6 types of people you meet at the gym

We all have gone to the gym at some time of our life. Some to beef up, some to tone down and some just to have something to do in the evenings. No matter what category you are in, you must have come across these people at your gym.


1. The 'Rocky Balboa Uncle': He comes. He exercises. He conquers. Protein shake in one hand, bandana on his forehead and a music player playing eye of the tiger. They are the epitome of gym dedication. He will come everyday, some days he'll come twice. Rigorously do every single exercise on his exercise chart. Yes, he is perhaps the only one who uses it and follows it religiously. You don't want to be up against him in a marathon.


2. The 'Arnold Schwarzeneggggeradaeioweoiqe" guy: This guy makes you think of your life as the most worthless thing in existence. So you are doing your final set of bicep curl with the bad-ass 20 pounders and he starts his warm up with a 80. He makes all your time in the gym seem like a pitiful waste of time. The trainers all seem to flock to him, even though he clearly doesn't need them. Generally idolizes people like Salman Khan and Sunny Deol. We can all be like him, all we need to eat are 15 eggs a day and walk like theres a stick stuck between our arms and torso.


3. The 'pressure cooker': She's the one who whistles out a long and very high pitched phoooooooooo after every muscle exertion. Well this may not be a generality but every gym memory and gym story I have is incomplete without her. You could hear her as you got out of the elevator. Maybe channelling all that sound energy to food may even help in cooking it, who knows. Physics is a strange science.


4. The "Hot babe": Lets accept it. Every gym has at least one. The ultra beautiful creation of god who comes at such a time that sets the schedule of almost every other gymmer. We all want to talk to her, all want to work out next to her and we all fantasize about her (steam room, changing room, elevator etc.).  But at most the extent of our conversation will be limited to,
Me: Guess what, she spoke to me today. That too on her own!
Jealous Friend: WTF? kya hua? detail mein bol.
Me: She asked me at the health bar, "Please pass me the salt" !!
Friend: wooooowwwww, Im going to eat there everyday now.


5. The "Aaj to pakka body banaunga" guy: He comes in all pumped up. Hrithik Roshan photos inspire him and he dreams of having a perfect 6-pack every morning. His routine usually starts with the most strenuous exercise owing to all that adrenaline. A number 4 or number 2 around from the above categories pushes the macho in him off the charts. Theres nothing really wrong with him except that his workout usually ends with a stop at the local vada pao stall or the sandwich wala.


6. And lastly the "Kal se gym pakka" guy: All of us have been there, done that. Common reasons given by this person range from not feeling well because of last months gym session to having no time in their busy doing nothing schedule. These are people I respect a great deal. Even though they have the urge to do something to better their health, they are quite content in being procrastinators. As I read recently in a friends post, Life is too short to waste away in the gym anyway!


Let me be honest, I would fit somewhere between 5 and 6. Its a nice healthy place to be in. What about you?

Can you win a game without a strategy?

Imagine a game of chess where every piece is not related to the other. They all go out to battle on the board. They all try to win for themselves and not for each other. Put in another way, you play every move only with the intention of not losing on that move. There is no long term vision in the gameplay. What can be the possible outcomes? 
From where I'm looking at it, there can only be one. Fail.
Strategy. The thread that binds together all the individual components, tells us when to sacrifice a pawn to save the queen, when to sit quiet even when an easy target is available. Strategy.

To abstract this thought to a broader perspective, consider every piece on the chess board to be a person in the management hierarchy of an organization. Each piece is related to the other either implicitly or explicitly. Ones performance will influence the other in a particular way. Just like the bishop could influence the queens next move, an engineering tester can influence the plans of a middle manager and how he plans out the work structure.


The binders in a management structure are the different roles played by intermediaries, Liaison, Integration, Cross Linking of different groups and using of formal reports. Think of it as the Pawn telling the Rook, "Ok, so let me die this time around. That gives you a clear chance for his next 3 pieces". Similarly a Liaison role filled between a test engineer and the marketing guy brings them on the same page. He/She acts as a translator. "Ok Mr. Marketeer. The bottom-line is, our 'worlds most efficient' automobile is giving 5 miles/gallon. We need a new selling point!" Fast and efficient flow of information along the structure. The structure in focus here can be formed using one of many, or a combination of many from among,
1. Function 
2. Type of Product
3. Market for the Product
4. Hybrid: Matrix or Front/Back structure.

So now that a strategy that works is in place, with all the necessary connections between the ones who ensure its success, the next step would be evaluation. We did the splitting up of roles into individual parts and connected them using a strategy. But is it really taking us (the organization) anywhere? How do we gauge the effectiveness? Incentive based evaluation to bring back everyone on the same page! 


All these again circumvent to a same point. The importance of a good IT support structure for the management structure. Creating logs at every step keeps everyone in the loop about decisions being made and decisions to be made. It exemplifies that the success of a strategy depends in a big way on a successful IT infrastructure in the organization.


The bottom line of this thinking is, 
Firstly – don’t design your management systems to each be independently perfect – design them as a group to compensate for each other. 
And second, don’t get too hung up on which conceptual strategy, architecture, org structure etc. to occupy, simply use the ones that have the most power for you when you are addressing a specific issue. (easier said than done!!)


P.s. You never know, Gary Kasparov could be the one who holds all the secrets to a successful management strategy. He did beat Deep Blue! More on that later.. 

Tech"no"logy?

(The background behind this post lies heavily in a Management of Technical Organization lecture I attended this week. It was about how being in a technical organization can affect the management. Managing an IT company today is totally different from managing any other Technical company that focuses on physical outputs.)

1. What is technology?

2. Can it be 'defined'?

The answer to both those questions are very ambiguous. My answer to them is that Technology is change. Something, anything that is different.

There are people out there who criticize the premise of companies like Facebook, Twitter or even job hunt websites like Monster. How can they be termed technology companies when they don't have a sound infrastructure backing. Their argument being that tomorrow if Airbus were to go bust, they would have the financial authority to save themselves by selling their assets. Assets that are physical quantities. That are measurable. How would you recover money if a website valued at XYZ billion dollars suddenly collapses? They have nothing that can be termed a liquid asset. Facebook has 3200 employees answerable to 100 billion dollars of valuation! Compare that to 170000 people for a 56 billion company - Boeing. Is it a bubble that can burst tomorrow? I think not.

What makes companies like these successful is the Idea, the Idea of something different. It makes them a technology. Facebook has acquired cult status. But what makes it so different is the amount of information it has. It has managed to do what no one else could, it makes information sharing 'Cool' and essential at the same time. No single enterprise has had so much information about people ever before. In the economic sense, technology can be anything that will lead to an objective. The objective may or may not be tangible. It can be money, happiness or innovation. Emphasis is change again.

However the drawback of an IT company is the environment in which it functions. They seem to dig their own grave. Lenin once said that a capitalist will sell you the rope to hang yourself. Its an exaggeration of a basic idea, can you keep up with your progress? The IT world is changing at a pace that is hard to keep up with, even by the companies involved in the trade. Management of such organizations cannot be on par with something like Boeing or GE. They cannot function in bureaucracy. The rules and limitations of it will act as barriers and not guidelines.

Change is good. Change is needed. Facebook updates its features every few months or so. It might be annoying to get friendly with them initially but thats what makes it tick. And it completes the circle by coming back to the same point.

Technology is change. Change that is good.

This post critiques some ideas and is an abstraction from this article from The Economist.