What does Pakistan want?

Steve Coll writes a perceptive piece of the stratagies underlying the military establishment of Pakistan. Even more interesting is the secret document accompanying this piece. Worth a read.

The real leadership lessons of Steve Jobs

In a long instructive piece, the biographer of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson, tries to draw out the real lessons from his life and his leadership success.

"His saga is the entrepreneurial creation myth writ large: Steve Jobs cofounded Apple in his parents’ garage in 1976, was ousted in 1985, returned to rescue it from near bankruptcy in 1997, and by the time he died, in October 2011, had built it into the world’s most valuable company. Along the way he helped to transform seven industries: personal computing, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, retail stores, and digital publishing. He thus belongs in the pantheon of America’s great innovators, along with Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Walt Disney."

His greatest achievement was making Apple as an enduring company. But what were the real keys to his success?

1. Focus

When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, it was producing a random array of computers and peripherals, including a dozen different versions of the Macintosh. By getting Apple to focus on making just four computers, he saved the company. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. That’s true for companies, and it’s true for products.” Focus was ingrained in Jobs’s personality and had been honed by his Zen training. He relentlessly filtered out what he considered distractions.

2. Simplify

Jobs’s Zenlike ability to focus was accompanied by the related instinct to simplify things by zeroing in on their essence and eliminating unnecessary components. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” declared Apple’s first marketing brochure. Jobs aimed for the simplicity that comes from conquering, rather than merely ignoring, complexity. Achieving this depth of simplicity, he realized, would produce a machine that felt as if it deferred to users in a friendly way, rather than challenging them. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said, “to make something simple, to truly understand the underlying challenges and come up with elegant solutions.”

3. Take Responsibility End to End

Jobs knew that the best way to achieve simplicity was to make sure that hardware, software, and peripheral devices were seamlessly integrated.

4. When Behind, Leapfrog

The mark of an innovative company is not only that it comes up with new ideas first. It also knows how to leapfrog when it finds itself behind. That happened when Jobs built the original iMac. He focused on making it useful for managing a user’s photos and videos, but it was left behind when dealing with music. But instead of merely catching up by upgrading the iMac’s CD drive, he decided to create an integrated system that would transform the music industry. The result was the combination of iTunes, the iTunes Store, and the iPod, which allowed users to buy, share, manage, store, and play music better than they could with any other devices.

5. Put Products Before Profits

When Jobs and his small team designed the original Macintosh, in the early 1980s, his injunction was to make it “insanely great.” He never spoke of profit maximization or cost trade-offs. “Don’t worry about price, just specify the computer’s abilities,” he told the original team leader : Focus on making the product great and the profits will follow.

6. Don’t Be a Slave To Focus Groups

When Jobs took his original Macintosh team on its first retreat, one member asked whether they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” Jobs replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Caring deeply about what customers want is much different from continually asking them what they want; it requires intuition and instinct about desires that have not yet formed. “Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page,” Jobs explained.

7.Bend Reality

Jobs’s (in)famous ability to push people to do the impossible was dubbed by colleagues his Reality Distortion Field, after an episode of Star Trek in which aliens create a convincing alternative reality through sheer mental force.

8. Impute

Jobs’s early mentor Mike Markkula wrote him a memo in 1979 that urged three principles. The first two were “empathy” and “focus.” The third was an awkward word, “impute,” but it became one of Jobs’s key doctrines. He knew that people form an opinion about a product or a company on the basis of how it is presented and packaged. “Mike taught me that people do judge a book by its cover,” he told me.

9. Push for Perfection

During the development of almost every product he ever created, Jobs at a certain point “hit the pause button” and went back to the drawing board because he felt it wasn’t perfect. “Real artists sign their work,” he said.

10. Tolerate Only “A” Players

Jobs was famously impatient, petulant, and tough with the people around him. But his treatment of people, though not laudable, emanated from his passion for perfection and his desire to work with only the best. It was his way of preventing what he called “the bozo explosion,” in which managers are so polite that mediocre people feel comfortable sticking around.

