• Leadership = People around you producing expanding results.
• First step is taking responsibility. Responsibility = Ability to Respond. You have ability to respond to any situation, any person. Responsibility is not a burden. It’s a grace you give yourself.
• How do we listen to our people? People show up as we listen to them. If I listen to someone as a loser, he will always do things like a loser. Are we listening to our people as if they are leaders?
• Be a lifelong student. This does not come easily, you have to practice and allocate time to learn. Not just to learn technical skills, but also leadership.
• Keep your battery charged! Disempowering conversations drain your energy. Replace them with thoughts that give you energy.

Related posts:

1. Avoid these customers – five warning signs to say no to customers, plus three signs to die for

• Mind Blowing – Rajesh Gaikwad (professor in charge)
• Awesome – Brijesh Joshi (professor)
• I have attended other seminars, but this was the best ever!
• Where were you two months ago? (internship project planning started two months ago for the college, and many people repented the session did not happen two months ago)
• Superb – as usual – from you!
• I created some great project ideas by the end of the session.
• Excellent. Thank you!
• Truly motivating. This will help us a long way in our projects.

I am thrilled by the results! And am looking forward to see what projects the students do!

Here are the slides from the presentation.

World’s Best Presentation Contest

Would you like me to speak at your organization? Contact me at nirav at mehtanirav dot com.

Related posts:

1. Live Scribe – Amazing Writing Technology – Never Miss A Word

We work on outsourced software development projects. One of the biggest challenges in that is to communicate effectively. We started having weekly telephone calls with customers to improve project execution. Here are some tips on drastically improving your effectiveness of handling conference calls with customers.

1. Connection: Have the number to call handy. And an alternate number to call in case the first does not work. Understand the timezone difference. Where will the client be when you call? Get connected 2 minutes earlier than scheduled.
2. Accent: Just as our clients have accent, for them, we have an accent. Indians have a variety of accents (per their cultural background) and that makes it even difficult for the client to understand what we say. Speak slowly, make sure each word is clear.
3. Disturbances: If there are disturbances on the line, don’t keep saying “are you there”, “can you hear me”, “i can hear you” etc. Keep going slowly. If you did not understand something because of the disturbance, tell the client “I didn’t get what you said (about …)” and let them answer.
4. Echo: Mute your microphone when you are not speaking. You may be on a speakerphone in a conference and the client may get echo of what he is speaking if you are not on mute. The same may happen to you if the client is on speakerphone. You can request them to mute their line while you are speaking. This will even save you some bandwidth if you are using VoIP.
5. Homework: Be prepared for the conference call. A conference call is a meeting. So be prepared with the agenda, be ready with your status updates or questions.
6. Culture Difference: Be aware of the culture difference. Your client’s expectations and understanding will not be the same as yours. The slang will be different. Some clients will be very demanding, some will be easy. Watch for this and act accordingly.
7. Cutting Long Conversations short: You or the client may keep on talking. Cut this short – unless it’s contributing. If the client is repeating himself, check whether you understood what they said, and if you reiterated that to them. Go ahead, explain the client what you understood. This will most probably reassure them that you got what they wanted to say. When needed, remind the client about the agenda and time limit for the meeting. And get back on track. Tell them you “would love to get to work on what’s been discussed. And will give an update at the end of the day”.
8. Correct Grammar: Speak good English. Incorrect grammar can upset the customer. It will not only make it difficult for your client to understand you, but will also give a bad impression of you. Practice speaking.
9. Greeting and Closing: Greet with a “good evening” (or similar, depending on the client’s time). And close with a “Thank you”. At the end of the meeting, summarize the actions to be taken now, and provide an update on when can the client expect to hear from you.
10. Listening: The most important thing on any call, is to listen to the other person! Listen actively. Repeat what the client says in your head. This will help you understand it. If you don’t understand, say what you did, and request the client to explain the rest. Practice listening! This is one thing that can elevate your performance anywhere!

What do you say about this? Are there any other tips you’ve got? Any experiences you want to share? Feel free to comment!

