Thums Up and Misplaced Patriotism

It must have been some time in the 1990s in India when the government allowed Coca Cola back into India. In my patriotic zeal propelled by teenage absolutism, I decided I would only drink the Indian brand "Thums Up," a cola that had a similar color and flavor as Coke. Thums Up was made by a company called Parle Products and it was bottled at a factory not far from our flat. Within days, I read the announcement that the owner of Parle Products had sold his company to Coca Cola. He had looked out for his own financial interest, and made me realize how naive I was to not think of mine. 

I thought of this story because of the convergence of a few events:

1. The CHIPS for America Act
2. India awarding contracts for trains to European Alstom
3. Honor's withdrawal from India

The CHIPS act has laudable goals to ensure that the US does not lose competitiveness in semiconductors. As long as the equipment to make semiconductors, the tools to design them, and the latest designs to use that equipment all originate from the US, then does it really matter where the actual chip gets manufactured in volume? The geographical closeness of Taiwan and South Korea to China and China's growing aggression in the Taiwan Strait seem to be the key reasons why this act was needed to secure continued supply of semiconductors. One can fully expect a future where the most advanced chips will be made in China, with our without American help. At that point, we'd just be artificially limiting our own access to lifestyle improvements made with Chinese technology.

Now let's take the case of the gradual build out of slow "metro railways" in India and the uncertainty of the rollout of the first "bullet train." By picking Alstom and Japan based companies, the Government of India is very likely penalizing the Indian populace by paying more for technology that's been most widely deployed in China. I had made a similar argument when India was picking mobile network technologies. National security concerns can be allayed technologically.

Finally, and Indian customer feeling patriotic and buying a more expensive local brand over a cheaper Chinese brand is doing disservice to himself, just like I was, when I stuck with Thums Up. Let's say a local manufacturer, takes a local loan and builds an inferior phone. Is that the best utilization of capital? Even with the self-evident assumption that all people are equally capable, the phone will likely be inferior because the local manufacturer does not have the same sales volume, supplier discounts, research and development as would a higher volume Chinese manufacturer.

References

1. Titles - H.R.7178 - 116th Congress (2019-2020): CHIPS for America Act | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
2. https://www.railadvent.co.uk/2022/07/alstom-wins-order-to-supply-52-metro-trains-to-india.html
3. Former Huawei smartphone sub-brand Honor said to withdraw team from India amid geopolitical tensions | South China Morning Post (scmp.com)

India at 75. A commentary on freedom.

Freedom is the ability to act without fear. The actions could be speaking one's mind, opening a business, traveling to destination of one's choice and even to do nothing at all. Freedom is enabled by personal security. Security against hunger, security that comes with shelter and security that your individual plan for life will not be upset by the changes around you. What is the pursuit of happiness other than the feeling that you can work yourself to a better situation by acquiring the education and the skills you think you need? These thoughts come to mind on the occasion of India's 75th Independence Day. I am an American citizen now, but I feel I can credibly express some fresh perspectives on freedom.