11. Engage Face-to-Face

Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its potential to be isolating, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by e-mail and iChat,” he told me. “That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas. People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

12. Know Both the Big Picture and the Details.

Some CEOs are great at vision; others are managers who know that God is in the details. Jobs was both. Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes says that one of Jobs’s salient traits was his ability and desire to envision overarching strategy while also focusing on the tiniest aspects of design.

13.Combine the Humanities with the Sciences

He connected the humanities to the sciences, creativity to technology, arts to engineering. There were greater technologists (Wozniak, Gates), and certainly better designers and artists. But no one else in our era could better firewire together poetry and processors in a way that jolted innovation. And he did it with an intuitive feel for business strategy. At almost every product launch over the past decade, Jobs ended with a slide that showed a sign at the intersection of Liberal Arts and Technology Streets.

14. Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Steve Jobs was a product of the two great social movements that emanated from the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s. The first was the counterculture of hippies and antiwar activists, which was marked by psychedelic drugs, rock music, and antiauthoritarianism. The second was the high-tech and hacker culture of Silicon Valley, filled with engineers, geeks, wireheads, phreakers, cyberpunks, hobbyists, and garage entrepreneurs. Overlying both were various paths to personal enlightenment—Zen and Hinduism, meditation and yoga, primal scream therapy and sensory deprivation, Esalen and est.

 Jobs stayed hungry and foolish throughout his career by making sure that the business and engineering aspect of his personality was always complemented by a hippie nonconformist side from his days as an artistic, acid-dropping, enlightenment-seeking rebel.

 “While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

When we are patients

In the past I have written a great deal about sicknesses, doctors and caregivers that help us deal when we are patients. I realize that I have never written a column about the patients point of view in all this, though I did write a book “ Straight from the Heart” that was entirely from the patients point of view! But it is true that I have never written a blog about it. Anyway I have always wondered what sick patients think about as they lie in their hospital beds and doctors move in and out? What are their thoughts after the relatives and friends have left? Do they ponder their past or worry about the future? What do they worry about ? Money? Who will look after the family? Funeral arrangements? A complete recovery?

Even as I was contemplating this, Fate jumped in with a cruel twist, and I was hit with a triple whammy. A Delhi viral fever weakend me sufficiently to fall victim to the Shingle virus, which in turn infected the bladder to require catherization. In a short space of ten days, I went from a reasonably functioning vertical man to a almost completely dysfunctional horizontal man. 

I could now do my own research, I wryly observed to myself as I lay in bed.

The first thing that happens when you are patient is that your entire universe contracts . It actually shrinks rapidly only to your immediate family. World events leave you cold, even though you may have been an avid follower of the daily news. You tend to ignore newspapers and magazines, and unread books pile up beside your bedside. Your mind is fully concentrated on you and your disease, completely impervious to other more world shaking issues. It is a time of complete narcissism. And you rapidly become the most selfish person in the world.

The reason for this retreat to a different self is the pain that most difficult diseases accompany. A little twinge that you would have dismissed when vertical, become of earthshaking importance when you are laid low. Sometimes you lie still in bed hoping that shafts of pain will somehow miss you. Or when you move,  it is with utmost gingerness lest some parts in your body get displaced. Each little path, even to the nearest bathroom becomes a momentous trek requiring great planning and precise movements. Even when in bed, you turn around with great care lest you let loose some unforeseen and unknown pang of pain.

Not only are your thoughts solely about avoiding any pain, they are completely empty. You lie on the sofa in front of a constantly on TV, yet you hear almost none of the programs. You doze in and out but there are no dreams – only blackness and blankness.

Sometimes when the pain becomes too sharp, you do dream of happier days and times. Or at least you try to, if you want to survive. Other times you may just hug yourself to sleep and cry in solitude bemoaning your fate. A creative time it is not.

And then in your wakeful moments you realize that life is running along- there is food on the table (or served on your bed), the house is clean, somebody is doing the shopping. There is someone tending to your every need, even if your answers are in the monosyllabic. She is beside you when the pain becomes overwhelming and she knows when your depression is unusually deep. She will then quietly organize your children to call you to cheer you up; and stretch her hand to hold yours in the middle of the night.

As you gradually recover and become somewhat human, you begin to notice the courage and fortitude, the thoughfullness and love that underlie this. Yet the sheer burden of carrying the entire load – of nurse, cook, provider, cleaner- is clearly evident even as she sits besides you massaging your back while she hides her own pains from you. As I noted her exhaustion, I  ventured to ask her “ Why?”

