Author: Sri Srikrishna (Page 21 of 22)

Customers – finding, keeping and letting go…

March 14, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him,” said M.K. Gandhi. As with many of Gandhi’s teachings, it is hard to disagree with him, but harder still to follow his simple advocacy of direct action.

Photo jm3 via Compfight

If your business involves direct interaction with the customers who walk in the door, Gandhi’s advice is a great place to start. However, it is just as likely that your business requires your going to the customer (selling credit cards, vacuum cleaners or consulting services), or shipping your product to customers you have never seen (software, books or mobile phones). Occasionally, as in the case of radio, television or newspaper columnists, it may mean “free” broadcast of your product and very little interaction with customers, if at all. In all these instances without a good number of paying customers, you will find it is hard to run a viable business.

The customer, someone who pays for your goods or services, is what defines your business. So how do you find customers — and having found them, how do you keep them coming back? Will there be times when you want to let go of customers — if so, how do you do it?

Finding customers

“Build it and they will come” may work in the movies, but definitely it is unlikely to work for most businesses. Even if you run a retail store, a barber shop or a restaurant in the most popular mall in town, finding a customer – especially the right, paying customer is non-trivial. And is best not left to chance. If you are not a retail store front but rely on direct or indirect sales folk or other marketing channels to reach your product or service to your customers, it is even more critical that you find the right customers and find them fast.

As an entrepreneur you have to recognise that first and foremost, you are a sales person – regardless of your job role or what it says on your business card. You will be selling to partners, employees, financiers, bankers, suppliers and most importantly to customers.

To find customers, particularly appropriate customers, you begin with understanding what it is you have to offer and who will be best served by it. This determines your target customer segment. For instance, “Mothers of young children will benefit from our childcare service” or “Companies with employees in more than one location will benefit from our Web-based HR tool.”

Now, it is relevant to address “How will I recognise this customer?” In other words, qualifying the appropriate customers within that segment. “Working mothers and mothers with more than one child will find our service particularly useful and be willing to pay for it.” “Companies, with more than 40 employees, offices in multiple cities, revenues greater than Rs 10 crore and profitable will be the most likely buyers.”

Once you have answered these two questions, then it is a matter of locating or reaching out to these qualified, target customers. In the example we have spoken of, we could reach the target segment of working mothers through hospitals or nursing homes, through children’s stores, through their workplaces, or even movie theatres that play children’s movies. And all this is without advertising, which I assume as a start-up, you will not be spending money on.

If you are selling to companies, it is important to go where these companies congregate, be it to a trade show or exhibition, industry associations and consortiums and to partner with companies offering allied services, so that their existing customers become your prospects. The most neglected and important way to find new customers is to ask old customers for referrals! Far too many entrepreneurs fail to do this and leave easy money on the table.

Keeping them

If you thought, finding good, paying customers is hard; keeping them can be harder still. The good news is that “It takes less effort to keep an old customer satisfied than to get a new customer interested,” as Michael LeBoeuf, retired professor of management at the University of New Orleans, says. There are three critical steps for keeping customers. Step one is providing them what they want, not just what you have to sell or offer. Step two is asking them for feedback and actually listening to them – not just to what they say and how they say it but most importantly to what they don’t say. No news is not always good news in keeping customers. Finally, step three is demonstrating through your actions that you have listened to them and improved upon your offering or service.

Letting some of them go

The hardest lesson I have found is that sometimes we have to let customers go. It appears to contradict LeBoeuf’s assertion, made in the previous section, that keeping a customer is easier (and hence better) than finding a new one.

If you don’t let go of the ones that are either not profitable, or not paying you on time and distracting your business with the overhead of running after them, you will find yourself in trouble soon. And these are the easy ones!

Even harder to let go are customers who are profitable, but don’t treat your employees well or with whom you have fundamental issues of values mismatch, the ones that supported you in your early days but are now sucking up all the energy of your company with little or nothing to show for it. And it is critical, that as an entrepreneur you spend time each month and each quarter reviewing and culling your customers.

Yes, you had better have other paying, profitable and prosperous customers to be able to do this – and that brings you full circle to finding new customers, keeping and growing them even as you continue to weed and cull those that are holding you back! So get out there and begin selling!

This article first appeared in the Hindu Businessline in March 2008.

