#9. Tehri - 1
Medley of what I learnt this week
Tehri is a rice based dish cooked with medley of seasonal vegetables. A fail-proof dish in every household in northern India that everyone happily gorges upon if nothing else pops-up for cooking.
This issue of newsletter is a Tehri of different ideas and concepts I learnt this week. Here we go.
1. To be (Cloud) or not to be (Cloud)
In 2020, enterprise spending on Cloud ($130B) surpassed that on datacenter hardware and software ($90B) by a huge margin. As new organizations embark on the journey, the obvious efficiencies in operation and economics drive the adoption of cloud.
While many organizations are still catching-up on this migration towards cloud, a reverse trend - called Cloud Repatriation has already started. Repatriation results in one-third to one-half the cost of running equivalent workloads in the cloud. Dropbox, for example, moved away from cloud and was able to save $75M. As organizations scale, growth tapers - the spending on cloud starts to pinch and moving to on-prem is way to reduce the pressure on margins.
For any SaaS based organization continuous focus on optimizing infrastructure spending and creating portable solutions (flexibility to run on Cloud and On-Prem) is the key.
Read the insightful article for more details here.
2. Two German words
I came across two new German words this week.
A) Schadenfreude
This great book on decision making- Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts mentions the word Schadenfreude: deriving pleasure from someone else’s misfortune. The book says, “engaging the world through the lens of competition is deeply embedded in our animal brains… A lot of the way we feel about ourselves comes from how we think we compare with others…”.If someone we view as a peer is losing, we feel like we are winning by comparison and vice-versa.
We need to be aware of Schadenfreude - this mindset of zero-sum game we all carry could become a roadblock in our learning and a source of constant anxiety.
B) Auftragstaktik
I learnt this term from the book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. The origins of the term come from War/Military, Auftragstatik is a principle where commanders were to tell the subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it. “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity”.
We see the same principle as the backbone of various agile methodologies like scrum - Autonomous teams. We as leaders need to empower our teams to take the decisions - provided we have been able to deliver a vision - that all team members strive to achieve together.
That’s all for this edition. If you liked it, please do share with your family and friends.
Very well narrated!!