A really long time ago, I’d written this blog post about “comparative advantage” versus “competitive advantage” employees. A competitive advantage employee is better at a particular kind of task or skill compared to the rest of the team, and he is valued for that kind of skill. A comparative advantage employee, on the other hand,…
Ratings revisited
Sometimes I get a bit narcissistic, and check how my book is doing. I log on to the seller portal to see how many copies have been sold. I go to the Amazon page and see what are the other books that people who have bought my book are buying (on the US store it’s…
Freelancing and transaction costs
In the six years of running my own consulting business, I’d forgotten about an essential part that you need to endure as part of a job – piecemeal work. It is fairly often when you’re working for someone else that you get work that is so tiny or insignificant that you can hardly take ownership…
The (missing) Desk Quants of Main Street
A long time ago, I’d written about my experience as a Quant at an investment bank, and about how banks like mine were sitting on a pile of risk that could blow up any time soon. There were two problems as I had documented then. Firstly, most quants I interacted with seemed to be solving…
Introverts and extroverts
I find the classification of people into introverts and extroverts to be rather simplistic. While it is bad enough that people are commonly classified into one of these, you also have metrics such as the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) that formalise this classification, with top consulting firms actively using such classifications in their day-to-day work.…
How power(law)ful is your job?
A long time back I’d written about how different jobs are sigmoidal to different extents – the most fighter jobs, I’d argued, have linear curves – the amount you achieve is proportional to the amount of effort you put in. And similarly I’d argued that the studdest jobs have a near vertical line in the…
Slavedriver sandwich
Something that happened at home earlier today reminded me of my very first full-time job, which I had ended up literally running away from barely two months after I’d started. I like to call this the “slavedriver sandwich”. The basic problem is this – you need to get someone you normally have no influence over…
Medium stats
So Medium sends me this email: Congratulations! You are among the top 10% of readers and writers on Medium this year. As a small thank you, we’ve put together some highlights from your 2016. Now, I hardly use Medium. I’ve maybe written one post there (a long time ago) and read only a little bit (blogs…
The Chamrajpet model of leadership
When you are doing a group assignment (assuming you’re in college) and you get assigned your share of the work, the assumption is that the allocation of work across team members has been fair. Good group leaders try to ensure this, and also to split work according to the relative interests and strengths of different…
The Ramayana and the Mahabharata principles
An army of monkeys can’t win you a complex war like the Mahabharata. For that you need a clever charioteer. A business development meeting didn’t go well. The potential client indicated his preference for a different kind of organisation to solve his problem. I was about to say “why would you go for an army of…
Planning and drawing
Fifteen years ago I had a chemistry teacher called Jayanthi Swaminathan. By all accounts, she was an excellent teachers, and easily one of the best teachers in the school where she taught me. Unfortunately I don’t remember much of what she taught me, the only thing I remember being her constant refrain to “plan and…
Marketing
I’m in a conversation with a friend on marketing my consulting services and he gave me a most genius piece of advice You can say you do supervised learning instead of saying regressions. Last month I was at this big data conference. Everyone I met said they were into big data or analytics or some…
Law of conservation of talent
For starters. there is no such law. However, there exists a belief in most people’s minds that everyone is equally talented, and it is only that talent in different people is spread across different dimensions. It starts when you are in school. If you are not good at maths, people tell you that you must…
Long mails
As you might have noticed from my blog posts over the years, I like writing long essays. By long, I mean blog post long. Somewhere of the length of 800-1000 words. I can’t write longer than that, because of which my attempts to write a book have come to nought. Now, thanks to regular blogging…
Networking eatings
Given that I’m a freelancer and do several things to earn my money, and that there is no consistency in my income flow, I need to do a lot of “networking”. Essentially, this is about generally catching up with someone over an informal chat, discussing what we do, and exploring if there were any synergies…
Numbers and management
I learnt Opeations Research thrice. The first was when I had just finished school and was about to go to IIT. My father had just started on a part-time MBA, and his method of making sure he had learnt something properly was to try and teach it to me. And so, using some old textbook…
CEO Presentations and Rocky Movies
As part of my consulting assignment, yesterday I had to make a presentation to the CEO of my client. The process of preparing the presentation reminded me of Rocky (or any other Martial Arts movie). In these movies, before the protagonist can challenge the antagonist, he has to go through a series of underlings. Only…
Generalists and specialists
So you have generalists and specialists. Generalists are fundamentally smart people who can do a variety of things. They take a look at a problem, take some time to understand the basics, and then go about solving it. They get bored easily, and move from problem to problem. Generally, they don’t dig deep but are…
Detail
Detail is the devil. That’s my big problem in life. I’m fundamentally clumsy and prone to errors, and don’t have much of an eye for details. I tend to make a lot of silly mistakes. So whenever I’ve to do some task that requires precision, it requires me to put in way too much energy,…
I’ve done it yet again
I quit my job earlier this week. I did so on Wednesday, the fourteenth. In hindsight, I should have waited another day and quit on the fifteenth, to coincide with the anniversary of the demise of Lehman Brothers. So for the fourth time in five years of career, I’ve quit a job without knowing where…
Internal Conflict
When a bunch of friends and I described ourselves as a pantheon a few years back, I was War. Part of the reason was that in Hindu Mythology Karthik is the God of War, but more importantly, I was War because I was always at war with myself. With three others being conveniently called Disease,…