Related posts:

1. Avoid these customers – five warning signs to say no to customers, plus three signs to die for
2. Teaching English is not easy

What do we normally do when we hear from an irate customer? The first reaction is to justify our position. No matter how much we say that “we understand your concern”, what we really do, is save ourselves. Look back at the last time you dealt with an unhappy client. What you did, and what was the reaction.

Now think how could you act differently next time? What could make it better for both you and the client?

Here are the 4 Sure Steps to Calm Down an Irate Customer:

1. Listen: Actively listen to the customer. Don’t get stuck in preparing your response that you don’t even listen to the client. Listen to their concern. Why are they saying this? What’s the actual problem they are facing? Repeat what the client says in your head. Paraphrase the main points back to him. Such that he knows that you understood the problem.
2. Take Responsibility: Take responsibility for the problem. Customer is always right, whether he is right or wrong! Take responsibility of the problem on behalf of your organization. Don’t blame it on any colleague or third party. You are the person who has the power to do something about the situation – whether you feel like it or not. So take full responsibility for the problem. Apologize.
3. Get Into Action: Ask questions to the client that force him to think. Figure out what will the solution to the problem and what’s the next action. Don’t just sit after listening to the client, take action to solve the problem.
4. Communicate: Keep the client in the loop. Communicate back your solution, the status updates on that. Keep talking till the solution is reached. Don’t leave it lose.

Image courtesy GetEntrepreneurial.

Related posts:

1. CEOs earn only twice of Computer Programmers – Earning Power of 80 Occupations in the US
2. Avoid these customers – five warning signs to say no to customers, plus three signs to die for

Most of us will try to do more and be better if we could relive yesterday. We desire to accomplish more. Like we saw last month, you can be more productive by creating good habits and rejecting bad ones. But then, with all the right intentions, why do we keep practicing bad habits? What’s the bottleneck in achieving what we desire?

The problem is that we do not do what we said we would do. You can become what you want, if you do what you said you would do. We must continually review ourselves and stay in action. Keep practicing the good habits and keep rejecting the bad ones. This persistence will pay off!

But there is another fundamental question we got to ask ourselves. The question is: “Do I want to be great? Really?” Read further if your answer is “Yes!”

There is some good news! You can become great. All great people started like you and me. They had some traits that made them great.

Richard St. John, a millionaire marketer was puzzled when a small girl asked him, “What really leads to success?” Even though he achieved success, he couldn’t tell her how he did it. To answer her question he spent 10 years interviewing over 500 successful people, including Martha Stewart, Richard Branson, Russell Crowe, and the Google founders. After analyzing all the data, Richard discovered the 8-Traits that lead to great success. What he found surprised me with its simplicity! And I had no doubt that following those 8 traits will make anyone successful.

I want to share those 8 traits to become great with you. The picture below depicts the 8 traits. Clicking on the picture will take you to a video Richard made to explain the concepts. The video is wonderful and I strongly recommend watching it, and sharing it with everyone on your team.

8 Traits To Be Great

You can also find a nice summary of these ideas on Richard St. John’s site.

Related posts:

1. Live Scribe – Amazing Writing Technology – Never Miss A Word

How was the last month for you? What are your achievements? What are the things you wanted to complete, but did not?

And if you could redo yesterday, how would you work? If you could really relive yesterday, how would you start your day? What all actions would you take? What would you not do?

More than 80% of us would like to be more productive, more expressed and more satisfied if they could relive yesterday. Why did we not live yesterday like that than? It’s not that we couldn’t do it. It’s not a question of ability, it’s a question of going beyond the usual.

You may know that we have a Monthly Review Meeting in Magnet. Different teams meet once a month to review the last month, share the learnings and to create something for the month ahead. We started with these introspective questions this time.

Our habits determine our productivity

As you think more, you can see that you work and behave in a particular way. These patterns are due to our habits. Our habits determine our productivity. Look at your achievements, and you can see there are some good habits giving you those results. On the other side, there are some bad ones contributing to your failures.

To share something from my life, I could make a list of good habits and bad habits.

My good habits are:

• Creating alternative solutions to a problem
• Setting targets for myself and following them up
• Listening to podcasts and music while I am on the move
• etc.