Her reply: “ I expect you to do the same for me”

The power of friendships

Some months ago I wrote of high powered women in India who seemed to have everything - a brilliant career, immense wealth, high status in society- but were not married. One of the things I had noted then was how all of them spent considerable time and effort in building and maintaining their network of friends. Here is wonderful piece by Emily Rapp, which makes the same point. Here is her story of the "Wrinklies".

"In 1997 I arrived in Geneva to work for a year at the headquarters of a relief organization. Feeling overwhelmed by my job and lonely in a city of overworked expats passing through for two to three year stints at the United Nations or other organizations with the rather nebulous goal of “changing the world,” I made friends with a group of women. I was 22, and all three women — one American, one German, and one Argentinean – were 30 years older than I and had worked for the same organization in various administrative capacities for the length of time I’d been alive. After one lengthy, boozy dinner of fondue and buckets of white wine, they quickly took me into their friendship fold and jokingly referred to themselves as “the Wrinklies.”

All three women (and myself as well) were unmarried, living alone, and working to assist people in real need in countries around the world.  Despite the fact that I immediately felt accepted, supported, challenged and nurtured by each of them, when I first joined their weekly dinner group, I felt sorry for them. They weren’t married, they weren’t mothers – and at this time, and up until very recently, I clung to the belief that this constituted some failure on their part. They found me equally mystifying. Was I really worried about the size of my ass or trying to finagle a recent date with a man they thought (from my description) was boring and slightly odious? (He was.) Was it a good use of my time, they wondered, to hang out in bars getting smashed and looking to score and by doing this (they were rightfully doubtful) find “the love of my life” when I said I wanted to be a writer? Sure, sure, I said, but I dismissed their concerns, and mourned what I interpreted as their missed opportunities to have a real life, which I assumed would only start for me when I was married and a mother. I loved them, but in my mind I was remembering that old phrase I’d heard for most of my life, in hushed and shameful tones: old maid. I was also keen to make my life look “normal” and “acceptable” in some way because I have a disability; if I didn’t get the body part right, I reasoned (irrationally, although it seemed quite rational at the time), I could get the “what your life looks like” part right.

While I was obsessing about how I looked and who would love me, these women were helping to save the world – not in a way that would win them accolades, certainly – but the work they were doing was important and life-giving. And there I sat, foolishly pitying them. What I realized, sitting there, was that these women had been in these kinds of emotionally challenging situations for over 20 years. Together. They understood, together, as friends, and apart, as individuals in the world, the urgency of compassion, and that it often goes unnoticed but that this doesn’t make it any less important or vital or difficult to sustain and cultivate. And they also understood that you could try as hard as you possibly could, and disaster could still strike – mercilessly. Without warning, without fairness, and with fatal consequences. I wasn’t ready to change my man-chasing, embarrassing ways, but a seed was planted on that afternoon. Nearly fifteen years later I get out of bed each morning and am thankful that I wasn’t so myopically committed to old, tried myths about women’s roles that I couldn’t see what was happening in that room between those three women, or what was happening in my own mind…

The Wrinklies weren’t spinsters or old maids and they were not “failures” in any way. They were free. It was I who failed to see them, until later, for who they really were: educated, hugely intelligent, fascinating, financially independent. Women who led rich lives full of meaningful work, deep and lasting friendship, sex when they wanted it, time with the beloved children of their family and friends, conversations about politics and art and literature, culture, travel to remarkable destinations where they did not journey as unconscious tourists but as guests in people’s homes and hearts. Despite these full lives they owned their own time, they owned their days…

