Simplicity and Minimalism Info Quote

“There’s a tremendous power in using the least amount of information to get the point across,” - Rick Rubin

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Happy Birthday to You Tube and Me!

Besides my birthday, yesterday was the 20th birthday of You Tube, which was founded by two guys from my college (computer science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).  

Here is the first video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Great example of iteration and simplification

Space X followed Musk's design philosophy: "The best part is no part."

© 2025 Praveen Puri

AI Vibe Coding Tips

(These tips, interpreted generally, also help out with non-coding AI uses):

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Cats and Projects

"Successfully pulling off a complex, high-stakes IT project is like herding cats who speak different languages."    - Praveen Puri

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Why Your Project Needs a Fresh Set of Eyes

The overlooked power of having someone outside the system

Sometimes you're too close to the problem to see the solution. That’s not a weakness—it’s normal. But staying stuck isn’t.

Internal teams get caught in politics, assumptions, and inertia.

A trusted outside advisor brings objectivity, challenge, and clarity.

I help you cut through complexity and focus on what matters.

Example: Navigating vendor negotiations, stakeholder friction, or changing course mid-project.

Feeling stuck or second-guessing the path forward? I can help you regain clarity and momentum.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

When Your Project Feels Stuck, Start with Clarity

Why most transformations stall—and how to get back on track:

Executives rarely struggle with a lack of ideas. The real problem? Too many competing priorities and too little clarity.

Whether it’s a tech transformation, a product launch, or a major system upgrade, progress often grinds to a halt because no one agrees on what “done” looks like.

The biggest barrier isn’t tech—it’s misaligned vision.

Strategic Simplicity® helps untangle the noise and identify what actually matters.

Clarity isn’t a luxury—it’s a prerequisite for traction.

Real-world example: A foreign-exchange project at a major bank stalled due to misunderstandings between the UI team in Toronto, and the back-end team in Chicago.  The project shifted gears, and became successful, once everyone got on the same page about goals and success metrics.

If your initiative is drifting or overloaded with opinions, clarity is step one. Let’s talk.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

What Does a Strategic Advisor Actually Do?

Hint: It’s not implementation—and that’s a good thing

If you're hiring someone to “do the work,” you’re looking for a contractor or implementer. But if you're looking for clarity, guidance, and a better path forward—you’re looking for a strategic advisor.

I advise, co-create, and facilitate—not configure systems or write code.

My role: advisor to executives, facilitator for teams, strategist for complex decisions.

I stay high-level so you can stay focused.

Need an experienced partner to help you think through your toughest projects? That’s what I do.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Scientific "Proof"

Proof that light is faster than sound: some people appear bright until they open their mouths.

-Phyllis Diller

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Direwolves are Back!

George RR Martin, the creator of “Game of Thrones”, got to hold one of the first dire wolves in 10,000 years.

Fictional dire wolves were in Game of thrones, but in real life they went extinct 10,000 years ago. But scientists used gene editing to create new ones.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Junior Bridgman

In this weekend's WSJ, I read about the death of Junior Bridgeman, an ex-NBA player from the 70’s and 80’s, Junior Bridgeman. He was very good, a sixth man whose number was retired by the Milwaukee Bucks.

Back then they didn’t make the money they make now, yet, he’s one of only 3 NBA players (the other two being Le Bron James and Michael Jordan) to be a billionaire.  And he made it all in retirement.

He retired in 1987 with about $750,000 and he used the money to buy 5 Wendy’s restaurants.  

By 2016, he owned 500 Wendy's restaurants, 100 Chilis, plus Golden Corrals, etc. Then, he bought a Coca Cola bottling plant

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Backfiring Tariffs

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Two Tips to Be More Innovative

1. Get Bored Easily

As a management consultant, I have found that my most innovative clients get bored quickly, and seek to continually reinvent themselves. They test out new products / services, and drop old ones when they get bored.

2. Turn Problems into Opportunities

The best example of this tip is the famous 1930's jazz pianist Art Tatum. When he would travel for performances, he would often find that the piano at the night club or venue would have broken keys, or be out of tune.

Rather than get upset, Tatum would get excited! He would spend the day incorporating the flaws into his music, and would end up giving an improvised, one of a kind performance.

This is a must-have skill for innovation! Problems are always occurring. Instead of simply fixing them, and getting back to the status quo, recognize them as an opportunity for innovation, and improve the product or service beyond the old normal.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How The Economist Sees Trump's Tariffs

The editor-in-chief of The Economist didn’t mince words about Trump's tariffs: “The question for countries reeling from the president’s vandalism is how to limit the damage.”

She also referred to "Liberation Day" as "Ruination Day" :-)

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Trump's Tariffs vs. Small Business

© 2025 Praveen Puri

New Tariffs Create New Business Needs

Beyond price, Trump's new tariffs will create new issues for businesses, who are suddenly going to find themselves in need of trade lawyers and experts.  

They will have to modify their processes to include more customs procedures and documentation.  To the extent that customs coding is like medical coding, it will be an area ripe for AI/automation.

