SAST Wingees

Celebrating 5 years of blogging + Other Milestones

Prolog

It has been a while since i wrote on this blog. Thankfully Abdul Fakhri and Priya Raju have been doing a wonderful job of picking up the slack. 

Fine Tastings

Since this section has not been carried in a while, i decided that it may not be wise to list all the links i liked, many of which i share on my twitter account. Instead i decided to recommend 2 books that i read recently that have had a huge impact on me. The first one is world renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s What got you here won’t get you there. Marshall has plenty of free resources on his website that you can take advantage of. I am indebted to Sanjay Radhakrishnan for bringing this book to my attention. The second one is Carol Dweck’s @#$%ing brilliant book Mindset . We have been searching for the Soul of Success on this blog  . I would say Carol Dweck has captured the soul of success in her  book. I am indebted to Rajkumar Ravindranathan for recommending this book to me. If you are a parent or a leader, you must read both these books. 

Blog Milestone

I am so happy to announce that we completed 5 years on this blog on June 27, 2009. What a tremendous feeling it is to see this baby that myself and Ganesh hatched grow into a fine sparkling child.  We have now logged a whopping 5,071 comments as of today with 552 posts published.  Compared to last year, we added nearly 2,300 comments in the past 1 year, which is nearly the amount of comments we logged in the previous 4 years combined. The amount of learning that i have received through this blog and the career impact it has had dwarfs the previous 37 years of existence on this planet combined.

My informal surveys amongst the twitterers showed me that blog traffic through RSS is significantly down for the twitterers. I was worried that our blog traffic may have gone down significantly. Fortunately, that is not the case, the traffic pattern seems to be at the same levels when we hit the million page views.  All of these accomplishments would not have been possible without all of you the readers/commenters. Special thanks to commenters –  Subba Muthurangan, Senthil, PK Karthik, Vamsi Poondla, Saraswathi..  

Thank you to all the bloggers specially Abdul Fakhri, Priya Raju, Ganesh Vaideeswaran who have written some fantastic posts in the past 1 year. Hopefully, our not so active bloggers Sreedhar, Sujatha, Sultana, Sibu will blog more this year.  I am also happy to announce that Kumaran Anandan has expressed an interest in contributing to this blog. We look forward to his posts. 

Special Thanks to John Keegan and the Pressharbor team who do a fantastic job of hosting this blog.

Career Milestone

I turned 42 last month and I have been in the midst of making some life changing decisions, in part inspired my Dr. Randy Pausch . After 21 years in the industry, and 14 years in the current firm, i have taken up a part-time role in the same firm as SVP/Head of Innovation. No words of gratitude are enough to thank my management for allowing me to do this.

During the past 3.5 years, i served as the CKO and had the once in a lifetime opportunity of bringing a breakthrough innovation Cognizant 2.0 to production – thanks to a brilliant idea that  my team mate came up with. The teams that i worked with have some of the best people that i have ever seen. They are definitely going to accomplish bigger and better things. I will of course be watching with delight from a small distance away from them. The affection and kindness that my teams showered on me last month is something that will be seared into my memory. Again, mere words are grossly inadequate to thank everyone. 

What Next

While i continue work part time in my current firm, in the other part of my time, i want to chase some of my dreams. One of them is to help Priya Raju with the social entrepreneurial venture she started recently.  The second one is to work on researching the Indus Valley Civilization. I have joined a local research group – Indus Research Center, which is part of the Roja Muthiah Research Library.  There are some passionate people working in that group. I hope to contribute to the initiative and hopefully see that the Indus Script is deciphered soon.  Please wish me luck, as i pursue something that is so far away from my skillset/educational qualifications/work experience.  

Epilog

This is something i always ask every time i do a celebration post. What else can we do to improve your blogging experience on this blog? Please fire away your comments.