Author: Sri Srikrishna (Page 12 of 22)

Marketing Your Services – Lessons from a Journey to Bhimavaram

March 26, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Recently I had to travel to Bhimavaram in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. Of course I had to look it up on Google Maps to figure out where it was. It’s about a 120km north northeast of Vijayawada. As my daughter had to be there at 9am on a Saturday morning and had forgotten to tell me but five days before, I had to scramble to make the arrangements. Now that I’m back in Bangalore I realize somewhat belatedly how everything we needed was handled almost a 100% online.

The Economist in its latest issue talks of Indian technology firms and where they may be headed. While I didn’t agree with everything they asserted, my own experience of making it to Bhimavaram and back resonates very well with their core premise that technology, the web and mobile have already changed Indian businesses irrevocably. Here’s what I found and learned.

Google – of course this is where it began – with Google Maps figuring out where Bhimavaram was and the nearest airport – Vijayawada in this case. Cleartrip was my next stop to check out airline tickets. Once I found Jet Konnect had the best connections checked out their website as well and bought the tickets there directly. Usually when travelling to a new city, I’d call friends, to see if they had any recommendations for hotels. Given I was travelling with my daughter, I checked TripAdvisor for reviews and everyone seemed to suggest the Taj Gateway awas the way to go. So off I went to TajHotels website. Then I had the bright idea to check hotels right next to them – as in centrally located by not as expensive. I decided to check out Stayzilla who’s ads I’d seen in Bangalore – and they got me a good deal at the Taj Gateway. Then off it was to find a rental car. I called the Taj up and asked them to refer a cab company. Once again I felt the cab rates were quite high and so a quick Google search revealed a service called Saavari.com that fit the bill – they could get you a cab (including rates, ratings, the works) in practically any city – most importantly in Vijayawada in this instance. However, I couldn’t figure out a few things re quoted price online, so I called them on their toll free number. They said they’d get back to me and never did. So in the meantime I kept searching and here’s where Google Local came in real handy. Several cab companies in Vijayawada had excellent reviews ratings on Google and I reached out to one of them over the phone after checking out rates on their website (which I’m finding hard locate just now). So here we were four days before our travel, with flight tickets, hotel bookings, local taxi rental all done over a couple of hours online and on the phone – to a city we’d never been to, whose language we did not speak and with some measure of perceived safety for my teen traveller.

Lessons learned

Online reviews matter – the hotel we ended up staying in had good reviews on TripAdvisor. The cab we used had good reviews on Google local. These were instances of a local supplier beating out a larger national “professional” supplier. Social and community word-of-mouth is getting better, even it’s not from someone personally known to us.
Websites matter – Even after locating the cab company via a review, the fact that their website had clear rates, reviews and contact info is what tipped us over. Good websites matter – Savaari.com and Stayzilla I had to look up in my mail trial as I couldn’t recall their names – and in the formers’ case I couldn’t figure out the pricing and latter’s case I had to resort to the phone to resolve issues.
Customer service matters – Saavari.com said they’d get back to me and they never did. They had a beautiful website – clean and while my use case was not a clear fit to their standard offerings, phone calls were not returned. Similarly Stayzilla called me back to say that the Taj Gateway room was no longer available – that they’d put me in an another hotel on the same street. To give full credit to them, they constantly followed up but were caught scrambling. The place they finally got me I passed on due to poor reviews on Trip Adivsor. Jet Konnect won over ClearTrip as it was easier to cancel or make changes with them.

This was the first time that I travelled to a new city – let alone a Tier 2/3 town – without seeking direct personal inputs from friends or family and did so at short notice and had a uniformly pleasant experience – despite not speaking a word of Telugu in this instance and carrying minimal cash. Whether web and broadband penetration is where we’d like it to be or not, for businesses the web and mobile have changed how they do business forever.

Keeping yourself & others honest – Lessons from my dad

March 11, 2013 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Growing up, I recall my father gifting things to folks – in what I deemed – a reckless manner. There was time when someone admired my father’s wristwatch and he took it off and insisted that they take it. My sister and I argued with him, not just on that occasion but on several others that he was being taken advantage of. Of course his response was that there’s as much pleasure, maybe even more, in giving as there is in taking. My sister’s immediate offer of making him ecstatic by happily taking any and all gifts that he planned to give in the future, I don’t think was taken seriously.

