The only three things you need to know about Leadership....!!!!

When I was 23, I attended a 5 day course on Leadership and Management. Being fairly new to the world, I lapped the information up, taking notes fervently and hanging off every word the demi-God-like facilitators shared, usually accompanied by surprisingly neat flipchart writing. And I’m glad I did, because over the past few years I read numerous books, blogs, and articles on leadership; watched countless videos by great speakers given their views on the issue; and been on a few more training courses that promise to provide ‘new tools for your kit bag’. Every single one points back to the three main lessons I learnt during that glorious summer week in 20xx… 

Rule 1 – Know your people, Know your People, Know your People

The difference between managers and leaders is that Managers understand staff, and leaders understand people. For managers, process is king, being functional and efficient and knowing who your staff are, where they should be, and what they should be doing. Leaders understand their people: Why do they come to work? What motivates them? Are they a morning, afternoon, or evening person? What’s important to them in their life outside of work? Where are they heading in life? What do they want and need from you? If they won the lottery, what would they do? Where would they go?

Great leaders act with their team in mind. You may have had a busy weekend working and come 9am Monday morning are ready of offload all of your thoughts and plans, but everyone else may still be waking up, and not appreciate a full-on diatribe the second they walk into the office. They also understand how their team will react in different situations. A regular example is when a boss is heading off on a well-deserved holiday and proudly proclaims: ‘I’m away, but you know what I’m like, I’ll still be checking my BlackBerry!’ Do their employees think:

a) What a great boss! So dedicated to her job, there if we need her, and has really impressive time management skills to be able to do that and still relax with the family.

b) Doesn’t she trust me? Does she think that I can’t cope? That the world will stop if she’s away for a week? That makes me feel worthless.

Understanding your people as people, not staff, allows you to make more informed decisions which are tailored to the person, to frame your questions and requests in an effective way, and to ultimately get the best out of your team.

Rule 2 – Situational Leadership

So you’ve spent time getting to know your people, know your people, know your people… Now what? Ken Blanchard’s brilliant ‘Situational Leadership’ model has the answer.

A mistake a lot of would-be leaders make is to think their style works with everyone. Sometimes they get lucky and a large section of their team responds positively, being a perfect match for their way of working, However more often than not the team will have vast fluctuations in performance, with flashes of success and the odd outstanding performer, but in a largely dis-engaged and ineffective group.

Therefore, great leaders, having got to know their people, are able to adapt their style depending on the situation and person. When people approach a new task, they may be highly knowledgable, relatively confident, or doing it for the first time – and therefore respond to different leadership accordingly. Crucially, the same person may be highly competent in one task, but not at all in another, meaning that great leaders need to use different styles for the same people. The ability to seamlessly switch between these leadership styles is the difference between good managers and great leaders.

The below Ken Blanchard diagram explains this far better than I ever could:

Rule 3 – Team, Task, Individual

John Adair developed his Action Centred Leadership model while lecturing at Sandhurst Royal Military Academy and as assistant director and head of leadership department at The Industrial Society. Put simply, Adair demonstrates that great leaders spend their time evenly in three areas – focussing on achieving the Task in hand, the management of the Team, and the development of Individuals.
Most managers tend to focus wholly on the task because it’s more tangible, working through the correct process to achieve whatever needs to be achieved by the set deadline. However, often this is at the detriment to team morale and individual engagement, leading people to ‘work to rule’ and suppressing creativity.

By taking a ‘helicopter view’ and committing the time to develop a strong team spirit and understanding, it becomes far more likely that the task (and future tasks) will be achieved successfully – potentially even going beyond what was originally expected. And by getting to ‘know your people’, a good leader can make sure that the right people are focussing on the areas in which they’ll be most effective – whilst keeping them engaged and motivated, encouraging them to think more broadly, and driving themselves to achieve further success.

It’s a simple, but brilliant approach – and one that can turn an average collection of people into a great team, and an average manager into a great leader.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, now plans to dominate the world

Mark Zuckerberg now plans to reach 7 billion of the world's citizens online. He plans to enter into partnership with some of the largest mobile technology companies. The young CEO says the web is an essential part of life. Everyone deserves to be connected with one another, which ever part of the world they live.
 

