Manage Decisions

The debate on internet taxes is live and thriving in spite of the recent renewal of the Internet Freedom Act. The doors to darkness are still open and there is an intense debate as to whether it is time to strictly enforce taxes on internet purchases. This was the topic which I hotly debated and took a stand against further taxation. Most of you are already aware of the TEA parties that took place on April 15th, we as citizens are scarcely breathing with taxes consuming most of our incomes. Adding to this suffering is the current financial crisis causing wide spread unemployment, rapidly deteriorating asset values and an uncertain future. Instead of encouraging competition and entrepreneurship, we are trying to curtail the economic boom and the radical change internet has brought about – the free flow of information at no cost. I did a presentation and a paper on this topic that can be accessed through the links below:

Internet Taxes – No more new Taxes: A Presentation

Internet Taxes – Against New Taxes: My Stand

Since recent past,  the word ‘Green’ has been reverberating across the nation. The current financial crisis has been a blessing in disguise for the push towards a green economy. As part of a sustainable stimulus to the economy, the Government is embarking on a huge spending plan which will create, thrive and sustain the green effort. Apart from the cap and trade policy, the Government is providing subsidies and incentives to green businesses, tax breaks to citizens for investing in green technologies and funding innovation through research programs. As part of my public policy debate, I had the opportunity to research and reflect on the policies towards a new, green economy. The details of my paper are listed here  -

The New Green Economy

Leadership

Everyday we hear stories of IT projects gone berserk and I have personally witnessed many IT project failures in my recent lifetime. This is an earnest effort on my part to explain why projects fail and for what reasons. It is such an irony that the very folks who fail are the ones who get rewarded for such specious, deceptive and fallacious achievements. I can narrate stories about projects which from the “get go” have inherent problems but are overlooked by the most incompetent, visionless leadership. Projects are such sacred endeavors that in order to succeed you have to have a holistic approach to realize your objectives. It demands dedication; motivation and a keen interest to succeed, which in my opinion lacks in every project. I will have a series of articles where I will blog about project failures. These articles will be very simple, straight forward and right to the target. The first one in this series deals with leadership, a critical component in the success of any project. A project before being undertaken has to be examined from a macro perspective for:

• Whether the project aligns with the organizational goals
• Does the project provide significant benefits in terms of cost savings, improving quality, enhancing customer interaction, improving customer satisfaction etc.
• Cost-benefit analysis favors the need to take up the project
• Involves the use of technologies and solutions which are scalable, reliable and performance driven

Leadership Crisis

Most projects fail because of ineffective leadership. This is visible through:

• Lack of vision and understanding of the organizational goals
• In competency to drive the project
• Inability to lead, motivate and inspire
• Engagement in activities which mislead and falsify real progress
• Indulge in blame game to save themselves from accountability
• Unfair in favoring selected few with whom they share vested interests
• Misuse their authority to condone and control others

Managers

In addition to leadership failure at the top tier, we have managers (the so called technical/functional leads) who lack in the following skills:

• Have no vision and do not take criticism, feedback and input from others
• Don’t have basic management skills especially communication, people-management and facilitation skills
• Are insecure that others might supersede them
• Micro manage teams and lead to chaos and lack of commitment on the part of team members
• Unfairly promote and favor individuals with utter disregard for merit and performance
• Are gutless and always consult higher management for every decision making
• Live in a delusion that they are the masters of technology and can undertake any project without even doing a feasibility study
• Assume that what they do can be done by others at the same pace.
• Have no respect to the individual aspirations of the team members
• Tend to control everything and make it secretive in order to have a firm grip and keep their jobs secure (make their existence a necessity for the organization)
• Do not have the competencies since they lack diverse experience in their careers
• Deliberately create hurdles or en grain fear in order to promote their agendas
• Profess the blame game and always find a scapegoat to hide their failures and inefficiencies
• Are authoritarian when it comes to implementing policies. This is a way for them to target specific individuals who oppose their motives or are a threat to their existence.

I will continue to extend this discussion with few more thoughts.