A Stake in the Outcome – Building a Culture of Ownership

March 12, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

These last six months, I have been doing a good deal of reading; on average maybe two books a week – at least one of which has been a business book! I have gone back to reading books that have been in my library a long while such as Paul Hawken‘s Growing a Business as well as reading new (to me) ones such as A Stake in the Outcome by Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham.

I ran across A Stake in the Outcome (ASitO) while browsing business books at the Easy Library (a great online library with a brick & mortar presence in Bangalore). Having read and been influenced by Bo Burlingham‘s more recent Small Giants, I began browsing ASitO at the library itself. As the saying goes, “When the student is ready, the Master will appear!” Certainly that’s how I felt as I scanned the book quickly right there and subsequently brought it home to read.

Chapter 3 titled The Design of a Business, begins:

Most people, I know, don’t think about the company they’re designing when they start out in business. They think about the products they’re going to make, or the services they’re going to provide. They worry about how to raise the money they need, how to find customers, how to deal with salespeople and suppliers, how to survive. It never occurs to them that, while they’re putting together the basic elements of the business, they’re also making decisions that are going to determine the type of company they’ll have if they’re successful.

I felt someone had just hit me on the head with a two-by-four. Every week I meet someone who is thinking about starting something. Nearly every last one of them talks about their product or service idea and if at all they talk about their company, its only when they intend to “flip-it” (“Built-to-flip” as Jim Collins speaks of as does Sramana Mitra in a recent blog entry). Jack Stack in contrast, states clearly that

Ownership Rule #1
The company is the product

It is worth pausing here and reflecting on his assertion. All too often I see entrepreneurs, young and not-so-young, pitch their businesses as I have heard Hollywood scriptwriter’s do! “Think Netflix but for Indian movies,” “Waiter.com meets iTunes,” “Google but for contextual search.” I’ll refrain from speculating whether the internet bubble begat this or this begat the bubble and what role VCs had to play in this. This focus on what a company does, rather than what a company will be, Stack asserts misses the opportunity to explicitly design your business from ground up. If you haven’t figured it now by now, I agree whole-heartedly.

In many ways, the practices of visionary companies that Jim Collins and Jerry Porras discuss in their book Built to Last have been explicitly operationalized in Stack’s company Springfield Remanufacturing (SRC). The big difference is that Stack’s direct writing style and first-hand experience makes this a gripping read rather than an dry business book. Also unlike most business books that appear to document management’s clever (often infallible) strategies, Stack walks us through both the good and poor decisions they made, as they set out to remake SRC. In the end (in fact in the epilogue), Stack quotes Herb Kelleher, cofounder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines responding to The Wall Street Journal’s question on what he meant when he said Southwest’s culture was its biggest competitive advantage.

“The intangibles are more important than the tangibles,” Kellher replied. “Someone can go out and buy airplanes from Boeing and ticket counters, but they can’t buy our culture our espirit de corps.”

ASitO walks us through SRC’s journey of building such a culture of ownership from that day in 1982 when Stack and his managers did a management buy-out of their struggling engine remanufacturing factory to twenty years hence when their 10cent stock was worth $86 (since then has grown to over $136). Most importantly the authors don’t romanticize the journey and are explicit in periodically setting our expectations with insights such as “Stock is not a magic pill” (ownership rule #4) and “Ownership needs to be taught”(OR #7).

ASitO is a must-read for any one contemplating starting a company or looking to effect change in their organizations through employee participation and a culture of ownership.

A much more detailed summary of the book itself can be found here

Hiring for Skills, Talent AND Values? One Story

February 3, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

In a recent Forbes article, Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles state,

Repeatedly we hear from executives that the talent pool is not nearly as challenging to navigate as is what we have come to call the “values pool.” We suggest that, […], the real shortage facing companies in the future will be less about finding individuals with the knowledge, skills and abilities to do the job than about finding individuals whose personal value system provides a fit with the company’s values and mission.

Photo Credit: –Mark– via Compfight

Anyone who has run or worked in a startup knows how true this is. In our own startup Impulsesoft, at the very beginning (circa 1999) there was no such separation of values and talent. When you are less than eight people, everybody better be able to pull their own weight – but then again the reason you do a startup (at least the reason we did) is to work with people who share your values and vision. It’s when you try to begin hiring beyond the first few – the core team, the importance of values becomes real apparent. We went through four distinct phases in our startup –

[i] can we get anyone else to even join us?
we got started without a lot of forethought or planning. We even got our first customer signed up, before we bought our first computer. Now there was the minor matter of actually doing the work. It dawned on us then that with no money, no office and no clear grand strategy could we even get anyone else to join us. We talked a good story I can tell you that – but when our first prospective employee’s dad showed up to check us out, we knew we had a challenge on our hands. However values were paramount at this phase, as we felt we had the talent to get the job, any job, done!