Internet not only connects us to our families, friends and communities, but it is also connecting us to the foundation of the global knowledge economy," Zuckerberg had written in a paper posted to his Facebook page late on the Tuesday. The title asks "Is Connectivity a Human Right?"
 

Connecting more people to the internet is like a philanthropy that will create a number of potential Facebook users. This will also help to improve the company's bottom line.
 

"There is nothing wrong with that," said Fordham University communications professor Mr. Paul Levinson. He is the author of "New New Media."
 

Having access to the internet is a profoundly prominent human right in the 21st century.
 

To reach there, Facebook Inc. on Wednesday had announced a partnership with Internet.org. It includes the world's biggest social network, along with Korean electronics giant Samsung, Nokia and wireless chip maker Qualcomm Inc. More companies are expected to join in partnership with Facebook.
 

Facebook team states that the company's goal is to "get internet access available to the two-thirds of the world who are not yet connected" – nearly about 5 billion people.
 

Levinson called the project "profoundly humanistic while adding  "at the same time, I would never say that Facebook is run by angels."
 

Levinson said “If this effort pays off, then Facebook will expand its user base, advertising revenue and control. Business and philanthropy, in this case, will go hand in hand.”
 

The plan of the group is still in an early rough-draft phase, including developing cheaper smartphones and tools that will reduce the amount of information required to operate mobile applications. For Facebook, this move will certainly add  a number of users to its current 1.15 billion and with them more advertising revenue. Still, Zuckerberg paints the effort as something larger.
 

"For nine years, we have been on the mission to connect the world. We have now connected to more than 1 billion people, but we will have to solve much bigger problems to connect the next 5. The vast majority of people do not have an access to the internet," Zuckerberg wrote.
 

He even pointed out that people who already use Facebook "have way more money when compared to the rest of the world." That means it may "not be beneficial for us to serve the next few billion people for a very long time, if ever. But we believe everyone deserves to be connected together."
 

Most of Facebook's users live outside the U.S., and much of the site's new user base will come from developing countries in the years ahead. While most Americans first got online using desktops, many of the Internet's newest users are bypassing PCs entirely. They rely on mobile phones instead.
 

Javier Olivan, the vice president of growth and analytics at Facebook, said Facebook's move continues what the company has already been doing to get many people online. This includes "Facebook For Every Phone." This is an app that was launched in 2011. This app will allow people with basic and non-smartphones use Facebook. The company has invested more than $1 billion so far to connect people in the developing countries to the internet.
 

The Internet.org project is Zuckerberg's latest venture that seeks to meld philanthropy with ambition.
 

The billionaire CEO had made his first charitable splash in 2010, two years before his company went public, when he donated $100 million in Facebook Inc. stock to Newark, N.J., schools. He then gave another $500 million to a Silicon Valley charity with an aim of funding health and education issues. Earlier this year, he launched Fwd.us, a political group that aimed at changing immigration policy, boosting education and encouraging investment in scientific research.
 

Web browser developer Opera Software and MediaTek, Wireless equipment company Ericsson, another wireless semiconductor company, are also the founding members of Internet.org.
 

Google Inc., which is not a member of the Internet.org effort launched a similar project earlier this year with the purpose of getting the entire Earth online. The project is called as the Project Loon, the effort launched internet-beaming antennas up on giant helium balloons.

A site Microsoft has not updated in 15 years

Thanks to a link from Reddit posted by JoeyTheHamster, we found a Microsoft webpage that hasn't been updated since 1998.

It's for a Microsoft videogame called Monster Truck Madness 2.

"Download it now for a bunch of mud-diggety fun!"

The site itself is an awesome retro flashback, but the game's system requirements are even better:

* Multimedia PC with a Pentium 133 or higher processor;
* Microsoft® Windows® 95 operating system or Windows NT® Workstation operating system version 4.0 with Service Pack 3;
* 16 MB of RAM; 32MB recommended;
* Super VGA, 16-bit colour monitor;
* Microsoft Mouse or compatible pointing device; joystick or race car controller recommended;
* 28.8 or higher baud modem for head-to-head play. If you are still rocking a 14.4 modem, you are out of luck.

