Management – Muthu’s Musings

My 2018 Book Recommendation

Every once in a while we come across an interesting book that questions your assumptions, derails your beliefs and yet in a profound way affects your thoughts. Last year I picked up this innocuous looking, although bold book “Courage to be Disliked – The Japanese Phenomenon that shows you How to change your life and achieve Real Happiness” by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Kaga. The title itself is quite a mouthful but the book is a light read of around 288 pages written in a conversational manner between a philosopher and a student. Whole book talks about Alfred Adler’s Teleology (study of the purpose of a given phenomenon rather than cause as believed by Freud)

The important thing is not what one is born with but what use one makes of that equipment – Adler

While the Freudean Idea believes that a person’s past psychic wounds (traumas) cause present unhappiness, Adler proposes that we don’t suffer from traumas but we make out of them whatever suits our purposes. We lack courage to change our lives and find excuses in our past. No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on. Attributes all problems to interpersonal relationship problems.

Here are some other ideas:

It’s enough to move forward and no need to compare with others. Try to strive for your better self than trying to “keep up with the joneses”
Human beings are not the same but are equal. Concept of promoting horizontal hierarchies (equal) rather than vertical hierarchies (hierarchical)
One must not seek recognition which promotes vertical relationships. When one person praises another, the goal is to manipulate someone who has less ability than you not due to gratitude or respect. Encouragement enables one to complete their tasks.
Identify your tasks from others’ tasks and ensure you don’t trample on others’ tasks and don’t let others trample on yours
Happiness is a result of feeling of contribution to the society, i.e., by doing your job that indirectly helps others or doing social service or anything else
Life is always simple not something one needs to get too serious about
Greatest life-lie of all is not to live here and now
People are comrades, and the world is a wonderful place
Do not look at the past, and do not look at the future, live in the earnest
If “I” change, the world will change
and many others ….

I had to read twice to make sense out of this simple narrative. It certainly helped me put things in perspective and highly encourage you to read it.

Leadership in exceptional situations

**Spoiler alert for Episode 4, Season 7**

Being an avid fan of Game of Thrones, I constantly review the situations and how it relates to leadership and strategy. Daenerys Targaryen took a decision and attacked the Lannister army against the counsel of Tyrion and Varys. Is this the right decision? Let us review the context in which the decision was made. Euron attacked Greyjoy fleet and the took away the Sand Snakes destroying her entire naval fleet. Jaime attacked High Garden and took the Gold and food back to King’s landing. The victory of Grey Worm attacking Casterly Rock was useless as the Lannisters removed everything from the castle and left skeletal army to defend it.

She could have listened to Tyrion and followed the approach he recommended. This would have been a conservative move. She was seething with rage and had to take an action. Here is where her leadership shines. She listened to the wise men but not satisfied with the strategy and came up with her own plan. As leaders we encounter such situations where we listen to the team for guidance but make our own decisions. This is critically important to establish yourself as a leader.

You may encounter a setback while executing the decision similar to how the dragon gets injured by the arrow. We need to anticipate such failures but they need to be few and far in between, otherwise you risk getting fired from your position. While it is easy to conform to the decision of bosses, peers and team members, there are situations where you may have to make your own decisions. Daenerys has altruistic intentions for ruling the seven kingdoms. As a result she listened to Tyrion and did not attack King’s landing and raze it to ground with her dragons. However she felt that such inaction has costed her naval fleet and food supplies from High Garden. Therefore she took the dragon and dothrakis and destroyed Lannister. Viewers got satisfaction in punishing the evil Lannisters.

As leaders, we need to get as much information about the situation through data, wise counsels and/or AI to evaluate but make decisions that would benefit the organization. With that said, in a mature organizations decisions are made collectively and stakeholders may disagree but commit to the common goal.

Share your thoughts below.

Why Domain Driven Design (DDD) is getting popular?

