M'aider for corporate culture

Will the spring revival of "corporate culture" come after the widespread availability of COVID vaccines? 

Corporate culture provides an execution framework for employees. It determines the rapidity of response to executive direction, sharpness of focus on the competition, moderates the risk taking appetite and determines the approach to solve problems. For Qualcomm, while there is no definition of culture enshrined, my perspective would be that our culture is to pivot our work to topics raised in all-hands meetings, do what it takes to make the customer launch on time and escalate when needed regardless of title to resolve an issue.

Unlike project-specific top-down command and control, corporate culture is an emergent phenomenon. 

In Emergence, Steven Johnson paints a panoramic canvas on the topic, albeit somewhat haphazardly as compared to Drucker's books, with useful insights. He draws analogies from ant colonies, slime growth, how cities develop over time, etc. "A successful ant colony can live up to fifteen years, despite the individual worker ant living only up to one year." "... the global behavior that outlasts any of its components parts - is one of the defining characteristics of a complex system." A system in which "local behavior leads to global wisdom" is how I would summarize as the key definition of an emergent system.

Corporate culture depends on the collective knowledge of employees that is built up over time. It outlives an employee's career in the company. For executives that cherish their corporate culture and want to preserve and maintain it, questions that might arise are:

• How to ensure that the year-long work-from-home hasn't diminished the prevalent culture in the organization?
• How do new hires, who haven't even stepped into the office since they joined their jobs, participate in the collective knowledge?

To enable macrointelligence and adaptibility in emergent systems, here are a few points Steven Johnson makes, paraphrased by me:

1. Make information widely available within the organization - information on competition, new technology, performance of business units, etc. 
2. Keep organization structures simple: too many dotted lines and joint responsibilities detract the focus from execution. It forces employees to learn a non-simple vocabulary to talk the language of each leader. 
3. Encourage cross-team encounters: when a company is young, everyone knows everyone else and information flows rapidly. As a company grows, one group does know know the activities of other groups. This diminishes the adaptability of the collective. 

Here are my thoughts on implementing the above - starting now and continuing upon return to campus.

1. Have multiple touchpoints per week for the employee that require the employee's active participation: 1-1 manager / team-lead meeting, small team meeting, cross team code/design review meeting, etc. Large group meetings are good for broadcasting content but don't provide the opportunity to the employee to ask questions or influence the outcome of a decision, which could lead to disengagement.
2. Use video calls for 1-1 meetings: this baselines expectations for mutual attentiveness, environs, grooming and dress code.
3. The speakers and people with a question in a large meeting should turn on their videos: this establishes a question / answer protocol and enables non-verbal interactions.
4. Allow working-from-home for two different teams. Since chance encounters at work are not possible currently, encourage short-term cross team projects as a way to build up connections within the organization. Two is a good number - I think more would lead to a diffusion of effort. 
5. Let the participants ask questions that a leader would normally ask for the sake of speedy progress toward the conclusion in a presentation. In an in-person meeting, body movements, hand gestures, etc. signal to the speaker to pause and let the other person speak. In remote meetings, the leader should step back and steer the participants to do a bulk of the talking, while steering the group in the direction of productivity.
6. Leaders should explain why they are taking a decision a certain way and let the team correct them real-time. The "why" enables new joinees to understand the thought process and the motivation in achieving a decision. 
7. In-person high-level design review meetings, energized sprints in bring-up labs, cross-team debug efforts, chance meet-ups for lunch in the company cafeteria - were good opportunities to bring people together for cross-team encounters. Bring them back as soon as safety protocols permit.

If you have reached this far, I owe an explanation for the title. Vaccines will be widely available by April. The first of May could be considered as the first day back at work in the office. May Day, celebrated on the first of May is a celebration of the Spring season. Corporate culture needs to be celebrated AND saved. The word for asking for help is "Mayday" repeated thrice, which itself comes from the phonetic equivalent of the French "venez m'aider" - come and help me. Too much cryptic crosswording at an impressionable age leads to an overly convoluted precis. 

What are your thoughts?

Kuntal.

The problem with Bitcoin

Middlemen induced carrying cost is the main problem with Bitcoin and all public ledger based currencies.

Until a few years ago, paying a $2.50 fee to withdraw cash from the ATM was the norm. Fee-free withdrawal was available only at your local bank's ATM and that too was limited to a few withdrawals per month. Now, with credit union networks or by maintaining a certain balance, one rarely comes across ATM fees. Bitcoin takes us back to paying a fee, not just for a withdrawal, but for any transaction with it. Let's work out why this fee cannot be removed and why a better solution is needed for wider adoption of public ledger based currencies.