Yet once I hit my teens, I became aware that whenever my father lent people money – particularly to a steady stream of strangers, often referred by relatives – for a family exigency or to buy a motorcycle or to go abroad to study, he always insisted that they sign a promissory note or pro-note as was called. This was usually a letter on plain paper, stating the amounts borrowed and the borrower’s intent to return the sums upon demand or by a certain date. The borrower signed it across a revenue stamp pasted on the paper, making it a legal contract. This was in marked contrast with how he handled grants at the small non-profit he ran, which usually gave money directly to elementary, middle or high schools for kids who needed financial help to pay their fees or for books. These grants were just that and the beneficiaries, usually economically disadvantaged kids, were not expected to pay the money back.

So I asked my dad, why he took pro notes from these other folks who borrowed money from him. His response was that if he didn’t treat the money as a loan, that he expected the borrower to return, it diminished the value perceived by the borrower. While most borrowers intended to return the money, it didn’t hurt that there was a legal reason for them to pay off the loan. As my dad put it, “If they return the money, it allows me to lend it to more people who could use a helping hand.”

Ronald Reagan is credited with popularizing the term “Trust but verify” (or as the Russian proverb went “doveryai, no proveryai”). This was my dad’s own method to keep himself and others honest.

3 Steps to Create a Culture of Innovation

November 22, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Yesterday I was part of a panel discussion on innovation and entrepreneurship at the opening of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Development Center (IEDC) at the Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering. One of the first questions the moderator posed was “How does one create a culture of innovation and what role does leadership play?”

To me this is not that different from the question, How does one create a culture of ______ (fill in the blank) – for instance courtesy and consideration. You start by being polite – kind and courteous. Similarly creating a culture of innovation within our companies, divisions or teams is to start by being innovative. What does that mean?

To me it means three things

a] INSPIRE Talk about, share and celebrate innovation – set aside time, whether a Friday lunch or before your weekly team meeting to show what you mean by innovation. Bring in a mechanical water sprinkler and share with your team why you think it is innovative or better yet ask them what is innovative about it. A clasp on someone’s chain, a pain-free blood sugar measurement tool – in other words – “the ordinary” and the extraordinary that’s around us every day. Allows you to discuss and develop a shared sense of what is innovation and over the common misconception that only a cure for cancer can be innovation. Over time this can be things that your own team or company are innovated, but don’t wait for it to be done in-house

b] MEASURE Put in a process, where the team can spend time focusing on problems – which allow scope for innovation – could be in technology, internal processes or methods or any other function within your business. Intuit for instance created a process for employees to share ideas and seek inputs which has eventually become a product they now offer their customers. And most importantly put in measures — only that which gets measured will get done. So when you talk about it, ask about it, measure it, everyone begins to pay attention to it and that’s how a culture of caring about innovation gets slowly built up.

c] REWARD & RECOGNIZE Nothing works like recognizing the work people are doing and rewarding innovative behavior. A critical element here is not to celebrate success alone or what is commonly perceived as success – ie a new product that launches or a new idea that’s implemented, but to recognize and reward risk taking. Unless we create a culture within our companies of tolerating mistakes and viewing them as a way to learn and do better, it will be very hard to create a culture of innovation. As Gordon Moore, founder of Intel put it “I view this year’s failure as next year’s opportunity to try it again. Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.”

5 Reasons Why You Need a Founders’ Agreement

November 15, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 5 Comments

Just this last year, two founders in two different startups that I’ve invested in quit. Back in 2000, when one of the co-founders of my first startup quit (on religious grounds) we were quite taken aback and ill-prepared to handle it. However that parting was amicable and all the founders involved — there were five of us — are still on talking terms. Despite this first-hand experience, I did not foresee founders in either of these startups leaving. To make matters ~~difficult~~ interesting one of the founders left in a rather acrimonious manner, which proved quite a bit of challenge not just financially but emotionally. Sure, eventually things get to a new normal and while neither of these startups is still completely out of the woods, they’ve survived, evolved and even grown. Ever since this happened, I’ve been informally talking to folks, both boot-strapped as well as those with angel funding, about founders’ agreement. And usually I’m greeted with a blank stare, when I pose the question, do you have a founders’ agreement? Occasionally to keep things interesting I ask them “Do you know what an inter se agreement is? Do you have one?