My bad habits are:

• Losing track of time while reading interesting blogs
• Being a control freak when I could delegate
• Pushing my ideas without understanding others’
• etc.

When I looked at it for myself, I could clearly see that if I develop my good habits further and reject the bad ones, I can be much more productive. I also saw that good habits practiced together created a momentum of energy that kept me motivated till I got the work done. And bad habits took away energies.

What are some good work habits?

There are many good work habits – coming on time, planning your work and working your plan, understanding client needs etc. We picked up the topic of nurturing good habits in this month’s Monthly Review Meeting in Magnet, and came up with a few suggestions. I think even you will find them useful. Here are some habits you can embrace:

• To-Complete Lists: Instead of making “To-do” lists, start making “To-complete” lists. There is a big difference between “working on” something and “completing” something. Focus on completion, not just progress.
• Understanding Time: If you don’t value your time, no one will. Train yourself to gauge how long is an hour. Understand the value of each hour you spend, and maximize it.
• First Thing For Tomorrow: At the end of the day, I decide what’s the thing I will do first when I come in office tomorrow. I keep things ready and mentally prepare for it. That ensures that I don’t waste the precious few hours at the start of the day just in checking emails!
• Focus On Important: Ignore the rest, simple!

Monthly Targets

What good a learning if it’s not put to use? We created a one page sheet to list 5 learnings, 5 goals for the month, and 5 rewards – one each for achieving a goal. Rewards could be big or small, but it’s mandatory that you have a reward for each goal. Each goal should also be a SMART goal.

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Realistic
• Timely

This sheet is with each Magneteer now, and we check how far everyone’s got every now and then.

Things are going on well so far! I will tell you what the results were in the next month! In the meanwhile, feel free to nurture a few good habits that inspire you! And share with us what you get!

Additional Resources:

• Monthly Plan Sheet for June 2008 (Feel free to customize this to your needs.)
• How to form a good habit
• SMART Goal Setting
• Anatomy of a habit

Related posts:

1. Live Scribe – Amazing Writing Technology – Never Miss A Word
2. Bogged Down, Need a Break, Here’s what I am going to do this weekend
3. Handling Unicode with PHP

Seth Bindernagel (Community Program Manager) and JT Batson (Head, International Marketing Efforts) of Mozilla Foundation are coming to India in mid July. The purpose of the trip is build further community involvement and start to find people who can help localizer drive the adoption of Firefox 3. This includes both supporting current volunteers in contributing more and providing resources.

Magnet did most of the localization for Firefox and other open source tools for Gujarati. Continuing our endeavors, we are organizing a one day event at our office to promote and support Firefox on 21st July 2007. Seth and JT will speak about community, localization, Firefox 3 and also promotion!

Note: The event will not be on 14th July now, since Mozilla will be attending the open source conference in Ahmedabad on 13th and 14th July. We will have it on 21st July now.

Here is the plan for the day:

• 10.30AM – Registration (it’s free!)
• 11AM – Introduction & Welcome
• 11.30AM – The State of Mozilla
• 12.00AM – Do we need an EN_IN version of Firefox? Local English, local search providers, certain spellings and other India specific items. Brainstorming, and team formation.
• 1.00PM – Lunch break
• 2.00PM – Brainstorming on promoting Firefox in India (Spread Firefox.in?)
• 3.00PM – How to localize Firefox? How did we localize for Gujarati? – small workshop
• 4.00PM – Firefox 3 – what’s up the sleeve?
• 5.00PM – Completion

The day is going to be exciting. It’s going to be mix of development, community and brainstorming sessions.

Who should attend?

• Everyone who’s helped in localization of Firefox / other Mozilla Software
• Students and Open Source evangelists who want to promote Mozilla / Firefox
• Community organizers & marketing enthusiasts
• Anyone who’s interested in Mozilla / Firefox

Location:

Many thanks to HBCSE for hosting this event. Directions here.

