Gopabandhu Das - by Shreeram Chandra Das (1976)

One of the very early freedom fighters yet quite unknown to the India at large. The man who brought congress to Orissa and started the nationalistic movement for one India in Orissa. The book is written as a consideration to how great a leader Utkalmani Gopabandhu Das was. I think important that such text be published which can influence the people of India on the contribution of Orissa to the Indian freedom movement and how some people in remote corners of the country have carried out selfless service to a mankind. A land known more for its natural calamities, deaths of hunger than its strong cultural heritage and art owes forever to this man for its existence.

A must read book for anybody to know a bit about some selfless souls of our times.

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff and it's all small stuff - Richard Carlson (1997)

I will refrain from writing a review on this book as this book is small stuff as well :-). Well the point is not that. Very nice book and will suggest if anyone is interested in knowing about life it has good potential of introducing life skills. Surprisingly, the moral is very similar to the Karma yogi philosophy "Karmanyebaadhikaraste Ma phalessu Kadacha na" and nothing more. Once, one learns to be a karma yogi the book is just too obvious.

But in any case, I will add my own view points on the subject. I think over a period of time as we become more and more competitive in the society we have tried to evaluate everything. Things we like or may not like. We want to evaluate it against a set of metric and dissect everything to small stuff which we can extract. That person is like that. This person is nice. I think we have started comparing every feeling we encounter to the best feelings we ever encountered in life. In fact, no one is away from this neither the author nor the summary writer. We have to learn one life skill to accept things as they are. Accepting does not mean killing to fire to change. But, not to complain about it. One more point I feel is important is not to be non-competitive. I guess the less we know the more we try to compete.

If you have read chanakya niti sometime in your life you might have heard "Namrati Phalanti Briksha, Namrate Gunina Janaah" - You will find a fruit bearing tree bowing down, wise men are egoless as well. However, we do not see that in real life with the wise men we know of. One reason could be, in society we have created the system we have a competitive means of identifying the wise. Eliminating the competition is important. Bringing in competition with self will probably eliminate some of that. Am I a more learned man than I was yesterday? Am I a better person than I was yesterday? are probably some questions we should ask.

Finally on the book: Must read. But will be hard to digest if you still are battling with the small things. I could not accept all the points in the book. I feel they are because I am not yet out of those illogical needs in my life and not that the book is wrong.

HBR on The Mind of the Leader (2005)

Good and nice book to read. However, it will not give a quick tip to become a great leader. Ultimately you will realize you are a leader if you have followers. There is no 2 minutes leadership skills available to train. Why should one read this book? To open your horizon is all this book can offer. Like most HBR articles and collections this is doing no more. There are all kinds of leaders in the world. Morality and leadership again are not related. In the political circles we know there are corrupt leadership at various levels. Yet, there are highly moral leadership as well. Couple of articles like the one on Manager and Leader can arouse your mind. This clearly distingguishes those differences. From most part there are some salient points that are clearly coming out if you analyze each of these text deeper.

• Every Leader has a viewpoint or focus
• Every Leader has followers
• Every Leader has an ability to influence

Beyond this I guess any discussion on leadership is dissection of facts, which will definitely open your mind and may make you immune to surroundings and styles of leadership. I guess that is what for most we learn from life anyway.

Overall good read if you just look at it from a perspective of gaining additional viewpoints. Not recommended if you look at it as a self help and leadership guide.

Lateral Marketing - Philip Kotler and Fernando Trias de Bes (2003)

A very simple yet very effective framework to bring in innovation in any marketing set up. The basic concepts is fairly simple choose one of the 4Ps and apply one or more of the following transformations:

1. Substitute it
   
2. Invert it
   
3. Combine it
   
4. exaggerate it
   
5. Eliminate it
   
6. Reorder it

A gap will be apparent due to these transformations. The idea is to create an offering which is relevant to the gap created. The difference between lateral and vertical marketing is, while lateral marketing emphasizes on creating gaps and filling it with new offerings, vertical marketing creates a segment where a gap may not be apparent and a segmentation can create a new range of offerings. An excellent example given is of a heavy consumer vs a normal consumer. The gap does not exist yet through vertical marketing concepts you will typically create an offering (bigger container) for a heavy consumer purely for targeting. Overall, as per the authors lateral markets create new markets while vertical markets create better segmentation, targeting and positioning (STP) thus grow markets. Both kinds of practices have their own advantages and one cannot be replaced for the other.

Unlike brainstorming where ideation is a team effort, lateral marketing concepts can be used by individuals and more over lateral marketing is far more focused as it's conceptually based on changing part of an existing paradigm. The book also suggests methodologies for storing unused ideas for later reference.

A must read for any marketing executive.

A Search in Secret India - Paul Brunton (1934)

The book is about Paul's search for a guru and achieving realization in the end with help of his master Ramana Maharishi, one of the greated seers of modern times. Written in a simple language and aimed towards western audience, I think this book also provides a lot to learn for native Indians to understand their own country.

Must read if someone is trying to get an idea of existence of various forms of yoga that is practiced still in India.

The Cathedral & The Bazaar - Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revoloutionary (2001) : Eric S. Raymond

The book although published in 2001, there articles presented in various different times. In last five years open source initiative have taken software to new areas and heights. I guess some of the ideas presented may have not be very relevant in today's times. There is a lot of new advances like Microsoft being more standards concious are not part of the book. Two articles I felt were important to understand the open source community at large:

1. Homesteading the Noosphere
2. The Magic Cauldron

The reason I liked the two articles as the first one talks about the community and how the gift economy works and the second one is about how to create a business model around open source and the sustainability of the same. I think the revolution is a long way to go. However, the way open source is fuelling the evolution of software there is a possibility of software as services may work out as the eventual model.

However, there is still some time may be in next 2-5 years.

A must read book for anyone who wants to understand the vision and motivation of open source. But, I still would say this book is not enough still to provide the needed insight to model a business around open source as there are not enough data to create a perceived value for your business.

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution (1999) : Edited by - Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman & Mark Stone

This book is a bit dated in comparison to changes that have taken place and the acceptability Open Source Software has garnered over the last five to six years. Of course, the examples used may not be all relevant to the current context. For example, the lack of software project management practices are actually gone. We see more accurate and much more well thoughtout design documents in many open source implementations. There has been large number of companies who have started to contribute to open source in a bigger way. It will be probably hard to imagine a company today can shut its eye to open source.

What do we learn from this book?

This book is about vision as seen by almost big names in the open source community. All have there unique outlook for open source. Some do it because they believed in the cause, some out of frustration and some may have seen a business need to accept it. It's a place where people having variety of interests have come in to create a community of "Diligence, Patience, and Humility" while preserving "laziness, impatience, and hubris" of individuals as Larry Wall has put it.

An interesting read to understand various facets of one of the neo-technology movements of our times.