[ii] lets focus on bringing only these three/four folks on board
Once we had our share of new college grads (NCGs) come by, wisdom bloomed. We were not going to be able to do it all – hustle customers, write proposals and actually write code – let alone direct the still not-steady-on-their-feet NCGs. By now we’d been talking to ex-colleagues who shared our values and skillwise walked-on-water; they saw that we were not yet dead and realized there might be something here after all. Suddenly we had a core team, that was incredibly talented and well aligned.

[iii] how fast can we hire hands & bodies and bring ’em on board?
Suddenly we were a real business, with customers signed up for products we hadn’t built yet, and paying customers expecting us to support them with prototypes we had shipped as product. The software managers wanted more coders – the hardware folks more designers and everyone wanted more testers – we just went crazy trying to find the “talent pool” – if you could walk, string a set of C code together and didn’t drool excessively, we hired you! Even the talent bar probably got shaky in this phase.

[iv] what the hell where we thinking in phase [iii]
When products still didn’t work as advertised and customers were no happier, having paid up even more money and our own managers ready to kill some of their staff, we began wondering what the hell had we been thinking? The questions now were how do we let go of these folks and get folks with the right values and attitude even if we have to teach ’em the right skills? The lesson we learnt was that though we had hired talented folks, they had come up real short in both attitude and vision alignment. Our hiring process about which we had become quite proud (It’s hard to get hired at Impulsesoft, we’d say) had become too much talent focused and too little value focused in phase [iii]; the fact that I am writing this today means we learned from this and while it hurt us, it didn’t kill us. But then again that’s the sort of lesson that stays with you.

Bennett and Miles are right – only the future is here NOW!

Entrepreneurship Series – Hindu Business Line

January 28, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Thanks to my grandfather and numerous teachers along the way, reading is one of my greatest pleasures – and even today, while allegedly busy working, I manage to read one maybe two books a week. In my callow youth I felt, that any one who reads either self-help or how-to books must be somehow wanting. Luckily somewhere between ages thirty-two and thirty-five, I seemed to have gained my senses. And here I am today, practically bursting with lessons learnt from my grandfather, mother and father and a slew of mentors, a few I that I have met in person and a whole lot I have only encountered through their writings.

Running an entrepreneurial, cash-strapped, people-intensive, technology business is the surest way I know of having utter decimation of any semblance of ego – yet surviving the pounding each day and actually thriving and growing is probably the biggest boost to one’s ego as well – do it long enough and a true state of non-duality can be reached. I am not there yet – but along the way have learned a few things and reckoned its my turn to share with the world. With that in mind, I began writing a series of short articles, that are now getting published in the Hindu Business Line on alternate Mondays. Today the third in the series has appeared.

Business is about people
When most people talk about starting a business, they are thinking about commerce — buying and selling. At first glance, business appears to be about that. The street hawker who sells vegetables off his cart or the corner boot polish is indeed doing just that. Even in the case of these single-person businesses, people, usually in the form of customers (and occasionally as investors or moneylenders), are critical to their survival.

However, any business that does anything more complex very rapidly becomes all about people. Particularly for entrepreneurial ventures, it may seem that it is only about people. Make no mistake, capital, cash flow, products, marketing and sales are all important; yet these play the same role for other businesses including your competitors. Your people are what will separate your business from the pack. Full article here.

Storytelling and Culture in Companies

January 25, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: Bindaas Madhavi via Compfight

I was lucky enough to grow up with a paternal grandmother, a maternal grandfather and even his mother, my great grandmother (GGM), who were always ready with a story. My GGM’s life story itself is worth a whole separate post – widowed at nineteen, while pregnant with my grandfather, she raised him, through a polio attack (when he was two, that left him crippled in one leg), saw him through college, and when he was widowed with ten kids, she then in her sixties, raised the kids, (and the first grandkids) while managing the household, ten cows and a small farm-sized garden.

