Contact me at bala@balaramadurai.net.

My Books

I have written a few books on various topics.

My Podcasts

I have recorded a few podcasts on topics that I am very happy to talk about.

Design Thinking

The learners get under the skin of the user/customer and solve problems for them. The approach is based on an age old theory (more than 2000 years old) postulated by Lord Buddha. The learners learn thinking tools from the design world, the TRIZ/ARIZ world, Indian arts, metaphors and the patent database. Finally, they utilize some tools from six thinking hats and Mr. David Snowden. They learn the course interactively through silence, videos, stories, inane jokes and interesting assignments.

Creativity and Innovation

This workshop module uses the ARIZ/TRIZ thinking methodology (You could say that this course is an offspring of the design thinking course). The learners bring in problems that they have been working on and I guide them to use ARIZ/TRIZ in detail. The learner brings in problems that they have already understood and are fairly certain about the problem to solve using the concepts in the course.

Technology Forecasting

If design thinking is for the NOW, technology forecasting is design thinking for the future. The learner uses a methodology called FORMAT - http://handbook.format-project.eu, a result of a European Union funded (~$3 million) project. The learner hones their skill to think of a future timeframe of more than 10 years. They will consider the potential of the current technology, but also the alternatives and how strong or weak is their technology of interest in comparison to the alternatives. Imagination, intuition, analytics and data crunching go hand in hand in this course. The predictions from the forecasting exercise are not as important as the questions of forecast posed (first stage of the FORMAT methodology).

Executive Coaching

“How does one execute a large innovation project within my company? Do I get personally involved or delegate? Am I listening or telling? I am doing my best, what more can I do?” If these are questions that keep coming to your head (and you happen to be the head of a company or department), you have reached the right place. One on one coaching can work wonders in clearing out the fog around some of the issues you may be facing in your workplace.

Intrapreneurship - A workout

Intrapreneurship is a conundrum of sorts, since it is making an entrepreneur out of an employee taking the risks of an entrepreneur with the friendly resources of a company. How did Mindtree achieve this in 2008-9? I introduce the participants to the company profile. I excite them with the remarkable history of a very different kind of company. How and why did they launch 550? Why is 550 a very different sort of program? How did the program bring out innovation and the creative entrepreneurial spirit of the company? The learners assume the role of innovation managers of companies of their choice to design and present an intrapreneurship program.

Client Speak

I have worked with many clients and I always like to hear that they come out from the collaboration happy and satisfied. Have a look at what the clients said about my work.

Updates (News and Blog)

I write occasionally about a few things that are dear to me - writing about life, teaching tools and techniques, and learning about technology. I plan to write more about health and writing in general as well. Stay tuned. Please do subscribe to my blog if you like what you read.

Podcast Enterprise: S2S25 Bread and Circuses

on 2025-01-29

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

  1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
  2. Story structure
  3. Character analysis
  4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: When this episode opens, you find that the USS Enterprise is in orbit around a planet called 892-IV. They’re looking for an individual called RM Merik. He’s an old friend of Captain Kirk and he was in command of a spaceship that went missing on this planet and they want to find him before he violates a prime directive. And of course, Kirk, Spock and Dr. McCoy beam down onto this planet. They want to investigate and find Merik, but they don’t want to violate the prime directive and interfere with this planet’s civilization because from their scans they have found that there are cities, there is a civilization, there is a 20th century civilization. Actually, and there is a culture here. According to Federation law, they want to leave it as is. However, they land in this valley type area, they are promptly captured by a couple of people wearing very pale and grubby clothes. And They are threatened with violence and dragged off to the mountains. In the mountains, there are caves where an old man comes out. He trusts Captain Kirk for some reason. And The person who has captured Kirk, McCoy and Spock is called Flavius Maximus, which is a very Roman name. And It seems that these people who are in the caves are escaped slaves who follow the sun. And we don’t know what the sun is. They call themselves the children of the sun. They’re also very focused on peace and brotherhood and that camaraderie and that sort of thing. So they shun all kinds of violence, apparently. Even though Flavius Maximus wants to shoot Kirk, he doesn’t. And it also comes to light that the place that they escape from is Rome, an alien Rome that keeps slaves. The slaves escaped from there. Rome is still thriving. It has come into the 20th century. They have television, they have cars, they have electricity, and they have a television network that actually broadcasts all of their gladiatorial fights. Flavius was actually one of the gladiators over there and he escaped. So now he is one of the best gladiators but he has escaped and now he will not fight.

