Layoffs — The process takes a life of its own

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Layoffs is one of the most painful process any company can go through and it effects everyone from people who are let go (and their lives disrupted as a result of it), to people who stay back (and are demoralized) and the management who has to lead them post layoffs. While this process is as painful as it is, it is sometimes needed and unavoidable.

Read more @https://medium.com/@irfanganchi/layoffs-the-process-takes-a-life-of-its-own-7cadcce97ac1

Strong Leaders

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I usually write on diverse topics such as: Product Management, Data Science, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Leadership. This article is part of a series of articles on leadership. Being a strong leader is about many things, but none more important than emotional intelligence. I have written a detailed blog on emotional intelligence, which is yet to be published, but today I am going to focus on the decision-making ability of a leader and how emotions and intuition play a role.

The business world is complex and fast-moving. Deep, rational thinking may sometimes be a luxury that a leader cannot always afford. Strong leaders make quick decisions under extreme pressure and it might seem like a gut-feeling or random decision. It may almost feel like they are being impulsive, but that is not the case. Conditions under which leaders have to make decisions sometimes preclude the use of rational analysis. Their information may be limited or the pressure of time forces them to make quick judgments. There are limits to rationality and many psychologists believe that much of the cognition occurs in a realm of intuition outside the norms of consciousness.

My colleagues always ask me how I make such risky decisions so quickly, and I tell them that it comes with experience. Now that I am in my mid-thirties, I have been in senior leadership positions and led companies and products for quite a long time. Over time I have made many critical decisions and developed an intuitive process which helps me make quicker decisions; they might seem like gut decisions but they in fact are not. You develop an intuitive process for recognizing patterns and seeing through the missing information. Intuition is a composite phenomenon involving interplay between knowing (intuition-as-expertise) and sensing (intuition-as-feeling). As a leader, you are going to make 10 decisions a day and all you can do is hope that you make more right ones than wrong, and that the net result is positive. You cannot let the fear of making wrong decisions slow you.

When it comes down to it, it is the tenacity, grit, optimism, and the ability to fail-up that differentiates a leader from a non-leader. I will now restate the list compiled by Amy Morin, a psychotherapist, but add my thoughts and personal experience on each of the traits strong leaders need to possess/ get rid of to be successful.