Some of my favorite memories of my GGM are from dinner time. Six or seven of us kids, cousins and siblings, would be sitting in a semi-circle, on the floor of my grandfather’s dining room. GGM would be seated with her back to the wall, at the center of the half circle, with a large stainless steel bowl of mixed steamed rice and yoghurt. Each night, she’d narrate a story as she fed us dinner. She’d scoop up one handful of the rice and drop a dollop in each of our outstretched hands, going clockwise. And with each handful or mouthful, she’d narrate what happened next, in the tale for the evening. Oh, on so many nights, we’d have to stop eating and console her, as at particularly poignant moments in the tale she’d stumble, stutter then sniffle before a stream of tears would run down her wrinkled face. At other times, she’d have to stop the story to urge us to continue eating or close our mouths as we’d listen to her all agog, our food and outstretched hands totally forgotten.

Those local tales of lions that came as bridegrooms and sparrows that stuffed themselves and the longer tales from the Indian epics have not only stayed with me but taught all of us the values that my GGM held dear. In a very small way I have tried to share that with my own two children. However, the larger lesson I have learnt is the value of stories and storytelling to imbibe culture in families and companies.

There is a large swath of didactic and somewhat intimidating academic research done in recent times on the role of storytelling in business. Leaving that to the experts, in every company I have worked with, there has been storytelling – of dream deals that were saved or won by heroic individual or team efforts; customers from hell or my own favorite, of a customer who insisted on paying by Sep 30th ahead of our delivery milestone, as his budget would vanish on Oct 1st, but wanting a handwritten personal note from the CEO assuring that we’d still deliver on our commitments; our own story of how we asked engineers and managers to have their pay raises deferred and then to take a pay cut and my wife’s favorite, of how I was a zombie the day we lost that truly big, already-in-the-bag and company-saving quarter million dollar deal and the mourning we went through (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – all in a day.)

Of course storytelling need not be just in front of the fireplace, over dinner or by the water cooler. Books, emails and memos can just as powerfully share stories and values. The best examples I can think of include

- “Memos from the Chairman” by Alan C. Greenberg, former Chairman of investment
  banking firm Bear, Stearns & Co. In a series of memos, many at less than 150 words, he has shared his views, thoughts and narrated tales (with a fictional protagonist) in an informal and easy style
- “Small Decencies: Reflections and Meditations on Being Human at Work” by John Cowan – a collection of fluid essays that narrate tales from John’s personal and work life and lend tremendous insight into our own lives, without hitting us over the head

I’d recommend both these books for a hearty good read, even if storytelling and organizational culture are not your favorite topics!

Service – it’s a mindset

January 24, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

For over ten years now I have tried not to miss the Palo Alto Library book sale, that’s held the second Saturday of every month. In the early days I’d go berserk picking up every book that I could lay my hands on (at $1 for hardbacks and 25 cents for paperbacks could you blame me?). In December when I was in San Jose, I took a much more leisurely stroll through the sale. Besides a pulp novel for the plane ride, I picked up only one book, “The Customer Driven Company” by Richard C. Whitely. Little did I suspect how appropriate this book was going to be to my ride home. I guess when we are ready, the lessons seek us out.

It began at Chicago – despite some 200 flights being cancelled earlier that day, my flight to Paris was going to be on time! Thanking the travel gods, I ran to get into line for my check in. Once I got to the counter, is when my troubles began. To save you the gory details, the litany of woes from here on out included:

They didn’t have a vegetarian meal for me – worse yet the lady couldn’t care less – when I showed her my printed itinerary with the AVL tag on it, she said “That’s Delta’s computer system – its not in ours” (it was a code share flight). Then she coolly went on to call out for the next customer!

In Paris, they board all of us (still with no AVL), and after nearly an hour on board, announce they have a problem with the potable water system and engineers are trying to fix it. An hour later they say there are still trying and we should stay put. An elderly gentleman, walks up to a flight steward and tells him that he is diabetic and asks could he have some orange juice. The steward responds (I am not making this stuff up) “We have water – if we gave you juice, we’d have to give everyone juice.” Finally after four hours (during which the flight crew was found snacking and drinking juice in the rear) we are asked to deplane – all 350 of us – and head back to the transfer counter

The only silver lining at the transfer counter (we get in line around 3PM) is that all passengers are treated with truly equal disdain without discrimination on the basis of skin color, nationality or gender. By 5PM we are actually given some bottles of water, juice and sandwiches arrive at 6PM. The plight of the folks who were unfortunate enough to be travelling with kids was truly appalling. Each passenger was being re-routed (next day, same day through Dubai, or via Frankfurt). The miracle was even at this point, NONE of the passengers were yelling or screaming. By mid-night there is a near riot, when the remaining passengers are told they may have to stay over yet another day. Till the time, I got my own ticket re-routed to London Heathrow and then onward to my final destination, no airline official had explained to any of the waiting passengers what was being done – let alone apologize for the inconvenience to the customers. The irony of standing in line reading “The Customer Driven Company” seemed lost to any the crew members.