With cash, one central bank issues the currency, regulates its supply and checks for fraud such as counterfeit bills. Once the currency is printed, the cash could undergo many transactions before it comes back into the banking system. Verification is done at the point of transaction without the requirement of a public record of the transaction. For example, you buy groceries, you pay with the cash in your wallet, the grocery store clerk checks that it is familiar looking money and accepts the payment. The proof of the transaction is that you got your groceries and the grocery store has the physical currency you used as payment.

The problems with the central bank approach are: virtually unlimited paper money can be created by a small number of decision makers - thereby eroding trust in the currency, slower innovation by established financial systems such as SWIFT, periodic financial cataclysmic events such as the dot com crisis in 2000 and the housing bubble in 2008, etc. Having the inherent value of a currency tied to purchasing power is actually a good thing for a central bank with reserve currency, but not so much for countries whose currency does not get accepted beyond their borders. 

Bitcoin provides an elegant solution to many of the shortcomings of the current system and kudos are due to the early adopters for supporting the value of cryptocurrencies with real money. 

However, there are structural shortcomings to the current generation of cryptocurrencies. Let's start with the public ledger - a record of all transactions done on a coin, and in my opinion one of the biggest shortcoming. The reason for Bitcoin's public ledger is that since the currency is digital, it can be easily copied. To prevent copying, the transaction must be publicly validated and recorded so that if the same money is used for a different transaction, that transaction will fail. This carrying cost - of always remembering the transaction along with the actual cost of the transaction are unsustainable for widespread adoption. 

Although physical cash isn't "fee free" either, it is very likely always better than Bitcoin in terms of transaction costs. It takes resources to operate the mint, mine the metals to make coins, pay for law enforcement for checking compliance, pay salaries to central bankers, etc. Even if the world were to fully move to a cryptocurrency based society, these agencies would still be needed to some extent, so the current system is cost-neutral.

An ideal cryptocurrency would function with cash-like properties - uniqueness, fungibility, stateless verification and low transaction cost. Are there central bank issued cryptocurrency or quantum computing solutions that can address the above problems? 

I think than an algorithmically managed coin issuance scheme operating like a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) but operating under regular tuning by the Federal Reserve will be a strong candidate for the next generation US Dollar. Another option would be to stay decentralized but use the uniqueness guaranteed by the quantum mechanical property of teleportation. More of this later, perhaps when work-related downtime again aligns with the Christmas break. It's going to be a busy 2021.

Happy New Year everyone. 

Kuntal. 

PS - the US Congress did a great thing recently by passing the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA).  The lawmakers that deserve praise and support are: Carolyn Maloney, Mike Crapo, Sherrod Brown, Maxine Waters and Patrick McHenry.

Dysfunctional Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)

 Juxtaposing three news articles from this week: the University of California considering a tuition hike, a new parliament in India and Sweden moving to a bitcoin-like official currency eKrona, leads one to cast a skeptical eye on whether the government is the rightful arbiter of how to best allocate tax revenues. 

At a time when California communities are suffering from high unemployment due to COVID and education remains the one dependable pathway to higher income, it is unthinkable for the regents to further "tax" the populace. 

In India, the ongoing farmer protests call into question the central government's method of running the country, the unnecessary money being spent build a shrine to autocracy provide the answer on how out of touch the new rajahs are with the populace. 

While Swedish bankers can't keep track of the source of external money that flows into the country [1], they seem to be proactive in ensuring that the internal tax base is maintained and has improved traceability with the move to eKrona.

Rather than representing the people, the UC Regents and the government of India are operating like pseudo Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Instead of the ideal software-contract run organizations where decisions are taken algorithmically and transparently, these organizations are "decentralized" in the sense that organization outlives the operatives and are "autonomous" in the sense that their decisions are not changeable by the people having a stake in them. An appropriate term for such organizations would be "Dysfunctional Autonomous Organizations."

What can a regular person do? Simply voting for a change does not seem to be enough. Thoughts?

Thoughts on tracking large engineering projects

 Here's a short summary of my thoughts on efficient tracking of large projects that I have used with some success and gradually refined over time. 

1. Only track milestones.
2. Minimize the number of tracked milestones.
3. Make the dependencies between milestones explicit.
   This requires minimal tooling.
4. Express upstream dependencies only.
   A milestone owner must document what they depend on, not where their deliverable will be used.
5. Do not track effort.
6. Do not track offsets from milestones.
7. If a milestone’s date is in the past, assume it to be done.
8. Track changes in committed milestone dates. This is the weekly tracking that is needed.
9. Build tooling such that every team only updates their own milestones and the tooling alerts the dependent milestone owners of changes.

