Nirvana

Effectiveness must be learned as an executive is paid for being effective asserts Drucker, the management guru.  Effectiveness is the ability to get the right things done and is a habit, a complex of practices that have to be acquired. Outlined below are the steps that could make you more effective according to his book “The Effective Executive” ( A soft copy of this book is also available at Asiaing)

• Record where the time goes (Know thy time) and analyze the executive’s time (pruning of unnecessary activities) - this action alone will make a man more effective. He needs to be able to dispose of time in fairly large chunks for maximum effectiveness.  Identify the time wasters which follow from lack of system or foresight. A crisis that recurs a second time is a crisis that must not occur again. The recurrent crisis is simply a symptom of slovenliness and laziness.

• Focus outwards on your contribution to the organization with concern for results rather than efforts and stress on responsibility.  Think through who uses your output and what the user needs to know. Focus on contribution supplies four basic requirements of effective human relations : communications, teamwork, self-development and development of others.
  • What is the most important contribution I can make to the performance of this organization?
  • What self-development do I need? What knowledge and skills do I need to make the contribution and what standards do I have to set myself?

• Making strengths productive - integrate individual purpose and organization needs appropriately.  One has a pretty good idea whether one works better in the morning or at night. One knows whether one works best by making a great many drafts or one meticulous session.
  • What are the things that I seem to be able to do with relative ease ? To be effective he builds on what he can do and does it the way hr has found out works best. One feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.

• First things first and one thing at a time.  Identify priorities by
  • Picking future as against the past
  • Focus on opportunity rather than on problem
  • Choose your own direction
  • Aim High, aim for something that will make a difference.

• Effective decision concerns with rational action. Effective decisions do not flow from consensus of facts but from clash and conflict of divergent opinions.

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Call him ruthless, Call him a visionary.

Call him unscrupulous, Call him a genius.

Call him an opportunist, call him an innovative thinker.

Paying homage to the greatest dealmaker of all times.

A revolutionary with his footprints deeply entrenched in computers, music and movies.

Steve Jobs.

How do u like them apples?

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• Book : The Code Book by Simon Singh

• Genre : Non-Fiction

• Theme : Cryptography, History

• Rating : *****

I have been intending to read “The Fermat’s Last Theorem” by the same author for sometime now, having devoured “The Man who knew Infinity” by Robert Kanigel, and “A Mathematician’s Apology” by Thomas Hardy. I picked this book up at a local bookstore piqued by the number of copies on display - now I am glad I did!

The Code Book introduces the layman to the exciting world of cryptography and it’s evolution from medieval times to the present century influencing the history of mankind. The race between the codemaker in his quest for an unbreakable cipher and the codebreaker in his zeal to decrypt the cipher has been captured vividly and elaborately.
The book narrates the use of translation/substitution ciphers using keywords during the early times, unraveling of secrets using frequency analysis and leading to more complex ciphers like Vigenere cipher. The author details on Atbash ciphers, Dead Sea Scrolls and the Arabic world being the pioneers of frequency analysis to break codes.

The chapters on the Enigma ciphers and heiroglyphics were fascinating and very informative. The author lucidly details the role played by cryptographers in the First and Second World Wars and how they affected their outcome. Along the way, one encounters famous personalities like Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Thomas Young, Diffie and Charles Bennett and their roles in the development of cryptography . The book culminates focusing on advances in public key cryptography, PGP, RSA and quantum cryptography.

Overall, absolutely riveting and highly recommended.

Key Areas :

Substitution Ciphers - Monoalphabetic,

Translation ciphers

Frequency Analysis

Dead Sea Scrolls, Atbash cipher

Vigenere Cipher

Beale Cipher

Charles Babbage

Thomas Young - Heiroglyphics, Linear B

Alan Turing - Enigma, Zimmerman Telegram

Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie - Key Distribution, public key cryptography,PGP

RSA - Security,asymmetric cipher, prime numbers, factors

Charles Bennett - Quantum Cryptography

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• Novel: Blindness by Jose' Saramago

• Genre: Fiction

• Theme: Noir, profound and unprecedented

• Rating: *****

I had not heard about this fictional novel till conversing with one of my colleagues a couple of months ago. He had earlier recommended 'Life of Pi' by Yann Martel to me which I found fascinating and rich in content. When he told me that he had recently read Blindness and gave me the gist of the novel, I didn't find it convincing or interesting. Nevertheless, I surfed the net for any reviews and all of them were positive, if not superlative - enough to order my own copy online.Coming to the book, Blindness is a novel by a former Nobel Prize Winner - Jose' Saramago by name. The English version is translated by Giovanni Pontiero from Portuguese. An epidemic of "white blindness" strikes a city and spreads sparing no one except one character - a doctor's wife. As the epidemic spreads, the blind are quarantined in secluded places - the novel weaves a gripping and chilling tale about their hardship, their psyche and the chaos gripping the entire country.

The story is unique and distinctive, so is the author's style - after reading the first few pages, I observed that all the conversations between the characters were separated by commas and flowed without any punctuations. My presumption is that the author wanted to add this as a backdrop to bring out the anarchy in the novel - if that was the intent, he has done so inimitably. I took a longer time to complete this novel due to this oddity - it is very easy to get confused with who said what to whom. Another intriguing feature of this novel is that none of the characters/places have a name, the characters are referred to oddly as - the doctor, the doctor's wife, the girl with the dark glasses, the first blind man etc.

The author focusses on seven piligrims and their tribulations as they wallow in a society without any order and a putrefied city with a dearth of food and water. One of them, as said earlier, is a doctor's (ironically an ophthamologist) wife with no loss of vision. How she guides the six others in her group and overcomes all the distress is the main theme of this novel. The story is compulsive, touching and indeed disturbing interspersed with the author's perceptive comments - he writes that losing one's vision is equivalent to losing one's soul.

As the story ran through, I could not help but wonder would life be any different if the whole incident were real. Also, I was on very edge eagerly awaiting the author's climax - i was not disappointed.

I wish that I could read the original - I feel that I would have appreciated it even more. I highly recommend this novel, it's right up there with the all-time bestsellers - Not for the squeamish though!

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