From a strategy / negotiation perspective, they'll have to think about how much they would be willing to absorb, how much to pass on to customers, and how much they can get others in the supply chain to absorb.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Palindrome Fun

"Mr. Owl ate my metal worm" is a palindrome, just like the "taco cat" who hunted the owl...

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Interesting Angle to Houti Raid Signal Group Chat Controversy

One interesting angle to the whole signal group chat controversy is that some were wondering if they were using signal because the official systems are a pain to use on a day-to-day basis.

I don't know if that is true in this case but, as a general principle, user friendliness is an important part of security.  If, while making something secure, you trade off the usability, and make it very inconvenient to use, that actually diminishes security, because it tempts people to find work-arounds, so they can get their work done.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Pine Cone in Snow Haiku

I just saw a pine cone lying in the snow and felt the urge to write a haiku:

Pine cone in the snow

Lying in peace on its side

Contrast brown and white

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Project Management tool: Frustrations Journal

#Projectmanagement tool: blank sheet labeled “Frustrations”. At any time, if something frustrates you, no matter how small, write it down! Don’t analyze, just note it. After the project, go back to it, and you’ll probably get some good ideas for improving your processes.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Roman Numerals

I can’t remember how to write 1, 1000, 51, 6 and 500 in Roman numerals. 

I M LIVIDI can’t remember how to write 1, 1000, 51,6and500 in Roman numerals.I M LIVID

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Power of Stubs

If you have to gather data on several items (for example sub-topics for a book), or addresses for several contacts, etc., and you only currently have some of them, then create "stub" entries for the others.

The stubs serve two purposes: first, it makes sure that you do not forget to add them.  Second, it helps you fight procrastination to see empty stubs.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Proactive Cyber Security

One of my clients randomly sends fishing emails to their employees.  If they click on them, they have to attend a training class 🙂

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Don't Be A Content Creator

Don't be a "content creator". Instead, market yourself as a "marketing/branding strategist".

The bottom line about content creators: They are like ghost writers. Except that, instead of using the client's IP to create books, they are creating posts, articles, videos, etc.

If someone markets him- or herself as a content creator, they will attract clients who are at the stage where they've decided on the vehicle (i.e blog post) and topic.  Now they want a pair of hands.

Instead, by marketing him- or herself as a  "marketing/branding strategist," they will attract clients who are in the "what should we do stage." That means higher fees, lower labor, less competition.  

After helping clients determine the vehicle and topic, then they can offer the option to have them write the content (for a large fee) or get a commodity resource to do it. 

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Testing Musk's New Grok 3 AI on X

I was just testing out Musk’s #Grok3 on X. It’s pretty good. I asked it to create three javascript programs for me:

1. Displays a break dancing dog.

2. A dancing bear.

3. prompts you to enter a color, and displays a block of that color.

It created all three programs in split second

I just copy/pasted each program to a file and ran them on my browser.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Stick

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Value of A Second Language

A hen was taking a stroll with her baby chicks.  Suddenly, a hungry cat jumped out in front of them.  

The hen said “bow-wow-wow!” And the cat scampered off.  The hen told her chicks, “see children, it pays to learn a second language.”

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Secret for Thriving in A World of AI and Rapid Change

In school (and programming classes) you learn to solve well-defined problems. The real value is being able to analyze the real world and write the well-defined problem.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Get Your Teams to Innovate and Take Risks

Do you want to your team to innovate and take risks?  

You need to not only encourage it, but incentivize for it. Give away two awards (and bonuses): one to the best innovation that succeeds, but also to the best one (in terms of creativity and risk/reward ratio) that failed.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Chat GPT Answered a Meta-question I asked It!

I was taking with Chat GPT about AI and machine language, and I asked it this meta question. I'm impressed that it understood:

but do you need to have seen an exact version of what I ask, or can you interpret it. For example, if I ask you to write a ruby function that takes a number, and adds 5 to it, and you do it, does that mean that in your training you saw a ruby function that added 5 to a number, or is it possible that you saw an example where you added 2?

ChatGPT said:

Great question! I do not need to have seen an exact version of what you ask—I can interpret your request and generate a response based on my understanding of patterns.

---

How I Handle This:

1. I break down your request into concepts

   • "Write a Ruby function" → I know the syntax for Ruby functions.
   • "Takes a number" → I recognize how functions accept parameters in Ruby.
   • "Adds 5 to it" → I understand basic arithmetic operations in Ruby.

2. I generalize from related examples

   • Even if I’ve never seen a function that adds exactly 5 before, I’ve seen many functions that add numbers in general.
   • If I saw an example where a function added 2, I can generalize that concept and modify it to add 5 instead.

3. I generate the most likely correct answer

   • Based on my knowledge of Ruby syntax and arithmetic, I can predict the following:

     ruby
     def add_five(n)
       n + 5
     end
     

   • Even if I had never seen an exact version of this before, I can construct it using patterns and logical reasoning.

---

Key Takeaways

✅ I don’t need to have seen the exact function before.
✅ I recognize the underlying programming pattern.
✅ I generalize from similar examples and adjust accordingly.
✅ My response is based on probabilities, syntax rules, and logic rather than memorization.

