People at Work & Play

“Anything For You Ma’am: An IITian’s Love Story”, Srishti Publishers and Distributors, 2006, Rs. 100 is an entertaining book by Tushar Raheja.

It is the love story of an IIT Delhi student and graphically captures the spirit and culture of the IIT campus and of life in a typical middle class Indian household.

As a review in The Hindu says this novel is highly recommended for all veterans of campus life in India. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the book .

Congratulations, young Raheja. We look forward to more of your writings.

Saffola is a well known product in India. It comes from Marico.

Came across their very informative and useful site called Saffola Life.com.

To lower your cholesterol, the first steps usually involve making Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes (TLC). The National Cholesterol Education Panel (National Institute of Health- USA) guidelines recommend Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes, which include:

• Diet - A diet that is low in fat and cholesterol. This is important, because food (especially red meat and dairy products) is a major source of the excess fat and cholesterol in your body.
• Exercise - Helps reduce high cholesterol. Also helps reduce other risk factors for heart disease, such as high blood pressure.
• Weight loss - Reduces LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, increases HDL cholesterol. Also helps to lower blood pressure and diabetes.
• Not smoking - Quitting will raise your HDL cholesterol levels. When diet and exercise aren’t effective enough, doctors may prescribe cholesterol-lowering medication as an addition to diet and exercise

4 Indians die of heart disease every minute. Unlike in days past when heart attacks were more common in people in their 50s and beyond, today’s world sees relatively young people die in their 30s of heart attacks.

Isn’t it worth being careful?

Congratulations to Viswanathan Anand on becoming the World’s Chess Champion yesterday.

His victory gives India a lot to cheer about. The cricket team won the Twenty20 championship, Pankaj Advani became the World’s Billiards Champion and now comes Anand’s triumph.

“Let’s see what kind of reception I will get” asked the chess champ.

Pankaj Advani, who is only 21, has an enviable record in both billiards and snooker. He has won both the billiards and snooker world amateur titles.

Over a hundred countries celebrate World Heart Day today.

Heart disease and stroke is the world’s largest killer, claiming 17.5 million lives each year. That’s why World Heart Day was created, to create public awareness of risk factors for heart disease and stroke and to promote preventive measures.

Statistics suggest that South Asians seem more naturally vulnerable to heart disease than other ethnic groups. Lancet 2000 study showed that, even after adjusting for all known risk factors; South Asians in Canada appeared to have a higher rate of heart disease than Europeans or Chinese living there.

Nearly 95 percent of people who developed a fatal cardiovascular disease had at least one of these major risk factors: high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, diabetes besides a poor diet and overweight.

I had of course heard of IQ and EQ but GQ?

GQ turns out to be Google Quotient according to what I saw in Lena West’s blog Tech Forward.

The authors of Career Distinction: Stand Out By Building Your Brand, William Arruda and Kirsten Dixson have created an Online Identity Calculator to help you evaluate your current Google search saturation and relevance.

Interesting. Try it out for yourself. I did !

Onboarding is a crucial people process. The success of the onboarding program gets the new employee off to a good start.

Here are 7 reasons why onboarding programs fail:-

1. Each thinks it is the other’s responsibility. Lack of co-ordination between functions and people concerned make the new hire wander around unattended or pushed from pillar to post.
2. Existing employees do not support the program simply because nothing similar was done for them. They leave it to the new hire to “sink or swim”.
3. The new employee, especially the lateral hire, thinks he/she knows everything and does not give the program the attention it deserves. They miss out on issues of culture to their detriment later.
4. Managers are too “busy” and do not give the program the priority it deserves. They are quick to delegate the task to some one else.
5. Key elements of onboarding are delegated to those who are not competent enough to do it effectively
6. Too much information is loaded on to the new hire making them groan under the weight of huge amounts of detail, much of which are not needed for their own work.
7. The program is largely impersonal and the employee feels processed like a widget in an assembly line.

Apart from this, no program can give you insight into the “politcal” issues which simply must be learned through experience.

What factors have you come across which make a process so powerful in concept a failure in practice?

Very amusing title in an Economic Times article. “Spot The Cricketers Contest” . It’s amazing how our politicians are the first to hog the credit for something they have not done any thing to deserve. Apart from skipper M S Dhoni, no other cricketer got to sit in the first row.

It is reported in the Press that the Dy Chief Minister of Maharashtra spoke about Maratha glory , Shivaji Maharaj etc in his speech - in a function to felicitate India’s Twenty20 World Cup winning team. There were two players from Maharashtra in the team. One who did well, Rohit Sharma and another who did not do much, Ajit Agarkar. Awards of Rs 10 lakhs have been announced for both of them.

In a dig against Mr. Pawar, NCP chief and BCCI big chief “I think we should remind him that it was cricketers who won the cup and not his MLAs. Mr Pawar, it appears, has forgotten this small fact,” said BJP’s Gopinath Munde.

In case you are stuck for a topic to blog about, have a look at Chris Brogan’s blog.

He lists 100 topics you may like to write about. Interesting list.

I wondered how many of the 100 would get written about.

Should we add ” Thinking about Topics to Blog About” as a topic to blog about ?

The Red Zone , according to an article in The Fast Company , is a program started 3 years ago in the Boston Consulting Group to spot and tame chronic over workers. When a consultant averages more than 60 hours per week over any five weeks, he or she is flagged on reports seen by partners and managers.

What is striking is the effort made to get consultants to slow down and reduce risk of burn out in an industry characterized by long work hours.

Of course, hours of work is but one indicator. No one claims that the best achievements are from those who work most.

Do you want to have a variant of the Red Zone in your organisation ?

Very informative and interesting addition to my reading is The Juggle.

A blog in the Wall Street Journal (lead writer: Sara Schaefer Munoz ) on the choices and trade offs that people make as they juggle work and family.

I was interested to see that the issues discussed are almost universal. From Montana to Moscow, from Washington to Warsaw, the issues around balancing often conflicting demands between work and family are the same.

I guess because we are all human, right?