1. Is everyone in India free? The answer is clearly no. Kashmiris aren't free. Nagas want freedom. The land belongs to the people and the people should be able to decide if they want to be associated with a certain country or they want to be by themselves. My Gujarati family emigrated to Maharashtra generations ago. I think Maharashtra would do better as a free country. It doesn't make sense for Maharashtra to send money to the central government when farmers in its own province Vidarbha commit suicide when crops fail. The central government was created by the British to manage India. Unfortunately, we Indians have been trained to think that the political party in power in Delhi is indistinguishable from India.
2. The meaning of the word Adivasi is - early resident. If land ownership were to be decided by who occupied the land first, then India belongs to Adivasis. Everyone else must start paying rent to the Adivasis for occupying their land. It's not as ridiculous as it sounds. We, Indians have been paying tax to the occupiers for a long time, just not the Adivasis. We paid taxes to the Rajas and the Maharajas, to the Nawabs and the Chhatrapatis, to the Sultans and the Peshwas. We are used to propping up royalty with our labor and bowing before them. What justifies forcibly paying a portion of the income to a state? Clearly, my family must have thought that they have better prospects in Maharashtra. Maybe we were escaping the plunder caused by foreigners in Gujarat and accepted the terms of staying in Maharashtra. I  have emigrated to the US for similar reasons - better prospects. Freedom is perhaps the ability to pick whom to pay taxes. Had the people of Arunachal Pradesh been a part of China, their per capita income would have been $17,200 per annum instead of $2,453, in terms of purchasing power parity. Of course one can't put a price on escaping the Cultural Revolution, but it does make me pause for thought that an accident of geography would have changed the lives of so many people depending on which side of an imaginary line they landed upon.
3. One aspect of freedom is the ability to travel worldwide. With an American passport, I can travel to Europe, Japan, Australia, Korea, Canada, etc. without a visa. I am the same person I was - brown skin, Indian looks, but the paper I carry lets me travel freely. If I were in India, I would have to get a travel visa by first proving that I have a strong reason to return to India. Why would a foreign country want proof that Indians want to return home before granting a visa? The answer is the stark difference in the quality of life and the emigration statistics. A vast majority of Indians prefer the higher quality of life - good schools, roads, affordable houses, cars, ability to practice religion freely, etc. available in developed countries. Unless we are educated, developed countries feel like we would not contribute to their national advancement and that makes it harder to get a visa. Unless the Indian passport works without a visa, Indians should not believe any rhetoric from the Indian leadership about the worldwide respect for the Tiranga, and that India sets an example to the world, as sometimes claimed by flag waving Indians.

Neither Ambedkar, whom I greatly admire, nor the American founding fathers had the perfect vision for a just future. The constitution, laws, rules must be relegated to their appropriate position - subordinate to the welfare of people. True freedom is still far away.

Kuntal.

Engineers for Human Rights

A peaceful progressive society is built upon human rights being respected. With large chunks of everyday life being driven from our phones, it is time we set up a code of conduct for engineers who work on building those devices and associated technologies based on connected devices. The code of conduct should be used by conscientious engineers to take concrete decisions everyday, such as: project choice, hiring decisions, career progression, research subject choice, etc.

The technologies of concern that can lead to human rights violations when abused are: biometric tracing (facial recognition, emotion estimation, etc.), drone warfare (autonomously or remotely powered drones), communications (instant messaging, audio and video calls, emails), content filtering (authenticity, hate content, manipulative content, recommendation algorithms) and medical devices (remote health monitoring, nerve interfaces).

Code of Conduct

1. I will not enable technologies that strip away individual privacy.
2. I will build technologies that take human differences into account, with regards to physical differences, speech and cognitive ability.
3. When I test my technology, I will ensure that it doesn't work unless the logging, audit and reporting mechanisms function as designed.
4. I will enable data erasure on a personal device. I will not enable data erasure on a government device.
5. The default mode of operation for my technologies will be set to private and encrypted.
6. I will not build mass surveillance technology.
7. I will not enable machines that kill.
8. I will not build technologies that prey on or attempt to indoctrinate vulnerable people.
9. I will restrict the license to use my technology so that it can only be used in a way that human rights are not violated.
10. I acknowledge fundamental limits to understanding humans and will not work on technologies that identify emotions, ascertain guilt, etc.
11. I will educate myself on whistleblowing laws and use them appropriately when asked to do something that conflicts with my conscience.

While there are legitimate reasons for law enforcement to be using the technologies available to keep the society safe, it is up to engineers to build safeguards from misuse. As someone who intends to follow the points listed above, I would not hire an engineer who works for the NSO Group company that enabled governments around the world to tap into journalists' private communications.

If you're a student, I'd encourage you to take a look at UConn's excellent Engineering for Human Rights Initiative to plan your courses and join some organizations. While I don't have personal experience with them, it seems to provide good guidance on how next generation engineers could develop a social sense. After graduation, you may also consider joining the On-Call Scientists. For further reading: despite suffering from rigor mortis on the executive side, the UN does produce good quality documentation: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Regards,

Kuntal.