Beyond all these indignities, what stayed with me was the surly nature and utter indifference of the crew even in the normal flight, going out to San Francisco from Paris and on the way back from Chicago to Paris. It made me wonder what is it that makes, an entire crew and later ground staff, in essence a statistically large sample of the organization behave without any semblance of a customer service mindset.

I have been travelling across the Pacific (ANA, Cathay, Malaysian, Singapore, Thai) and the Atlantic (Air India, American, Delta, Lufthansa, United) for more than twenty years. In the last five years, I have travelled a minimum of five times a year internationally and put in my share of hops on Jet Airways, Kingfisher, Ryan Air and Southwest as well. This makes me a reasonable judge of the service levels for air travel. While by no means is poor service the sole prerogative of my (via) Paris trip, surly and inconsiderate cabin crew has been seen on Delta, United and occassionally even on Thai – the French experience was on an altogether new low. A casual browse through the Internet shows that my experiences are by no means unique.

Every airline has problems, often caused by things way out of their control – however, how they respond to it is totally in their control. This is true for every business and in our own lives. Truly successful businesses, Singapore Airlines and Nordstrom jump to mind, lay great emphasis on having a customer service mindset. And this shows how they respond especially when things don’t turn out they way they are supposed to. As someone who has travelled with two kids multiple times across the Pacific, I can personally vouch for what a world of difference a customer service mindset can make even when the kids are sick and throwing up, the TV doesn’s work and your special meal is no where to be found. A graceful smile, an apology, an understanding nod, maybe an extra blanket or pillow go a long way to not only making a passenger comfortable even in adverse circumstances but convert them to a lifelong customer. You’d think this would be simple – alas even good companies that knew how to do it well even on a short haul flight across California (such as AirCal, PSA) lost it when they were acquired by larger airlines and of course the trans-oceanic flight history is littered with its share of horrow stories (can you say TWA)!

Culture in Companies and Business Success

January 22, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

In what’s becoming an annual event (okay, it was two years in a row), I attended a workshop titled “Values-based Leadership” lead by Richard Barrett. Despite the slow start, and initial misgivings when Richard quickly put on a video of his that’s available on YouTube (hey, I have come to hear you in person, was my first thought) – the day proved to be thought-provoking and productive, for two reasons. Firstly a full day away from the daily grind at the office, just thinking and discussing things from the sublime, (Who am I? What is my purpose in life?) to grimy reality (What is the culture in your company?) was a much-needed breath of fresh air. Secondly, the workshop turned out to be completely about culture, ways of measuring it and the role culture and values play in the business success of organizations. Many thoughts that had been stewing below the surface of my conscious mind or even the few that had cleared the surface and were still nebulous at best, began to get some definite shape and dare I say, validation through the course of the day.

Before I push ahead, it’s worth stepping back and trying to get a working definition of culture spelled out. Many serious thinkers have come up a variety of definitions – ranging from the anthropological all the way to organizational – I will confine myself to the rather simple assertion, that culture is how people in an organization behave and expect others to behave, on a daily basis. This behavior is almost always driven or at the very least most strongly influenced from the top, down. In other words, the leaders (in small enterprises these are almost always the founders) set the culture and the everyday actions of the people in the organization reinforce this culture. Here again, I use the term actions to include explicit inaction or lack of action as much as deliberate actions taken. For instance, not confronting (constructively or otherwise), or avoiding conflict is as much an element of organizational culture as an action such as yelling at your subordinates or sharing recognition and praise as well.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should also state my position – that I believe that culture trumps all other considerations in building healthy, dynamic and long lasting successful organizations. Yes, all those things we learned in business school or at our fathers’ knees are still true – operational excellence, technology, and R&D, financial performance, killer products or services are all important for success but culture is critical to sustain and build upon the gains made. After six years of running a bootstrapped software company, from the giddy optimistic start, through axing one entire department and having those folks out-placed, asking the remaining team to take 10-15% pay cuts, even as we worked to deliver newer products, fend off competitors and keep those fickle customers who hadn’t yet gone out of business in the downturn or been gobbled up, to achieving market leadership in our niche and finally selling our own company, the number one insight I have gained is that culture is the critical ingredient for organization success.