Here are five reasons why you need a founders agreement

Self knowledge As I found in my second startup, even when you start a business with people you’ve worked with for a long time, your stated and unstated expectations can be very different. As each founder may be in a different stage of their lives – be it with parents, spouses or girlfriends, kids or even personal aspirations. Many times, we don’t know what we don’t know or or thing we’re making implicit assumptions about. A founders’ agreement helps flush these out – especially when your other partners state their own concerns, desires or expectations. This could be from the profound – of what happens if a founder dies to the mundane of how equity will be evaluated if a founder wants to cash out.
Relationships As my father used to say, businesses can fail and often do fail. Most young people enter into business with friends as co-founders and even in the case where a founder was not a friend before, the heat of a startup certainly will meld the relationships into one of friendship, if you are lucky. So when things begin to go south, the inter se agreement acts as an impartial or at least a mutually agreed manner to resolve differences. Founders can leave not just for professional reasons, but because their spouses want to go overseas, or they are going through a divorce or loss of a parent or child – all events that are traumatic enough without having to deal with a business relationship coming apart.
Values A founders’ agreement in many ways makes you confront your own stated values for your business and yourself. With multiple founders, the creation and negotiation of a founders’ agreement is fraught with unearthing people’s deepest fears and concerns. The disagreements and discussions in creating an inter se agreement at a time when the founders are in a good relationships at the beginning of the journey, are some of the surest ways of unearthing and cementing core values. So how you handle a senior employees restricted stock or options in the event of an exit or their early departure may tell more about your co-founders values than any amount of values workshops.
Reality check Whether you are a first time entrepreneur or working on your fourth startup, there is an inherent level of reality-distortion or self denial that’s needed to even get started let alone keep going. As one of my co-founders asked me two years into our latest startup “Have you retired or are you serious about this business?” An inter se agreement is a great way to remind and re-iterate to yourself that you are a realbusiness and not a fun (technology) project and that you have obligations to yourself and others
Success As Miguel Cervantes put it so eloquently (in Spanish) the secret to success is preparation. (He actually said “The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.” When you embark on a startup the only certainty is that everything is going to change. Knowing, or at least discussing what such change, especially in the founding team would mean for the company and other founders is a good way to make sure that you, at the very least don’t fail but improve the chances of success of your enterprise. Being prepared and the sanity of knowing your values, relationships and aspirations are all likely to be preserved will enhance the chances of your success.

Sure, all of us have run businesses, scaled them, sold them and in some cases buried them without inter se agreements. However if you can do it with greater peace of mind, sort of riding your Harley with a good helmet, why not!

Culture, people & other imponderables

November 7, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Don’t worry that your kids don’t always listen to you, worry that they are always watching you.
— Robert Fulghum

Startups & founders have enough to worry about without adding culture to the mix. Or so it would seem. As Fulghum points out in his own inimitable style, culture is what is being built as you worry about execution, hiring or product market fit.

What most of us don’t realize is that we are actively, even if blindly building culture in our companies every waking moment. The trouble is when we do this without being mindful or engaged, we usually end up building a culture that we are surprised about as it invariably bites us in the rear.

Starting from the moment you step into the office, people see if you greet the security guard, whether you get your own cup of tea or put it away when done. Whether you text in meetings or worse yet when you answer the phone during a 1:1 meeting. Even if you answered yes, yes, yes and no & no, they see what you do or say when a senior team member flames another, or a team member screams at a vendor. When you are quiet about a white lie to a customer or don’t question why a payment is being withheld, you are communicating loudly and shaping culture – though not necessarily the way you want.

So culture in a startup is not an option – but what sort of culture you want is a choice you can make.

Share the credit generously – Lessons from my dad

November 4, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“That is what TTN has visualized.” I’d heard my dad say this so many times as I was growing up. TTN was TT Narasimhan, his boss – who relied heavily on my dad as his execution guy. In later years, my father took on the role of the CEO of two group companies and was left to call the shots in these and other businesses. Yet, in almost all public instances, my dad never did anything without indicating that he was only carrying out TTN’s vision. While not comfortable himself with any form of public praise, he was never failed to point out the contribution of TTN, when someone praised or credited him with any success. Even in the hierarchy and sycophancy-laden culture of India in the 70s, it was clear that it was something else that drove my dad.

I recall, once having a big argument (at least that’s how it seemed to me) with my dad, as to why he did not take credit for a lot of what were clearly his own ideas and doing. My dad gave me the indulgent smile he was wont to, when he felt I was being particularly childish or unreasonable. “Son, keep in mind, that all I’m able to do is because of the freedom and trust, not to mention the capital that TTN has provided. It’s in his name that we are borrowing money – that enables us to do what we are doing.” He could see clearly that this did not cut much ice with me. “Even without all of that, there are two things to keep in mind son,” he continued. “It does take vision – not everyone can provide it. And giving credit to others does not take anything away from your own contribution.”

