A perfect Teacher

A perfect teacher would be, when his own children be able to learn from his teaching
Vinod V V

Have you seen a teacher’s son/daughter getting low grades, Mostly. The reason being that as parents we tend to shower our love on our children and they completely take advantage of the situation. A perfect teacher/parent is one who understand the strength and weakness of their children and teach them accordingly.

Isn’t that true.Technorati Tags: teacher, teaching, kids, children, love, strength, weakness, quote

Tested on animals – Mahindra Renault Logan

Event: Mahindra Renault Logan Drivathon
Date: 25-12-2007 (Christmas Day)
Venue: YMCA, Nanadhanam, Chennai
Contact: S.Kumar
Mobile:98409 47464

It is supposed to be fun rally organized by Mahindra Renault Logan to test the mileage of your Mahindra Renault Logan.

• Do you want to know who where the animals?
• and Who tested on them?
• and Who benefited out of this Mahindra Renault Logan Drivathon?

Before we start, Let us understand on how to test Mileage

1. Fill up petrol- full tank
2. check the odometer reading
3. If you have trip meter, set it Zero
4. take a long drive say about 100 and odd KMS, never switch off your car in between your drive (to get good readings)
5. Follow the speed limit (45-55 KMS/hour)
6. Once you reach 100 and odd KMS, go to next fuel station
7. Top up the fuel, to full tank.
8. Note the KMS traveled from your odometer, check the trip meter reading
9. Note check how much of fuel was needed to have it full tank
10. trip meter reading/ top up fuel needed to full tank will give you = Mileage i.e KM per Litre

So what happened at Mahindra Renault Logan Drivathon – car rally
I was there for the event at 8:30 AM at the venue. The event is supposed to start at 9:00AM which didn’t happen, because of the lack of management skills. Flag off happened, after few apologies made by the announcer.

I started to take the drive at 12:09 PM, went to the Fuel station at Venkanarayana Road.

A gentleman approached and said “Sir we will fill the tank full, out of which 5 litres of fuel price will be waived off and the rest you have to pay, Is that fine with you”.

I accepted, this is how they filled the fuel

My odometer readings were noted down and written on the card. My trip meter was made zero. And I started of to the rally.

Most cars had ladies and kids in the car – the best part was that, some car drivers took a break on the road side to take a leak. “What about the ladies and the kids?” What a shame?, Even if they had arranged for some nice place to take a short break for 2 hour long drive, it would have been nice. Well, my family did take a break at the Petrol Pump station at Venkatnarayana road, before the rally started. I realized, so was happy for my family too.

So my trip meter reading said 103 KMS when I was back from Mahabalipuram to Venkatanaraya road Bharat petrol pump station. I was doing between 50 and 60 KMS/hour. I was driving like a monkey as ordered, to execute things as said.

Now the top up started at the pumping station which recorded about 4.155 litres of petrol. So that means 103/4.155 should be my mileage. Which is actually wrong, because the Car fuel indicator says that my petrol tank is still not full. (Check the video)

My mileage is 24.789 KM per litre, WOW, I could believe it. The same car was doing last week, having a mileage of 9 KM per litre

Here is one more catch my fuel indicator was not saying that it is full tank, see the video to believe it. See other photos to know what was my readings.

Click on the image for a larger view

Did you notice the time, which I referred while I entered the pump station 12:09 PM and at what time did I start 12:35 PM and at what time I reached the pump station again 2:59 PM
You want to why the delay

Click on the image for a larger view
Do you see the Mahindra Renault Logan on the opposite side of the road in a queue.

What is explained in the video?
If you noticed the video, I had taken at the time when I reached the YMCA ground, still wondering WHY the fuel indicator is not showing the fuel tank full. So it means that there is enough space to fill up some more fuel to make it full tank. Which most of them didn’t realize.

Now to answer the questions

Do you want to know who where the animals?
there were 100 and odd drivers with their family, driving their cars, following orders and not not having fun on the gracious day Christmas

and Who tested on us?
Mahindra Renault Logan Marketing team

A surprise did happen during the prize distribution ceremony. A owner of Mahindra Renault Logan was agitated and trying to claim for the prize as his car did a 40KM per litre mileage (Diesel version owner)

and Who benefited out of this Mahindra Renault Logan Drivathon?
Can you imagine 100 and odd drivers spending their money to filling up the fuel tank full and driving their own cars and following orders at the mercy of Mahindra Renault Logan team for only one reason to prove that Mahindra Renault can do 33KMs per litre for the petrol version and 37KMs per litre on the Diesel version.
I should say that the marketing guys made little spend by gaining more

1. breakfast (bread sandwich and water, if you like it eat it else leave it. That was stance. Hospitality ZERO)
2. 5 litres of fuel waived off during full tank session
3. lunch (Saravana bhavan – Mini meals)
4. and another 4-5 litres of fuel for top up total of 8-9 litres of fuel while including the 5 litre of fuel which was waived off during the full tank session (Petrol or Diesel)
5. Spend on venue
6. And of course the event management team.