RSVP:
Please add your name to wiki (link below), if you wish (you should!)  to attend the event:
http://db.glug-bom.org/wiki/index.php/Upcoming_meet_RSVPs

We plan to have a Mumbai GNU/Linux Users Group meeting in the evening with a talk on Ruby on Rails. The plan on that will be announced on the mailing list soon.

Participants

1. Seth Bindernagel
2. JT Batson
3. Chris Hofmann
4. Venky Hariharan
5. Kartik Mistry
6. Nirav Mehta
7. Dibya Prakash
8. Vipul Mathur
9. Barkha Khatri
10. Dilip Khanolkar
11. Mehul
12. Osric Xavier Fernandes
13. Mitul Lambani
14. Easwar Hariharan
15. Joel
16. Gaurav Chaturvedi
17. Anurag
18. Mohan S N
19. Sanjay Bhangar
20. R. K. Rajeev
21. V K Bharadwaj
22. J. T. D’souza
23. Prashant Shah

Related posts:

1. Team: We need to improve quality of Gujarati translations
2. Who’s following you on Twitter – bots?
3. Choosing an Open Source CMS – Book – Now Available

I have learnt a lot of leadership from Landmark and Robin Sharma, so I based my session on the learnings from those two sources. We talked about self leadership, the areas in life that the participants were not fully satisfied in, and created action items by the end of the session that led to breakthroughs for them. (I talked to one participant today, and he said he got outstanding results by following the action item.)

Here’s the outline of the session.

1. What is Leadership?
2. Leadership != Management!
3. Leadership is people around you producing expanding results.
4. Self Leadership
5. There is nothing nobel in being superior to others. True nobility lies in being superior to your former self.
6. It is not the mountain that we conquer but ourselves. – Sir Edmund Hillary
7. Yellow Glasses
8. All leadership begins within
9. We see the world not as it is, but as we are
10. Anything less than a conscious commitment to peak personal performance is unconscious commitment to weak personal performance
11. Never settle for mediocrity when you can attain mastery
12. Principles of Self Leadership – Personal Renewal, Abundant Knowledge, Discipline of Physicality, Early Awakening, Death Mentality
13. What’s opening up for you?
14. Questions?

I was glad the team shared their lives and participated. I was actually feeling grateful for the honor of witnessing the breakthroughs they will be causing for themselves. Truly blissful!

No related posts.

No related posts.

What comes to your mind when you think about leadership? What pictures come to your mind when you hear the word leader?

Do you see Mahatma Gandhi? Hitler? Your boss? Your dad? Your self? Jack Welch? All of them indeed are super leaders. But let me tell you this, You are the leader of yourself! We are the leaders of our lives. Life may put us in any circumstances, but we decide how we react to them. We are the leaders who shape our lives.

You don’t need to have a formal designation to be a leader. In your work, you can simply decide to be the leader of the job you are responsible for.

One of the most important attributes of a leader is, in Robin Sharma’s words, “Absolute Personal Responsibility”. A leader takes absolute personal responsibility for her environment. All too often, we try to blame things on others. We want to escape from the responsibility. Remember, responsibility is not a burden. Responsibility is an honor you give to yourself. Treat it well.

Second, it is perfectly alright to fail. No journey is without a puncture or two. Failures are your friends. When you fail, you take responsibility for it; learn from it; and move on. Don’t worry about what others will do or say when you fail. Remember, it’s better to fail than not to try at all.

Leaders are always pushing the envelop. One of the things that gives me a lot of power is the urge to make things better all the time. To go beyond the achievements and excel. Under promise, over deliver. This does not mean you promise less, but you deliver more than the expected. Do you remember a time in your life when you got more than you expected? How was the feeling? What if you create that same joyous feeling for others? For your family, friends or clients?

Life is about taking leadership. Be a leader for your life. Decide how you want to shape your life and work on it. If you fail, treat it as a lesson. Just don’t stop at big ideas and inspiration. Take on doing something like a leader every day. I am sure this will bring tremendous breakthroughs to you!

Life is about personal leadership. Lead your life.

Related posts:

1. Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreements – code for life and personal development
2. Bogged Down, Need a Break, Here’s what I am going to do this weekend
3. Smart Usability: Remember password, not username