I can’t say that I was convinced that day. Several years later, when he had hired several PhDs in the research department of the pharmaceutical firm he was the CEO off, I saw this in action again. My dad had only graduated from high school, as his father’s death while he was still in 9th standard, and the family’s financial situation did not allow him to pursue a college degree. So here was a man, with no formal qualifications other than a high school diploma from a small town in Tamil Nadu, who’d worked his way up from accounting apprentice through chief accountant to eventually CEO of two firms. “All credit has to go to our scientists for how well our firm is doing today,” was his constant refrain.

At my father’s funeral last year, many strangers came up to me and said “I was able to pursue college or go overseas only because of your dad.” So my dad’s exhortation to “Spread the credit” clearly had not undermined him in any way – his actions spoke loud enough.

This is a lesson that I’ve finally begun to appreciate and practice. Let me tell you about all that things that I’ve learned from Rajagopal….

3 reasons you need a co-founder or partner for your business

August 20, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Rock climbing (B&W) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Not too long ago I begun interacting with the young founder of a web 2.0 firm. He’d done an impressive number of things – identified a key market need based on his own work experience, built a prototype, gotten paying customers, hired—initially part-time—subsequently full time coder and even raised a small investment from an accelerator. After our first interaction, which was mostly spent learning what he’d done already, what had worked and what hadn’t, we begun discussing business models and his intent to raise angel money.

Somewhere in the discussion I raised the question of “Do you intend to find to find yourself a partner or two?” You’d have thought I had slapped him, in the way he reacted. Once he got over the initial shock of my question, he was genuinely puzzled. While he never came outright and said it, I could see that he continued to be befuddled by my seemingly dumb question. “Why would I need a partner?” – the unasked question hung over the rest of our meeting. It set me thinking as well and here are three reasons – better decisions, stronger company and emotional support – and that I believe having a partner (or two or three) can help your startup.

Two heads are better than one Your business and you will do better, if you have another set of eyes, ears and all the grey matter that hopefully lies between them, available to you. While perseverance is one of the most critical things for business success, it always helps to have someone tell you that you are being pig-headed or this is the time to let go of a customer or an employee. Do you sign up to a particular deal, should you build that product or abandon it, should you borrow or raise some more money – all these decisions are easier and most likely better when made with another set of inputs, that a co-founder can provide. Advisors, consultants and mentors can play this role some of the time and can be useful in not being so close to the decisions, but they rarely have to live with the consequences of these decisions the way a co-founder or partner would have to.

Successful businesses require teams Having co-founders, finding and persuading someone else, to embark on the insane journey that building a business can be, is the first step in making your business successful. It is not just investors who look for a team – one with complementary skills, but potential employees and prospective customers all care about the fact that your company is more than just you. Sure there have been single founder companies that have been successful, but why make it more difficult than it needs to be to build your business. Yes, teams and successful ones can be built with employees, but they will never be the same as having a co-founder or partner who has a same stake in the outcome.

Entrepreneurship is lonely business Entrepreneurship is hard enough without having to slog through it on your own. Sure if you are lucky, family, friends even advisors or mentors can help make it a little less lonely. However, none of them can give you the time that a good co-founder or partner can give you. Even if your co-founder is very different from you, they’ll be able to better understand and empathize than anyone else about the challenges you face, the frustrations you feel and help smooth out the highs and lows that are inevitable in any startup.

Lessons start-ups can teach all of us

June 14, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

As with most sayings there’s a good deal of truth to the truism—history is written by the victors. And rarely do such histories dwell on the mistakes or, worse yet, atrocities committed by the victors. While modern historians have attempted people’s histories or stories of the subaltern, as academics are fond of calling it, it’s pretty certain most histories are not exactly balanced reporting.

Cover of "Founders at Work: Stories of St...

Cover via Amazon

Stories of entrepreneurial journeys in many ways are not that different from histories written by the victors. Many of them are only slightly better than hagiographic biographies written by adoring admirers. Baskar Subramanian, one of the co-founders of my first start-up is fond of pointing out that once an entrepreneur is successful, he can write the story of his journey in any manner he deems fit. So if a start-up saga contains few mistakes, almost no accidents or lucky breaks, and where every major decision was the result of great strategic thought, you know you are reading a history by the victor. So a bucket of salt may be required when you read such a history or seek to learn from it.

