Month: September 2018

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.

College Decision

I clearly remember the day when my dad enrolled me in college and left. Education in India and for that matter specifically in Tamil Nadu is very straightforward. You work hard to get good grades and take the entrance exam. Your selection to the top colleges is based on the rankings which is a combination of the two. If you are on top, there are no doubts about getting into the top ranking colleges. Very simple and efficient.

Whereas, the higher education in the US is very complex and the choices are limitless. For a senior, especially one with 3.96 GPA, 12 APs above 4, working a part-time job, participating in National honor society by volunteering hours at the community, doing a senior project in robotics, achieved brown belt in Karate, likes mainstream rappers as well as obscure ones and of course crazy about the NFL, NBA team stats of the players, the choices are even more complicated.

His dream was to become a Mechanical Engineer and complete the MBA program to become an entrepreneur. I am glad he was so specific about his objectives considering the fact that, I wanted to become a Civil Engineer but within few weeks I changed to Electrical and Electronics, now I work in IT.

He was admitted to University of California, Berkeley and Barrett Honors College in Arizona State University. Both very different colleges with very different offerings. A quick comparison will tell you that Berkeley far surpasses Arizona State University and there should not even be a decision involved here to pick the right choice. This is what meets everybody’s eyes but my son chose Barrett in ASU for the reasons below. I am writing this blog post for anyone who are debating on the choices.

The comparison cited above compares the bigger Arizona State University with 70,000 students with UC Berkeley and does not take into consideration the Barrett College within ASU. Barrett is the honors college with around 2000 freshman and was started to capture and retain the extraordinary student talent within Arizona. Berkeley does not have a comparable college and their take is that everybody here is  an exceptional achiever. This is good and bad. Good because it is a level playing field for all the resources available and bad because the students have to work very very hard to the point of burning out to compete with each other.

With Barrett honors, the students are given priority student advisement and are provided with world class housing and dining options which are otherwise not available to the regular students. The Barrett program is isolated from the University and has its own boundaries. The housing is spectacular when compared to the old dilapidated structures in Berkeley (they really are and we were surprised). These Honors students are given opportunities to participate in Research during their undergraduate year wheres in Berkeley it would be next to impossible to get access to these opportunities. Another distinguishing factor was that the entire faculty in Barrett are dedicated to supporting the limited number of freshman when compared to the large number in Berkeley.

With regards to the machine shop, we were made aware in Berkeley that only Junior students are provided access and can tinker things. With Barrett the students will have the opportunities in Freshman when they can sign up for EPICS program that will make them tinker to solve a community problem.

Being the resident of the state and for his academic excellence he got a full tuition ride in Barrett with a Presidential scholarship. It may be a different situation if the college costs were comparable to Barrett when the decision would have been equalized. However, our situation was unique and will be different for different individuals.

Though part of me was siding with Berkeley, my son made the decision easier when he signed up for the orientation and enrolled himself in Barrett. According to him, he would like to complete the undergraduate in Barrett and pursue his graduate studies in out-of-state university although Barrett has a 4+1 program in which he can earn his graduation in 5 years. He said, “Dad I would rather be a big fish in small pond rather than a small fish in a big pond” and I was speechless.

Fast forward four years, he is out of ASU and came out with flying colors. We don’t doubt his decision and he is pursuing his dreams.