Chennai Pattanam

January 16, 2022, Sunday

Collected food, came to the room.

I took a power nap to get some relief from the headache. This worked.

Afterward, out for a quick stroll, to the restaurant, and reception on floor 5.

The stay was great.

I got some plain paper and borrowed a pencil to draw the city view outside our room window. I wanted to draw the colony downstairs with sheet houses, a common restroom, people outside with the colorful containers for water - from the borewell they have in the community.

Above the colony, the view showed a city with concrete buildings up a shallow valley revealing hazy mountains far away.

The view is spectacular with eagles flying around searching for or eating food from their claws, people walking about in the colony, static buildings of corporations, and apartments. There were green spaces in between the buildings that were good to see untouched in this metropolitan city.

I finished the sketch by 2 pm.

Quick lunch and headed out to the VAC.

Reached there in a taxi; I sat by the boundary wall on a bench there listening to the Culture code.

The chapter about the “Billion Dollar Day when nothing happened” - where a Google employee casually saw a hard problem in a post-it note on the kitchen wall, worked on that problem where nobody asked him to, found a solution that helped Google gain the edge in Ads market (pay per click) - precisely where their revenue jumped from $6 million to $99 million.

The author Daniel Coyle speaks about the third type of start-ups - commitment based (where the culture is based on people coming together and building a culture from core values); that Google with this culture, always performed better than the other two types - Professional (skill-based hiring) and STAR (hiring the best people).

The book was recommended to me by my dear friend and coach Peter Kovacs, CQSavvy. 🙏

Other notes from the first chapter (“Build Safety”) include:

* Safe connections between colleagues.

* Making a connection before requesting help.

My key takeaways after discussing this with Peter include: importance of being curious, willingness to carefully being vulnerable while sharing, asking for help, problem facing vs person facing to co-create a solution. [01/28/2022]

Below is an attempt at Chennai Pattanam (Pattanam means city in Tamil and Malayalam) from the window at Ibis.

🦅 ☮️