“Oberoi hotel walls separated the city into two worlds: meticulous on one side and a bit ruinous outside. Bangalore has many walled islands of niceties. The trick is to hop from one to the other without stopping.”
When I was mid-air between Bangalore and San Francisco, the mover called. “Your household passed the US custom. When do you wish to take delivery?” What!? I tried to remember what’s in the container and begged for the weekend to clear out the space. Monday, September 15th, a big truck pulled into our drive way and started the last part of my relocation.
Last I saw these boxes was July 11th in Beijing.
Start unpacking.
Juniper has this interesting Dewey system to address a location. My office is, for example, 2.2.062. Everyone in the Sunnyvale campus knows to find building 2, 2nd floor, and room 062. When I arrived at the Bangalore site, I was confident to locate 4.0.2.8, where I am temporary assigned. Start with building 4? No-o-o-o-o. Bangalore site has a different Dewey system. It is the floor #4, zone 0, and “cabin” 2.8. By the way, the floor that you can walk into from the street is called, not ground, not one, but floor #0. Pretty cool for an old C programmer.
I found two rooms with interesting labels.
They are rooms with 2 bunk beds and several sofas. I turned on the light and woke up a guy (it was around noon time). How delightful! If an engineer has been braving the project over-night, this room gives him/her a chance to recharge. So many times I wish to take a quick nap before driving home. The fight against fatigue behind wheel is so scary. I applaud the courage of the local management to have made these rooms.
I made acquaintances to many, but not all, leaders at Bangalore site. Three years of being the remote guy came flashing back when I chat with them. I found them nodding (as acknowledgement) when I described the experience from China. I told my boss (who now lives in Bangalore) that how much I appreciate that he understands. I guess he also appreciates a staff the same.
The world will be better if we all understand better. Right?
Leaving a place is a process of being stripped. Piece by piece, something that used to attached to you was forcibly removed. I experienced this process for the past several months. This trip, I can feel it, removed the last part. Beijing is no longer my home.
What are the names of those emotions when you come back home? Six weeks separated me from Beijing, now I am visiting, instead of returning, according to China custom. The taxi did not stop at my apartment and took me to the hotel instead. Felt so weird.
People asked me to compare and contrast. My readily made answer is, “Beijing is stressful socially and easy at work. The US is the other way around.” Much of what one need to accomplish requires extensive personal network, so called GuangXi, or special assesses to information not widely available. Living in Beijing is hardwork, at least for those who want to make things happen. Work, on the other hand, is relatively straight-forward. I was blessed with staff and employees that are diligent, detail-attentive, smart, and motivated. They usually carry out my decisions smoothly without much over-sight. They exchanged my trust with effectiveness and efficiency.
In the US, or silicon valley, work decisions and their implementations are more complicated. The data collection and interpretation take longer time. The conclusions are usually not obvious and decisions, therefore, harder to make. This translates to longer planning cycle and working hours. Socially activities, though, are simple. Crack open several cold beers, fire up the BBQ, turn on the TV, bring out the food. Everyone just have a good time.
Beijing’s bright blue sky shocked me. I don’t remember seeing white clouds in the entire 3 years. The traffic is eerily light. The always brisk hotel lobby is quiet and subdued. What did they do to Beijing? Oh yes, Olympics.
Many told me stories: she got married, so did she. She is pregnant and he divorced (and married again). He left the company and he got a new boss. And, the usual, so-and-so bumped into so-and-so while interviewing at that company. It feels like watching your family through a one-way mirror. I care so much yet can do so little.
Maybe it is enough that I listened. I hope.
Few years ago, I read this book by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. Like most management books, they distilled common senses into operational principles and thought guidelines. This book has profound influence on my managerial style and even career choices. It is one of the books I kept on my shelf. (My standard practice is to donate them to friends or library.)
Over the years, I gradually developed my own execution skills, much of them based on Larry Bossidy’s book. I wrote two blog entries on this topic: Management 101 and Management 102.
Most worthy changes involve many people. As a general rule, people do not want to change themselves, they just want others to change. Almost all people will flatly deny their resistance to change, yet their behaviors betray them. The best, and sometime the only, way to change people is to convince them to change by themselves. Once people understand the needs and benefits, and they have accepted the stress, they change willingly.
The tricks are simple: after designing the change, allocate sufficient time to socialize and communicate. When doing so, put yourself in their positions. Focus on explanation. If things make sense, people embrace the change. Otherwise, they stonewall.
Socialization and communication is more effectively done in person. There are many modern ways of communication. Almost all of them remove personal contacts to certain degree. Supplement your socialization and communication with those tools. Avoid using them as primary channels.
What if you are in a hurry and there are too many people to visit? You will be surprised how much difference a voicemail would make. Rehearse and practice your voicemail. Keep it short, keep it personal, stay on point.
Give people time to internalize and express their thoughts. There are two benefits: being heard speeds up the acceptance, you may also learn something valuable.
