Helping Employees Avoid Mid-Career Crisis


First things first – individuals own their career , not companies or bosses or coaches or anyone else . Others can help , but only you can execute . I had this conversation about mid career crisis situations quite a few times recently in some variant with my mentors , and with people that I mentor . I thought I will jot down a few points that came up – mostly for me to come back to for a refresher from time to time . Feel free to add , challenge etc as needed via comments .

1. What got you here won’t get you there

Nothing changed my career for the better than this one lesson that I learned from Bill Smilie , at an executive training program few years ago . The essence of the idea is that you need to constantly evolve your thinking and approach to get to the next level . If you are an ace sales person , just doing what you do best year after year will maximize your commission – but won’t get you to be a sales leader who manages many sales people .

2. Hard/Smart work is required , but nearly not enough if you don’t know where you are headed

You should know where you want to go. Ideally with a plan B and C . If you can’t clearly define what is it that you want – certainly don’t expect your boss to do the thinking for you . Run ideas by everyone you trust – and do it periodically . But decide for yourself .

And for those of us who help others – we might not have the ability to solve all problems that are brought to us . So be prepared to coach your mentees to the level you can and hand them off to another mentor who can take them to the next level . This happens in sports coaching all the time , and is easy to do in career situations too .

3. Don’t wait indefinitely for things to change for better

Loyalty is a great trait – but don’t let that be a one way street all the time . Give time for decisions to be made and processes to finish . If it doesn’t happen at first shot, try few more times if there is some thing to be added to the approach . If all reasonable approaches seem to not work – stop wasting your time and go to plan B . Just don’t get yourself tightly wound up by repeatedly doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result .

4. If things don’t work and you have to move on , ALWAYS leave on pleasant terms

Be it a customer who never gives you business , a boss who never gives a raise or a vendor who is habitually late on delivery – if you are getting out of a business relationship , do so without a big fuss . I can say from first hand experience – time and distance heals most hurt and disappointments in business . Learn what you can from the relationship and move on – save yourself an ulcer in the process 🙂

5. Plant those saplings every chance you get and pay it forward

We all need help from time to time . But you will need to establish the support system before crisis hits you . This is another reason why leaving on pleasant terms is so important . Also – never hesitate to pay it forward . It is not always possible to reciprocate help – for example , your CEO might help you with making an important customer introduction. But your odds of doing that for him is low . But if you nurture that relationship and make an intro to someone else coming after you – it will be very useful . Don’t try to keep a count – make time to help .

I try my best to give time for anyone who asks – and as long as they are genuine , I will give them time again and again . It didn’t come to me naturally – I learned it from my mentors . And they taught me to not waste their time .

6. When things are going well for you , learn to present better and negotiate better

I very rarely meet people with poor ideas , or who don’t deserve what they ask for . However – in many cases , they can’t articulate their ideas and they don’t have good negotiation skills . The time to learn is when you are on a roll – but if you didn’t do it then , do it now . Take classes , practice , meditate , watch it on you tube – whatever works for you . But do it .

The whole idea of effective presentations and negotiations is simple – make it personal to who you are dealing with , and give them options to choose from wherever possible . Yes and No are not the only options I am talking about here 🙂

What would convince a CFO won’t convince the AP clerk . And listen – usually they will give you enough clues on what will work with them . My way of making a presentation or negotiation simple is to avoid slides and use a piece of paper or a white board . Try a few different ways and see what works for you and polish it .

7. Align your goals to a higher purpose that others can relate to

No , not world peace or anything of that proportion . I just meant it in a more tactical way .

In corporate world , I am surprised how many employees don’t think outside their narrow responsibilities . I had a difficult sales situation once with my management not willing to accept my idea on how to close the deal . And the customer chose to stand their ground as well . I could not close the deal that quarter as I had committed , and had to take a week off to keep my sanity . That was the first time ever that I failed in such a magnitude and sort of in such a public way .

In that time , I caught up on reading a lot of business magazines and so on and quickly it dawned on me that if I recraft my proposal to help in an area that was a strategic concern to the company – I might get it approved . So I went back to my bosses with a new plan – and put it in context of the strategy of the company . I got approval in 5 minutes – and they even offered additional concessions I didn’t even ask for . And the very next day – I closed the deal with customer . You bet it changed my whole approach to dealing with my superiors .

This is one point I need reminders on – I knew how to do this with customers for a long time . It just didn’t occur to me till this incident that I should have done it with my own employer too . You live and learn , eh ? Icing on the cake was a few weeks ago , one of my mentors called me to thank for this approach which he learned from me and used successfully in negotiating something big.

That’s it for now – my dogs are pawing me to go play with them . Off I go

Are you ready for big data getting bigger and faster and never getting deleted ?


It is a rather scary thought, even for a guy like me who loves playing with data for fun over the weekend, after pretty much doing the same at work during the week 🙂

The quantity of data that gets generated today is huge, and it is getting created faster than you can think about it. Just my smart phone alone probably generates more data than all the emails I have ever written in my life till date. More the data – more the options to play with it and see if there is anything useful.

However, at some point – one would start to question if it is worth hoardinig the data indefinitely.