The last time I saw the Wrinklies was in 1999 on a return trip to Geneva. The youngest of the three had had a stroke as a result of a brain tumor. These friends she’d worked and traveled and lived and laughed and loved with for over half her life rented a new ground-floor apartment that would accommodate a wheelchair, took shifts taking care of her, all the while holding down jobs that were about saving other people’s friends, other people’s kids, other people’s lives – not directly, no, but on the sidelines, behind the scenes, booking travel and setting up conference space and directing supplies and networking with people on the ground who were face to face with whatever crisis situation needed to be handled. I was nervous as I sat waiting in a pub to see them all again, afraid of seeing my paralyzed friend. Would my face show a reaction that I didn’t intend? Fear? Disgust? The three of them came in together, smiling. The unaffected two had learned to understand the other’s few words; they wiped her face, helped her eat and made her laugh. This was a snapshot of what my own deep friendships could lead to: transformation. I saw, on that afternoon, that it’s possible to transcend the limits of your skin in a friendship. That a friend can take you out of the boxes you’ve made for yourself and burn them up. This kind of friendship is not a frivolous connection, a supplementary relationship to the ones we’re taught and told are primary – spouses, children, parents. It is love. When the youngest Wrinklie died, I remember getting the news in my apartment in Berkeley, married, already knowing it wouldn’t last, and thinking she was lucky. And she was.”

In praise of sisters

India has a unique festival – Rakhsa Bandhan – literally knot of protection- where a sister ties a “rakhee” around her brothers hand. The rakhi is a symbol of the purity of a relationship between a sister and brother. By it the brother pledges to protect the sister in every birth. Just as the brother is bound by a promise to protect the sister after getting a string tied onto his wrist, so also the sister prays to God for his protection. Rakhi is basically a sacred thread of protection embellished with the love and affection of a sister for her brother.

This traditional Hindu festival 'Raksha Bandhan'  has its origin about 6000 years back when Aryans created first civilization. And there are many legends which have built around this rather unique festival that celebrates the love that a brother has for his sister.

Among these legends is story of Rani Karnavati and Emperor Humayun. During the medieval era, Rajputs were fighting Muslim invasions. When Rani Karnawati, the widowed queen of the king of Chittor realised that she could in no way defend the invasion of the Sultan of Gujarat, Bahadur Shah, she sent a rakhi to Emperor Humayun. The Emperor touched by the gesture started off with his troops without wasting any time.

Some claim that this ritual even started earlier with Lord Krishna. In order to protect the good people of Dwarka, Lord Krishna killed the evil King Shishupal but was hurt during the war and left with bleeding finger. Seeing this, Draupathi had torn a strip of cloth from her sari and tied it around his wrist to stop the bleeding. Lord Krishna, realizing her affections and concern about him, declared himself bounded by her sisterly love. He promised her to repay this debt whenever she needed in future and he did when she was being dishonored and he made sure that the saree she wore was endless.

This day epitomizes the love between a sister and her brothers and the sacred thread is proof of this lifelong bond. History is replete with records where women have invoked this rakhee and where men- sometimes even of different religion and origin but who have become “ dharma bhais” or brothers in spirit, have rushed to the help of their sisters.

In modern days, however, the role of the sister has turned – now it is they who have become the protectors of their brothers. While traditionally, sisters adore their older brothers, and remain their lifelong cheerleaders, they dote on their younger brothers. It is to her that younger siblings repair for advice and consolation in times of trouble. She is the first port of call when things become tense in the household and parental pressures mount for when mom and dad don't understand, a sister always will. 
An older sister is a friend and defender - a listener, conspirator, a counsellor and a sharer of delights.  And sorrows too. And when parents are no longer around, it is often she who becomes the glue that holds the family together. She is no longer the one asking for aid and help, instead she has become the dispenser of succor and lifelong affection and support for her brothers.

Some of us are blessed to have such sisters as well as the counterparts of “dharma bhais”, the “ sisters in spirit”. I have come to increasingly appreciate and value the affection that underlie these relationships. A sibling is after all the keeper of one's true identity, the only person with the keys to one's unfettered, more fundamental self.  The pure love and concern that, in ways subtle and unsubtle, tie the siblings together over their lifetimes, is one to be carefully fostered for our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk.  She is your mirror, shining back at you with a world of possibilities.  She is your witness, who sees you at your worst and best, and loves you anyway.  She is your partner in crime, your midnight companion, someone who knows when you are smiling, even in the dark.  She is your teacher, your defense attorney, your personal press agent, even your shrink. It is the most nurturing of relationships but the role of sisters is often left unsung and under appreciated. And it should not.