In the coming weeks and months I hope to share some of the lessons I have learnt from my journey as an engineer, manager, CEO and general factotum (they are nearly the same thing, you sometimes have a little more freedom as a factotum) and in the bargain, I hope to learn as well. The journey continues!

3 Reasons to Dive Deep in Your Job

January 21, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

(cc) Nick Kenrick . via Compfight

“What would keep you with our company for 10 years?” This is a question I pose at every interview I conduct. Whenever I ask this question to a prospective employee I am greeted with a wide variety of responses — the younger the job candidate, the more incredulous is his reaction.

I can hear the wheels turning in their head as though they are thinking, “You can’t be serious — are you?” A few of them are honest enougah to say, “I feel that’s a life time. I don’t know where I’d be two years from now.”

The good news is that over the years I have heard a few interesting responses ranging from “I don’t know about 10 years, but I can tell you why I’d stay five years or so,” to “I have just spent the last 12 years in one company, so here’s why I’d stay…” The answers for their staying at one job any serious length of time are usually — good people, good work, and continuous learning. These are what make them stay — freedom, support and flexibility are why it is easy to stay.

With the same certainty that I ask this question, most job candidates usually end up asking me one definite question “What more are you going to be doing?” The senior candidates usually pose this as, “Can you tell me what else is on your roadmap?” The younger ones are more direct and want to know “Are you going to do anything beyond Bluetooth?” or “Will I get to work on Java or MIDB or Layer 2 protocols?”

Simple and natural as these questions are, I find myself often having to bite my tongue and not ruin the whole interview with an acerbic retort, such as “We intend to do only one thing and do that really well, before we’d consider doing more.” To understand my own seemingly irrational response, I have tried to reflect on why this is such a point of contention for me.

Diversification – not always
The knowledge industry and particularly the information and biotechnology businesses themselves are relatively young and the typical employee in these firms even younger. The great enthusiasm, eagerness and a can-do attitude that marks their youth is accompanied by great impatience to perennially move on to the next thing.

They seem unaware of the old saying “Plough well and plough deep” and the rest of us, as managers and employers, in our anxiety to recruit employees, appear to be doing far too little to champion this message.

It would be wrong to blame this all-too-common desire to go wide, as opposed to deep, solely on the young. The social phenomenon at play here is one of perceived risk and its management.

There is a strong belief that, as with personal investment portfolios or national reserves, diversification is not only good but also necessary. It would be hard to argue that diversification inherently is wrong — but what is good for money or asset management is not necessarily good for a technologist or knowledge worker.

The rationale
Natalie Goldberg, the American writer, quotes her Zen master Katagiri Roshi as stating “If you go deeply in one thing, you know everything else.” The thought is not only non-intuitive but provocative as well.

Lest you misunderstand Katagiri Roshi, it is worth clarifying that his assertion that, by being the best writer/runner/plumber you can be you know all there is to know about singing/biking/engineering, focuses on the how we acquire knowledge, not what. In other words, by becoming the best C programmer or VHDL hardware designer or customer support engineer, you can learn about yourself, how to learn and how to apply what you have learned. Now to do anything else, however different, is now only a matter of applying this knowledge to the specifics of the new thing you are trying to learn.

Winners all
I realise how true Roshi’s statement indeed is when I take even a cursory look at the great engineers I know of and admire. Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winning physicist and a teacher par excellence of physics epitomised this concept of diving deep.

Feynman’s Nobel Prize was for his contributions to quantum electrodynamics, a field few outside the rarefied atmosphere of theoretical physics would easily understand — yet he has written the most lucid and immensely popular introductory physics textbooks that college freshmen use. His simple demonstration and explanation, on what went wrong with the O-rings of the space shuttle Challenger leading to its accident, only reiterated his deep understanding of his chosen subject, solid state physics.

Nearer home, Robert A Pease or Bob, as he’s called (\rap as he signs himself) has been a fixture at National Semiconductor for 30 years now as an analog designer. Bob arguably has spent most of that time working on ‘one’ thing — how to make analog circuits and make them better. Yet as a prolific writer — he’s a highly respected columnist at Electronic Design, sought-after speaker and as an engineering mentor he has few equals. A living example of how doing one thing unbelievably well pays off in spades in multiple dimensions.