1. Wasting Time Feeling Sorry for Themselves – Strong leaders know that life is not fair and do not dwell upon variables which they have no control on. They do not spent time feeling sorry for themselves because of how they were treated. They accept the results of their actions and are always willing to move on.
2. Give Away Their Power – Like my grandfather always used to say “Never let anyone or anything have so much power on you that they can hurt you”. Strong leaders take control of a situation and never let their emotions get in the way.
3. Shying Away from Change – The biggest fear of strong leaders is not change, but being stuck in a monotonous life. Leaders actively seek change, they embrace it. One of my biggest fears is getting stuck in the same job or same company. I encourage everyone I mentor or who works for me to always be learning, always be changing and always be seeking to better themselves. Life begins at the end of the comfort zone.
4. Waste Energy on Things They Can’t Control - The only thing you have control over is your response to uncontrollable situations. As a leader you have a risk-it-all attitude and you are bound to go through peaks of success, valleys of failure and everything in between. You will find people who will love you and people who will hate you. Strong leaders don’t waste energy worrying about things they can’t control.
5. Worry About Pleasing Others - One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my life, which was Dhivya’s (my mentor, friend, mentee, and a business partner) philosophy and was aptly worded by John Gardner is “You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.” I have an obsessive need to make sure everyone loves me and if someone does not, I end up spending a lot of time trying to please them. I have been working on this for quite sometime and am getting better at it (This is one reason why I never ventured into sales, because you have to take constant rejections)
6. Are not afraid to feel emotion - There can be no success without passion and there can be no passion without emotions. The ability to connect with fellow humans is one of the most important skills one needs to have to be a successful leader and lead a happy life. I will talk more in detail about this in the emotional intelligence blog I have been working on for 2 months. I will also cover in detail the learning of the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” by Richard Boyatzis. For those of you who are interested in learning more about emotional intelligence should read the book “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ” by Daniel Goleman and the book “Emotional Intelligence 2.0” by Travis Bradberry. These are two very popular books on the subject. Coaching someone on emotional intelligence can be very tricky and I general get about 70 – 80% success rate. I have been successful at mentoring people, almost a 100% on every subject except on emotional intelligence. It is sad how many current and future leaders today do not even have a basic understanding of emotional intelligence. Disclosure: I recently tried teaching the course “Inspiring Leadership through Emotional Intelligence” on a mentee and it didn’t work. I am yet to completely understand why, but I think teaching emotional intelligence is very tricky and it is best to tell the person what you are trying to do upfront and get a buy-in. In my case, I think it was a combination of not telling the person all the techniques of improving emotional intelligence but also I found the second reason in the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman (Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and winner of the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences) According to the the New York Times columnist David Brooks recently declared that Kahneman and Tversky’s work “will be remembered hundreds of years from now,” and that it is “a crucial pivot point in the way we see ourselves.” They are, Brooks said, “like the Lewis and Clark of the mind.” Once I started reading this book to understand a few questions I had on emotional intelligence, I found this book providing deeper insights into human irrationality and intuition.
7. Fear of Taking Calculated Risks - Strong leaders have a high risk tolerance and tend to employ risk it all strategies. They analyze all the variables and take calculated risk as there can be no success without taking risks. They have the conceptual ability to see all the possible outcomes and control the execution in order to result in a favorable outcome. The planning fallacy is “only one of the manifestations of a pervasive optimistic bias,” Kahneman writes, which “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.” Now, in one sense, a bias toward optimism is obviously bad, since it generates false beliefs — like the belief that we are in control, and not the playthings of luck. But without this “illusion of control,” would we even be able to get out of bed in the morning? Optimists are more psychologically resilient, have stronger immune systems, and live longer on average than their more reality-based counterparts. Moreover, as Kahneman notes, exaggerated optimism serves to protect both individuals and organizations from the paralyzing effects of another bias, “loss aversion”: our tendency to fear losses more than we value gains. It was exaggerated optimism that John Maynard Keynes had in mind when he talked of the “animal spirits” that drive capitalism.
8. Giving Up After Failure - As long as every failure brings you closer to your ultimate goal, failing is not a bad thing. The important thing is to learn from it and get one step closer to your goals. Failure can teach you a lot more than success and as a leader you are going to fail many times. If you are not failing, then you are not taking enough risks, not pushing yourself beyond your comfort zone and obviously you will not fully realize your potential. I have mentored 28 people so far and currently mentoring 3 more. I failed mentoring one person in 2013 and I can honestly say that I learned more from that one failure then any successes I had mentoring in the past.
9. Fearing Alone Time - Strong leaders use alone time to plan, reflect, and reenergize for the next race. Whether they were victorious or defeated in the past competition, they know that every individual run is just a sprint and ultimately they need to remain strong for the marathon.
10. Expecting Immediate Results - Staying power is the most important trait for a strong leader. Good grades and fancy education is not going to guarantee you success. Strong leaders do not expect automatic success. They work hard. They compromise and make sacrifices. They make friends along the way and maybe even a few sharks (someone they have a lot to prove to so that they can say you were wrong about me) in their life. They take their school breaks as an opportunity to engage with the world at large, gathering all kinds of experiences and constantly bettering themselves.

Which of these traits do you need to improve on? It is important to critically evaluate yourself and work on these qualities to become a strong leader who your employees would love to be influenced by.

Serial Entrepreneurs

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It has been exactly 2 years since I decided to close my previous (and first) startup. After pondering over it for a few months now, I have finally officially kick started my new startup. I decided to start it with one of my previous co-founders, but am still on the hunt for a third member. My last startup, which began as a winter break project, became surprisingly successful and led to the creation of Faqden Labs. We shut down the startup due to various reasons, which will be discussed in later blogs.

Until 2011, I launched almost one iOS app per month. The process of going through the opportunity assessment, product discovery, building a MVP product, and finally launching it was very gratifying. The rush of launching a new app and marketing it cannot be matched by anything else. Since December 2011, I have been busy with my job from Yahoo  to Personagraph,  now combined that with my kid and I’ve had no time to think of a new startup idea or pursue an app, which made me miss that rush in my life. I am currently the co-founder of Personagraph, which was built in an incubator model. Incubators as entities have capital and they attract entrepreneurs looking to build businesses. It is like building a new business unit inside a large company.

