Home Happiness

Everyone feels the need for a home - A place where one can leave their troubles outside the door and find comfort and shelter. But to a person who has been on the road ever since consciousness took hold, a home is a dream. And with time, that dream is embellished even more, till finally, it becomes a mythical, abstract concept that prompts an essay such as this one !!

Contrary to popular opinion, a home is not a house. The word "house" usually embodies the physical part of the word "home". It will not however, capture the soul of the block of cement. A home is neither dependent on the size of the house, nor its opulence. To an extent, it is even independent of the people who inhabit it.

A home, therefore, is a purely a purview of the individual. It's the individual's choice as to what does or does not constitute a home. Below is a poem by John Clare:

Like a thing of the desert, alone in its glee,
I make a small home seem an empire to me;
Like a bird in the forest, whose world is its nest,
My home is my all, and the centre of rest.
Let Ambition stretch over the world at a stride,
Let the restless go rolling away with the tide,
I look on life's pleasures as follies at best,
And, like sunset, feel calm when I'm going to rest.

I sit by the fire, in the dark winter's night,
While the cat cleans her face with her foot in delight,
And the winds all a-cold, with rude clatter and din
Shake the windows, like robbers who want to come in;
Or else, from the cold to be hid and away,
By the bright burning fire see my children at play,
Making houses of cards, or a coach of a chair,
While I sit enjoying their happiness there.

I walk round the orchard on sweet summer eves,
And rub the perfume from the black-currant leaves,
Which, like the geranium, when touched, leave a smell
That lad's-love and sweet-briar can hardly excel.
I watch the plants grow, all begemmed with the shower,
That glitters like pearls in a sun-shiny hour;
And hear the pert robin just whistle a tune,
To cheer the lone hedger when labour is done.

Joys come like the grass in the fields springing there,
Without the mere toil of attention or care;
They come of themselves, like a star in the sky,
And the brighter they shine when the cloud passes by.
I wish but for little, and find it all there,
Where peace gives its faith to the home of the hare,
Who would else, overcome by her fears, run away
From the shade of the flower and the breeze of the day.

0 the out-of-door blessings of leisure for me!
Health, riches, and joy! — it includes them all three.
There Peace comes to me — I have faith in her smile —
She's my playmate in leisure, my comfort in toil;
There the short pasture-grass hides the lark on its nest,
Though scarcely so high as the grasshopper's breast;
And there its moss-ball hides the wild honey-bee,
And there joy in plenty grows riches for me.

Far away from the world, its delusions and snares —
Whose words are but breath, and its breathing but cares, —
Where trouble's sown thick as the dews of the morn,
One can scarce set a foot without meeting a thorn —
There are some view the world as a lightly thrown ball,
There are some look on cities like stones in a wall —
Nothing more. There are others, Ambition's proud heirs,
Of whom I have neither the courage nor cares.

So I sit on my bench, or enjoy in the shade
My toil as a pasture, while using the spade;
My fancy is free in her pleasure to stray,
Making voyages round the whole world in a day.
I gather home-comforts where cares never grew,
Like manna, the heavens rain down with the dew,
Till I see the tired hedger bend wearily by,
Then like a tired bird to my corner I fly.

This poem is quite representative of the expectation that I have placed on our new apartment under construction. As you might observe, the individual also feels that the home represents a culmination of achievements throughout his/her life, a place which grants him "immunity from further prosecution".

How IBM's values translate into an ethics platform

The following is an excerpt from an essay I wrote to highlight IBM values and cultural moorings:

IBM, for long, had a very short motto – THINK – that it tried to apply to its daily practices. Coined by Thomas Watson, the motto served IBM well through its foundational years. With this single word in mind, IBM prided itself in being at the cutting edge of industrial innovation.

However, as with thought itself, IBM was often criticized for “thinking” but not “doing” enough. Most of this criticism was external, but some of it was internal, coming from well meaning employees, often frustrated with dysfunctional processes and systems. With new market trends and IBM’s emergence from a period of difficulty, it made sense to heed the criticism and devise a new value system to support the internal restructuring. With this in mind, a jam session was organized to discover the core “culture” of IBM and what it means to be an IBMer. The output of that session was three separate values:

§ Dedication to every Client’s success

§ Innovation that matters – for our company and for the world

§ Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

Upon further analysis, it is clear that these values represent something more than the professional standards to be followed. What emerged from the jam session was, therefore, even more symbolic – a way of life, with each of the values having direct links to everyday life. All IBMers who are guided by these values also share a common bond – a world view that is based on these values.

Dedication to every Client’s success

Dedication to a client’s success demands passion, focus, determination and true empathy. An IBMer is expected to use all available means to ensure client success. “Dedication” is not an empty word which is measured in terms of overtime hours. Instead, it is usually the result of an empathetic understanding of the client’s requirements and issues. Such empathy also helps us to build trust, a fact discussed in detail later.

These values cannot be applied during the course of a workday unless the IBMer is willing to extend them to all facets of external life as well. It is, for example, highly unlikely that a person is dedicated to the client’s cause but oblivious to the needs of his or her family, friends and community. Our professional life is but an extension of our personal life and people who exhibit this dichotomy of character will be unable to keep the façade from crumbling, leading eventually to the client suffering the consequences. It would be easy for peers to spot such anomalous cases and take appropriate corrective action.

