Category: Columns (Page 4 of 7)

Columns, arranged by topic, that I have written

Do you know more about your TV than about your doctor?”

July 9, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Are you a doctor?”

I am never sure how best to answer this question. My first, unvoiced response is a curt “no.” But I then settle for a more ambiguous, “No, I am not a medical doctor.”

In India, where politicians insist on being addressed as Dr. A or B, usually having been bestowed an honorary degree — deserved or not — by admiring vice-chancellors, it was not uncommon a generation ago to see folks append a BE or MA (English) as my grandfather did, after their name.

I have always assumed that this is a left-over from when the Brits ruled us — of having to wear one’s qualification on one’s name, if not on one’s sleeve exactly. Guess saying you are a summa cum laude from Harvard in your bio is not that different.

While a PhD does stand for Doctor of Philosophy (in my case, in materials science and engineering), I have always been uncomfortable being addressed as Dr. Srikrishna — somewhat misleading and a bit pompous, I felt. If I had any momentary doubts it was quickly cured after my travel agent booked me on a couple of flights as Dr. Srikrishna and I had to explain to the crew that I was not a medical doctor when they called upon me to attend to a unwell fellow flyer. Talk about truth in advertising!

Yet, I am asked this question each time I take someone to the hospital. For the record, I must admit that on more than one occasion, the word “assertive” has been used in conjunction with my public behavior.

For those of you who have not been in the emergency room of a major hospital in India, assertive is not necessarily bad, in fact it may be a necessary condition to get proper and timely care. Sure, emergency rooms (or as we insist on calling them in India, “casualty wards”) are filled with emergencies, small and large, but even when they are having the occasional slow night, doctors appear to work on a need-to-know basis.

More importantly, your need to know seems to be directly related to your social standing in the doctor’s eyes. Granted, the internet and Google have made every patient “an expert,” complicating an overworked doctor’s job.

For those of us who’d like to believe that class and other atavistic divisions are a thing of the past, experiencing an information triage in a seemingly uncaring doctor’s hands is the clearest indication of how class as a social arbiter not merely lives but thrives.

“You did what?” was the first reaction of my wife’s best friend when I recounted the story of the birth of my second child. The scene was the birthing room in a small nursing home that my wife’s obstetrician ran in South Bangalore.

The room had unfortunately been painted all too recently and the fumes were not helping matters, as the midwife encouraged my wife to push. The good wife was gritting her teeth and the doctor waltzed in to declare that she might give my wife a shot to move labor along.

“Are you sure you want to do that?”

The question popped out of my mouth even as I gritted my teeth wondering where my wife got the power to squeeze my hand so. The doctor, to her credit, didn’t freeze in shock – nor did she ask me “And in which college did you get your medical degree?”

Instead she briefly tried to explain to my wife and me why she thought it was a good idea. The mid-wife and orderly were as bug-eyed as my wife’s best friend was upon hearing about my “questioning the doctor” and at that in the middle of child birth. Luckily our second child had other ideas and chose that very moment to put in her appearance without waiting for further inducement, chemical or otherwise.

I’ve found that this doctor, like many others, was prepared to listen and willing to explain her thought process, and therefore treatment options, patiently to me. But the very same doctors make snap judgments, often unfavorable in nature, about their patients’ educational and financial status — based on whether they spoke English, how they were attired (in western or traditional garb), how old they were. And they routinely choose to play God with little or no explanation.

As a scientist and engineer, I set out to test this hypothesis by appearing only in traditional white dhoti, speaking only in Tamil or Hindi, and my relatives and friends cooperated by having a variety of medical challenges with great regularity. Concussion from a fall for a 12-year old; appendicitis for a nine-year-old; dengue-like viral fever; clavicle fracture in an 80-year old; uterine fibroids for middle-aged cousin; possible tail bone compression soccer injury; all topped off with prostrate surgery and a urinary tract infection. The local nursing home, regular hospital and super-specialty hospitals – government- and private-owned — all figured in this multi-year experiment.

Repeatedly, whether it was an in-law having hip replacement done (“old”), a parent having a parathyroid surgery(“traditional”) or a chauffeur’s child being treated for inhaling toxic fumes (“blue-collar, uneducated”), the doctors’ explanation of the problem, prognosis and its treatment was governed by their perceptions of the patient.