Who are the loser?

1. Fuel to fill up the tank
2. quality family time on the Christmas day
3. apart from that those god damn sponsor stickers from JK tyre and those numbers sticked all over the car. Who is gonna pay to remove that, With out spending money.

Mahindra Renault Logan owners are the ultimate losers to gain new customers

Who were the gainers?
Mahindra Renault Logan Marketing team – to make fake mileage result. It is pretty simple I say, you have around 100 odd drivers at your disposal feed them you have the results.

Do you want to know how this Viral Marketing is supposed to work?
Let’s say 100 and odd Mahindra Renault Logan happy customers, who had good mileage experience is about to unfold the secret to all their friends and relatives, well sort of boasting off that their car did give an ultimate mileage.

If you care for fellow car owners please digg this or post a link on your blogs. Atleast the new car owners can be spared.

some related posts regarding Mahindra Renault Logan

Some more post which are in continuation with Mahindra Renault Logan

1. How I bought my new Mahindra Renault Logan – space, value for Money- Review
2. Why Mahindra Logan, Renault Logan, Dacia Logan?
3. Mahindra Logan – Usability Explored
4. Is your Mahindra Logan in safe hands – After sales, What service
5. Mahindra Logan – Look out for the new version
6. Mahindra Renault Logan free service – unveiled
7. The Devil in my Mahindra Renault Logan

Technorati Tags: Renault, Logan, Mahindra Renault Logan, Review, safety, kids, usability, car, chennai, dealer, howto, best, petrol, diesel, fear, marketing, sales, savings, automobiles

Professional screen capture tool snagit – Full Licensed Version, Now for free!!!

Camtasia is giving out its old version of it screen capture tool snagit, so that customers could try and play with the software. The marketing part comes here, The latest version of camtasia screen capture tool snagit can be upgraded at half the price.

Ok here are the details of the screen capture tool on how to download

ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/SnagIt.exe [English]
ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitde.exe [German]
ftp://ftp.techsmith.com/pub/products/snagit/725/snagitfr.exe [French]

and here is the link where you can obtain the free license 

I guess Camtasia want to kill its competition from the market.

courtesy: digital inspiration thanks to  amit.

Management Pot-Pourri – A lesson for Every Salaried Employee

A forward mail from one of my friend, It is nice management lesson for the salaried employees.

A lesson for Every Salaried Employee

A shopkeeper watching over his shop is really surprised when he sees a dog coming inside the shop, He shoos him away. But later, the dog is back inside again. So he goes over to the dog and notices that it has a note in its mouth. He takes the note and it reads “Can I have 12 soaps and a shampoo bottle, please. The money is with the dog.” The shopkeeper looks inside the dogs mouth and to his surprise there is a 100 rupees note in his mouth. So he takes the money and puts the soap, shampoo and change in a bag, and then places it in the dogs mouth.

The shopkeeper is so impressed, and since it is the closing time, he decides to follow the dog. The dog is walking down the street, when it comes to the zebra crossing, he waits till the signal turns green. He walks across the road till the bus stop. He waits on the stop and looks up the timetable for the bus. The shopkeeper is totally out of his mind as the dog gets into the bus and sits on a vacant seat. The shopkeeper follow the dog. The dog waits for the conductor to come to his seat. He gives the change to the conductor and shows him the neck belt to keep the ticket. The shopkeeper is almost fainting at this sight and so are the other people in the bus.

The dog then moves to the front exit of the door and waits for the bus stop to arrive, looking outside. As soon as the stop is in sight he wags his tail to inform the driver to stop. Then not even waiting for the bus stop to arrive the dog jumps out and runs to the house nearby. It opens an big iron gate and rushes towards the door. As it approaches the door, he changes his mind and walks towards the garden. The dog walks up to the window and beats his head several times on the window. It then walks back to the door and waits. The shopkeeper maintaining his senses walks up to the door and watched a big guy open the door.