Microsoft shows green energy momentum with investment in Keechi Wind Farm

RES Americas developed and constructed the 343 megawatt Lower Snake River Wind Farm. The project, which began operating in 2012, is owned by Puget Sound Energy and is Washington State’s largest wind farm.

From the time you wake up in the morning until you rest your weary eyes at night, you do things that consume power.

BZZZZ. Turn off the alarm. Turn on the lights. Brew some coffee. Turn on the TV. Recharge your phone. Turn on the computer. Turn on the AC or heat. Surf the Internet. Heat some leftovers in the microwave. Watch more TV. Do laundry. Run the dishwasher. Or watch more TV. Turn off the lights -- except for the one on the porch. ZZZZ.

All those things add up.

Luckily, if your appliances, coffeemakers and lights depend on the Texas power grid, there’s going to be 110 megawatts (MW) more clean, renewable energy flowing into that grid by the end of 2015, generated by 55 brand-new wind turbines that will make up the Keechi Wind Farm project. That’s enough to juice up 55,000 homes at peak production.

Microsoft has committed to a 20-year power purchase agreement with RES Americas to buy 100 percent of the electricity generated from the soon-to-be-built Keechi Wind Farm Project. It’s Microsoft’s latest investment in renewable energy and is just one of several innovative projects and approaches the company has pursued in the past few years.

“We have a long standing ambition to move in the direction of sourcing more clean energy as a company, so over the last few years we’ve increasingly purchased something called RECs – renewable energy credits (more than 2.3 billion kWh globally) – and so this is an opportunity to go to the next stage and invest directly in green energy,” says Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s chief environmental strategist. He sees Keechi as a “moment in our journey” that includes an increased focus and acceleration in the direction the sustainable energy strategy the company has pursued over the last several years.

With projects focusing on increasing energy efficiency, renewable energy and carbon-offset projects funded in part by an internal carbon fee, Microsoft has become an example to others to be pro-active when it comes to clean energy use and investment.

“When influential companies such as Microsoft sign up to buy wind power, it sends a strong signal on the importance of taking meaningful action on sustainability,” says Susan Reilly, president and CEO of RES Americas, the energy developer behind the Keechi project, and chair-elect of the board of the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA). “By signing a contract to buy power from the Keechi Wind project, Microsoft is making the financing, construction, and operation of this 110 megawatt project possible. To be clear: it would not have happened otherwise. The Texas electrical grid is like a pool, and Microsoft is adding clean, green wind power to that pool.”

RES Americas developed and constructed the 99 megawatt Central Plains Wind Farm, which is located near Leoti, Kansas.

It takes about one megawatt (MW) of energy to power 500 Texas homes on the same electric grid as Microsoft’s San Antonio datacenter. In an area 70 miles northwest of Ft. Worth, construction begins in December to build the Keechi Wind project. This power purchase agreement represents a sizable investment in the wind energy sector in Texas – which has a strong wind resource and has invested in building out its transmission infrastructure to improve integration of these resources into the broader grid. Texas has more installed wind capacity than any other U.S. state, with a total of 12.2 gigawatts of capacity. Wind energy is the source of 9.2 percent of all electricity generated in Texas.

“All of the electricity we consume is from the power grid, through local utilities, which includes a mix generation resources including hydro, natural gas and wind,” says Brian Janous, director of energy strategy at Microsoft’s Global Foundation Services. “This project gives us a stake in putting more renewable power in the grid. We’re not having this power delivered directly to us. We’re going to continue to consume power as we always have for our buildings and datacenters -- but we’re affecting the mix of generation, adding 110 MW of green power that wouldn’t have been there otherwise and displacing carbon fuels. We’re driving change in the generation mix on the grid in Texas.”

Microsoft is driving change in many other ways, too.