I am sure you have heard of the term Serial Entrepreneurs; people who love to start company after company and are unable to do anything else. There is another category of entrepreneurs called Parallel Entrepreneurs who start multiple companies simultaneously. A parallel entrepreneur is someone who can’t do one thing at a time. They need to be working on multiple startups at once to feel accomplished. Serial entrepreneurship put all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. “If VCs spread their risk across numerous companies, why should not we”, says Scott Rafer, 38, the former CEO of the search engine Feedster. You can’t be a parallel CEO, but you can be a parallel entrepreneur. The key is to have a full-time dedicated CEO running the store once the idea has been proven.

I wanted to use this opportunity to touch a little bit on what you need to ask yourself if you are a first time entrepreneur. Before venturing into any start-up it is critical to ask yourself if you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? There are many ways to tell if you have that inner spirit, that burning desire to be better than you were the day before, and to really determine if you've got the potential to develop a genuine entrepreneurial mindset. Below are few traits discussed by Matthew Medney (Founder & CEO of DOG Media NYC) in one of his blogs which I am summarizing here:

You need to be a natural born leader and this is something you will know very early on in your life. Have you always been the captain of your football team or any sport team you played? Are you incapable of turning off your brain, always conceptualizing new ideas 24/7 365 days year round? You always dig deeper and try to understand the ideas at a deeper level and emotional level. You are obsessive with a never give up attitude (almost a Richard Branson Syndrome),  are motivated by people who perfect their art/skill, and are inspired by greatness and have a collective mind. It’s never been work to you everything you do for your company is fun, engaging, and exciting. You've never felt that you've truly worked at all.

Unlike the school playground, the entrepreneur world is kind to misfits. Those square pegs may not have an easy time in school, they may be mocked by jocks and ignored at parties, but these days no serious successful startup can prosper without them.

The mental qualities that make a good entrepreneur resemble those that might get you diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome: an obsessive interest in narrow subjects, a passion for numbers, patterns and machines, an addiction to repetitive tasks, and a lack of sensitivity to social cues. A lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs find the symptoms of Asperger's "uncomfortably familiar.” Some people joke that the internet was invented by and for people who are "on the spectrum", as they put it in the Valley. Online, you can communicate without the ordeal of “meeting people.”

ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder - people who cannot focus on one thing for long) is another entrepreneur affliction. As David Neeleman, the founder of JetBlue says: "My ADD brain naturally searches for better ways of doing things. With the disorganization, procrastination, inability to focus and all the other bad things that come with ADD, there also come creativity and the ability to take risks."

Emotional Courage

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I was thrust into the world of leadership very early on in my professional career due to a pure chance event. When Verizon’s vice chairman Lawrence T. Babbio promised Wall Street that Verizon was adding more than 10 million new lines to the 36 million now equipped with digital subscriber line (DSL) service, a product called Golden Source was funded to meet these objectives. I was one of the developers assigned to this product for DSL loop qualification processing. I reported to a Project Lead who reported to an Engineering Manager. In 2003 while monitoring the data migration scripts at around 3:00 AM, I had a disagreement with my lead on how to handle a technical issue and we ended up arguing over it. During this time, my lead entered into disagreement with his manager for various reasons, and I and his manager became very close. She appreciated my decisiveness and started relying on me for critical tasks.

A few weeks later, she was promoted and was asked to head a new critical initiative for Verizon at a new division. During the same time, my lead had already resigned due to disagreements with his manager. Since the project was almost complete, they decided to put me in charge of Golden Source Product as a project lead, just 2 years into my professional career as a software engineer. Ever since my childhood, I was always consistent in my response to what I wanted to become when I grew up; “I want to do a PhD and become a scientist” I would say. Turns out I ended up not perusing  a PhD and becoming a scientist, and here I was being asked to lead a team of 15 developers with many engineers a lot more experienced than me. This was going exactly the opposite of how I thought my career will go.