This can be all done with Excel and minimal IronPython. There is a place for rigorous tracking using MS Project for tasks and resources, but in my role as an engineering lead, I need to react to movement of large milestones and I've found the above methodology quite useful. 5 and 6 are bread and butter for program managers and 7 borders on heresy but for a lead engineer these guidelines do help reduce the management time spent on things that are on track.

What are your best practices?

Regards,

Kuntal.  

गली का कुत्ता

 आज कल भारत मे अजीबोगरीब कुत्ते पाले जा रहें हैं। बैंकों का कर्जा न चुकाने वाले, जिनहे आम लोग धनी बुलातें हैं, अपनी गाड़ी, कपड़े, उच्चारण के अलावा कुत्ते भी विदेश से लातें हैं । भारत में बोंबड़े, शाही, आदि, जैसे पालतू  कुत्तों की कमी तो है नहीं तो फिर विदेशी कुत्तों की क्या जरूरत हो सकती है? संभव है की वातानुकूल घरों मे भारतीय कुत्तों से सर्दी सहन नहीं हो पाती। यदि सारी जनता को भी विदेशी चमड़ी का शौक चढ़ गया तो गल्ली के कुत्तों की देखभाल कौन करेगा?

गल्ली का कुत्ता बनने के लिए कुत्ते को कुछ उपक्रम दिखाना पड़ता है। अंजान व्यक्तियों के आगमन पर भोंकना, रोटी देने वालों के परिवार के सदस्यों के पीछे दुम हिलना, भटकी हुई गाय, बकरी को डराकर फिर बाहर निकालना यह सारे अनिवार्य काम कुछ सप्ताह तक करने के बाद ही कोई निराश्रय कुत्ता एक गल्ली का कुत्ता बन सकता है। 

यह पद कोई स्थायी पद नहीं। मध्यरात में पड़ोस की गली के कुत्तों के साथ ज़ोर से भोंकना, गल्ली के शराबी की बातें गौर से न सुनना, उपद्रवी बच्चों को कांटना, इत्यादि वर्तन से यह पद खोया जा सकता है। 

हमारे भवन के तल कोष्ट पर यानशाला है। इसके कोई कोने मे हर रात भालू नामक कुत्ता सोता था। दिन मे भालू अपने कुत्ते वाले कामों मे मस्त रहता था। इस प्राणी का नाम किस भले आदमी ने रखा यह तो अब राम ही जाने, लेकिन अब लोग उसे वहीं नाम से बुलाते थे और वह भी अपना नाम जानता था I हो सकता है कि यही भालू को बगल की गल्ली वाले उसे अन्य नाम से बुलाते हों पर कुत्ते का क्या है ना आधर कार्ड ना राशन कार्ड, जो मर्जी वो कार्य I 

भालू के लिए मेरी माँ हर रोज़ दो रोटीयाँ बनाती और संध्या का घरकाम संपूर्ण करने के बाद, उसे खिलाने जाती  I इस नगण्य बरताव का बदला भालू बहुत प्यार से देता था I जब माँ पैदल बस स्टॉप जाती तो भालू उसके पीछे जाता और बस आने तक वहां बैठा रहता था I जब माँ लौटती थी तब खुशी खुशी भौंक कर और दुम बड़ी उत्साही से हिलाता था I क्या आपने ऐसा कोई विदेशी कुत्ता देखा है? 

चलो छोड़िये I क्या बेकार में तुलना करना I जिन्होंने इस देश की गालियों को गाड़ी के शीशे के पीछे से ही देखा है वह लोग क्यूँ इस फिजूल बात में पड़े  I जब गाड़ी पे लाल बत्ती हो, जनता के पैसों से घर, नौकर और सुरक्षाकर्मियों हो तो जनता जैस थोड़ी ना रह सकते हैं? आखिर जनता को भी अपने शासक का पद समझाना एक शासक का ही तो सेवापूर्वक काम है I 

गली के कुत्ते का क्या है I  आज है, कल गाड़ी से कुचल गया I 

Systems co-operatives for India

While India continues to suffer from death from malnutrition, with almost 9 hundred thousand deaths in 2018, it is with deep despair that one notes that Indian farmers are throwing away produce during the COVID-19 related lock-down.

The government is fully culpable for these and other deaths due to the hasty imposition of the lock-down. But it is time for each one of us to take steps to build support systems that ensure that India becomes a developed country, where poverty and malnutrition are a thing of the past and we can truly establish the country that every school child pledges to form everyday.

