Who is Farhan Lalji?

Fiddling around with WordPress – adding plug-ins, analytics, widgets etc - got me thinking about how much I’m enjoying having time to myself now. I’m rediscovering PHP, reading newspapers, magazines and books for fun and not for class.  I’m socialising and catching up with people all over again.

I was chatting with a couple of my fellow exec MBA’s last night at sundowners and discovered that I wasn’t the only one.  There’s something different about going to bed now, piece of mind is the only way I can really explain it.

I left work at the end of every day for 20 of the past 22 months and started immediately thinking about school.  I can’t explain how nice it is to leave work and think about absolutely nothing, to just take time and smell the roses.

Another side effect of the MBA is how much my TV watching has declined.  I used to watch an hour or two an evening and now I feel guilt just turning it on.  This has been to the wife’s delight.  She never was much of a TV person.

I’ll probably be even giddier next week, with our summer ball and congregation (not convocation, apparently we don’t get our degrees officially till August).  Then I’ll start looking for things to do with all the time I have now, I’ve got learning to play the guitar, learning Hindi, French and Spanish properly, taking golf lessons and going on holidays again on my to do list, but my own pace.

A friend of ours said the other day how much she like’s post MBA Farhan, and so do I, so do I.

With Gordon Brown making the transition from chancellor to PM today I found myself thinking about the transition from managing the finances to being a leader. Actually it was more with the FT’s article humorously titled, “Eeyore must become Tigger of No 11” comparing business roles to characters in Winnie the Pooh. Segue: it’s interesting that the FT’s renamed the article online, but I swear that was the title in the print version! Oh, and sorry if you’re stuck outside the FT’s walled garden.

I love the comparison of finance people to Eeyore and Chief Exec’s to Tigger’s. For those who aren’t familiar with the characters, Wikipedia puts it perfectly, Eeyore is a pessimistic, gloomy, old, depressed stuffed donkey and Tigger is a cheerful, outgoing, competitive in a friendly way, and completely confident in himself Tiger.

In my (admittedly limited) experience with finance people and Chief Exec’s that’s really been the case. Sure there are exceptions, but it’s an interesting analogy. Most of the finance people I’ve come across have been Eeyore-ish and a lot of Chief exec’s have been Tigger’s. Actually let me rephrase that, a lot of the successful chief exec’s I’ve read about have been Tigger’s.

Personally, I’m a lot more Tigger then Eeyore, with a little bit of Pooh – a gentle bear who never attacked anyone, and is much loved for being playful - thrown in.

An interesting game would be “Tigger’s or Eeyore’s” looking at business personalities and politicians as characters from Winnie the Pooh. From what I’ve read I would guess that:

• Steve Jobs is a Tigger
• Jerry Yang is a Tigger
• Bill Gates is a Tigger with a bit of Eeyore hiding deep down
• Not sure what to make of any of the Google guys
• Warren Buffet is an Eeyore with the heart of a Tigger
• Mark Cuban is a Tigger
• George Bush is a Piglet (who masquerades as a Tigger and an Eeyore)
• Tony Blair is a Tigger
• Gordon Brown is an Eeyore trying to make believe he can be a Tigger

Can you convert from one personality to another, I’m not so sure. But it will definitely be interesting to see Gordon Brown try.

Mashable had a post outlining LinkedIn’s plan to introduce APIs on its “business networking platform” in reaction to the growth of facebook and its application popularity. This really got me thinking about how mature social networking is today?

If we consider social networking an industry, then we would assume that it goes through the normal industry life-cycle, with introduction followed by growth, maturity and then decline. We’ve seen social networking sites (companies) rise and fall, grow and now innovate and follow on.

The way I look at web industries is by comparing it to my family and seeing who’s using it. So when my younger cousins are onto something but I’m not, I consider it in it’s introductory phase. When I’m on it but my wife isn’t, it’s in its growth phase. When both the wife and I are users then it’s mature. When everyone, including my mom is on it, it’s probably about to tip from mature to decline.

So by that rationale, social networking is still growing. My wife has resisted the temptation of joining facebook – and for that matter any social networking application/site/tool – to this date, but temptation’s growing and she’s coming close… I think.

Growth is an interesting time in industries; we’re seeing some real innovation and some real problems being worked on. Personally, I’m finding it difficult to see beyond the application and widget noise and see some real value in applications built on facebook. Feels like someone new every day is using a new application – telling me what their mood is or what books their reading or what their toilet habits are like, okay actually that last one is an app I’m developing. The point is I’m not sure which applications add value and which ones are just clutter on my profile. Is this rapid application development on facebook sustainable? Will it filter onto other social networking sites? Will LinkedIn be able to create a similar buzz around its api and applications built by the community?