This past year Microsoft began building a pilot datacenter in Cheyenne, Wyoming that will run completely independent of the grid from energy generated from biogas, a byproduct of a nearby water treatment plant. Another datacenter in Dublin, Ireland, has implemented a thermodynamic cooling process that happens without loss or gain of heat, which reduces energy costs per megawatt by up to 30 percent. Microsoft is also retrofitting existing datacenters to be more efficient with harder-working, lower-energy servers, compressor energy reduction and custom light-emitting diode (LED) lighting.

An internal carbon fee -- which Microsoft charges to business groups based on their output of carbon, primarily through electricity and air travel – helps fund these projects and the Keechi Wind project. The fee is the cornerstone of Microsoft’s commitment to carbon neutrality. The funds generated from the carbon fee are used for investing in energy efficiency projects, carbon offsets and for the direct purchase of renewable energy.

Microsoft offset more than 300,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions through that growing portfolio of innovative carbon-offset projects in 2013, and purchased 2.3 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of renewable energy in 2013— more than twice the amount bought the previous year. This year, the Environmental Protection Agency recognized Microsoft as the second largest purchaser of green power in the U.S. And when Microsoft pledged to become carbon neutral in fiscal year 2013, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) validated that the company made good on its promise.

Bernard says Microsoft has spent a little more than two years rethinking its own infrastructure – the “smart buildings” concept captured in the “88 Acres” story. “Let’s use ourselves as an experiment to see what’s possible. We spent time and focused on our campus. Now we’re taking what we’ve learned from our own experiences to Seattle and CityNext. Now we’re going to the next level -- can we help our customers save energy as well?”

One way customers can reduce their energy use is by transferring from on-premise installations to cloud computing, Bernard says. At the very least, that transfer causes a 30 percent energy reduction, up to a best case scenario of 90 percent, depending on an organization’s size, efficiency and what product lines they’re using.

“Public support for renewable energy is strong and growing. Consumers are more aware than ever of the harmful effects of carbon pollution and the role renewable energy can play in reducing these impacts. They want the electricity that powers their lives to be green,” Reilly says. “RES Americas and other companies have long been selling power from wind projects to electric utilities. Selling directly to companies that use a lot of energy, such as Microsoft, is an important trend in the industry, and we expect to see more deals like this.”

The 149 megawatt Halkirk Wind Farm, which RES Canada constructed in 2012, is the largest wind project in the Canadian province of Alberta.

The physical manifestation of this deal will start appearing in December. Like a lot of things in Texas, these wind turbines are big. Looming nearly 312 feet in the air – that’s the same as a 29-story high-rise building – one rotor on these wind turbines measures 328 feet in length – a few stories higher than the shaft it’ll rotate around. Each turbine will generate about 2 MW apiece.

And because each part has to be trucked in and assembled there, it’s going to take the better part of 2014 to get those 55 wind turbines going. But even before all 55 are all operational, they’ll start generating power.

“If you look at the company strategy overall, it’s across three areas: demonstrate responsible environmental leadership, enable energy efficiency both in and through the use of information technology, and accelerate scientific development,” Bernard says. “So when we look at something like Keechi, in the context of that framework, it’s part of a portfolio of activities that are happening in our datacenter division aimed at improving efficiency, lessening our power supply, and greening it when possible.”

For more information on the Keechi Wind Farm project and Microsoft’s ongoing clean energy efforts, check out “Microsoft Signing Long-Term Deal to Buy Wind Energy in Texas,” "Microsoft announces new investment to power a greener cloud" and this infographic.

Isro is launching its first mission to Mars today. Stay with TOI Live Blog for latest updates.

There is palpable excitement at the mission control, 7km away from the launch pad. Indian Space Research Organisation chairman K Radhakrishnan has been going around the mission control, shaking hands with the 58 top scientists directly monitoring the progress of the mission.Hundreds of people have gathered on the roads leading to the spaceport and on terraces to catch a glimpse of PSLV-C25 as it lifts off minutes from now. Scientists here told TOI that everything is progressing as expected. Cloudy skies and a light drizzle about 90 minutes before the lift-off time gave some anxious moments to lay people, but scientists said the weather is just fine."Earlier we were a bit worried as Sriharikota is a cyclone prone area this time of the year," said a scientist in the mission control. "Weather forecast shows there could be light showers, but there is nothing that will affect the launch."