If engineers, marketers, financial experts, artists and lawyers can get together to build the following, it will help steer us in that direction:

1. Information dissemination
1. For better or for worse, WhatsApp is the medium of communication within a section of the populace. We need engineers to work with WhatsApp to clearly mark "certified" stories, whose authorship is fully traceable.
2. Censorship of any identified author must be impossible. This will ensure that Twitter-like suspension of accounts that express unpopular opinions does not take place.
2. Task-oriented networking
1. How can we connect a farmer throwing away produce to the migrant laborer who needs food while he is walking from the city to the village.
2. We need a social network that enables task oriented connections.
3. Foreign exchange monitor
1. I feel physical pain as I write this but with the foreign exchange that Nirav Modi / Mehul Chokshi stole from India, India could have bought 200,000 ventilators. That is 5 times the current number of ventilators in India.
2. Investor visa attorneys - every developed country in the world allows permanent residency based on investment. This is a legal way to do money laundering that enables transfer of wealth from developing countries to developed countries. Neo-colonialism is alive and well. We need lawyers in every developed country to trace the beneficiaries of such visas and ensure that developing countries' precious foreign exchange is not drained illegally.

For all of the above, we need public activists, communications experts, project managers, etc. who can move these "systems co-operatives" forward. The Amul approach is worth emulating in other systems. If there are such activities already going on, I will be joining them. If there aren't, I pledge to start and support them with time and money. Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter.

A Primer on the Value of a Currency

There's a song in the movie पूरब और पश्चिम (East and West) movie, that has the line "पूरब वाले हर जान की कीमत जानते हैं" (Easterner's know the value of each life as opposed to Westerners who value materialism). India's nationwide lock-down in response to Covid-19, the resultant death from starvation, and the haphazard movement of supporting migrant labor brings into focus the value of human life in India.

Compare the size of economic stimuli being applied by countries across the globe in an effort to contain the growth of the disease and it is clear that India's per-capita stimulus is quite low.

Let's get into the reasons why:

Every country in the world can print money. That money can be used to buy things locally. The only thing that holds governments back from printing money is that it leads to inflation, thereby bringing the value of the money back to its original value.

Now say that country A wants to buy from country B. Country B would not accept the currency from country A since the government of country A could simply print all the money it needs. That leads to inter currency exchange rates. To arrive at an exchange rate, one must convert each of the currencies to a mutually agreed value. That value could be derived from a commodity that is heavily traded between the two countries or it could be derived from the relative value of the currency from country A and the currency from country B as compared to a third reserve currency that both countries trust.

For a currency to act as a reserve, the government that prints the reserve currency must be stable, trustworthy, transparent and be run on sound economic principles. The country that prints that currency must trade widely so that the value of its currency with respect to goods is widely acknowledged.

The only country that meets the above criteria is the USA and that is what makes the US dollar the world's reserve currency - the currency of choice to keep savings in. The US can print the money it needs since there are systemic checks and balances in place that the entire world trusts. This explains the extraordinary size of the US stimulus as compared to those from around the world.

All other countries in the world including those in the European Union, need to keep a liquid hoard of US dollars so that it can be used to buy things outside the EU. Both the EU and China have been trying to make the Euro and the Yuan become reserve currencies but that have only succeeded marginally and instead they too have to keep up their "forex reserves" (foreign exchange reserves).

Since India cannot print its own money, India needs to produce things of value that other countries would want to buy from India with US dollars. At the rate things are going, ventilators might very well become the preferred reserve currency in the world. Also, since it is virtually impossible for any country to build everything its populace needs by itself, India will need to keep a strong forex reserve that can be deployed in times of national crises such as that triggered by COVID-19.

India also needs strong independent institutions rather than relying on regional or national level strong-men since strong institutions truly establish lasting trust in a country and its policies. The chaos caused by the sudden imposition of a nationwide lockdown imposed without thought given to food delivery, labor migration, etc. demonstrates the need for institutional clear-headedness and not personality-based leadership. Even in the US, President Trump had to follow the voices of reason coming from Drs. Fauci and Birx and extend the shutdown, despite wanting to open up the economy by Easter.

Finally, the death of a child due to starvation starkly illustrates the value of an Indian life, determined by the present day Indian government. In contrast, the low fatality rate in Germany shows the value of investment by a government into the wellbeing of its own people. I don't want to translate the fatality rates into a math equation: one German life is equal to x Indian lives type of an exchange rate, but that is the sad truth.

Manoj Kumar was wrong.