Akshay on the business of security : Leadership

The InfoSec X Prize: Fundamental Change Through Competition

Akshay Aggarwal — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 01:06:34 GMT

Today I had a thought provoking conversation with Dr. Peter Diamandis , Chairman and CEO of Zero Gravity Corporation & X Prize Foundation, on radical & fundamental change. Change that advances the status quo rather than relying on incremental...(read more)

Business During Downturn: The Chain Of Trust

Akshay Aggarwal — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:48:43 GMT

Business during economic downturns brings to the surface the tiny fractures that were unnoticeable during the good times. It is a fertile ground to relearn some of the lessons of the past & form wisdom for the future. I am going to try and capture...(read more)

Connecting a Global team: the power of 30 seconds

Akshay Aggarwal — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:46:05 GMT

Technorati Tags: Leadership , Business One of the challenges I constantly grapple with is leading a large yet mostly remote team. Managing across 5 time zones posting I wrote about it earlier generated a lot of discussion and loads of ideas. Recently...(read more)

Managing across 5 time zones

Akshay Aggarwal — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 05:03:00 GMT

I don't know when it happened.

Year 1: 2 people 2 countries 2 time zones.
Year 2: 11 people 4 countries 5 time zones.

Over the course of my team's growth it became apparent that we needed to grow globally especially develop an offshore team to be cost competitive. So I went on a hiring spree ending up with a 10 person team spread over US, India, Israel and Australia. Managing a global team was always a desire and it came with a sucker punch of challenges built in. Apart from the usual scheduling,HR and team cohesiveness issues of working with a large team, some of the challenges were

- kudos emails in foreign languages

- sensitivity around organizational hierarchy

- crazy finance rules and labor laws

- hearing "yes" all the time is a red flag. The local teams almost always have a way to improve the process to suit their environments, don't let them accept you unopposed

- discuss the wins and the losses

Things I learnt

- Inconvenience people in rotation. especially true for team calls

- Use instant communication. IM's have made the world an easier place to manage

- Make friends with local legal and HR staff. They can help you out of situations that you don't even realize you are in.

- LiveMeetings and video conferencing are critical. Video conferencing during meetings helped my team connect.

- A well stamped passport makes for happy teams. Visit them often.

- Value collaborative effort. It takes a lot for someone from Israel and India to collaborate of their own initiative. Encourage and reward it.

- Get your management to spend 1:1 time with them. Out of sight really is out of mind.

- Always have a local backup person they can turn too for immediate needs. Just in case you are scuba diving on a Sunday when a deal is waiting to get closed in Israel.

- Most importantly what worked for me was just letting the team know the problems and complexity involved. Since a manager always tries to hire people smarter then himself, more often then not, they come up with better solutions. The team is a self correcting mechanism.

- Spend time learning skills that your team will need to help you enable them. I realized that I am their advocate to the organization and need to spend time learning the do's and dont's to help propel my teams aspirations.

I'm still learning but definitely enjoying the challenge. Comments on your experiences/tips nurturing teams are welcome.

The Business of Application Security & Performance

Akshay Aggarwal — Tue, 08 May 2007 10:12:00 GMT

As I fly from San Jose to Seattle passing over Crater Lake pondering over what this blog will be about, two things come to mind. The first is that the business of developing secure, high performance line of business applications is an area I have had an opportunity to work with several CSOs/CIOs on and would like to capture this interactive knowledge. The second is purely about leadership. I encouraged the 10 people who report to me to blog and can’t really do so without taking the time out to do so myself.

Over the past few years I have evolved from a Senior Security Technologist striving towards securing Microsoft’s critical applications and software to an Engagement Manager on the Application Consulting & Engineering (ACE) Services team at Microsoft. The ACE team as you can gather from this blog is the team at Microsoft IT responsible for application security, privacy and performance.

I was hired around 2 years ago with the aim of helping the ACE team start a consulting practice around security by leveraging internal MSIT learning and taking it out to major clients and partners. This is has since expanded to the area of security and performance consulting. My role is to manage the business lines in the East and West Regions of the United States, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Latin America. Apart from that my current responsibilities include developing strategies for scaling Microsoft’s application security practice, incubating new service lines and establishing offshore capabilities.

This blog will focus on the business aspects of application security and performance as well as experiences relating to leadership development.