The guy starts beating, kicking and abusing the dog. The shopkeeper is surprised and runs to stop the guy. the shopkeeper questions the guy “What in the heaven are you doing? The dog is a genius he could be famous in life.”

The guy responds “You call this clever? This is the 3rd time in this week that the dog has forgotten the door keys.”

The moral of the story: You may continue to exceed onlookers expectations… But will always fall short of the bosses expectation…

The salary Axiom: The pay raise is just large enough to increase your taxes and just small enough to have no effect on your take-home pay.

Isaac’s Strange rule of staleness: Any food that starts out hard will soften when stale. And food that starts out soft will harden when stale.

Lampner’s Law of Employment: When leaving work late, you will go unnoticed. When you leave work early, you will meet the boss in the parking lot.

Indeed a humorous forwarded mail, but some points make you think.

Management Lessons

I have see lot of email forwards and this is no bullshit story on management.

Lesson Number One

***********************
A crow was sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day.
A small rabbit saw the crow, and asked him, “Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?”
The crow answered “Sure, why not.”
So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, and rested.
All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson:

To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.
______________________________________________________________________

Lesson Number Two
************************
A turkey was chatting with a bull. “I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree,” sighed the turkey, “but I haven’t got the energy.”

“Well, why don’t you nibble on some of my droppings?” replied the bull. “They’re packed with nutrients.”

The turkey pecked at a lump of dung and found that it actually gave him enough strength to reach the first branch of the tree.

The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch.

Finally after a fortnight, there he was proudly perched at the top of the tree. Soon he was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot the turkey out of the tree.

Management Lesson:

Bullshit might get you to the top, but it won’t keep you there.
______________________________________________________________________

Lesson Number Three
**************************
When the body was first made, all the parts wanted to be Boss.

The Brain said, “I should be Boss because I control the whole body’s responses and functions.”

The feet said, “We should be Boss as we carry the brain about and get him to where he wants to go.”

The hands said, “We should be Boss because we do all the work and earn all the money.”

And so it went on and on with the heart, the lungs and the eyes until finally the asshole spoke up.

All the parts laughed at the idea of the asshole being the Boss. So the asshole went on strike, blocked itself up and refused to work.

Within a short time the eyes became crossed, the hands clenched, the Feet twitched, the heart and lungs began to panic and the brain fevered.

Eventually they all decided that asshole should be the Boss, so the motion was passed.

All the other parts did all the work while the Boss just sat and passed out the shit!

Management Lesson:

You don’t need brains to be a Boss – any asshole will do.

______________________________________________________________________

Lesson Number Four
************************

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold, the bird froze and fell to the ground in a large field.

While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on it. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, it began to realize how warm it was.

The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy and soon began to sing for joy.

A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate.

Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung and promptly dug him out and ate him!

Management Lessons:

1) Not everyone who drops shit on you is your enemy.
2) Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
3) And when you’re in deep shit, keep your mouth shut!

courtesy:Kailash

Technorati Tags: management, bullshit, lesson, funny,

Passion down to the pyramid

Working is important, but with passion is even more important, because that is one which shows the right path to reach for your goal in life (career).
successful product/service have passionate users and passionate contributors.

What happens when the passion doesn’t drive down the pyramid?
There is a solid example right on my blog.
If you have noticed, few posts of mine have attracted more views because of problems which the end user faces/faced (Castrol Bike Zone). The product Manager had the passion, but failed to communicate to the people who are actually delivering the service/product.

What is the fix?
When you develop a product, you become the rightful owner of the product (so called the brain child of yours), What about others who have worked along with you. Most of the time you as a Product Manager don’t give the feeling of product ownership to every individual who worked with you (you could have observed this on a team meeting, your team members would have been least bothered about what you say) If are passionate enough, spread the words, speak, give them freedom, make them the rightful owner of the respective part of the product.

If you have observed the pyramid image, I had separated the top portion, Which is You, who have to deliver the same passion down the line, meaning spread the work with your team mates (team work is the word, fight for the customer and not for your owner), if you felt the customer will be happy for a small price which you can bear, do it.
Have this as your work culture and I am sure nothing will go wrong. End of the day what you provide is user experience and what you learn.

Technorati Tags: passion, pyramid, passionate, teamwork, ownership

Have you heard the about the Word EE?

EE

1. Emulate ( Simulate the application from scratch or with the know source code )
2. Enhance ( Add new Features, Enhance the existing one, tweak the code to work faster )

This holds good for products or service which are available in the market and most of them follow it.