I was not trained as a manager, did not have any business school training, and no mentor and no HR training. One fine morning during a staff meeting with my Vice President, I came to find out that I was now the Project Lead for one of the most important (even though almost complete) products at Verizon. As my luck would have it, the Golden Source initiative took a surprising turn with new goals and we were funded another few million dollars to embark on new objectives, which ended up resulting in it becoming a more important and more visible project. I had daily calls with the Group Chief Information Officer (CIO) and visibility for this project was unlike any. Since the previous engineering manager was already moved to another division, it was difficult to move her back and hence I was promoted to the Manager role with multiple leads reporting into me within a few months. I had gone from being a developer to becoming a manager in less than 6 months in 2003 and within 2 years of my professional career.

Both my product and I succeeded and went on to win three awards in 2004 at a Verizon event in New York. In this blog I am going to write about emotional courage. In future blogs, I will cover emotional intelligence, courage, passion, manager vs. leader, and many other critical leadership topics.

So what is Emotional Courage? Do you have what it takes to be a leader? Leadership isn’t something you can learn in a book or in an academic setting. It is part nature and part nurture. You can only nurture leadership by practicing it in real life situations. Leadership at its heart is the courage to take action in uncomfortable and difficult situations. This is called Emotional Courage according Peter Bregman (CEO coach and regular contributor to HBR blogs) who defines it as “standing apart from others without separating yourself from them…speaking up when others are silent… [and] remaining steadfast, grounded, and measured in the face of uncertainty.”

You cannot teach someone leadership in a classroom setting. Leadership can only be learned by doing the actual work, giving people the chance to practice and make difficult decisions in extraordinary circumstances. Best way to give them this opportunity is by putting them in real-world scenarios where they get to make real life difficult decisions where they feel a sense of emotional risk. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people.

Speaking up in difficult situations is another crucial skill for emotional courage and leadership. As Rick Phillips, chief communication officer at Nationwide Insurance says in an article in Communication World, “[Communication] is not a spectator sport, and you have to stick your neck out. You can’t always make the safe play.”

Every manager I have worked for in my career has read innumerable books on leadership and attended multiple training programs, but not all of them were great leaders. What separates a leader from a follower? There is a massive difference between what we know about leadership and what actual leaders do. I have never seen a leader fail because he or she didn’t know enough about leadership. It’s not about knowing what to say or do. It’s about whether you’re willing to experience the discomfort, risk, and uncertainty of saying or doing what it takes. These are the things that distinguish powerful leaders from the weak ones.

In the heat of the moment, when the pressure is on, and your emotions are high, how will you react? Will you let the emotions get better of you, or will you show emotional intelligence and emotional courage. The only way to teach courage is to require it of people. To offer them opportunities to draw from the courage they already have within them. To give them opportunities to step into real situations that they find uncomfortable. I recently met someone who I wanted to train to become a leader and the best way I knew how to do that was to recommend that we do a startup together. There is no better experience than co-founding a startup. The stress one goes through as a startup CEO is unlike any other. The emotional roller coaster one goes through within themselves and with their family and life partners due to startup stress would train even the least experienced person on how to be a leader. Whether the person will pursue it or not, whether the person succeeds as a startup founder or not, he/she will truly learn the hard lessons of leadership, such as remaining clam under pressure, handle stressful situations, show emotional courage, and be decisive. It might be helpful to skim over my other blog “Fear of failure - A motivator for success?” as well.

Passionate Leadership

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This is the 3^rd blog in the leadership series I have been writing on for the past few days. My two previous blogs were “EmotionalCourage” and “Emotional Intelligence”. Leaders need to have many qualities to be successful, but none-is more important than passion.

At the risk of sounding too kumbaya, passion isn’t just a wild, loud, take-no-prisoners sort of quality.  True passion requires honest commitment to something, which you feel strongly about, and staying committed through difficult times. When a leader is passionate, people feel a deep sense of being led in a worthy direction by someone who is committed to something more important than his or her own individual glory.

In the HBR Blog by Joel Stein called Boringness: The Secret to Great Leadership,  Joel talks about how his images of great leaders “were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking.” In doing research for a book, though, he discovered that most really effective leaders aren’t the loud, pizz-azzy kind.  He found, instead, depth of commitment and a quiet attention to the details that allow that commitment to bear fruit.

What qualities of leaders result in people to accept another’s leadership? According to Erika Andersen, Forbes contributor and author of “Leading So People Will Follow”, there are six qualities that people most want to see in their leaders.

