The other day, Robert Khirallah and I had an excellent discussion with a cybersecurity leader. At the end of the conversation, the individual asked – “what are you management superpowers?”. Thankfully, Rob took the first shot and (as always) gave a very eloquent answer. When I gathered my thoughts, I started with an analogy of…
Books in review: 2023
Last year I was on the trails for 100s of hours and audiobooks were great companions on all those long-distance runs. There are some books that I re-read at the start of the year, others I will re-read this year, and then some that I had dreaded finishing or had to leave unfinished. Books I…
12 rules for completing your first ultramarathon
Sharing a few lessons I learned along the way. This post reminds me of a conversation I had with Dimple after the Mt Tam run. I wasn’t fully prepared, the race went miserable and I jokingly told her that I was never going to run again let alone participate in an ultramarathon until I hear…
Year in review – 2023
I remember watching a Ted talk long back. I don’t remember much of it, but do remember a sentence from the talk – “The days you remember are the days you live”. Following are the few days that I’ll remember and cherish from 2023. 👉 Got promoted to Security & Compliance Director, Mar ’23 👉…
Why everyone should do an Ultramarathon
While I don’t recommend signing up for an ultramarathon right away, I do urge you to take that first step. Start with a short run for a week and cultivate the habit of striving for goals bigger than yourself. You may never know what you are capable of.
Book Notes – Built to Last, Jim Collins
After Good to Great, I had high expectations from this book, but it fell short. The research is good, but for some reason seemed outdated e.g. comparing the greatest companies of our generation and did not have a reference to Google / Apple / Microsoft which seemed odd – no fault of the book though…
Marathon Plan
Wife and I have been debating a lot about the Marathon plan that we want to follow. She has previous experience of a 10K and thinks that 21K would not be a huge shift — of course, she has never attempted a half marathon. I did a few half-marathons and know the change from half…
Hubris Syndrome
As soon as I activated LinkedIn, I saw a barrage of folks sharing this HBR article from 2018. And of course, the title is catchy enough so I gave it a read. The article provides excellent insight on why it’s important for leaders (I would argue for managers at all levels) to keep their ego…
My Octopus Teacher
This documentary was recommended by a friend sometime last year but I finally got a chance to watch this with Wife today. For the entire 85 min of the documentary, Wife and I were glued to the screen and totally engrossed by the love and friendship developed between the Octopus and Craig Foster. I learned…
Work mentalities
Wife asked the other day what’s the major difference I observed between working at Ginger/HH than the previous companies. I have been fortunate to work with companies that had a culture and history of 150+ years with 100,000 employees, companies that were 20-year-old startups, and then a real start-up that was going through a major…