Presentation Zen and Garr Reynolds

Public speaking is still one of the most feared activity both in academia and industry. Widely believed to be the stronghold of a gifted few , it actually is a skill that can come easily through a small conscious learning effort.Garr Reynolds , a former Apple employee & a famous presenter himself , has a beautiful handout that talks about effective use of ideas from cognitive sciences and the world of zen into presentation & public speaking. A very good read.

Garr Reynolds is currently Associate Professor of Management at Kansai Gaidai University where he teaches Marketing, Global Marketing and Multimedia Presentation Design. he presents on subjects concerning design, branding, and effective corporate communications.You can also catch him blogging here.

Lateral Advantages of Blogging...

So it has been quite a while since I have been irregular in posting. But I guess the trend would stop and all flYandCrash readers would see more of me in the coming days.
And reasons of course are quite boyish!

I was attending a meeting at my office one of these days and unlike most of the meetings, none of us knew each other. This was an Ad-hoc meeting and people had come from different offices. We all reached just about time which left no scope for any introductions.

As we tried making ourselves comfortable in those unfamiliar surroundings, I saw a rather cute looking (ahem) female colleague (err) staring at me. Boys will remain boys and my levels of comfort ness obviously decreased. But yes, she was looking at me quite intently I should say...

The meeting was just to about to start when suddenly the young lady shot up 'Hey, aren't you the same ranjit who blogs'. '
Why yesss ...and you always were on the look out to propose me.. rt? ..Here I am. Do it now! , C’mon’
Naah, I didn't say all these for nuts, but I guess by now you would have got a fair idea on how cute the girl was!

And so what did I say in real?
‘Lots of ranjit-s blog ...which one did you read ?' True Professional indeed .huh !

Now, this was actually an unnecessary answer. Cos , I don't really enjoy that high a page rank that people would find me on the internet through the clutter made by all the other ranjit-s who blog. Most of my company mates know me through the Blogging session I took a couple of months back. That one was streamed live across the organisation's offices throughout the globe. So I was quite sure she too was bitten by the same bug. :)

She did confirm this later when we synced up post meeting and talked about how blogging and collaborative sites like wiki are changing the way internet works. She was quite well read and made for an interesting conversation partner. She too seemed to enjoy the same. (Ahemm.. signs that we could make interesting partners ? oops , make that conversation partners ) A rare combination of beauty with brains, I should say.

Ya, but the whole point is that Blogging can bring about quite a lot of lateral advantages :) So whoever has not yet taken up the digital pen , you are losing way too much in life my boy.

Btw,did I say that she reads my blog regularly…Hmmm

What is the Graph on top all about ???

Well, to put it in one line ... It's all about how you, I and others across the world are facing hotter summers / winters .

Description: Global temperature. Axes are not labelled in order to keep the diagram language neutral; x-axis: year (1900–2004), y-axis: global temperature in °C. The black line is the annual global mean. The red line is the 10-year running mean. The grey area is the 95% confidence interval of the same data, calculated for the 50 years up to and including each year's measurement.The diagram illustrates several aspects of global warming, the most obvious of which is the increase in mean temperature. However, also the confidence interval has increased both in value (i.e., warmer climate) and in width (i.e., more variable temperature). Periods of rapid change are characterised by many measurements falling outside the confidence intervals. Two such periods can be identified: the late 30's / early 40's, and from the 80's to today.
Temperature increase in those periods is due to anthropogenous effects, according to the IPCC.

Source: graph drawn by Hanno using data published on the web by P.D. Jones, D.E. Parker, T.J. Osborn & K.R. Briffa (2005) as "Global and hemispheric temperature anomalies – land and marine instrumental records". In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, Oak Ridge, Tenn., U.S.A. [http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/temp/jonescru/jones.html]

Licence: released into the public domain by the author

Satyam is India's Best Software Employer

Satyam Computer Services has been ranked 'Best Indian Software Employer' by the just released Economic Times - Hewitt Survery 2007. The Study spans across all verticals and across Industries. It also takes into account MNC firms operating out of India.

Aditya Birla Group gathered the top honours in the overall list and Satyam stood second. The release also talks at length about the distributed leadership culture at Satyam titled 'Full Life Cycle Leadership (FLCL) which ends up creating over 1700 CEOs for the company. The Survey , Satyam Story

TCS does it again !

No, This is not abt TCS's quarterly results for sure.
Then ?
Well..More to do with the punchlines that the company comes up with at regular intervals.The latest one titled 'Experience Certainity' is seemingly part of it's just launched multi million dollar 'Branding' campaign. Apart from full page Ads splashed every third day across national dailies , industry sources are indicating towards a strong effort being undertaken by the company to change its perception of a low cost outsourcer.

This also vindicates the urgent need felt at most of the Indian IT firms to scale up to a position offering stronger value addition to customers. IT behemoths have perhaps finally realised that low cost alone won't take them too far in the Global IT services space.

And by the way , nothing is of course too 'Certain' about the punchline in itself.After 'Beyond the obvious' and 'Enjoying every moment of IT' , I guess this is the third one thats coming from the TCS stable in as many years. Hope they definitely catch on to this one.

A new avtaar of Gtalk

For all of you who are both Gtalk and Firefox fans, Google has introduced a whole new way of tabbed chatting !

talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client helps you to chat through an IE window with no obtrusive Ads or Email messages.

Check that out ~ !

of India and the religion called cricket ...

Yes, I am back after a long break which included a stint of hospitalisation and also the great Indian world cup debacle !
Not quite interested in joining the bandwagon bashing up the cricketers but yes, things do need a terrible repair.What , when, how ...I think there are tons of good people around to decide that.

But yes , do whatever but make sure that these larger than life heroes run at least 10 miles everyday so that they remain fit.It's a national shame to see our fielders giving flying kisses to the ball when it races to the boundary.

Having said that, I do not quite agree with all the hooplah that is being raised about bad performance of our so called 'Stars' .Since when did India become a land of High performers and dedicated professionals? We as a nation lack seriousness in anything we do.So why blame them alone ?

Lets just sit down and hope that better things are there in store for the future ! And ya , pray for their well being too.
Till then watch some good teams play the game & enjoy ...after all with India Inc. going global with acquisitions like Tata-Corus , I think its not too out of loop if we do a thumbs up to the English / Australian teams for a change..Global Indian,eh .