• Farsightedness
• Passion
• Courage
• Wisdom
• Generosity
• Trustworthiness

Authors Robert Kriegel and Louis Patler cite a study of 1,500 people over 20 years showing the value of finding your passions within your life:

“At the outset of the study, the group was divided into Group A, 83 percent of the sample, who were embarking on a career chosen for the prospect of making money now in order to do what they want later, and Group B, the other 17 percent of the sample, who had chosen their career path for the reverse reason, they were going to pursue (their passions) what they want to do now and worry about money later. The data showed some startling revelations:

At the end of the 20 years, 101 of the 1,500 had become millionaires.

Of the millionaires, all but one-100 out of 101- were from Group B, the group that had chosen to pursue what they loved (their passions)!”

I wanted to underscore using an example based on my personal experience on how following your passion can lead to success. By 2006, I had already spent 5 years at Verizon and worked/led innumerous products like iView, Golden Source, DSL, Design Services (high speed network provisioning system), Home Networking, and was ready to call it a day.  I had 3 offers on hand from investment banks in New York and also had a MBA admission at IIMC (Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta), one of the best business schools in India. I was invited to lead BAAIS Video product. BAAIS Video was part of the Verizon’s FiOS initiative (a 32 billion dollar investment) and handled the video aspect of the triple-play (voice, data and video). This product was started in 2005 and two leaders had already failed at delivering the product on time. I wrote a deeper technical blog covering my experience on this project in the blog “Global Software Development using SCRUM”.

I had a choice to make. I said to myself “ONE LAST TIME”

By the time, I was invited to look into the product; the Engineering Manager was already fired, 2/3^rd of the team had quit, and the Senior Engineering Manager and Director of Engineering were desperate to turn around the product and had no clue on how to fix the issues and business (which funded the product) had lost all faith in the engineering team to deliver this product.

Once I made the decision to stay and lead this project, the first thing I did was talk to the remaining team (which was no more than 10 people by that time). I told them that I am honestly committed to turning around this product. I discussed my previous experiences with turning around products at Verizon and tried to show genuine passion. I heard everyone’s point of view and presented my thought process and invited everyone in the dialogue to challenge me. Passion balanced with openness goes a long way. As a leader, I rolled up my sleeves and jumped into the architecture and code. I directed all the communication to business through me, to protect the team from any external fire. It was going to be my failure if we failed and teams success if we succeeded (the buck stops at me).

8 of those 10 people ended up staying and committing to the product. We hired more people and by Sept of 2008, we were a 100+ development team. This team was the most sought after team at Verizon, in that everyone wanted to be part of it. We were the most funded product at Verizon, and the youngest team with many of my leads under 23 years of age, and the most successful product of that year. We were a turn-around success story and won awards.

It was the best team that I had the privilege to work with and I still miss working with such high caliber people. I was happy to have led them to success. I succeeded because this was my passion, which helped me rally my team, and my honest commitment to turning around this ship was contagious enough to help me recruit new blood in the team.

A person’s passions can ignite other people’s passions and bring energy into their lives. Real passion provides inspiration that’s much deeper than cheerleading  or a temporary emotional high. When leaders are truly passionate, people feel included in the leader’s commitment to making important things happen.  That’s satisfying on a deep level, and it lasts. If you want to raise your influence, then you need to be a passionate leader.. 

War Commander And Competitive Strategy

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While at business school, Competitive Strategy and Marketing Management were my favorite subjects and I ended up specializing in them.  Of the two, Competitive strategy was my favorite simply because it caters to a human’s basic desire to compete and win. As a co-founder and president of my current company Personagraph, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of a larger company, I end up using a lot of teachings from the competitive strategy class by Pai-Ling Yin and the Advanced Competitive Strategy class by Michael Cusumano. As a product manager in my previous jobs, I benefited a lot from what I learned from these classes. The only other class, which taught me more, was the System Architecture class by Prof. Edward Crawley. You can read my detailed blog on the System Architecture class here.

I have been obsessed with the War Commander game by Kixeye for the last couple of weeks now. It is an extremely addictive game and I ended up spending a lot of money buying weapons, for the first time ever. I finally understand why Zynga is not doing so well in comparison to Kixeye. Apart from being targeted for a different demographic, it is an extremely well made game. The hiring video of Kixeye highlights the type of games they make and the company culture.