As managers we (and those of us who are also parents) understand how difficult it is to communicate effectively what we know to be true and correct. Doing so in a manner that is both comprehensible and palatable to the other person is yet more difficult. So to all those prospective employees I interview, I try to explain why we are looking for people who want to dive deep in one domain — why we feel we have yet to explore (not to mention profit from) Bluetooth sufficiently before we look to things beyond it. Why becoming an expert in a single domain can create great generalists, but like the proverbial rolling stone — shallow knowledge in a wide swathe of subjects does little for them and is of no interest to us.

Much as I’d like to say that I am successful in this evangelical endeavour clearly there is a long way to go for me, for the prospective employee and for all of us as an industry.

This article first appeared in the Hindu Business Line dated January 21, 2008

Where do you start?

January 14, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo: Lori Greig cc

You have decided to start your own business, that’s great! What now? Where do you begin? The good news is that you have already begun — taken the first step, so to speak, with your decision. Now, it’s merely a matter of finding customers, figuring out what they want, providing it to them, preferably better, faster and more economically than other folks and start counting the cash! Before you run out to do all that, it’s good to have a plan and it’s even better to see what others have done; those who have been successful and even those who have failed once or more. By building on the lessons they have already learnt on how to start, run and grow a business, you begin on the shoulders of those who have gone before — both giants and mortals!

Read and listen to others’ stories

Unless you have a grandmother who likes to tell stories or, as in my case, a father ready to regale you with tales of business, reading is the best place to start. Even if you are a vociferous reader, you will soon discover that reading is a luxury once your business gets rolling.

If you are amongst those who never found reading a pleasurable activity or just did not do a whole lot of it, this might be the right time to get a good shot at it. Reading about or, in these days of audio books and podcasts, listening to stories of other entrepreneurs will serve not only to inspire you, but help you avoid mistakes, small and big. Every person has their favourite list of must-read books, as do I (see box). Like most good advice in life, these books are timeless and can be read in whole or part at any time. Each time you go back to them, you’ll find another nugget of insight and they will grow with you as you grow as an entrepreneur.

Get yourself a mentor or two

When the good bard said, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” he knew a thing or two. Once you start a business, there will be many a night and day when you will not merely be uneasy, but feel alone. Having a mentor and sometimes more than one mentor can help you get through not only those dark days, but many a time help you avoid them by appropriate forethought and preventive action. Most start-ups, even those that are well-funded, have a formal board of advisors who can help the entrepreneur discuss ideas or options, gain introductions and get advice on topics relating to the business.

Regardless of the nature of the business you intend to start, having a mentor or an advisor is a smart thing. Besides the experience and contacts they may bring, just the fact that they are not as intimately involved with the daily trials and tribulations of the business makes them that much more objective and, therefore, valuable. In different times in your business, you will find that you need different kinds of mentors – the only real criteria for selecting the right mentor are your trust, comfort and judgment.

Write down a plan

While there are entire books devoted to creating business plans, I am not a big believer in three ring binders and 20 pages of spreadsheets showing discounted cash flows. In fact, I am not sure I know what discounted cash flows are. However, writing down a plan in simple English is always a good idea. Just set down your aspirations for the business and capture the five Ws and the H — what, why, when, where, who and how.

Your business, if it is anything like 90 per cent of other new businesses, is certain to go through significant changes, many in its first year of existence. This, however, is not a reason to not have a plan. Six months or a year into your business, when you revisit the plan, you can update it, edit it and, if required, throw it away and begin a new one. “Start your business at the beginning — not the business plan or paperwork or an office, but your idea, reduced to its core essence,” says Paul Hawken, successful serial entrepreneur and author, in his book Growing a Business. Reducing your business to its core essence is non-trivial and the best way I have found to do it is to write it down. Writing things down, you will discover, is one way to make them come true!

All the reading, listening and writing is only preparation for the real thing. So, after having read a little, listened some and drafting a plan, go out and get started!

A helpful reading list

Growing a Business by Paul Hawken: The first person conversational tone of the book speaks from the heart and is as applicable today as when it was written more than a decade ago. What the CEO Wants You to Know by Ram Charan: The author’s Indian origins and his experiences with the family shoe store make this book easy to relate to.

The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker: Forty years after its first publication, this book, like good wine, has aged well. If you are going to read only one book, this should be it.

Selling the Wheel by Jeff Cox and Howard Stevens: Most entrepreneurs are surprised when they build something and the world does not beat a path to their door on its own. This novel is the gentlest way to get acquainted with selling.