Kirk still has to find Merik and when he mentions his name to the old man in the cave, he realizes that Merik is now Mericus and he is kind of a high ranking official in the cave.

in the city. And Kirk has to go to the city, find Merikus and as things go, he finds himself captured, imprisoned. He meets Merikus, who is now in a strange mental state because he has to, he has had to watch his crew get killed in the gladiatorial fight. There’s also pre consul, I think, Bala is he, is he called a pre consul or a pro a proconsul Claudius Marcus, I believe his name is, who is almost in charge of the entire empire. And He is a very shrewd, annoying, irritating character who wants to throw Kirk and the rest of them into a gladiatorial fight for TV ratings. And also they managed to bring Flavius back into the arena.

Arena is actually a bit of a joke because it’s a small area in a studio where they have to stand within a rectangular space and fight each other to the death. And this is where McCoy and Spock have a lot of quips also. Spock is able to use his nerve pinch against his opponents, they escape from this area. Kirk has to use his wits to outwit his way out of this hellish Roman empire. And it’s. It’s all very, very surreal, actually, The experience of watching this is pretty surreal. And also, he manages to convey somehow to Spock about the Enterprise, that there is something wrong. And Spock has to use a bit of ingenuity to get the rest of them out of there. And Merik, when it, when push comes to shove, and when it comes to the end of this episode, he uses that last opportunity to get Kirk and the rest of them back onto the Enterprise while being killed himself. And this is where Kirk, when he’s back in the Enterprise, he’s wondering what the children of the sun actually mean.

And Spock thinks that sun worship is a very primitive religion, but then it turns out that it’s not the S U N sun. It is the S O N son. They are followers of some variation of Christianity. And so Kirk feels that this Roman empire will also fall.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

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Karmic Design Thinking is available for 129 INR only on Jan 16, 2025

on 2025-01-02

Exciting news! My book “Karmic Design Thinking” is available on Kindle for just 129 INR, but only today (January 16th, 2025). Don’t miss this one-day opportunity to grab your copy at a special price!

As someone passionate about design thinking, I’m thrilled to see over 100,000 learners enrolled in my NPTEL course in the last 5 years. This book complements the course material and offers deeper insights into the world of design thinking.

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Podcast Enterprise: S2S23 The Omega Glory

on 2025-01-01

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

  1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
  2. Story structure
  3. Character analysis
  4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: When this episode opens, we find that the USS Enterprise is orbiting a planet called Omega IV, and it’s also getting close to a ship called the USS Exeter, which has had some sort of problem with communication, and it has gone offline, and the Federation wants to know what happened to this ship. So Kirk, along with the landing party that consists of himself, McCoy and Spock, board the USS Exeter along with Lieutenant Galloway, and they find the ship is completely deserted. But after they do a bit of preliminary examinations, They find that it’s not deserted. They find that the members of this ship were actually dead and all the water has been drained out of their body reducing them to just some kind of crystalline dust material. The surgeons log that they find aboard the bridge tells them that there is an infection aboard and the only way to avoid any sort of death, the same fate is to have themselves beamed down to this planet.

That’s the only way. And the captain of the USS Exeter is also down on that planet. So Kirk and the landing party cannot go back to the USS Enterprise. So they beamed down to Omega IV. There they find Captain Ronald Tracy, who is the captain of the USS Exeter.

And here’s where things get a little bit bizarre because they come to a village square. They find one set of people, one group of aliens attempting to behead another group of humanoid aliens. The aliens in charge seem to be more Far Eastern in appearance. They are very humanoid. And the other group of aliens, the supposed savages, look like Europeans.

And one thing leads to another. The aliens in power are the Kohms. And the others are the Yangs. Captain Kirk finds that Captain Tracy is a little off in the head. He’s looking for immortality. There is something in the planet’s atmosphere that protects all of them from disease.

And because of that, according to Captain Tracy, at least The Kohms are living for thousands of years. He wants that kind of longevity for himself. But he also takes a dislike to Kirk and has him imprisoned. While in prison, Kirk manages to somehow befriend some of the Yangs over there.