I am yet to see a customer who said any data is useless. People (including me) hold on to emails from 15 years ago that they will never read again in future, with the intention that some day there “might” be a need for that. Since storage became cheap, this has become even more easy. I have emails in my archive about a camera I bought in 2000 and I lost it in 2005. I have no reason to keep that email – yet I do. Why? mostly because deleting that one email does not add any value – my yahoo email service doesnt charge me to hold it, and the time taken to find and delete those useless emails is larger than the benefit on first thoughts. I am only one person – and I probably have several GB of such information that I have no use for. If I multiply this by the billions of people hoarding the information – it is a few exabytes of useless data that is lying around in servers around the world, probably with redundant copies.

Now of course there is the question of whether this data is useful in aggregate. If Yahoo can do text analytics across all emails it holds – maybe insights like ” 18 % Indian men lose cameras every 5 years” might turn up. That might not be useful information directly for Yahoo – but might be something Yahoo can sell to a camera manufacturer or an insurance company. Of course the privacy laws and so on will need to be addressed – and a good number of insights might just get killed strictly for legal reasons.

Then there is the idea of fast and furious data . In theory,  retailer can analyze your buying pattern, your geo location and your  social media  exhaust and alert you to pick up dog food on your way back home from work while you are driving, maybe with a map sent to your car’s navigation system.  This might freak out some of us due to privacy concerns – but might be useful for some others on an opt-in basis .  In this example – not only is every transaction useful to predict what could happen next, you can also aggregate it over years and make even more people freak out by out thinking them 🙂 . There might not be a hard distinction between signal and noise any more – what is noise in one scenario could be a useful signal in another.

There is lies and opportunity and the big cost that comes with it. There is some way of making use of any and all data – which means nothing ever will get deleted going forward. And it comes at a big cost – more storage, more compute, more power, more cooling, more people to manage all the system – essentially more of everything.  As long as the quality of insights lead to value that is greater than cost of “more of everything”, life is good. But at some point – the cost will need to be curtailed. How do we do that?

At a high level – there are two things to keep in mind

For starters, starting out on big data adventures without boiling the ocean will be a good thing. Sure every bit of data you have can be used somehow – but because it can be used does not mean you have to do it today. Having an up front strategy for making use of more and more data over time will be the sensible thing to do. If you don’t like this idea, walk over to your BI team and ask them about the history of BI projects that happen without a BI strategy in place. I will bet on you being convinced. If your BI team does not scare you sufficiently, just ping me and I will put you in touch with people who have those scars to show.

Second – choose your big data partners carefully AND for the long term. It is a nascent area – and rapidly evolving.  Big data is not something you buy over the counter today – it is a combination of a lot of different things . Neither customers nor vendors will have everything right upfront. So partner with firms who you can trust to not drop the ball when the going gets tough.Think through everything – what questions need real time responses, and what can wait ? Do you want to host the data in house or will you off load to someone else with adequate protections? Do you like high end servers with good DR, or would you keep commodity hardware will redundant data? Which existing solutions will you rip and replace, and which ones will you integrate ? How does this affect your BI strategy? How much do you want to invest in additional data quality? And a lot more. You don’t need everything answered upfront – but you need to keep tweaking your strategy as your needs and the vendor capabilities evolve.

There is also a chance that you don’t really need all the data to do what you want your big data project to do. Better use of statistics principles can give good enough insights in many cases from a smaller sample. And as soon as you know what is the question you are trying to find an answer to – you can start eliminating unnecessary data from your system ( or at least stop keeping redundant copies of things you probably don’t need).

Or just may be – instead of investing in “platforms” and do your own thing from scratch – may be you want your vendors to build big data applications for you, which you can then tailor for yourself more closely along the way.

Fun times ahead !

Operatics – Thorsten Franz’s Next Adventure


First off – read this post, please

http://scn.sap.com/community/hana-in-memory/blog/2013/07/31/betting-my-livelihood-on-the-oltp-olap-convergence-meet-operatics-thorsten-s-hana-startup

I cannot be happier for my dear friend, Thorsten Franz. If you don’t know Thorsten – reach out to him on twitter ( @thorstenster) or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/operatics . Trust me it will be worth your time to know him – and you can thank me later 🙂

Thorsten is an SAP Mentor – but I think of him as a mentor of SAP Mentors. He epitomizes everything that program stands for. He is one of those people who can blend deep technical expertise effortlessly with his love for writing and teaching . Couple of years ago, I got a thorough training from him in one hour on how to use River. This was done on a piece of paper and his laptop, when we were both at SAP Teched Madrid. In that one hour – I learned more than what I could have learned by myself in a month or more. He understood not just how it worked – but also how it was designed, what it could not do then, and where he expected it to go in future.

One of my biggest regrets in professional life is that I could not find a way to work with him in the same team. I tried many different times – but it just did not work out. But now with his new start up – I think we will have a chance finally to collaborate closely. I know for sure that I will learn a lot from that.

What is also pretty impressive to me personally is that he walked away from a cushy big company job , to try his hand at something he is passionate about. This is not a guy who is known as a dare devil risk taker. I have talked to Thorsten quite a bit and have taken his advice on many topics – I have never heard him say anything without careful consideration and deep thought. So when he chose to bet his future on Hana – you can imagine how thrilled I was.

Thorsten is living proof of how realistic the vision Hasso and Vishal have laid out for SAP Hana. He literally bet his livelihood on the convergence of OLTP and OLAP. How cool is that ? And having followed his very successful weight loss campaign on social media – I know he can meet any goal he sets for himself .

Thorsten , I wish you nothing but the BEST in both personal and professional life . It is an honor to have you as a friend . I am sure Operatics will scale great heights , and I look forward to celebrating your success – with a bottle of single malt of course.