The HP Way How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company by David Packard: The archetypal ‘two guys in a garage’ story is not only a ripping good read, but filled with useful nuggets about values, people, business and technology.

This article originally appeared in the Start-up Logic column in The Hindu BusinessLine.

3 Questions To Ask Before You Startup

November 17, 2007 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: koalazymonkey cc

Should I start my own business?” If you have ever found yourself asking this question, you are not alone. And rarely does this question arise by itself — on its heels, many more rush in. “How do I know it’s the right thing? What’s the first thing I should do?” A simple search on Amazon or Google with the words “Starting your own business” provides 738 books and over a million hits respectively — in a sense, this choice of plenty only seems to add more questions beginning with, ‘Where do I start?’ The best answer to this question is the simple one — start with yourself!

Before you try to figure out, “How do I raise money, or should I get a patent first or do I need partners?” the first step to answer the question should you even start your own business, is to better understand yourself. While some reflection is needed, this is not so much a philosophical or metaphysical exercise as much as answering three simple questions about yourself. You may have never taken the time to think about it and even if you have asked yourself one or more of these questions, never had the opportunity to step back and answer them. Certainly, once you start your own business, you will not have the luxury of time to answer these in any detail.

N.S. Raghavan, former joint managing director and one of the founders of Infosys, narrates a story about a young man who approached him seeking advice. “I have a job offer from Infosys and an option to start my own business — what do you think I should do?” When Raghavan responded, “Take the job with Infosys,” the youngster was taken aback. In Raghavan’s words, “If you are an entrepreneur, starting a business is not an option that you consider alongside taking a job — you’d just do it!” To dive in, or to ‘Just do it!’, as the ad exhorts us, is easy — staying the course, not drowning and not ruing it along the way — is the hard part. Let’s ask ourselves those three simple questions.

Passion Ask yourself, “Do I feel passionate about this? Will I feel as passionate about this a week from now? A year or five years from now?” If the answer is anything other than yes, you might want to keep that resume polished. When you ask yourself, “Do I feel passionate about this?” — ‘this’ could be a product — a low maintenance, low-cost, yet effective water purifier that four-fifths of the world needs; it could be a service — ball room dancing instruction for high-schoolers; it could be a concept — helping farmers in your hometown reach customers worldwide directly — or nearly evangelical — fresh water to every village in your state/country — it could be anything, as long as the fire of passion within you burns undiminished for long periods with little or no kindling. This is a good question to ask first and have answered in the affirmative before starting your own business. Do not confuse passion with being right or knowing something — passion is primarily believing and wanting. Once you start your business, you will learn more ways of being wrong than you’d thought possible.

Risk-taking Being an entrepreneur, which is what you’d be if you start a business, is a risky proposition — probably not as risky as skydiving or crossing a busy road in Bangalore during the evening commute. Most businesses last longer than a skydive and are fraught with challenges. So the next question to ask yourself is how risk averse you are.

Risk means many things to many people. Most people think primarily of financial risk — this, while certainly measurable, may be the least important. Often there will be others to bear the financial risk with you.

However, the time you personally invest, the emotional energy that would be required of you individually and most importantly, your self-worth, will be the bigger risks you will be taking.

These will be largely immeasurable but have far greater import on the rest of your life. So if you have never taken off for the weekend on a whim, usually get to the airport three hours ahead of schedule and have never run a yellow light, it is worth figuring out what your risk appetite is.

Perseverance Call it whatever you want — doggedness, perseverance or relentlessness — to be an entrepreneur means continuing in the face of constant discouragement by the world around you.

Often it would seem as though everyone but you feels it makes no sense to continue and yet you persist. Investment bankers who have yet to begin shaving will offer you advice. Your spouse, your engineering manager (and her spouse), that cheeky long-haired fellow in customer support not to mention your suppliers and even customers will question, critique and challenge you.

So if you haven’t been called pig-headed more than once in your life or find you cannot last through one session of working through the “simple” income-tax form or are discouraged by having to make the same presentation for the 17th time, some work may be needed in this area.

If you answered in the affirmative to the passion and perseverance questions, you are ready to start a business.

Should you actually start one, your chances of being successful at it or even enjoying the journey, will be determined by your answer to the risk-taking question. Luckily, for us, unlike the Prince of Denmark, it’s a little easier to answer the question, “To begin or not to begin?”