One of the twenty or so must read books mentioned in Poor Charlie’s Almanac is “Getting to Yes” - a principled approach to negotiations. It is an excellent and accessible read on getting to mutually agreeable outcome during negotiations ranging from salary to nuclear disarmament talks. For my present gig I commute between South San Francisco and San Jose on a not-so-enjoyable highway 101. Listening to books is a great way to utilize this time. In the book authors point out that one of the mistake parties make during the negotiation is just thinking about one’s own positions. Parties overlook the fact that the folks on the other side of table are humans too. Focusing on the basic human needs of security, appreciation, well being etc. would result in successful results for all parties.

While keeping the human nature in focus during negotiation is definitely fruitful, but I think this principle can be applied in general to a lot more situations. Especially while talking to people in authority. For example students can keep this in mind while talking to professors. Most of the time students would be focused on their own world and think professors are this abstract entities who are after their life giving assignments, asking them to review and re-review their assignments. Same goes for employees towards their managers etc. How many times any one thinks that professors or managers may have a life too. With loving wife and kids may be a dog too. Focusing on the human side of authorities would result in better and cordial relations.

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In a NY Times article “The Wealth Trajectory” Greg Mankiw, a Harvard Professor and a famous economics blogger explains the differences in earnings for average workers and the super rich. I found the following statistics good on value of education

In 2005, each year of college yielded an additional 12.9 percent. The rate of return from each year of graduate school has risen even more — from 7.3 to 14.2 percent.

Another thing to note for the premium on education is due to the age old supply and demand equation. The demand for educated people in the last few decades outpaced the supply there by raising the earnings of educated class. That also explains the reason for immigrant me being here.

But still education can take you limited distance on the path to super richness. The “real” reason for it seem to be being educated and lucky

Maybe educational levels are like Willie Wonka’s chocolate bars. A few of them come with golden tickets that give you opportunities almost beyond imagination. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to get a golden ticket, you can still enjoy the chocolate, which by itself is well worth the price.

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YouTube revolutionized the idea of embedding videos into websites. It was a matter of time before before various domain specific websites started embedding videos in their sites. There have been numerous job sites on the internet for job hunting. Now comes Nextjob for landing you the next job. They have a unique feature that the resume poster can embed a short video about himself and his skills. Kind of video resume. If you are in the job market do give them a try. Here is how a video resume looks like

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Having been in SAP for some years I get asked this question how to get into SAP as a career. I was writing this to a close friend of mine and thought of putting it on the blog. This advice is a rather first step to decide which stream to join in SAP -

1. Technology Consulting - understanding the architecture of various SAP solutions and advising the IT department of clients on what is best for them and then helping them implement it. Your end customers in this case is always IT department people. This is purely technical job :D Folks who work in this area are called technology consultants. On the first day of project you can recognize these guys as someone who is wearing a suit but is uncomfortable in it.
2. Business consulting - understanding the capabilities of SAP’s solutions and implementing them for the client’s business. For example let us say you manufacture bulbs - you have plants where you make them, you have suppliers who supply you materials, you have distributors who distribute your products and finally you have customers. Also don’t forget the employees. So you implement SAP solutions which take care of all these folks and the processes they are involved in. People who work in these areas are called functional consultants and they love to wear suits :D
3. Solution Delivery - both of the above activities could involve multi-month engagement with the end clients with a team of functional as well as technology consultants. This engagement would be called a project. There are folks whose main job is to deliver the on time within budget and scope delivery of these projects. These are your project managers. Usually PMs evolve organically from the above two roles. But you might see folks coming out of B-Schools directly jumping as PMs. This guy is a leader and can be seen very nervous during the first few days of the project ;-)

Once you have decided one of the three above you can focus on a particular SAP product. I wrote this with SAP in mind but I think this would be true for any enterprise software product.

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After many many years I have started reading a novel based on the true story of author - Shantaram. I am on the 11th page and I love it. Here is a blurb about Bombay

A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a ploding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time, into its own future.

A little be dramatic but about right for any large city in India.

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Last night I landed back in San Jose on US Airways 162 which should have been dubbed rather TechED flight. I am sure more than 50% folks were returning from Mandalay Bay. It was easily the biggest TechED so far with 6000 folks from all over the US, quite a few from outside US too. Attending the sessions you like and managing the schedule can be a lot of work - see right.

eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things

ADoW - ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.

“New” Identity Management - is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 

Virtualization - is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux

SDN Clubhouse - Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil, Mario Herger, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give :), check your basis skills in the back etc.

Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together

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Few days back I was at Project Management training and our excellent instructor asked what is the problem executives are trying to solve by going for ERP implementation. What he said rhymed with some thing Jeff Nolan wrote today on Future of Enterprise Software

CEOs are concerned about growing their businesses in an era of increasing uncertainty and efficiency demands; business managers need real-time visibility for intra- and inter-company events, as well as the ability to reconfigure processes with increasing frequency; the CFO, meanwhile, has to ensure regulatory compliance and business integrity.

For the CIO, these challenges come at time when maintenance costs are rising and the number of trusted partners are shrinking — systems remain undiminished, yet there are fewer vendors capable of supporting large-enterprise customers. We are down to less than 200 publicly traded tech providers from over 400 in 2001.

Thanks to Jeff for penning these thoughts and Om Malik for bringing all the folks writing thoughts on future of software.

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