QCOM Stock

QCOM stock की यह दिक्कत

Market गरम तो stock गुनगुना

और market नीचे तो छूटे पसीना

बेचारे Cristiano पर आई मुसीबत

मुश्किल से Wall St. में जमाया वजूद

चंचल Fed ने यूं बदली हकीकत

तब छापे नकद और अब बढ़ाए सूद

How to rapidly kill innovation

 Is your company too innovative? Are your engineers reading material beyond their immediate assignment? Is your audio expert taking too much of an interest in machine learning? Is your corporate culture so strong that it needs to be whittled down to command and control of automatons?

Here are simple steps to make execution slower than a dried up slug: 

1. Divide your company into as many groups as possible
2. Handpick the least co-operative people and empower them to deny access requests
3. Classify the company knowledge into meaningless overlapping categories
4. Build elaborate processes around how each category is handled and revise those processes every few months
5. Further split the knowledge into Sharepoint, Teams and OneDrive folders, each with limited access permissions
6. Encrypt all information
7. Mandate usage of special tools to decrypt information that you already have access to.

On a more serious note, there are legitimate safeguards that a company needs to implement to keep its innovations from leaking out. One needs to implement them with limited scope and even then, emphasize that sharing knowledge enables the organization to be a learning organization that moves fast.

Here are my recommended steps:

1. Start with trust
2. Ensure that trusted people have unfettered access to the information they need
1. This means engineers get access to engineering documents
3. Limit access as required by regulation and by genuine business need
1. Earnings outlook, production and supply outlook, etc.
2. Acquisitions, divestitures, etc.
4. Watch points of ingress and egress
1. Lock down SD cards, USB sticks, private email, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.
2. Limit internet access to a list of reputed websites that are audited regularly
5. Eliminate usage of company devices for personal purposes
6. Accelerate the timeline from design to patent filing
7. Rapidly flag violations and include immediate supervisors in the violation notice
8. Design documents are naturally resistant to the most common attacks - such as pictures or screenshots - ensure wide availability of these documents since they increase organization intelligence
9. Audit regularly for company content on the public internet

Anything else is eventually making your organization slower and dumber. Talented people soon leave and that only accelerates the demise of the organization. 

Don't let your organization become a resting place for dead slugs. Rethink document access.

Transactional Coaches, not Gurus

A parable of good behavior that I was told as a child, was that if you're walking and you meet god and your teacher together, you must first greet your teacher since the teacher shows you the path to god.

Since Sanskrit is dead, and the general populace only understands smatterings of it, any shlok/mantr in Sanskrit is taken as the word of god. One such subterfuge is "gurur brahma, gurur vishnu, ...," which basically says that the guru is the boss of the universe.

Eklavya's story from the Mahabharat made me question who was on the side of dharm vs adharm. Eklavya learnt archery on his own, but gave misplaced credit to the guru Dronacharya, who had promised to make Arjun the best archer. So Dronacharya asked Eklavya to slice off his thumb off as dakshina, a tuition fee, to the guru, thereby enabling him to keep the promise made to Arjun.

The rampant abuse of people by the current generation of sri-sris, swamis, yogis and acharyas has been getting widespread public attention in recent years. It is time for modern Hindus to free themselves from the yoke of gurudom and think of people who guide them as transactional coaches. A transactional coach is takes on the role only for the duration of the transaction - no more. You need to play soccer well, you work with a soccer coach. You need to learn yoga, you work with a yoga coach, etc. 

No more spiritual mumbo jumbo. No more dakshinas than the established free market rate. This will enable the "tax" on the Hindu household that currently goes into maintaining the lifestyles of gurus to be used into more productive community building activities.

A coach is an experienced person who has spent years absorbing the field he's coaching about. Is advice from anyone else even legitimate? If Modi, a person who dropped out from school, starts to preach on how to perform well in exams, he needs to be vociferously ignored. Rahul Dravid's personal experience in the Indian national side has enabled him as the head of Indian Cricket's youth program, to keep a full pipeline of cricketers ready for the next level. He has picked winners such as Mohammed Siraj with regularity. 

A coach is able to identify weaknesses to improve upon and guide you on how to play to your strengths. But coaches are only that - experts in their field who get paid to provide guidance to improve. Their guidance is neither a favor to the player, nor indispensable to the player's growth. Granting a coach mythical guru-like stature simply enables abuses - whether in India or in the US at places like Penn State and US Gymnastics.

Have a good long weekend.

Kuntal.

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.