While keeping the human nature in focus during negotiation is definitely fruitful, but I think this principle can be applied in general to a lot more situations. Especially while talking to people in authority. For example students can keep this in mind while talking to professors. Most of the time students would be focused on their own world and think professors are this abstract entities who are after their life giving assignments, asking them to review and re-review their assignments. Same goes for employees towards their managers etc. How many times any one thinks that professors or managers may have a life too. With loving wife and kids may be a dog too. Focusing on the human side of authorities would result in better and cordial relations.

In 2005, each year of college yielded an additional 12.9 percent. The rate of return from each year of graduate school has risen even more — from 7.3 to 14.2 percent.

Another thing to note for the premium on education is due to the age old supply and demand equation. The demand for educated people in the last few decades outpaced the supply there by raising the earnings of educated class. That also explains the reason for immigrant me being here.

But still education can take you limited distance on the path to super richness. The “real” reason for it seem to be being educated and lucky

Maybe educational levels are like Willie Wonka’s chocolate bars. A few of them come with golden tickets that give you opportunities almost beyond imagination. But even if you aren’t lucky enough to get a golden ticket, you can still enjoy the chocolate, which by itself is well worth the price.

1. Technology Consulting - understanding the architecture of various SAP solutions and advising the IT department of clients on what is best for them and then helping them implement it. Your end customers in this case is always IT department people. This is purely technical job :D Folks who work in this area are called technology consultants. On the first day of project you can recognize these guys as someone who is wearing a suit but is uncomfortable in it.
2. Business consulting - understanding the capabilities of SAP’s solutions and implementing them for the client’s business. For example let us say you manufacture bulbs - you have plants where you make them, you have suppliers who supply you materials, you have distributors who distribute your products and finally you have customers. Also don’t forget the employees. So you implement SAP solutions which take care of all these folks and the processes they are involved in. People who work in these areas are called functional consultants and they love to wear suits :D
3. Solution Delivery - both of the above activities could involve multi-month engagement with the end clients with a team of functional as well as technology consultants. This engagement would be called a project. There are folks whose main job is to deliver the on time within budget and scope delivery of these projects. These are your project managers. Usually PMs evolve organically from the above two roles. But you might see folks coming out of B-Schools directly jumping as PMs. This guy is a leader and can be seen very nervous during the first few days of the project ;-)

Once you have decided one of the three above you can focus on a particular SAP product. I wrote this with SAP in mind but I think this would be true for any enterprise software product.

A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind the discreet shelter of a satellite dish. An electric forklift truck was being used to unload goods from an ancient wooden cart with wooden wheels. The impression was of a ploding, indefatigable, and distant past that had crashed intact through barriers of time, into its own future.

A little be dramatic but about right for any large city in India.

eSOA was the biggest theme this year and it was quite fun to participate in the Product Strategy workshops with Product Management folks. There were also quite a few sessions on Composition Environment. In fact Vishal Sikka’s keynote demoed some parts of the CE. Some of the other interesting things

ADoW - ADoW or Application Delivery over WAN was announced last year and it was good to hear that SAP is using it internally for their portal. It is a software appliance to speed up the delivery of NetWeaver Applications over the long haul WANs like between continents and long distances. It is achieved by caching and bandwidth shaping etc.

“New” Identity Management - is based on SAP’s new acquisition Maxware. This will be very useful and powerful tool in SAP’s portfolio. I can see this tool filling a lot of gaps I have seen on NetWeaver implementations. Virtual Directory Server (VDS) concept inside this tool is quite powerful. VDS can put a facade around most of the user stores like LDAP, DB, ABAP user stores. Right now this exists as a separate tool from NetWeaver. Hopefully SAP would be integrating this with NW pretty soon. 

Virtualization - is a recurrent theme which has been very hot in the last few years. VMWare and Intel were seen promoting this heavily and I attended a session on virtualization and Linux

SDN Clubhouse - Not a technical thing but IMO clubhouse was the most fun place to be between the sessions. Cappuccinos and Mochas were excellent. Met a lot of interesting folks over here. Good to see Craig Cmehil, Mario Herger, Irfan Khan and Kartik Iyengar. There were a lot of activities going on like SAP demos on the pods, community theater, 5 partner stalls with lots of ipod touches to give :), check your basis skills in the back etc.

Overall a fun and tiring TechEd. You can see a large collection of photos on Flickr. On Monday the first day I picked a lot of ribbons I associate with. Sticking them together and hanging under the badge would have made a nice necktie. But I chose to wear just the badge. Anyway here are the ribbons stuck together

CEOs are concerned about growing their businesses in an era of increasing uncertainty and efficiency demands; business managers need real-time visibility for intra- and inter-company events, as well as the ability to reconfigure processes with increasing frequency; the CFO, meanwhile, has to ensure regulatory compliance and business integrity.

For the CIO, these challenges come at time when maintenance costs are rising and the number of trusted partners are shrinking — systems remain undiminished, yet there are fewer vendors capable of supporting large-enterprise customers. We are down to less than 200 publicly traded tech providers from over 400 in 2001.

Thanks to Jeff for penning these thoughts and Om Malik for bringing all the folks writing thoughts on future of software.

The Software services business … is about getting enough profitable accounts to keep your consultants and developers busy close to 100 percent of the time…..

It is usually important to mix senior people with junior to maximize profits for any given client project……

economies of scope are the holy grail….. they can come from structuring knowledge such as how to do requirements, manage projects, customize applications, conduct user acceptance testing, or reuse design frameworks and even pieces of code across different projects and customers.

Do read this book if you are starting a career in software in whatever side of the business - product or services.

“Well I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

Coming from Mr. Munger, incentives as the very first cause or bias in Human Misjudgment, learning about incentives is quite important. And now Tyler Cowen, an economist and author of very famous blog Marginal Revolution has written a complete book on incentives called “Discover your inner economist”

This 250 page book is quite an easy read and very accessible as Tyler has used the “Me factor” to fullest extent. For me the most interesting part was about the signaling concept. As an analytical mind it is very difficult to rationalize stuff like why spend extra money flowers on valentine’s or on diamonds. But when you consider signaling concept and what might be going in your partner’s mind it all makes sense :D thereby increasing your marital bliss.

If you live in a large metropolitan area like San Francisco bay area, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Singapore or Delhi you would resonate a lot with the chapter on finding good restaurants. Next time you are looking for good food look for low rent areas and don’t order what you can make at home.

There are other parts in the book about visiting museums, going to movies, dating and even saving the world. I finished the book over a regular weekend and was quite happy to read it. Gives a lot of talking points to talk with one’s peers to make one look smart (again me factor). Before ending the review a tip for the author. In the book Tyler wonders if sending a Christmas Card to his dentist who happens to be a Hindu an effective incentive. I would say send it on the Diwali (It is on Nov 9th this year) and it might work better.

Anyway I was following WWDC07 over the internet and it was quite close to being there, here is screenshot of the Safari Announcement

Steve jobs is a master salesman. Few things to note from his keynote are how successfully he uses “the hook” technique for presenting ideas or telling a story. Just like films or serials/sitcoms have punch lines to pique the interest notice he has “One more thing…” in the above picture. Also to note is how the core ideas or takeaways from the keynote were reinforced at the end with the following - sweet, simple and easy to remember line

“So, we’ve seen this morning Leopard, Safari for Windows, and an awesome way to write apps for the iPhone.”