Next topic? Managing time. (Not time management)
Last year, I reminisced on a summer BBQ, an impossibility in a highrise Beijing apartment. After moving back, among the first things we went shopping for is a grill. What we ended up is a free one donated by a close friend. Their Weber Round Grill is pristinely unused — cheap price for an invitation to the World-famous Wang family BBQ Ribs.
The secret ingredient, like many good things in life, is preparation and patience. It begins with a bag of Swift ribs from Costco. Rinse them clean, pat them dry, salt and pepper, soy-sauce lightly, and refrigerate over-night. Sides usually include a seafood item (Salmon for this weekend), sweet corns, yams, and some veggie. Soak a big handful of wood chips overnight.
The secret to good BBQ, like many good things in life, is preparation and meticulous process. BBQ refers to cooking meats slowly with indirect heat and the lid closed. The smoke is a critical part to the flavor. Smoke comes from heated moisture. The simplest source of smoke is the meat itself. The 2nd one is what people add to the heat, soaked wood chips are the cheapest and easiest way. The charcoals themselves provide mostly just heat.
The whole process takes about 90 minutes. Apply the sauce, if any, about 10 minutes before done. Splatter them on nice and thick, also quickly. Close the lid for about 10 minutes. Remove ribs into a serving pan. Cover with Aluminum sheet for about 10 minutes. Now devour. It is not cool to use utensil to eat ribs.
The smoky aroma rushes into your nostrils. The meat falls off the bones. Fingers are tasty. Cold beer goes down so cool. Everyone is in good mood.
Man! I am glad to be back.
It seems such a waste to run on treadmill today. After all, I don’t come all the way from Beijing to enjoy silicon valley’s indoor life. If you’ve been to Beijing, or read about the concerns for medal aspiring athletes, you know what I meant.
N. Mathilda, W. Java Drive, N. Borregas Ave., and W. Moffet Park Dr. form an almost 2-mile trail. Perfect for an office slacker like myself.
I sought advices from Mark for working at Juniper. He thought for a moment and said, “Listen first.” Mike Harding told me the same. They alerted me that I have not been following my own rules.
No sudden moves: it is almost never a good idea to surprise anyone. Plan for communication delays. Pull trigger only after everyone is expecting a loud bang.
I am not smarter: Jumping in to deploy an obvious solution, without understanding why it wasn’t done already, will frequently yield unpleasant surprises. If I am not smarter, then they must have good reasons doing things “obviously” wrongly.
Of course, all rules have exceptions. Emergencies demand swift actions. But Sin-Yaw, follow your own rules!
I am one of those security enthusiasts. You know, we get excited, and guarded, when someone brings up a topic related to security. As years go by, I learned not to chime in until I am certain that the audience are also professionals. It is best for normal people not knowing this part of myself.
I am also an engineering manager. When I have a goal, I lay down plans to optimize the probability of achieving said goal. These days, the plans always have a large socialization element: the part to obtain support and agreement from certain groups of people. Yes, the plans must also get resources and time element right. I have seen, and experienced, too many failures that root caused to poor socialization. Call it the tipping point requirement.
It is easy for enthusiasts to effect change via scare tactic, not much different from one from any insurance salesperson. “You are not protected.” What follow are usually a list of scary vulnerabilities and a broad request for money. They response from senior management is usually grave concerns and the approval for further studies. Teams get formed, people get busy, time passes, a thick report and a slide deck materialize.
And it usually gets no where. Frustration. Down morale. Team meetings become a venting venue. Gradually, it dwindles into bare existence. A couple years later, a new comer finds it, infuses some energies, and repeats the whole process.
There is a more practical approach: treat it as an engineering project and and manage it like one. Six-sigma world has a well defined methodology: DMAIC. It may sometime feels too heavy, but the spirit is pretty much good engineering common sense.
First, identify widely agreed and easy to implement IT security best practices and deploy them one at a time. Let me repeat: widely agreed, easily to implement, one at a time. The idea is to put the whole company on solid footing on the basics. While doing these, purchase several penetration tests. These are the steps for preventing inadvertent employee leakage and casual opportunistic thefts. When the barrier is just high enough, these petty attempts disappear.
With basic barriers in place and well-practiced, the company can move on to the next step: identifying the assets to protect. The normal ones are: engineering IPs, company planning documentation, company brands, personnel data, etc. Not only the assets must be known, the damages incurred when they are compromised also should be fairly assessed.
At the same time, agree on the villains: malicious employees, current competitors, future competitors, professional hackers, etc. An assumption on their organization and funding must be examined and documented.
These two steps essentially create a two-dimensional matrix: one axis being the assets and the other the villains. One can sort the rows and columns so that the most extreme cases converge at one corner and conceptually forming a ladder of value and vulnerability.
The next step is a function of resources and skill-sets: good engineering projects. That’s the easy part.
Sin-Yaw @ Juniper
The views expressed here are my personal opinions, have not been reviewed or authorized by Juniper Networks and do not necessarily represent the views of Juniper Networks.