Respect

As my responsibilities grow, I get to witness lot more interactions, and many a times have felt like sharing this thought. Hopefully I can pen this in a useful manner and make a note for myself as well.

What is respect?

Respect is a level of appropriateness that is required in every action that we undertake while dealing with another person. The action can be an email, or a message or a discussion or just a hi while passing in the corridor. It has to be maintained irrespective of our mood or feelings towards the person. While, it is human to be upset or not like a person, but the way we behave has to be at par with the respect that is due. Its unconditional.

Who to respect?

There are three types of people that I consider respect worthy, those who are healthy, wealthy and wise. Any individual with any one of these deserves respect. Lets look at the three qualities one by one.

Who is wise? 

As we grow older, we learn somethings that we are good at, some that we think we will never be or want to be. Everyone we deal with has gone through this cycle and is what he or she is. We have to respect it. Think of the office boy or maid, they respect us for our money or our skills that they don't have. Do we want to do their job? Can we? In professional life, e.g. sales people can think sales is everything, but that designer who designed the brochure is critical for our success, respect is due. Designers may think, we are greatest, but think of the person who actually sold or delivered the product one designed, a design isn't worth anything till it is put in its rightful place. Respect everyone whose job we can't do or don't want to. Its integral to functioning of the world or society or organization.

Why healthy?

In the world today, when people have different reasons to die early, a person who has lived for more years than I have, is healthy for me. Age is something that we can never equal. We can't be as old as our parents ever, neither can we catch up to the old man who blessed us before our very first big break in life. It takes a lot to age. The trouble that a 5 year old goes to be 6, or a 13 year old goes to be an adult, or an adult goes to be a partner or a parent or a manager, is something that we can only appreciate as much. Age deserves respect.

and wealthy... really?

Now that's a tough one. There are two types of wealth, self earned and inherited. Generally self earned is easier to accept (or not). Is inherited wealth as good? In hindu mythology the goddess of wealth, Lakshmi, is placed at par with Kali (goddess of power) and Saraswati (goddess of education). Wealth, in essence, is a form of power, it comes with its own set of responsibilities. If one doesn't deliver on the responsibilities, the power will wane. That's the law of nature. We don't know how they are delivering on their responsibilities. So, if someone has wealth, it is a sign of responsibility the person is carrying. It deserves its respect.

How to respect?

The "how" part of respect varies across cultures, context and ages. We can learn from others and experiment our own ways to show respect. I will leave this for the individual to decide. The only thing to keep in mind is that anything that is done is considered part of respect, intentional or unintentional.

In retrospect...

I can easily remember a recent instance where I did not respect a person who has more than one of these respect worthy qualities. It has been months since, but I still am not able to get over it. I promised myself, never to let myself slip again. This post is a reminder to me.

Consumer Product Design UX from a Techie Dad

(Its been more than 3 years since I wrote a post, 1221 days to be precise. The culprit is likely facebook and twitter which help dump a thought in less than 25 words. Let me see how much I can write today!)

A lot of times when we try to develop a product or a feature, our techies tend to start "why can't a user do it this way..", the answer comes only with experience. Once I was reading an article about why do certain things that they do, the answer was simple, because "they can". The same applies to a consumer product, users will do something because they can.

Often there is another way to protest some thing, "aren't user's intelligent to figure this out.. ". Well again, the kids today figure out the tabs and mouse operation as if they were born to operate it. The realization is that they (kids and users) are way too intelligent and will try to do things the way its "natural" or "intuitive".

If a product is not designed inline with "natural" and to handle the stuff that "can" be done, it results in "what did the user do to get here...". This one again is rarely traceable, like when we see our baby climb up or sing a made up song, we have no way to trace back. The product needs to be designed to be simple and a single way to get to a point.

... and the real UX is to predict and design accordingly.

Are you gold?

This is an article I wrote for our internal newsletter, sharing here for wider audience who are working as professionals.

 
These days, we hear news of gold hitting all time high almost on daily basis. It is not just now, whenever times have been tough in the modern history, gold has become more valuable.

Let's look at what makes this yellow metal so precious:
1. Gold Shines
2. Gold works great as investment even in worst of times
3. Gold is valuable in all its uses

I think we should imbibe these qualities in ourselves as professionals.

The most important quality we identify gold with, is its shine. Anytime we see a gold item that's not shining we have doubts on its quality. How do we shine as professionals? We shine though our communication and compassion in our jobs. We are extremely lucky to be working in an organization where, looking at our trainees, compassion will be an automatic reaction. We want to set high standards not just for them but also for our colleagues with top quality communication. We must shine in every action we do at work.

In our professional life we will come across tough times. Those who perform consistently will become more valuable members of the team. This is time to work harder and smarter to get to our goals. Always remember, rewards are much higher when performance is good in difficult times.

Gold is valuable in every form be it bullion, investment or jewellery. The more it is diluted, the more importance it gets, think of diamond jewellery, it is never made from pure gold but is valued more than pure gold jewellery. With the kind of growth we have seen, and we will continue to see, it will be required for all of us to take on different roles across organization and locations. We should make sure that we are doing the best we can; in every task we are assigned. Remember it is the Gold that valued not the item that gold is made into.

Quoting from "A Tale of two Cities" by Charles Dickens, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way" - in short, the period was so far like the present period.

This is the time you should ask yourself, every day you come to work, "Are you gold?" I do.