Another important word in the phrase is “every”. An IBMer cannot be selective about which client to help to succeed and which to ignore. The success of one client cannot be at the cost of another. In other words, client success becomes an egalitarian, organization-wide, all-inclusive goal.

Equality, then, has to be one of the bases for an IBMer’s outlook on other world matters as well. An IBMer cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color or caste. This has helped foster a warm and cozy work environment within IBM where fellow employees are judged not by the color of their skin, but by the “content of their character and deeds”. This facet is reflected in every policy within IBM – from compensation to career opportunities. This non-discriminatory attitude also bodes well for the community to which the IBMer belongs. It serves as one of the pillars of a secular democracy like India. An IBMer, insulated from discrimination of any kind at the workplace, is unlikely to be biased in personal life either.

On the basis of this value, an IBMer can be expected to become an important contributor to not only client’s success, but also the success of family, friends, colleagues and the community at large.

Innovation that matters – for our company and for the world

Innovation has become a buzzword in the recent times. However, innovation for the sake of innovation is pointless. Any innovation has to have a goal, which is usually the betterment of prevailing circumstances.

IBM’s value system tells us that any innovation should also take into consideration its wider implications. It has to have an inclusive basis, which improves the status of all the parties involved – the individual, the client, the organization, and the global community. The invention of the nuclear bomb, for example, even though it was an innovation of great technical achievement, cannot fit into IBM’s value system due to its adverse implications for humanity.

Further, innovations do not occur overnight. Any innovative IBMer will concede that innovations begin in small steps. It might, for example, start with a small code snippet to do everyday tasks. Over a period of time, the code snippet results in a reusable asset, then a product, and then an industry standard. An IBMer has to be open-minded and recognize opportunities for innovation in all walks of life – from smoother traffic control to decoding the human genome.

This is one aspect that IBM has always excelled in, as reflected in the large number of patents that are filed by IBMers everyday. However, to rest on our laurels would be foolish. New technologies are evolving everyday and IBMers are at the forefront of these innovations. An ideal example of this would be Service Oriented Architecture. As it gained prominence in the past decade, IBM has striven to master and develop the concept in order to be able to offer cutting edge solutions to its clients.

Trust and personal responsibility in all relationships

The recent scams in the corporate world such as Enron, Worldcom etc have raised serious doubts about the ethics followed by today’s professionals. This has necessitated IBM’s value system to integrate a strict set of ethics and moral standards.

It is reflected in the trust and personal responsibility that is expected from every IBMer in all their activities. An IBMer strives to build a relationship with the client and with fellow workers that is based on mutual trust. Trust can only be established over a period of time by the IBMer’s deeds and actions. Further, an IBMer focuses on maintaining that trust once it has been established. This trust, once established, can be easily extended to one’s deeds and actions towards the community, resulting in a conditioning of the conscience over a period of time – in other words, gaining trust becomes a habit.

Personal responsibility is one of the key components of building and maintaining trust. Shirking responsibility can never truly accomplish something substantial. Instead, an IBMer focuses on going beyond what is expected to ensure that a personal touch is retained in all interactions. Each undertaking should be treated with respect, as if it’s “personal”. Such an attitude would also help the IBMer to become involved in the surrounding community and work towards its betterment. IBM actively encourages this involvement by creating opportunities which allow IBMers to support school children, contribute to charities, assist in times of emergencies etc.

It is clear from the illustrations above that the value system inculcated in IBM holds relevance for not just this organization but also for other organizations and the community. In these troubled and ever-changing times, it serves to guide us and redirect our moral compass in times of doubt and uncertainty.

Mainframe - The forgotten workhorse

In today's age of the internet, people seem to have forgotten IBM's mainframe systems. I wonder how people can ignore the fact that the mainframes still drive the commercial projects and that they will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

The scalability, security and performance offered by this platform is unrivaled. I've been working on this platform for over 4 years now and the production environment has not crashed once on my project. There has been no incident of a security breach and no issues with performance. That's a far cry from Windows and/or Linux based systems.

Sure, MVS is not as snazzy as Vista or Leopard, but, it does what it is intended to do faultlessly - processing of files, database transactions and storage. Mainframes were expected to be consigned to the dinosaur heap when the Internet exploded. However, unlike the dinos, they evolved and at the same time retained their key benefits. CICS transaction gateways now connect the 8-color Mainframe to the 65-million-color world of the net. Meanwhile, Mainframes continue to house most of the operational database needs of large projects.

There has been a rather disturbing trend recently to shift business logic out of the mainframe and onto open systems. Clients claim that this reduces cost and removes the dependency on IBM and its hardware. However, this might not be entirely true. Instead of maintaining a single machine, clients often end up maintaining multiple servers to handle the same amount of traffic. As the volumes grow, this results in a nightmare for the admin staff. I also find that the experience with the "legacy" systems has given rise to more mature processes for development, testing and implementation. Is it worth it to re-invent the wheel ?

So where do mainframes go from here ? As I write this, IBM has announced its latest model in the z-series. With India and China growing at a zippy rate, demand for the mainframe will be strong in the short term. The choice of OS will also be varied, with IBM also announcing z-Linux on some of its machines.