No Easy Path to Success

Who does not relish a success story? If success stories are expected to motivate others to tread the path, Bibhu Dash feels that ‘ Every Street is Paved with Gold’ authored by Kim Woo - Choong, Founder and chairman, Daewoo is one book that should not be missed.
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This book is a compilation of 52 small essays, intended to fire the patriotic spirit of the young Koreans. The messages have universal appeal. The chapters are divided into four sections viz., Dreaming, Managing, Growing and Leading. All the chapters are easily readable although all may not agree with all their contents.

Sample this "The tradition at Daewoo is not having meetings during working hours. It is normally held before or after office hours. Long meetings are held on Saturdays or Sundays." It’s a good idea to ban some of the chapters, for it can corrupt a work force that sticks religiously to office hours.

History belongs to dreamers. Not to people who bind themselves in artificial boundaries. The conventional attitude to an opportunity is to get paralysed on the difficulties rather than concentrate on the possibilities. Kim tells "If there is only a 1 % chance of success in a project, the true businessman sees that 1 % as the spark to light a fire." This book is filled with such distilled wisdom from the Chairman of Daewoo. He has overcome all barriers of childhood. He was a refugee in the Korean war, who had to sell atleast 100 newspapers everyday to feed his family at the age of 14. Today Kim is called an International turnaround expert, who can pick up sick companies and turn them around. He is said to be a wizard in Textiles, Machinery, Automobiles, Finance, Shipbuilding, Hotels and Management. All these qualities from an Economics student.

Sixteen or Sixty! You are guaranteed to sit up and take notice. You may be a student, an entry-level or a middle level executive, a CEO, an entrepreneur of a small OR a billion dollar company. There are chapters to appeal everyone and make them think twice about their path to Real Success.

The book can be read at a breezing speed and still get the message strongly across. It would be worth studying a chapter a week and contemplate on the possibilities- on how it can be used on the self for further improvement. Highly recommended reading.

• The first analog computer called "Differential Analyser" was built by scientists of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1930. It was a electro- mechanical device capable of solving differential equations having 18 variables.

• ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), one of the earliest digital computers occupied 1000 square feet of space, weighed 30 tons and consumed 160 KW of electricity. It was used for 80,233 hours by American armed forces. It could perform 5000 mathematical operations per second.

• In 1958, Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM forecasted a world market for only 5 computers. In 1977, Kenneth Olsen, founder and president of Digital Equipment Corporation, said no one needed to have a personal computer at home. In 1981, Bill Gates said that 640K would be enough memory for anyone.

• In the early 1980s, Fred Cohen did extensive theoretical research, and performed numerous practical experiments, regarding viral type programs. He received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1986 for this work. Dr. Cohen’s definition of a computer virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a version of itself” is generally accepted as a standard.

• Bell Laboratories launched the first communication satellite Telstar in 1962. Weighing only 77 kg (170 pounds), it was powered by nickel-cadmium batteries, recharged by 3,600 solar cells. It made possible, transmissions of Television, Telephone, telegraph, Data, and facsimile signals across the Atlantic.

• World Wide Web and HTML were created to allow scientists to access the latest research fast, since production of data and information was outpacing the journals. The electronic document team at CERN, Switzerland developed HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as a subset of existing standard SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language).

• Albert Einstein, when asked to describe radio transmission, replied: "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat.  You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles.  Do you understand this?  And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there.  The only difference is that there is no cat."

• The derivation of term ‘bug’ is attributed to the moth that was found squashed between the points of an electromechanical relay in a computer called "Harvard Mark I" in summer of 1945, leading to its breakdown. The operation of removing the moth with a tweezer was reported as ‘debugging’.