In recent years, I have been the lucky recipient of this affection from many – from some who chide me when I do not stay with them during my visits to their hometown, to others who provided me a with a safe haven after a tense encounter with the terrorists and made sure it remained peaceful and calm. Or one who regularly scolds me on not staying with her, once irately observing that she would be happy to send me a hotel bill if it would help overcome my old fashioned values of not burdening married younger sisters. Another who constantly sends me clippings of the latest developments in science to cure my various ills, And another who took over my medical support when I fell sick organizing doctors medicines hospitals with a quiet efficiency and loving concern;  to another who cheerfully took leave of her legal practice to massage my aching muscles at a time when my wife was at her wits end in tending to my troubles.

There is a sweetness in these relationships that is hard to capture in simple words. I often ask how do people make it through life without a sister? For sisters are blossoms in the garden of life. There's no other love like their love for a brother. A love that is gentle, calm and full of affection- it is a relationship like none other. It surprises me that this sisterly love has not found a day for it to be honored. Of course, we need not a day but the whole year to properly thank those who provide us with such love and comfort. But a day would at least be a start.

Perhaps a silver rakhee day where brother can tie a gold or silver bracelet around their sisters wrists symbolizing the relationship?

The real battle below- analysing the republicans approach to 2012

In a remarkable piece, Chait analyses the deeper underlying motives of the republican strategies for the election of 2012. A number of disparate actions spread over the past two years begin to make sense when viewed through the prism of a desperate southern white desire to hang on to power despite the changing demographics. It is a battle against history and geography and unveils deep seated fears now swirling around the heads of a party doomed to being a long term minority status.

"Of the various expressions of right-wing hysteria that have flowered over the past three years—goldbuggery, birtherism, death panels at home and imaginary apology tours by President Obama abroad—perhaps the strain that has taken deepest root within mainstream Republican circles is the terror that the achievements of the Obama administration may be irreversible, and that the time remaining to stop permanent nightfall is dwindling away."says Chait.

The Republican Party has increasingly found itself confined to white voters, especially those lacking a college degree and rural whites. Meanwhile, the Democrats have ­increased their standing among whites with graduate degrees, particularly the growing share of secular whites, and remained dominant among racial minorities. Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point—meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country. These trends favor the democratic coalition, since as a whole the electorate is growing both somewhat better educated and dramatically less white, thus making every successive election less favorable for the GOP.

Faced with this bleak future, the republican leadership , rather than adjust themselves to their slowly weakening position,  have chosen instead to stage a decisive confrontation. If the terms of the fight grow more unfavorable with every passing year, well, all the more reason to have the fight sooner, goes their reasoning. This was the thought process of the antebellum southern states, sizing up the growing population and industrial might of the North. It was the thinking of the leaders of Austria-Hungary, watching their empire deteriorate and deciding they needed a decisive war with Serbia to save themselves. At varying levels of conscious and subconscious thought, this is also the reasoning that has driven Republicans in the Obama era. Surveying the landscape, they have concluded that they must strike quickly and decisively at the opposition before all hope is lost.

And what has been the strategy? Total opposition and complete denial of any credit to the sitting president for any achievment.

- The Republicans’ most audacious choice has been the hyperaggressive position they’ve adopted against Obama to sabotage his chances for a second term. There is a devious brilliance at work in the GOP strategy of legislative obstruction as they have very skillfully ground the legislative gears to a halt for months on end, weakening or killing large chunks of Obama’s agenda, and nurturing public discontent with Washington.

- The Koch brother inspired media campaigns against healthcare- Obama's signature achievement, the sponsoring of tea partiers, the negative response to job act

- Republicans have not ignored the rising tide of younger and browner voters that swamped them at the polls in 2008 either. Instead they have just set about keeping as many of them from the polls as possible in the future. The bulk of this campaign has taken the form of throwing up an endless series of tedious bureaucratic impediments to voting in many states—ending same-day voter registration, imposing onerous requirements upon voter-registration drives, and upon voters themselves.

- the outside funding of republican candidate through anonymous donations to swamp democratic candidates

- the deliberate raising of social inflammatory issues to divide the electrolate

Knowing what drives your opponent is an important tool in devising your own strategy. The question is can Obama's team formulate a countervailing strategy to overcome this?