So these folks and I as their “traditional” attendant got, at best, a sketchy overview. When my wife or I, dressed in our best, demanded in English that we be educated about the issues and choices, we were given the low down, usually starting with the “Are you a doctor?” question.

A close friend was a cardiac care nurse in California and I have heard my share of horror stories of how doctors talked down at and treated nurses shabbily. It almost seems an occupational hazard. So this doesn’t seem to be a problem uniquely confined to Indian doctors.

However patients, who are the paying customers, and especially those who require a detailed explanation of their situation and choices, seem to get the short end of the stick if they don’t speak the right language, wear the right clothes or otherwise belong to the “right” group even as doctors are making life-or-limb decisions on their behalf.

It’s disheartening when we are able to get more information and options about a 30,000-rupee flat screen LCD television from a high school-educated salesman than from a physician about to perform a procedure that not only costs more but needs to last a life time.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal online on Jul 9, 2010

Be Self-aware – Lessons from my dad

July 8, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

: Image by sowri via Flickr

“Just tell me what I should do!” My 15-year old was filling out an application for an international student exchange program. One of the questions was “What are your goals in life?” She’d of course asked this same question a week before, when she felt all her friends already knew what they wanted to do in life. As I couldn’t think of any excuse, I had to embark on a discussion with her.

“Think about what you like doing. What you truly enjoy. And what you think you are good at.” In her case, we figured she enjoyed drawing & painting, playing sports and working with young kids – and she was really good at all three. Ah yes, she enjoyed traveling too.”

The discussion set me thinking about a conversation my dad and I had many years ago. I can’t recall what triggered the conversation, but distinctly recall my father telling me “You are a Hanuman!”

For those not up on Hindu mythology, Hanuman is the monkey demi-god who is cited as the ideal devotee for his major-domo role to the eponymous hero of the Hindu epic, Ramayana.

I didn’t reckon that my dad was alluding to my physical appearance when he said I was like the monkey [even if a] God. Nothing I had done thus far, could allow me to be termed a devotee of anything other than good food. My perplexed expression must have given me away, when he continued “Like Hanuman, you don’t know your own strength!”

While knowing one’s strengths is good in general – it is a particularly critical skill for entrepreneurs. Most successful entrepreneurs, when observed from arms length, may come across as manic- depressive. Maniacal in pursuing what they believe is the right path and optimistic to a fault and then when that critical deal doesn’t happen or funding falls through or a key employee leaves, lost in the dumps – even if only for a short time.

Knowing your strengths may not do away with the ups and downs but certainly will help dampen the amplitude and help you make decisions with greater confidence. Knowing your strengths is just as much about recognizing stuff that you are not good at and surrounding yourself with folks who’s strengths complement your own.

Unlike my daughter who’s just fifteen as of this writing, I was on the wrong side of thirty when my father made his comparison to Hanuman. So don’t wait – get to know your strengths today. Ask your colleagues, your ex-boss, your staff and if your bold enough, your spouse or significant other. And once a year take stock to understand what new strengths you have acquired and what has atropied and been lost.

Be a self-aware Hanuman!

Don’t cheat yourself, by aiming too low!

June 30, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“You want us to pay you $120,000 and I have a quote here from your [much larger] competitor for $30,000!”

Photo Credit: djfunny via Compfight

In our first startup, just as we had built up our reputation in a niche, we encountered competition from a larger Indian firm at one of our major customers.

The purchasing manager had become a good friend and didn’t mince any words. We did bag the deal, still at over three times what the competition had quoted but not without with some fancy footwork.

I am sure our competitor would have broken even, at their quoted price, but they could have both bagged the deal and made a very nice profit at half our bid. By bidding so low, they queered the pitch not just for us but intrinsically undermined the value of what they were delivering.

Their eagerness to win this account, while understandable, needlessly drove down the profitability of future deals for all of us. And this was with a technology firm! This was the first time that I realized how short-sighted it can be to lower value by charging far too little.

This experience brought to mind, how other visionary entrepreneurs – often self-made men brought a different perspective to building businesses.

“I had three rupees in my pocket when I first landed in Madras.”

It was hard for me to visualize my father arriving in the city as a penniless high school graduate and reconcile it with the globe-trotting CEO that I had grown up with. At least two other folks of his generation that I know well personally came to Madras with less than 10 rupees in their pockets — from Gujarat in one case and Kerala in another — and went on to build multi-million dollar business empires, in plastics and publishing.

