While good managers have always been required to be analytical, the level of analytical ability being asked of managers has been going up over the years, with the increase in availability of data. Now, this post is once again based on that one single and familiar data point – my wife. In fact, if you…
The missing middle in data science
Over a year back, when I had just moved to London and was job-hunting, I was getting frustrated by the fact that potential employers didn’t recognise my combination of skills of wrangling data and analysing businesses. A few saw me purely as a business guy, and most saw me purely as a data guy, trying…
Statistics and machine learning approaches
A couple of years back, I was part of a team that delivered a workshop in machine learning. Given my background, I had been asked to do a half-day session on Regression, and was told that the standard software package being used was the scikit-learn package in python. Both the programming language and the package…
Why data scientists should be comfortable with MS Excel
Most people who call themselves “data scientists” aren’t usually fond of MS Excel. It is slow and clunky, can only handle a million rows of data (and nearly crash your computer if you go anywhere close to that), and despite the best efforts of Visual Basic, is not very easy to program for doing repeatable…
Meaningful and meaningless variables (and correlations)
A number of data scientists I know like to go about their business in a domain-free manner. They make a conscious choice to not know anything about the domain in which they are solving the problem, and instead treat a dataset as just a set of anonymised data, and attack it with the usual methods.…
More issues with Slack
A long time back I’d written about how Slack in some ways was like the old DBabble messaging and discussion group platform, except for one small difference – Slack didn’t have threaded conversations which meant that it was only possible to hold one thread of thought in a channel, significantly limiting discussion. Since then, Slack…
Generalist and specialist managers
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,…
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 nature of the professional services firm
This is yet another rejected section from my soon-t0-be-published book Between the buyer and the seller. In 2006, having just graduated from business school, I started my career working for a leading management consulting firm. This firm had been one of the most sought after employers for students at my school, and the salary they offered…
Scott Adams, careers and correlation
I’ve written here earlier about how much I’ve been influenced by Scott Adams’s career advice about “being in top quartile of two or more things“. To recap, this is what Adams wrote nearly ten years back: If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to…
Selling yourself for job and consulting
So for the first time in over eight years, I’m looking for a job. This was primarily prompted by my move to London earlier this year – a consulting business where you rely on networks rather than a global brand to get new business cannot be easily transplanted. Moreover, as I’d written a year back,…
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…
Scott Adams’s advice and career options
Some five years back, I took a piece of advice from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. A few years earlier, he had blogged that there are two ways in which one can be successful in a career – But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1. Become the best at one specific thing. 2.…
Banks starting to eat FinTech’s lunch?
I’ve long maintained that the “winner” in the “battle” for payments will be the conventional banking system, rather than one of the new “wallet” or “payment service providers”. This view is driven by the advances being made by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) which is owned by a consortium of banks. First there…
On writing a book
While I look for publishers for the manuscript that I’ve just finished (it’s in “alpha testing” now), I think it’s a good time to write about what it was like to write the book. Now, I should ideally be writing this after it has been published and declared a grand success. But there are two…
The problem with Slack, and why it’s inferior to DBabble
When two of the organisations I’m associated with introduced me to the chatting app Slack, it reminded me of the chatting app DBabble (known to us in IIMB as BRacket) that was popular back when I was in college. There were two primary reasons because of which Slack reminded me of DBabble. The first was the presence of…
Matt Levine describes my business idea
When I was leaving the big bank I was working for (I keep forgetting whether this blog is anonymous or not, but considering that I’ve now mentioned it on my LinkedIn profile (and had people congratulate me “on the new job”), I suppose it’s not anonymous any more) in 2011, I didn’t bother looking for…
Letters to my wife
As I turned Thirty Three yesterday, my wife dug up some letters (emails to be precise) I’d written to her over the years and compiled them for me, urging me to create at “Project Thirty Four” (on the lines of my Project Thirty). What is pleasantly surprising is that I’ve actually managed to make a…
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…