The concept of Domain Driven Design has been popularized by Eric Even’s book “Domain Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software” in 2003. Not much attention was paid at that time since the industry was recovering from the “Dotcom Bubble” and the applications developed were not as complex as we see today. Fast forward fifteen years and our worlds have changed. Businesses has evolved and startups have disrupted traditional industries successfully.

At the core of Domain Driven Design, Eric describes three main premises:

Project’s focus is on the domain and domain logic
Complex designs are based on a model of domain
Continuous collaboration between technical and domain experts to iteratively refine the model to address domain problems

By following this philosophy, big projects are chunked out into smaller projects based on distinct domain components. These small projects are assigned to independent teams for completion. By dividing the project into business specific domain and domain components a modular system is built. These business functions in the domains are reusable and over a period of time, there will enough parts that could be assembled together to solve an entirely new business domain problem.

The DDD encourages continuous collaboration with the business domain owners which is not unlike any Agile project that has business/product owners. The difference is that in DDD, both technical and business teams use the same jargon while discussing the domain problem and build software components that will directly address the business need. An important point to note is that development is not driven by latest and greatest technology but by the business and the software development teams can adopt a new technology only when the business domain problem couldn’t be solved using existing software.

In summary, DDD is not a new architectural pattern, but it affects how architectural decisions are made and the functions within the teams. Overall organizational leadership support, both business and technology, is essential since adoption of DDD may increase the cost initially but will taper off as more and more modular components are built.

Lessons from Cuckoo Clock

I am not sure when it started but it must be an Hollywood movie that showed a cuckoo clock that started my fascination for them. Growing up in a middle class family of seven siblings, I can only dream of such things. Well, I am happy to tell you that after 30 years my dream came true. It was much later in life I learned that Cuckoo clocks are made from Germany. So for Christmas, my wife and I were thinking of buying us some gift and I suggested the cuckoo clock and she agreed right away. So I decided to do some research on the clocks.

The clocks are made from the Black Forest wood. There are few companies such as Rombach und Haas, Anton Schneider among others that make these clocks. As you know, the first place you search for such items is in Amazon. So I dug through hundreds of listings to find the perfect one. While I was amazed at the numbers, it was impossible to find the authentic original cuckoo clock. Most of them were cheap fakes or made in China with plastic. I almost gave up and accidentally searched Google to come upon an European seller that had some original clocks. That does not give any confidence as they also could sell fakes. I found out that there is an agency in Germany called VDAS that certifies the clocks. You should know that they only certify mechanical clocks and not the quartz clocks. This would entail somebody winding the clock every once in a while. I recall my dad winding a big wall clock every Sunday growing up. Nowadays, I am sure everybody uses the quartz wall clocks which just need battery replacement once in a while but not every week. The clocks come in two types, 1-day or 8-day winding. The decision at this point was to go with mechanical since we get the certificate of authenticity and an 8-day so that I inherit my dad’s duties. The final decision was to settle on a manufacturer. We reviewed and found Rombach und Haas to be the best but expensive with slightly over budget. Then there was the holiday sale and we got some discount. So I ordered it and was delivered after four weeks. When it arrived my wife and I have identified the spot where it will hang and fixed it. There we were happy to have finally accomplished the childhood dream and my younger son runs down the hall whenever the clock strikes the hour to watch the bird. He tries to observe it closely. Everything was fine until my wife complained that she could not sleep due to the bird chirping every half hour. Luckily for me when I initially reviewed the features I found one where you have the mechanism to suppress the noise and decided to order the clock with this mechanism that saved me. Now we just suppress it during the night and enable it during morning.

As a manger, I can see valuable lessons in this process. Once you decide on the need to procure an item or resource you need to do your due diligence. While some products can be cheap and save money in the short run, it could hurt you in the long run. You may have get a quality product that can last longer. Along the way you may have to compromise ( winding the clock) and be proactive In identifying features that are not defined in requirements ( noise suppression mechanism). When you do the comparison, pay attention to the stability of the company for support needs (Rombach und Haas has been in business since 1894). Finally build a product that can outlast your lifetime.