I am certain that there are thousands of such unacclaimed, self-made men who started with little more than a dream and a great deal of determination, who through their hard work spanning decades, unwavering vision and a few lucky breaks have built successful businesses. A thousand mini-Reliances and Future Groups, as it were. This is the part of India and Indian businesses that makes my chest swell and gives rise to my unending optimism about India.

Yet our everyday experiences seem to bring us in contact not with these modern day Dick Whittingtons but with seemingly short-sighted tradesmen who are interested in making a quick buck, even it means burning bridges.

“The samples he sent were exquisite. My clients loved the color and quality of the granite — so distinct from the Italian stone they were used to.”

My friend, a mining engineer and consultant spoke of his experience helping buyers in Taiwan source stone from India.

“So you can imagine their shock when they received the first container load and most of it was second-grade and a good deal of it damaged. Having paid for the shipment with a letter of credit they had little recourse.”

My friend shook his head; the very recounting of the story was painful for him.

“And these were clients who were capable of moving hundreds of containers a month. The short-sightedness on the part of the seller to make a quick buck on the first container hurt not only his ability to sell again but set back the reputation of all Indian stone exporters.”

I wish I could claim this was one rogue trader. Alas, I have heard the story repeated – for leather goods, for handicrafts and pottery, bedsheets and linen, food grains. We seem to have honed the bait and switch to a fine art. Delivering good quality samples or first shipments and, once the buyer places a large order, shipping a lesser grade or worse to make a quick killing.

Of course this kills any chance of further business from that client or long term growth. And all too often damages the reputation of an entire segment or even the country as a whole. Why do we do this?

Lest we conclude that it’s just businesses that buy from Indian firms that face these challenges, consumers don’t have it a whole lot easier. Sure we’ve all read about how the Indian consumer is price conscious and finicky — businesses that don’t give them what they want are unlikely to survive, let alone thrive.

However, the demand-supply mismatch is so pronounced in favor of suppliers that most Indian businesses are able to get away with poor quality and all too often poor service.

As a reader of the Wall Street Journal recently put it “[their] focus [seems to be] on getting as many bucks as they can out of customers the first time they deal with them as opposed to cultivating repeat business. At least that is how I felt after paying 455 rupees for a beer at a pub in Khan market last week…”

The sort of behavior we are prepared to condone in our politicians — who after all may not be in power after the next elections — of making hay (or moola as may be the case) while they are in power, seems to infect many of our business folks, especially small businesses. This is particularly galling given our avowed belief in the concept of karma and a spiritual span of more than one life time.

This is why I have taken to hanging out at the railway station trying to spot the next Dhirubhai Ambani or someone like my dad so that my faith and belief in the visionary, long-term oriented Indian entrepreneur is restored.

A variant of this article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal online.

Are you a failure if your startup fails?

June 9, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 19 Comments

: Image by F33 via Flickr

“Son, businesses can succeed or fail. Because your business fails doesn’t mean you have failed!”

My father said this to me, one evening as the two of us sat down to discuss how the startup I headed was doing.

For a little over four years I had been running my startup. Months after we got started, the dot-com bubble peaked and burst. We had also chosen a technology, that everyone felt would not take off despite the initial hype. Our two nearest competitors where both American companies – one, also a startup, that had raised about 100 times more money than we had and the other a listed company with well over a 1000 customers. We’d over committed to the first three customers we’d acquired – miraculously in three different continents – and ultimately failed to deliver outright or were so late as to be not useful for the customers.

We had borrowed money from the bank (another of my father’s favorite piece of advice – debt is a good thing) and from family including my father. Just the previous year, we had to cut back on a rather ambitious – and poorly thought out – plan to design chips and keep our focus on software. We also had to let go nearly fifteen people, whom we’d hired in a burst, without much attention to culture fit, while persuading the people who remained to take 10-20% pay cuts with no commitments on when these cuts would be reversed.

This was also a time when I was commuting – spending two weeks every other six weeks in Bangalore, whilst my family lived in California. So between hotel rooms and my sister’s house, I spent many a night tossing and turning, worrying how we were going to make payroll that month and not sure if we’d ever turn the corner.

To add to the pressure, the senior staff, who’d been putting in 10-12 hours a day were buying first cars or homes incurring debt, getting married and now had spouses who now wondered what they really did. Once when we had to send a key engineer to a customer site overseas, we packed his new bride with him – so that they are not separated within weeks of their wedding! We’d had actually celebrated with a cake, when the company made its first million in revenue but ten minutes later had to dash off to dampen new fires.

