answers. A solution provider is supposed to be an intelligent and human, with the checklist serving the purpose of making sure s/he has covered everything, to which there is a hitherto chance of erring. Templates help standardize, maintain consistency and completeness. But standardization also means repeatable, industrialized and most importantly, emotion-less. Especially when template is not accompanied by a human emotion.

Besides, what is your role anyways?

Just think about this. If all you do is provide templates, exactly why are you required? The job of providing templates is rather mechanical and could potentially be done by another person (in the flat world, I must say – another cheaper person)

What can you do?

Take this from me. People don’t really need an expert, when all the expert does is supply templates. And even if they don’t tell on face, here is the truth: they do not value him. What can you do? You can be remarkable; you can be human by remembering a simple rule. The template is for you, try not sending the template (email is another evil, but that’s off-topic). Instead pick up the phone and ask them the same questions as if you genuinely meant to ask them. Call it value add or niche. I tend to call this emotional labor. Of course, emotional labor is not everything, rather a humble start.