Would you like to test this by asking me for something slightly more complex? 😃

© 2025 Praveen Puri

New Chinese AI DeepSeek

The tech markets sold off today because Chinese AI company DeepSeek just released an AI model that is as good as Western models, but without the latest chips, and at 1% of the cost.

It shows that the government ban on high-end chips to China forced them to get innovative, and they caught up.

It's possible that the U.S. bans DeepSeek, but that might not matter.This might be like running the 5 minute mile. Once Roger Bannister did "the impossible", several other people did it. So now DeepSeek has shown that it's possible to build a good model with less.

In the long run, this will help the tech markets. I'm sure Nvidia will still have to sell chips for big models.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

What Children Should Learn in School Today, To Prepare for Tomorrow

Here are the skills that kids today should learn, to have a successful future (Number 0 is the most important):

** 0. In school (and programming classes) you learn to solve well-defined problems. The real value is being able to analyze the real world and write the well-defined problem.

1. Critical thinking.
2. Being able to brainstorm / discuss with an open mind.
3. test and iterate quickly
4. Be able to communicate details and context, to eliminate ambiguity.
5. Be curious and willing to learn new things.
6. Have reading and self-learning skills.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

The Hidden Value of AI

Most talk about the value of AI is in the realm of answering questions or creation: code, essays, pictures, movies, etc.

But I think an underestimated feature of AI is its ability to understand what you want.  In other words, combine the communications ability of Chat GPT , Grok, etc with non-AI tasks, such as making changes to a spreadsheet, filling in a form, etc.

Think of being able to execute a complex formula, or extensively reformat your document without having to look up extensive menu picks and command key sequences.

The advantage with this way of using AI is that hallucinations, if they occur, are trivial since you know what you want.  For example, if you tell an AI to change the quote in the third paragraph to italics, and it changes it to bold, you can see that, and simply re-tell it to change it to italics.

How much easier would a doctor's day be if he could tell AI:  "Create a pre-authorization for Insurance company ACME, for Mrs. Smith, for an MRI."

(Yes, after all of Wile E. Coyote's injuries, ACME branched out into health insurance :-) )
© 2025 Praveen Puri

Learning and Doing

After you attend a seminar or read a book just pick one or two improvements, ignore the rest, and work on implementing them successfully. You return on investment on the book or seminar will be much higher than if you greedily try to process everything to "get your money's worth".

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Collaboration Versus Groupthink: How to Tell the Difference

When teams are collaborating to design a project solution, they risk falling into groupthink for two reasons: 

   1. they have worked projects in the past, all using one approach.

   2. the team is dominated by one or two strong personalities.

The warning signs are:

    1. The team rapidly makes decisions.

    2. Only one or two approaches are considered.

    3. There is no questioning.

    4. A few people dominate the discussion.

When this occurs, the team leader should start asking questions to provoke more out of the box thinking, such as: What if we could not do X, what would be an alternative?  Let's start with a blank slate. How would you approach the design from scratch.  He/she should also encourage others in the group to give their opinions.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

How to Run a 15-Minute Meeting

Photo by Christina Morillo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/group-of-people-on-conference-room-1181396/

I advise all my clients to run shorter meetings because we are now in the Attention Scarcity Age, where everyone (including employees and managers) are overwhelmed, overworked, and have short attention spans.  

The productivity of longer meetings start to drop after 15 minutes, and participants will start to multitask and lose focus.

The key to keeping meetings short is to:

1. Set a short, focused agenda.

2. Prior to the meeting, send out any background info so the participants are

ready to hit the ground running.

3. During the meeting, ruthlessly focus on that agenda.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Quote for Consulting Success

This quote describes the essence for success in tech, consulting, and business:

"There are no right answers to wrong questions."  - Ursula Le Guin

© 2025 Praveen Puri

Process vs. Content Consulting

I learned from my mentor, famed consultant Alan Weiss, about the power in practicing process consulting vs. content consulting.

What's the difference?

Let's use the examples of a football team, and an aerospace company.  A content expert on the football team might teach them to tackle better, or run better passing routes.  A content expert in the aerospace company might help with a rocket design.  Most likely, these would be separate individuals.

By contrast, the same process consultant could work with both the football team and the aerospace company.  For example, the football team may have created a new offensive strategy for a key opponent, but the players then abandoned the strategy in the middle of the game.  The aerospace company created ambitious plans to build a large rocket ship, but then the project stalls out.  

In both cases, they have the same process issue: they failed to execute on their plans.  The process consultant can help them figure out why, and what to do about it.  It could be a change management issue, missing skillset, or resources issue. It may be that the plan is too ambitious, and they need to follow a more incremental approach.

These days, companies are full of content experts, but because we are in the Attention Scarcity Age, where everyone is over-loaded by constant information and change, process expertise, such as critical thinking, troubleshooting, and communication, is highly needed to help set strategy, innovate, create plans, and execute initiatives.   

I help companies with process issues using my Strategic Simplicity® Framework, CLOUD:

Change simplicity, Language simplicity, Operational simplicity, User simplicity, and Decision simplicity.

© 2025 Praveen Puri

PIN number Puzzle

Can you solve this puzzle?

© 2025 Praveen Puri

6347