This Side of Paradise

…whole lotta leaving goin’ on…! first my bike, and now it’s quits to Fortune 9. That’s where office moved in Dec 2005 from our good ol’ office… after almost two years of struggling with the place, we call it quits from here tonight. We’re moving to a swank new mall (.. yeah.. mall) on road no.1, banjara hills…! never quite liked the place, and I’m sure it was vice versa too. Office life was never too good out here in terms of career and professional life. Had been to the new office on the 15th and for some reason, felt really comfortable at there, loved my new desk :)

I had this fantastic opportunity to be part of the information risk management forum at the client location. So, off it was to Bangalore again - the program was scheduled for a day, with various senior people speaking. The most notable among them being - Nandkumar Saravade - Director, Cyber Security and Compliance at NASSCOM. One of the very interesting discussions we had with him was an info sec accreditation similar to ISO 27001 which members of NASSCOM would use to benchmark themselves in the industry. Since offices in India serve various countries all over the world, the proposed standard would be trying to encompass information security laws across many countries. Any company having that particular security accreditation would surpass individual country specific requirements. Even a third party surveying/certifying firm like Gallup or Moody’s could actually define and administer these surveys and certifications. Great for the outsourcing business in India, and definitely a step in the right direction where information security measures are woefully inadequate when compared to the industry growth here.

I finished six years of professional life on Monday evening. It’s been a wild ride so far, there have been ups and downs, fighting against seemingly impossible situations and emerging out somehow. It’s been a time of learning new things and opening up to things which we never knew existed…! I think I’ve become a senior citizen in the company.. hell yeah…!! totally agreed :). Time to think of the future now…!

…my fourth company sitting in the same seat. The brokerage services division of ADP has been spun off effective Apr 1st and the new company has been named Broadridge. What does it mean for us? we’re going back to being a small company again - lots of growth opportunities, interesting times…something for everyone! here’s a photo of the opening at NYSE.

Exactly three months back, we set out to achieve the impossible…completing a seven month project in three months…! we made it at last…!! agreed…the three months were nothing less than hell….I’ve lost track of the number of weekends I’ve sat at the office from the morning to the night; I’ve lost track of the late hours I’ve been awake; I’ve lost track of how many times I got called when there was nothing else on my mind other than getting a few hours of sleep. But, in the end what matters is that we’ve kept our end of the bargain. We delievered what we promised. It’s a month of chill-out now, before getting on to the next project.

The month of June is very eagerly looked forward to by the management here. The reason - two scores arrive that define you as a leader. The first is the Gallup survey which shows how effective you are as a manager in terms of taking care of the team and the second is the client survey which is filled in by the end client. Bottom line, your performance as a leader is evaluated from all directions.

…is generally considered to be the most demanding project across our company. The general word is that working for a year in the GS project is equivalent to working for two years on any other project. To average joe, it seems like a project best avoided…you get paid the same for two times the work, twice the pressure..phew…!! Why would someone want to stay on there…!! Henry Paulson is the chairman of Goldman Sachs and there was a mail from him yesterday which started like this…