Batting at number 12: Books

Book Review: Microserfs

Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:14:34 GMT

Generally I'm not much into fiction but when a friend recommended Microserfs as a fun little book about early days at Microsoft, I thought I should give it a shot. The book is an easy read for a layman without any arcane references to the computing terms. The writing style is so immersing that after a while you feel like you have known Karla, Dan, Susan, Michael etc for a while.

There are a couple of gripes though. Since I was reading a fiction I kinda expected something dramatic, *fictional* to happen. Instead this book just went on like a real story and ended without much of a climax. Also the main reason why I wanted to read this was to see if I can get a glimpse of the early Microsoft days but since most of the story happens in the Bay Area, it was a bit of a letdown.

Still I'd recommend it as a comfort read for a geek.

Negotiations and Emotions

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:40:36 GMT

Negotiation is an art. I heard a talk by Dan Shapiro recently on using emotions for effective negotiations. Dan, an entertaining orator, is a researcher at the Harvard Negotiation Project and author of the book beyond reason. He boiled down the art to a simple 5 key formula.

Appreciate your counterpart, appreciate his participation and efforts
Respect his autonomy, make sure you don't tell him what to do and certainly not something that is his domain
Build affiliation with him so that you are comfortable negotiating
Acnowledge his status
Shape a fulfilling role in the whole process. Both for yourself and your counterpart.

In my everyday life that I mostly spend coding away behind closed door, I doubt that I'd need a tehnique to handle any discussions and negotiations but I liked the approach... something to keep handy for the annual review meeting :)