Even when an entrepreneur is clearly successful and well thought of on matters of integrity, such as Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, or for someone closer to home, J.R.D. Tata, the matter of relevance, particularly to a fledgling start-up, becomes important. A reader is at best able to draw only general lessons about perseverance or passion. India and the world are a significantly different place today than when these men built their businesses. So, how practical are their insights for an entrepreneur to apply today? Inspiration is critical and these tomes offer them, certainly, but entrepreneurs need more than inspiration. They need practical and proven insights that can be both internalized and implemented with ease. Do books of even recent entrepreneurial success, pertain only to a market segment—modern retail or generic drugs—or can their lessons be applied to any entrepreneur starting up?

With the advent of blogs, particularly those professing advice for entrepreneurs, a number of interview series, and subsequently, books of interviews of entrepreneurs have emerged. These overcome the shortcomings of a single subject or company book and are often stories of recent or still-running businesses, which the readers not only relate to but also are likely to encounter in their lives. Yet, not each of these are written (or worse yet edited) in a manner that makes them as palatable and useful as one would like.

The first challenge when trying to learn from the lessons of others is figuring out which lessons are relevant to your own situation. Once you identify the problems that are similar, if not identical, to your own, you’d have to figure out whether the solution is germane to your own situation. Hiring for a software product start-up may be just as difficult in Bangalore as it is in Mountain View or New York—however, the solution may be altogether different.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days by Jessica Livingston stands head and shoulders above most other compilations of founder stories. While largely confined to Silicon Valley founders (whose origins are as varied as Brazil, China, India and Russia—and more interestingly the lesser-heralded towns of US states such as Nebraska and Iowa) and what would be termed as “tech” start-ups in India, many of the lessons are broadly applicable to start-ups anywhere.

The 32 stories in Founders at Work are set in Q&A form, with mercifully short questions. The entrepreneurs’ answers are delivered in direct and often in an unflatteringly candid manner. The book, which I’d avoided reading for a long time, gripped me from the first page. The book works because it keeps its focus on the earliest days of the start-ups—whether they subsequently grew into today’s Apple or self-destructed like ArsDigita or were acquired like Hotmail or TripAdvisor. This is one book of start-up stories that you cannot do without, even if you never intend to start something on your own. You’ll do better at your job as will your company if you read this book and take its lessons to heart.

This article originally appeared in the Book Beginnings column in Mint.

Getting your people to take ownership

May 18, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

This last week I made a mistake for a second time and paid for it dearly. A friend had offered to book a hotel for me and feeling lazier than usual I’d agreed. And when she sent me an email with the reservation I actually felt good, because she’d booked me in a fancy downtown hotel at bargain rates. Of course, only when I showed up at the registration desk did I realize that I’d confused my drachmas for dirhams. So the good deal in a downtown hotel, for what I thought was $100 a night, turned out to be nearly $400. But by then it was too late not just with the non-refundable booking but also on a long day after a long flight with the family in tow. I reckoned might as well have a good time. But I was in for yet another shock. The lady behind the desk had a most snarky attitude. “No! Breakfast is not included with your room. It is $30 per person.” “No, there’s no free wi-fi—$7 for an hour or $15 for a day. By the way that’s per device.”

None of this rankled as much as her attitude that she clearly didn’t care how I felt and she absolutely felt no need to be even remotely polite. In contrast, the hotels that I’d stayed at the night before and the two nights afterwards, each cost well below $100 per night and offered free breakfast and free wi-fi (in only the lobby in one case and all over the hotel in the other). More importantly, both had extremely friendly folks at the front desk—who were happy to let us check in early, check out late and went out of their way to help us have a good time. And these were employees, who certainly were paid a whole lot less than my snarky host at the $400 a night hotel. My little one asked in the puzzled tone she uses when she doesn’t understand something, “Why did that lady have such a bad attitude dad?” And, of course, answered herself quickly, “Maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend!” What was evident to my 13-year-old was clearly not evident to the owners of this fancy hotel —not the boyfriend part but the fact that attitude matters. This lady with her snarky attitude did not only prevent us from enjoying our stay at $400 a night but made sure that we’d not go back there.

“I can’t just get them to take ownership.” How many times have we heard this refrain from managers or entrepreneurs? And how often have we voiced this sentiment ourselves? It seems like we all run into folks who can’t look at what they do to be anything more than a job. Something they do to make a living—put food on the table, pay the bills—and they can’t wait for 5 o’clock or the end of their shift, so that they can get back to their real lives. Sure we may use other words or expressions—“Doesn’t he have any pride in what he does?” and “I can’t seem to make them care about the company or customers.”