Why?
Users love the existing product, That means they expect most of the features already available in the existing software or service.
Let us say we build a new product like word processing software, you expect the least to have the cut, copy and paste. To my knowledge any new product will incorporate these with out even thinking that they are competing with the giants. what about spell check, WordPress didn’t have them initially, after users have asked this feature they implemented it. You know about any word processing software would expect a spellcheck, then don’t wait, provide them.

Innovation is the key, what if the competitor thinks and implements it faster than you, You provide it before your users ask about it in support or feature request or forums
A small example would be to export the text to different format or exporting them to blogs

I agree with Kathy sierra that running behind all the features of the competitors and implementing them is waste of time and would require a seperate team to enable them to the existing software because the core team will continue to innovate, but atleast trying to provide the best of features available from the competitor list should give you a better edge.

Technorati Tags: competition, feature list, market, management, manager, innovation, emulate, enhance

What is Effective Communication?

My Wife just Sent me a mail, I am not sure about the author, it was a
forward, really funny and tricky way to put things across to
managers

Jack and Max are walking from religious service. Jack wonders whether it would be all right to smoke while praying.
Max replies, “Why don’t you ask the Priest?”

So Jack goes up to the Priest and asks, “Priest, may I smoke while I pray?”
But the Priest says, “No, my son, you may not. That’s utter disrespect to our religion.”
Jack goes back to his friend and tells him what the good Priest told him.

Max says, “I’m not surprised. You asked the wrong question. Let me try.”
And so Max goes up to the Priest and asks, “Priest, may I pray while I smoke?”
To which the Priest eagerly replies, “By all means, my son. By all means.”

Moral: The reply you get depends on the question you ask.

For Example: Can I work on this project while I’m on vacation?!?

I am not quiet suprised, I guess she badly needs a vacation

Technorati Tags: vacation, request, management, funny, joke, communication, wife

Russian Dolls & Ogilvy’s Law

Russian Dolls

Originally uploaded by freshlysqueezed.

This is a famous quote from David Ogilvy

Ogilvy wrote that whenever someone was appointed to head an office of O&M, he would give the manager a Russian nesting doll. These dolls open in the middle to reveal a smaller doll, which opens in the middle to reveal a yet smaller doll…and so on. Inside the smallest doll would be a note from Ogilvy. It read: “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.”

It is kind of inspirational for me and that David Ogilvy could understand on basic building blocks of Organization.

Image courtesy: freshlysqueezed

What can make application more successful?

After looking in to most of the online applications like delicious, flickr, wordpress, blogspot and much more, there is been something called control or what users want to have or show on their applications have shown to rule.

It doesn’t stop with the community application like flickr, wordpress and other. It could be applied to other applications or even domain specific. It could be a network monitoring software or a document editing software or photo editing software.

What I am actually trying to communicate is that the core application gives the desired functionality and the users are given an option to play around to express themselves different from each other by providing plugins or extensions which could relate with their personal interest.

For example
Assume that I use a network monitoring software being a system administrator when my core application is doing my job, well actually monitoring my network, what else would I like to show off or my interest would be

1. My own personal presence online, what are the ways it could be my blogs, my flickr, my orkut, yahoo groups, IM etc
2. or I might be even a contributor, who may not even blog but contribute in forums or make comments in blogs
3. or just read tech news from different aggregators

So how should my application should be
My core application does the job, allows notification/alerts on the current news (eg. virus alerts for network administrators, a new tech on spam blocking etc)

When he reads these articles, he should be able to blog (export) to his wordpress, blogspot of use flickr etc from with in this application or even send this article as a mail to his boss or friends.
For eg. if you have been to groceries store or medical shops in India (cities), if some medicine or a product is not available, he wouldn’t say that he doesn’t have the product, he would send one of his men to fetch the product and give it to the customer. (building repetitive customer ),
so you could ask me does the shopkeeper gets anything and every thing the customer wants?
The answers is simple, what would interest his shop he would, what would his shop gain he would..

the above is just my thought process, if you are a network administrator, just let me know what you have in mind
in short “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”

to summarise, people like to control things what they own, would be ready to explore make a change if some one has on the community is contributing things which could improve/change their productivity.

Take my previous post Crazy about cars, The company allows to configure the toys, how about they have a site which allows people to contribute their designs

that could be a kick ass is my feeling

Technorati Tags: network administrator,apps, application, contribute, community, success, customer relationship, retain customer, brand building