Life in Balance: Amit Chaudhary’s Blog
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We all have morals and values (or standards, if you prefer) that tend to operate in certain band, fluctuating up and down a little, but overall staying in a certain range. Whether we are aware of it or not, we tend to apply or skip them when it comes to our work life (our employment or the startups we create.)

The reality:You can succeed with higher personal morals at work, whether it is working for your employer or your own startup. It happens in many fields including technology companies (Google: make money without doing evil) and Movies (Forest Gump made U$320M, My Big Fat Greek Wedding made U$240M neither of which are your typical violence prompting movies.)
If you stay with your morals, the satisfaction will be higher, you will sustain or increase your personal values. It might be tougher journey, the percentage of success might be lower. Finally your impact\contribution on\for others  will be much more and you would have lived an authentic life.

The choice is your to make, knowingly or it will just happen over time.

A few thoughts:

• Think about your need for success:

The more desperate you are, the more likely you are bound to comprise everything including the original idea, the values and so on.

• Decide your level of handling difficulties.

Yes, it is easier to sell the concept of a movie like “Die Hard” than “Good Will Hunting”, but it is possible. Be ready to handle more difficulties.

• Decide your personal resistance level

There are multiple ways to resist a direction. Since all of us have someone we are answerable to at work atleast upto a certain extent, decide your personal resistance level. It could be, you will refuse to follow a company with a conflict, you will follow(stay employed), but resist publicly and vigorously, you will resist in a subtle and diplomatic way with moderate intensity, you will not support it publicly but not oppose it either.

• Do not equate loyalty with blind support

Note, loyalty should not mean blind support. You can still care about a company, but criticize it from time to time. Scoble in his older role at Microsoft was an example of this.

• Your choice of employer or partners will have an impact on this.

If your partner in a startup or your employer do not share your values, lot of energy will be misdirected on convincing them instead of doing the right thing.

Your personal values:

If you want to evaluate or work on your personal values, I would recommend

• Levels of Consciousness by Steve Pavlina

• Gunas test: A self-evaluation method from ancient Indian texts & Ayurveda: This test is from the book Yoga and Ayurveda by David Frawley,

• Consider adding more of Yamas and Niyamas: The Yoga guidelines for conduct to your life.

Background:

It was surprising to me that what a person would never do himself, he or she is fine letting it happen (slowly) at their work. Hence this post.

I first realized this inherent conflicting behavior during the Mid-2006 US Govt request for user search data which MSN & Yahoo provided quietly, but Google did not. Speaking on this with a friend in MSN, his personal opinion was it is not a big deal because. 1. The data did not identify users. 2. Google was not doing it to protect it’s users and 3. It was for a good cause, avoiding child pornography. Nothing from official MSN channel had anything on the topic.

Personally, I believe the data was handed over to avoid expenses associated with lawyers, etc and to stay on the favored (often ironically called good books) of the US govt, age old “money and favor over values” decision.

The second time I ran into it was when was reading the post by Gred Linden, Ruthless enough for a startup? and his probable conclusion

It appears the ideal startup will give away something that used to cost money for free (preferably copyright material and porn), use other people’s content and resources, appeal to the baser human instincts (especially vanity and sex), and spam massive e-mail lists at launch.

Update:

Marc Andreessen puts Ethics in the top 3 Qualities to look for when hiring.

Also see, the Steve Pavlina article, Living your values: Part 1, Part 2.

bot-check is a WordPress anti-spam comment plugin originally developer by Brian at Blue Eye web development.

I have made changes to get it working with the latest WordPress, version 2.0.5 which is used to host this blog. It requires GDlib and MCRYPT.
Download: bot-check-1.2.tar.gz

Changes:

-Make bot-check work for WordPress 2.0.5 by correcting the add_filter call in bot-check.php

-Fixed the occassional corrupt image being displayed

-Fixed the comment being wiped out incase of incorrect or empty number (Captcha) field.

See install.txt in the file above for installation and license details (GPL, v2.)

PS: From what I know, bot-check works only with WordPress 2.0.x. I do not have any plans right now for WordPress 2.x or later.

Thanks to 37signals, I came to know of the Graphical adaptation of The 9/11 Report.

The final 9/11 Commission report is fairly large 585 pages, though available for free on the internet, I never got around to reading it. I ordered The 9/11 report Graphical adaptation from Amazon and read it in an evening and would highly recommend it for anyone interested in the events behind and before 9/11, the day of the largest terrorist attack on the US soil.

Click on these images above for a preview thanks to Amazon.com.

Summary

It covers the four planes used in the 9/11 attack on a timeline. It shows events before the attack including interaction or lack of it between the US intelligence and defense agencies, the reports that US government received, attacks on US embassies and interests in other areas of the world, growth of Bin Laden and depiction of actual attack, it’s preparation and the subsequent local agencies and US government response.

Here are a few notes from it about things I did not knew or register before:

Pre-event:

-Richard A. Clarke, member of National Security Council and Counter-Terrorism expert is shown repeatedly notifying Condoleezza Rice, then National Security Advisor to the US President about the threat of attack on the US soil. He is also the author of the book, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror.

-Bin laden has desire of killing each and every American.

-Pakistan paid only lip-service to US co-operation requests against Al-Qaeda until Sept 2001 due to vested interests.

-US Department of Defence agencies including NSA have more than 80% of the US Counter-Terrorism budget. The rest is divided among CIA, FBI, etc. There was a long history of not sharing information between these agencies including details of known terrorists.

-Within agencies, there was a failure to escalate warnings from the field. This include a FBI field report about Terrorist planning to use planes for attack.
-All the terrorist came on visitor visas. This might explain the current 6-8 month delay in vistor visa appointments in US embassies in India and other countries.
During-event:

-The FAA or the airlines were not capable of co-ordination to handle terrorist attacks.
-After the North tower was hit by the plane, rest of the North tower evacuation was not started for a while. The Morgan stanley security department finally initiated evacuation for it’s employees.
-The South tower was not evacuated for the ~30 minutes before the second plane hit it. The NYFD personnel actually sent back up people trying to leave the South tower.
-The radios of only the NYPD were working inside the towers and underground. NYFD had a communication and co-ordination glitches results in personnel in wrong places, non-functional instruments.

Post-event:

-George W. Bush, then and current US president made the following statement. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

-There were already attempts at the start of the response phase to associate 9/11 with Iraq.

-The later pages discuss the 9/11 commission recommendations and a report card on changes made so far.