My gut instinctive reaction to all of these questions is no. But I’m definitely enjoying the ride. It will be really interesting to see where social networking is at this time next year or even in three years time. Maybe by then the wife will have joined.

I raised an eyebrow yesterday when I saw that Google had acquired Zenter and was going to add presentations to its online docs and spreadsheets suite.

I’ve used G docs (but not G spreadsheets) and found it “okay”. I’m fairly certain G spreadsheets is the same, decent for collaboration and okay for the basics, but you wouldn’t create too extensive a document or model using the tools.

I’m not sure how good Zenter’s stuff is - has anyone use it? What I’m really hoping for is that this gives Google a bit of the office applications marketshare so we can see a bit of innovation around the Microsoft Office suite. Personally, I think Microsoft can do a lot more with Office online. Will this be the poke that the giant of Redmond needs to get it done?

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen competition being the spark that lights innovation. Apple and Microsoft keep enhancing their OS offerings because of their competition. If Moz hadn’t developed Firefox would we see tabbed browsing in IE? Probably not. In a competitive market no one’s able to rest on their laurels. Competition sparks innovation and innovation is great for users so in the end we all win.

One of the interesting things about working for a large multinational organization is that everyone has an opinion about the company. This definitely takes some getting used to.

I knew it was going to be interesting the day after I let people know I was joining Yahoo, this happened to be the same day the MSFT rumors came out. Over the weekend a friend of a friend went off on one about how I should have joined Google rather then Yahoo. And now with the Jerry Wang / Sue Decker / Terry Semel announcement I’m being IM’d, emailed and accosted by friends on facebook for my opinion.

It’s hard not to get annoyed and ticked off at the misinformation and speculation. It’s something I’ve never dealt with - got any tips? Here’s my strategy for now, assess the person/people I’m speaking to, that is their background, there perspective and their information source. And then assess the medium being used (i.e. a face to face conversation has to be dealt with differently then an IM or a facebook message). Finally tell them to shut the hell up. Okay I might need to rethink that last step.

Anyway, I guess it’s something I’m going to have to get used to. Especially as I want to stay at Yahoo for some time – which, for the record, I definitely do.

My name is Farhan. I hit 30 last year, finished my MBA last month and joined Yahoo last week - okay it was 5 weeks ago, what can I say I’m a sucker for patterns.

I used to blog at vox, and while it was a useful blogging tool for someone who was working full time and studying full time - i.e. A chimp could have set it up - the time was right to make a move. So, after a bit of diligence I chose WordPress, picked a pattern, hacked it up a bit, added a couple of widgets and voila, welcome to the life of Farhan, a blog.

To be perfectly honest, my blogging over the past 20 months or so has been pretty weak. I blame it on the stress of doing an executive mba, switching jobs a couple of times and generally being too tired to write anything interesting. Now that I’m done with the mba, at a company I love and a role I’m enjoying things should be different… I hope.

So what am I going to talk about here you ask? Well life in general, life in technology, life in London and other stuff.

My adventures this past weekend are a perfect example of how diverse the topics will be. Friday we went and saw Nitin Sawhney and a bunch of unsigned independent artists put on a great show at the Royal Festival Hall. Rappers, singers, cellists and spoken word artists doing their thing together. Very cool.

Saturday was spent at Borough Market. We’ve recently put our flat on the market and one of the things I’ll miss is the fact that borough market is step counting distance away from us.

Sunday however was a highlight not only of the weekend but possibly the year to date, Yahoo and the beeb organised an open hack day. And as an employee I got the chance to help out. There were great hacks and great people but why go into details when others have done a far better job.

One of the highlights for me was sitting down and chatting with Salim Ismail, another newbie to yahoo. What Salim’s done over the past 10-15 years is pretty incredible, but it’s pretty consistent with the type of people I find myself working with here at Y!

So there you go, first post check. Hopefully you laughed, you cried and you can’t wait to come back. I promise I’ll try not to keep you waiting too long.

Some related stuff:

• more on hackday (plus the Flickr pics - over 4000 pics!)
• while I was writing this, Terry has resigned and Jerry Yang has stepped in as the CEO of the company he helped co-found, my opinion has pretty much been summed up by both Salim and Fred Wilson’s posts.