I’m a Social Media Entrepreneur, Professor of Digital Marketing, Author of 9 books, Podcaster and an Organic Farmer.

The New Indian Express did a story on FailCamp that is taking place this Saturday, 14th July. Check out the coverage by Prashanti Ganesh.

Announcing the start of my next book titled ‘Rings to Cubicles’. It’s a book based on inspiring Olympians and the important lessons each of us can learn from them. With 20 days to go for the greatest sporting spectacle on the planet, I figured this is the perfect time to announce it. The idea for this book started during Beijing Olympics in 2008 and finally able to work on it 4 years later. Take a look at the cover photo and let me know what you think.

Easily one of the best interviews I have listened to. Phil McKinney is brilliant. Loved the way he spoke from his heart. Great questions too. I do a similar podcasts with achievers at http://Kiruba.TV/. Lots to learn from this interview series. Kudos on a job very well done.

Right opposite my home is a bakery I frequent. It’s run by a guy who earlier used to run a TV repair shop.  The TV repair business wasn’t doing well and he shifted his profession.

What has screw drivers got to do with cakes? Nothing.

One evening, while munching an egg puff, I asked him about his knowledge of baking. He replied he knew nothing but was confident of his business skills.  He recruited a very talented baker (“master’ as they are usually called) who did all the hard work of baking while the owner took care of the business side of things.

I asked him what would happen to his business if the baker fell ill and did not turn up for work or had to go home for an important festival.  His answer not only surprised me but drove home a very important lesson that we should all learn.

He said that in the baking community, it is commons practice that  if a “master” had to go on leave, then it is their duty to find another “Master” and fill his place until he returns.  This is a practice that is special to this set of people. The bakers form a community code and help each other.

I learnt a valuable lesson. If a bakery does this, why not in our firm? We now have applied this principle in our office.  Should someone be absent, then its their duty to make sure that someone, either within the company or outside, handle the task.  If anyone quits the job, then its their duty to get a proper replacement during their notice period.

Amazing what a bakery can teach you in life!

The awesome event where we celebrate failure. Failcamp is a friendly unconference where people get-together to share and learn from each other’s mistakes. Interested? Learn more http://failcamp.wikispaces.com/

Fascinating documentary of what happens inside Google. Glued to it.

One morning, a few days ago, I opened up my inbox. I noticed something that gave me an uncomfortable feeling. 80% of the new mails on the screen were useless. They were either newsletters I never read or press releases from PR folks I didn’t care. It was an effort for me to dig out the useful mail among the clutter.

Missing out an important client email was the last straw.

I could not take this any more. Decided to take action.

Two days later, I now have an extremely clean inbox. Its such a relief to open the inbox in the morning and only find emails that matter to me. Here’s how I did it:

Unsubscribe from Promotional Mailers: I was amazed how many promotional emails I was getting. I opened up each and every promotional email and hunted for that one word: UNSUBSCRIBE. I was pleasantly surprised that in most cases it took just one click to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribe from Newsletters: Yup, I remember subscribing to these newsletters. But I don’t remember reading them at all. The newsletters kept piling up. Time to get rid of them. Excepting two newsletters I found informative, I unsubscribed from the entire bunch.

Personal emails to PR folks: Because I was a columnist in newspapers once, I was easy target for PR folks to harvest my email and bombard me with press releases of their clients. I counted every major PR firm had me in their list. Time to get rid of them. Unlike the mailers or newsletters, these PR mails do not have unsubscribe links. So, I wrote personal emails to each of them, politely asking to remove me from their list. It surprisingly seemed to have worked. All those PR mails have stopped.

Filter out the adamant ones: Some companies make it hard to unsubscribe. They want you to login to their system with a username and password. Of course, its a trick. I had never registered in these sites. So, I just create an email filter to have them deleted even before these useless mails hits my inbox.

Ta Da!

I have a really tidy inbox now. Its such a great feeling to start the day with.

Is your inbox clean? If not, take action now. Clean inboxes are a big time saver.

I had an opportunity to conduct an unconference at my friend Sankarnarayanan’s 2-Day workshop on CoCreation. http://www.younomy.com/chennai.html . I love small groups because there is so much more engagement and interaction. Here are snaps from the event. Learnings from the event to follow soon as a blog post. — at Hotel Shelter, Mylapore Chennai. View the Album.

My colleagues added an extra year to my age! It was almost like I could see my future!.