The Hindu Business Line : Make hard work pay

Whether your business is click and order or brick and mortar, focus down layer by layer, using the `onion skin' approach. Above all, apply the power of strategic thinking.

BUILD fences around people, and you'll get sheep." That's a poster-able thought, especially for the archaic `establishment' departments that are masquerading as `human relations'. Also, it's a belief statement of William McKnight who moulded 3M to `embrace creativity'. To this Paul M. Elkin adds a `hard' fact: "Build walls around an organisation, and you'll get a coffin." Elkin's book titled Mastering Business Planning and Strategy, published by Viva Books P Ltd (www.vivagroupindia.com) is about `the power and application of strategic thinking'.

The first thing to hit you is the malaise that most managers suffer from: "Completely occupied by `fire-fighting', dealing with the crises and problems that are occurring today, rather than considering what is necessary to ensure the survival and eventual success of the business." What's the use succeeding in tactics but failing in strategy? So, whether your business is click and order, or brick and mortar, focus down layer by layer, using the `onion skin' approach to handle the environment, industry and corporate peels. After you have done the SBU (strategic business unit) analysis, move on to profile the competitors by drawing a matrix and developing a map of CSFs (critical success factors). Well, even as you're busy tweaking your software, your finance man is routinely churning out budgets and plans by making `small adjustments to the level of costs incurred' to improve `financial efficiency'. No, that won't do, so go for `cost profiling' - an analytical technique `to identify potential opportunities for more radical changes to the business cost base' and improve `financial effectiveness'.

In the chapter on performance measurement, the author discusses SKPIs (strategic key performance indicators), followed by the financial, operational and city KPIs. You know EVA, which Drucker called `the measure of total factor productivity', and its cousin MVA. Another EVA is employee value added - a measure one finds in many IT company annual reports. This ratio has total added value generated by business in the numerator and total cost of employees in the denominator. A book that argues for adding the strategy software to make your hard work pay better.

Eclipse to the extreme

DAVID Gallardo had but one purpose when starting Eclipse in Action. He wanted `to introduce Java developers to Eclipse'. In due time, Ed Burnette and Robert McGovern joined him and what you have is a guide on the topic, published by Dreamtech Press (www.wileydreamtech.com) , that goes beyond Eclipse to the plug-in terrain, and has stuff on SWT and JFace too. "The mother of invention is not necessity, it is irritation," is a quote of Henry Petroski that Bob Foster cites in his foreword, to emphasise the role of tool-building. One feature of Eclipse that strikes Bob as `extraordinary' is `the excellent technical support provided in the Eclipse newsgroups by the actual people who wrote the code': "In no other open source project are developers so committed to answering any and all questions thrown at them. In many cases, questions are answered with source code written and tested for the occasion. For a programmer, it doesn't get much better than that." Though Eclipse is free, you can make money by extending it. Eclipse's licence allows one to charge for his/her `Eclipse-based extensions'.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to what makes a software developer comparable to a blacksmith. "Many blacksmiths take pride in making their own tools... Using forge, anvil, and hammer, the blacksmith repeats the cycle of heating, hammering, and cooling the steel until it becomes a tool of exactly the right shape, size, and strength for the job at hand." So? "What code has in common with metal is malleability." Thus, Eclipse is the software developer's equivalent to the blacksmith's workshop. Written in Java, Eclipse is language-neutral, and also human language neutral. However, it is not strictly platform-neutral. "This is due to the decision to build Eclipse using the OS's native graphics. Eclipse is therefore only available for those platforms to which SWT (standard widget toolkit) has been ported." The fundamental component is the Eclipse Workbench. It has one simple job: "To allow you to work with projects. It doesn't know anything about editing, running, or debugging Java programs; it only knows how to navigate projects and resources."

As a software development tool, Eclipse is well suited for certain styles of programming. "Currently, the most fashionable style is XP," write the authors. That's not the Windows from Microsoft, but eXtreme Programming. "One of the most unique and controversial approaches advocated by XP's proponents is pair programming: At all times, two developers sit at a single terminal while writing code." Something auditors always insist as an internal control measure, but "more developers are probably talking about XP than doing it." Smooth reading.

Cracking secrets

A WHOLE book of secrets is what S.C. Coutinho gives in The Mathematics of Ciphers, published by Universities Press (www.orientlongman.com) . "A leisurely journey, with many stops to appreciate the scenery and contemplate sites of historical interest", the author promises to reach the final destination - RSA system of cryptography. Since the work has grown out of lectures to first-year students of computer science, there is no presumption of mathematics knowledge. "Cryptography is the art of disguising a message so that only its legitimate recipient can understand it." That should explain why we don't understand many election speeches. Perhaps the `twin sister' of cryptography could help, cryptoanalysis: `the art of breaking a cipher'. The most widely used public key cryptosystems is RSA, invented in 1978 by Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. Put simply, "every user has a personal pair of primes that must be kept secret" though the product of these primes is made public. What's the big deal, you might ask; factor the product and you would get the two prime numbers, won't you? "However, if the primes have more than 100 digits each, the time and resources required to factor `n' are such that the system becomes very hard to break." This is the trapdoor of RSA - computing product is easy, not factoring. For this, the `exact computation' of computer comes handy. Greeks distinguished between logistics (the science that deals with numbered things, not numbers) and arithmetic (nature of numbers with the mind only).

The book is full of stories that would make you like math and computing too. For instance, geometry originated in Egypt where the pharaoh distributed land to people in rectangular plots on which he levied an annual tax. "If the Nile swept away part of the plot, the surveyors had to be called in to calculate how much land had been lost." Because the owner would be eligible for a reduced tax, proportional to the land lost.

To find primes from the ocean of numbers, you can use the `sieve of Erathostenes', named after a Greek mathematician born around 284 BC. He was nicknamed `Beta' because his contemporaries believed that he hadn't reached a truly eminent position. When you apply the sieve to a list of positive integers, composite numbers pass through but primes get retained. Good read for the vacation to sharpen your numbers.

Books2Byte@thehindu.co.in

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