At the Edge of Entropy
Essays
Everything, newest first.
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Beauty and the beast
Axioms are beautiful. Why? Because when you look around, everything else rests on something else. Not axioms. They are the first ideas that need not be explained. An axiom can…
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Modern companies, dumb organizations?
Updating a few mental models in the past month, and how to view work in the modern context is one of them. Views are personal, and a combination of what…
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Organizations as nervous systems, and why middle managers matter
One of the major learnings I had working in the founder’s office role was to add another lens for how to view organizations: through the lens of nervous systems. Not…
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Fun Fridays are missing poker
Petition to every HR person running Fun Fridays, especially at startups: add poker to the list. What prompted me to write this post was a recent discussion with a few…
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Samaaj-sarkaar-bazaar
For the first couple of years, my exposure in startups was mostly within the company : how different departments interact with each other to get things done, and how to…
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Diminishing Marginal Returns on Emotional Hooks
Marketing teams tend to be biased towards psychology grads. Right from the JD to the interview questions, to the instructions finally given at work, there is an emphasis on understanding…
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The spiral of metamorphosis
Every individual goes through seasons of metamorphosis. According to Nietzsche, it went like this Camel -> Lion -> Child. But I don’t think it stays linear. It is cyclic spiral…
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Nuance Doesn’t Coordinate Well…
Something I have been thinking a lot about for the last few months are systems at scale. Pick up any system – education, healthcare, government, law, administration, large corporations, anything…
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The complexity of human negotiations
So every once in a while, I like to go through my writings from previous years. And more often than not, I end up cringing at what I wrote. Recently…
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Project Curiocity
We need to reimagine India’s libraries. Every time I land in a new area, I have this little experiment I run. I open Google (sometimes even ChatGPT) and type “libraries…