In his book, A Stake in the Outcome, Jack Stack, CEO of SRC Holdings Corp., talks about building a culture of ownership among the people who run a business and the critical role it plays in the long-term success of a business. The book builds on his own experience of taking the original Springfield ReManufacturing Corp. where he was a manager, from the verge of failure to a major financial success. The original $0.10 stock in 1983 when Jack and his 12 manager colleagues took over the business was worth $81.60 in 2001—for a return of 816,000% in 18 years! But that’s not the story. It is how all 727 employees own shares—not just some shares, the 722 newest shareholders own 64% of the business valued at $23 million in 2002. I’d run out and get this book for everyone on your team to not just learn how Jack and has team achieved this but to repeat it with your business.

This article originally appeared in the Book Beginnings column in Mint.

Put Employees First to Win More Customers

April 19, 2012 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Hal F. Rosenbluth (Photo credit: pennstatenews)

Waiters at French restaurants— maybe only at upscale French restaurants in the US—have a legendary reputation as unfriendly and at times downright disdainful. Of course, waiters across the social spectrum in India could easily teach their French cousins a thing or two about treating customers shoddily. And these are folks in the service business, where how you treat the customer is supposed to affect your business directly. Yet each of us can easily recount horror tales of poor customer service—be it with airlines, banks, call centres, retail outlets or telecom services—in practically every sphere of our personal lives. To be fair, customer service in India has come a long way since the early days of liberalization. The sheer choice of suppliers and healthy competition in the marketplace has done wonders to improve the manners of most frontline employees of service providers.

However, old habits die hard. A recent popular advertisement for a mobile service provider features a cantankerous old man who is bent upon ignoring, irritating or ill-treating his customers. And, as the Indian economy slows, the impact on businesses shows up first in the fraying edges of their customer interface. India is by no means alone in the decline. From the time of the Roman markets to the gleaming retail outlets of a resurgent Asia and gloomy malls of North America, customer service—good, consistent, delightful—has been a challenge.

Growing up in Chennai, I recall that nearly any retail store I went to had a small sign with a quote from Mahatma Gandhi. “A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is doing us a favour by giving us an opportunity to do so.” As with many other signs that dot the Indian landscape, such as No Entry—One Way Street or Do Not Spit or Cause Nuisance, Gandhi’s exhortation is “more honour’d in the breach than the observance”.

The service mindset has to begin at home. Indians, much like the Chinese and Japanese, like to pride themselves on being respectful to their elders. However, from our daytime soaps on TV to our overcrowded roads, thoughtlessness and rudeness, particularly towards elders, seems the rule. This behaviour just as easily spills into our malls and stores. If you’ve ever seen a parent admonish or worse yet slap their child at the supermarket, doesn’t it make you wonder how much worse they’d treat that child at home? Similarly, when you receive poor service from any professional service provider, you wonder—if this is how they treat their customers, how badly must they treat their employees?

Again, we needn’t wonder too long. Managers, at supermarkets certainly or even banks, don’t hesitate to dress down their employees right in front of the public. Many large Indian businesses, even when publicly listed, are often run as though they are proprietary firms where employee empowerment is largely absent. Multinational firms have succumbed to an Indian version of the Borgia families where politics and intrigue take much more of a manager’s time than advancing the business cause. However, as with every challenge that we face in India—and they are not only innumerable but often large—this itself presents an opportunity. An opportunity to provide exceptional service—to delight customers, differentiate a business and thereby thrive even in these difficult times.

The secret to achieve such exceptional service forms the very core of Hal Rosenbluth’s The Customer Comes Second. Co-authored with Diane McFerrin Peters, who works with Rosenbluth’s eponymous travel firm. His formula for creating an organization that provides exceptional service is to put your employees first and your customers second. Before we dismiss this as simplistic, it’s worth noting that Rosenbluth Travel has clocked more than $6 billion in annual revenue and has better than 98% customer retention. So clearly they must be doing something right. For the hard-nosed, what-can-I-actionize reader, the book offers specific tips and tools starting from finding the right people and training them all the way to using technology. Any book that talks unabashedly about culture and happiness in the workplace as this one does is a keeper and you should steal it from your nearest library.

This article originally appeared in the Book Beginnings column in Mint.