I have spent many hours on the game seizing a lot of territory by attacking and capturing enemy territories and it reminded me of what I learned in the Competitive Strategy and Game Theory classes. It took me some time before I recollected what I had read in the book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by Renee Mauborgne. One of the central themes of the book is that the competitive strategies are modeled after the archaic war strategies (resources are limited and the only way to win is to defeat the enemy and capture their resources).  My favorite quote from the book is “To focus on the red ocean is therefore to accept the key constraining factor of war- limited terrain and the need to beat an enemy to succeed and to deny distinctive benefit of the business world: the capacity to create new market space that is uncontested”.

Initially, when I started playing this game, I was continuously attacking enemy installations for resources (oil and metal). But once I recollected many of the Blue Ocean strategies and Coopetition theory, I started searching for new resources (oil fields and metal deposits) and was able to expand resources much more quickly. It is amazing how many of these lessons I applied and practiced in the War Commander game. Business schools should make games like these mandatory part of the course material.

I will write a lot more about Coopetition, Competitive Strategy, Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Strategy in next few weeks. My main goal for this blog was to highlight that business schools that focus a lot on theory, could benefit by incorporating games like War Commander in their curriculum which provides a platform to practice many of the theories taught in class. Those of you who have read Sun Tzu’s (a military strategist from china, on of the greatest military leaders in history) book The Art of War will be able to apply many of those strategies in this game as well. If you have not read Sun Tsu, grab a copy from amazon and read if you plan to make a career in strategy.

A Tribute to Shakuntala Devi

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Google’s tribute doodle to Shakuntala Devi on her 84^th birthday today made me proud to be an Indian. I am sure a lot of young people from India have no idea who she is. Popularly known as the “Human Computer” she was a great inspiration to many Indians of my generation. Her talents earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World records in 1982.

I started disliking Google since they started spamming the world with Google Plus, their so-called Social Network (a.k.a graveyard). However today’s tribute made me find a newfound respect for them. Google seems to want their Doodles to serve as both a celebration and an educational tool, keeping people informed of characters and events of which they might never have been aware. Shakuntala Devi will certainly be remembered more fondly due their efforts.

We grew up reading her books on mathematics and puzzles in numerous novels. She published the first book in India on homosexuality in 1977, which was amazing given the conservative state of India and the world in general on the topic at that time. Arthur Jensen from the University of California, Berkeley, studied her and Jensen’s findings were published in the academic journal of intelligence in 1990. Her mental ability at arithmetic’s was unparalleled and unmatched by any one of her time.

The legend had received no formal education in mathematics. At the age of 10, she was admitted to first grade at St Theresa’s Convent in Chamarajpet. But her parents could not afford the monthly fee of 2 Rs. She was thrown out of the school after three months To cite an example, at the Harvard University she was asked to derive the 23rd root of a 201 digit number which she answered in five seconds whereas a computer took 15 seconds. The people assembled there were drawn to a standing ovation for her skill. Her brainpower made her world famous and she visited countries all over the world and wherever she went she astounded her audience.

While at Ratnam Residential Junior College, a colleague of mine name Sashidhar was our schools version of Shakuntala Devi. He could do arithmetic faster than it would take time for us to input the data into our calculator. When asked how he does it, he said he was trained in the Trachtenberg system of arithmetic, which makes the high-speed arithmetical calculations with a remarkable degree of accuracy possible. Jakow Trachtenberg (1888-1953) developed this system during the seven years he spent in Nazi concentration camps during World War II to keep his sanity.

I tried, all the mental mathematics techniques including the Mental Abacus, Vedic Mathematics, and Chisanbop (finger counting method), all to no avail. It just takes too much time to master them, but I appreciate those who have the patience to master them. Scholars, often on the humanities side, prefer to have as little to do with numbers as possible. But numbers, in my opinion, are a part of life, so we better learn to live with them.

My favorite book by Shakuntala Devi is “Puzzles to Puzzle You” which I used while preparing for my software engineering interviews in India. People like Shakuntala Devi are few and her departure is literally a loss for the world.