He also gets beaten up quite often, as we’ll see in this episode. There are a lot of fistfights. Once he’s out of that prison, he also finds that the Yangs have some sort of obsession with freedom, which ties into the American constitution and the Kohms are communists. He manages to bring both these groups together in a very strange turn of events.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Continue reading

Podcast Enterprise: S2S22 By Any Other Name

on 2024-12-19

Space, the final frontier. These are the podcasts of the Podcast Enterprise. Its only mission: to explore story structures, to analyze our favorite characters and plotlines, to boldly talk what everyone has seen before

We will analyze all episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series or TOS for short using the following guiding structure:

  1. Synopsis or summary of the episode
  2. Story structure
  3. Character analysis
  4. Our likes and dislikes

The synopsis: When this episode opens, you have the Enterprise answering a ship’s distress call and captain Kirk forms his landing party that includes himself, Spock, McCoy, Lieutenant Shea and Yeoman Thompson. They beamed down to this planet looking for survivors. Now, what happens there is that planet looks quite uninhabited. And yet, Yeoman Thompson’s sensors pick up a human presence somewhere over there. And that is when the landing party, including Kirk, is accosted by a male and female human They look human, but then they tell Kirk and the crew that they’re not actually human.

They are members of the Kelvin empire of the Andromeda galaxy. And they’re here to take over the Milky Way, simple as that. And they want the Enterprise. So what happens now is Kirk and the landing party cannot allow this, but these Kelvins have technologies that they haven’t seen before. They’re able to paralyze people at will with some belt device that they have.

And then they also. Imprison Kirk and the landing crew so that they can be begin preparations to take over the Enterprise. Their idea is to take over the Enterprise, modify its engines and capacities and take it all the way back to Andromeda so that they can bring back more people. And this is a trip apparently that will take 300 years after the modifications to the Enterprise.

So while Kirk and the crew and the landing party is in the small jail cell. They’re blocked off by bars that their phasers cannot penetrate. They try tricks. Spock tries his mind meld. Nothing happens other than him getting a whiplash, a mental psychic whiplash. And then the, As punishment would be one of the Kelvins Rojan, the male Kelvin in charge of the entire operation kills both not kills.

He actually reduces human Thompson and Lieutenant Shea to some sort of dehydrated, chalky geometric form and he actually crumbles one of those forms thereby killing Yeoman Thompson and he says this is the punishment that all of Kirk’s crew is going to face, including Kirk, if they don’t do as he says.

Now this turns into a huge issue. They take over the Enterprise. There, there are very few Kelvins. I think there’s only Rojan, Kelinda, the woman in they found, they met on the planet along with him, there’s Hanar, and Drea, who’s the NA navigator and Tomar. So all of these Kelvins are now about the Enterprise, the crew of the. Enterprise. The human crew of the Enterprise is having a problem. The Kelvins are physically in human form, but they are not quite human and they’re getting used to human form. So there are some foibles and quirks that they have to get used to.

They have to cross a negative energy barrier at the end of the Milky Way to so that cross over into Andromeda and both Spock and Scotty decide to come up with an idea that will somehow explode the ship once they cross the barrier but Kirk is hesitant to give the order which turns out to be a bit of a mistake because after they cross the barrier Rojan decides to turn most of the crew almost all of the crew into those little chalky geometric shapes because those are non essential personnel according to the Kelvins.

The only essential personnel are Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty. That’s all they need. They don’t need anybody else. They don’t need Uhura. They don’t need you know, they don’t need Nurse Chapel. They don’t need anybody. Now, this is when Kirk realizes that the Kelvins are not quite human, but they are in human form.

They are literally trapped in their human bodies. And They did this so that they can enter the Enterprise and make that voyage back to Andromeda. But. Because they are in human form, they are also experiencing human emotions, and so Kirk decides to have a little fun with them, and maybe distract them long enough to get the ship back.

So he decides to seduce Kelinda, who knows she’s being seduced, but she finds it very amusing. Tomar is taken care of by Scotty, who gives him a lot to drink, and he knocks himself out drinking. Hanar, the other Kelvin is taken care of by Dr. McCoy, who injects him with all sorts of things and has him so jittery and nervous that he starts disobeying orders.

And Rojan suffers the most of all because he seems to be jealous of Kelinda and Captain Kirk. And that, drives him insane. So they don’t know how to deal with these human emotions. And this episode actually focuses on that, how much the human psyche and the, how much the human body can do. And if you’re not used to it, it’s going to drive you crazy.

And eventually there is a fist fight because there has to be a fist fight. And after that, Rojan, he is too tired to argue anymore and gives the controls of the Enterprise back to Kirk.

That brings us to the end of this episode. Thank you for listening to the Podcast Enterprise. Please do share your reviews with us and please share this podcast with any of your writing friends or trekkies. Live long and prosper!

Stay tuned in for our next episode! Enjoy!

Continue reading