I have been in the armed forces for over a decade and now with the corporate for some time. An organization is formed for a single function. Collective work for a common cause where each individual contribute his/ her  might to achieve a common goal. The organizations have rules and regulations, policies and culture which differ in each organization. Employees join organizations either on the strength of their technical skills or managerial skills and commence their partnership with the organization. Policies and processes emerge from experiences and goals of the organization and a standardization of work flow is achieved when employees start following these rules and follow them very well indeed .i.e., employees start doing the THINGS RIGHT . They are appreciated, recognized and rewarded for this behavior. The employee in turn is motivated by this recognition and continues to do the right things.

The simile is applicable for students as well. Computer Science engineers earn well and are appreciated by their social peers. Hence the entire society encourages a herd mentality where in all students are forced to take up engineering. To achieve this a studentSacrifices his entire life in preparing for entrance exams, works diligently, burns  the mid night oil to secure that rank in an IIT/ good engineering college. The student is doing THINGS RIGHT. But often these poor souls who spend their entire lives in pursuit of dreams, end up as failures when the systems and processes in which they are working suddenly collapse in a dynamic and evolving world. The theory of the “Survival of the fittest”  espoused by Darwin holds true not only to natural history but to human civilization of the world.

So the question is what is more important                Doing things right    OR                Doing the right things………….

What kind of sights and sounds the word “woods” bring to your mind? Have you ever been into any woods either trekking or following a trail? What kind of experiences, await you in the woods? Well I am not talking about my two cents about a latest RGV’s movie. Anyone starting to read this passage thinking of this as a commentary of the (in) famous directors’ works or about the more recent work of his, you can stop reading this now . I have not seen the new horror genre movie of RGV, hence can’t comment on same. By the by, I am no film expert although I do have some passing knowledge about movies and I intend up movies only if there is strong connection with learning and development related concepts.

Back to the topic of what images come to your mind, by mere mention of woods? Tall trees forming canopy, thick green/brown foliage depending upon the season and singing/chirping birds will be definitely part of the expectation. Coming to think of it, the sounds are as important as the sights that await you deep inside woods. Sounds are made by mostly the birds and it is quite difficult to imagine woods without any sounds, is n’t it?

While this post is not about environment awareness, given the connection I should mention about “Silent Spring” a book written in 1962 by Haughton Mifflin – which poses the question “How does it feel to have one fine Spring morning when there are no birds left to sing”? This book helped raise lot of awareness about the harm caused by many Pesticides such as DDT as arguably it killed and eliminated many bird species. Due to the debate raised by this legendary book, many harmful pesticides like DDT have been even banned in the western world from further use.

All of us have probably seen many of the advertisements from the major PC vendors or PC CPU vendors highlighting the virtues of their latest and greatest Multi-core CPUs and why we need to urgently dump our old PCs and spend the $$ to buy their new products.

Let me try to see if I can demystify this term and also get a peek into the basic principles of multi-core CPUs that are commonly available today.

To put it very simply, multi-core chips have more than 1 Microprocessor in them. Dual-core which means 2 CPUs is very common today and Quad-cores with 4 CPUs are becoming available for desktop configurations. Typically, on a single piece of silicon, the chip makers fabricate 2 or more Microprocessors. They normally have a local L1 cache and also connect to a common L2 cache, and then to the common internal bus structures. Most processor vendors have chosen the multi-core route to add processing capacity as increasing the clock speed beyond 3 GHz became quite difficult and the resulting power densities at such high speeds were hard to manage as well. From a silicon design perspective, I would say it was easier to design a multi-core CPU with connected Caches and buses than to push up the speeds further.

But, are we now tapping all that extra processing power with the added processor cores?

If you are wondering what the image here is- it’s Velcro. One of the most important innovations of the last century and an accident that created a billion dollar business. A series of other serendipitous inventions include- Teflon by DuPont, TNT by Alfred Nobel, X-Rays by William Roentgen, Telephone by Alexander Graham Bell, Phonograph by Thomas Edison, and who can forget Penicillin by Dr. Alexander Fleming. In fact some say that even the Internet and C Language were stoke of luck than proper planning.

Rightly so- good inventions are born out of necessity while great are born out of luck!

So here’s my proposal- If so many land-sliding inventions emerge from pure luck or accidents; why can’t we have these accidents Designed. Or what about LUCK BY DESIGN?

Further, while individuals can be attributed to having luck, can even organizations become lucky? Here I am not talking of chance events, am taking about a discipline towards introducing such instances in the life of an organization, artificially that the reaction results into something unexpected. And leadership has a role to play here.

For those who are new to butterfly effect- it’s a more dramatic fashion of depicting the sensitive dependence of a system on its initial conditions. To be more dramatic- flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas. It all comes from the Chaos Theory.

Perfectly deterministic systems, governed by mathematical equations may seem to behave absolutely randomly with a slight change in the seed (initial condition), as for its recursive nature. The whole of nature is governed by this Chaos Theory- Quasi Randomness. It’s a very interesting field of study and has been obsessing me for quite sometime now. I leave it to your interest and time to explore this field further. For the time being-