This story did have a good ending. Despite ourselves we turned a small profit in year five and a real one in year six. We sharpened our business focus and were gaining traction. Newer challenges emerged as pricing pressures drove deal sizes down, competitors were gobbled up by customers in some instances and the market adoption was slower than we anticipated, and the payroll bill continued to grow each year. Whilst my partners and our immensely committed employees along with some luck, brought us to a successful and profitable M&A conclusion, it was my father’s words that kept me going.

“Son, the failure of your company doesn’t mean you have failed.”

Are We Celebrating India’s 10,000 Entrepreneurs

May 14, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo ˙Cаvin 〄 via Compfight

“What does Anand Mahindra winning the entrepreneur of the year award mean?”

I hadn’t realized the same question had also been lurking in my mind until my friend raised it. Before I could really wrap my arms around the issue, he continued.

“Does it make sense, that in a nation of a billion folks, and likely a million plus businesses, that the leader – even one as successful as Anand Mahindra – of a 65-year-old company wins the entrepreneur-of-the-year award?” he asked. “You would think they would be able to find a smaller, up and coming company.”

And this came from an ardent admirer of Anand Mahindra. It set me thinking – never a good thing on a Monday morning.

Mr. Mahindra has many firsts and successes to his credit, be it his magna cum laude from Harvard, his growing the family business into a global powerhouse in tractors or his leadership of corporate India whether at Davos or on twitter (@anandmahindra).

A little further digging into (yep, I Googled) the entrepreneur of the year award revealed that previous winners included Kumar Mangalam Birla and Ratan Tata, both leaders of multi-billion dollar businesses founded by their grandfathers.

To be fair, the judging criteria of this particular award included global impact and leadership in addition to the standard business metrics. Past winners also included first-generation entrepreneurs N.R. Narayana Murthy of Infosys and Sunil Bharti Mittal of Bharti Airtel. Yet some others stuck in my craw.

It was around this time, that I got a call inviting me to speak at an entrepreneurial event called “Unpluggd” (no, it did not involve any acoustic guitars). Unpluggd was billed as a different event, namely one featuring only practicing entrepreneurs sharing their experience with an audience of entrepreneurs.

I am glad that I let myself be persuaded to speak at the event. I learned more from the other speakers and the more than 200 attendees – most of whom were practicing entrepreneurs – than they likely got from anything I said.

The first and foremost takeaway for me was that entrepreneurship, not merely of the tech variety but of every kind imaginable, is thriving in India. And entrepreneurs are getting started at ever-younger ages. A majority of the attendees were under 30 (Yes, I asked).

It was the audience that made this event electric for me. A fair number of the attendees came from engineering backgrounds, though some graphic designers and finance folks were also present. Most were already running a business full time with a couple having even scaled to more than $1 million in revenues. If there was an area that could have been improved, it was that less than 15% of the attendees were women. Then again that’s probably higher than the percentage of women CXOs in the BSE 500.

The speakers included folks running businesses ranging from corporate hospitals, online bookstores, mobile phone apps, bus-line ticketing and even a restaurateur. All of them were first-time entrepreneurs that spanned the funding spectrum – from completely bootstrapped, through angel-funded all the way to venture capital-funded. Most of the other speakers were yet to hit forty (I was a notable exception) or even thirty-five. The stories – and dare I say wisdom – that some of these folks shared with total candor and very little jargon was refreshing. And this was just one Saturday in Bangalore.

With Open Coffee Clubs, Saturday Startups and The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) events, there are signs of an entrepreneurial revolution brewing in India. And these are just the visible urban, mostly technical or professional group of startups. At the National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), we’re helping thousands of students start businesses each year (full disclosure: I work at NEN), many of them in India’s Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities.

Meanwhile in Ajmer, Rajasthan, in Panruti, Tamil Nadu, in Shillong, Meghalaya, in Wardha, Maharashtra and many such places, young people are pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams. The story of these yet-to-become Karsanbhai Patels and Sunil Bharti Mittals, their experiences and journeys need to be heard, shared and re-told.

The mainstream media is far too busy celebrating the already arrived, regardless of how late they got there. As a mentor remarked, we should quit looking into the entrepreneurial rear-view mirror and look forward to the road ahead.

All too often we hear that only Bollywood and cricket sells in India. But there are other sports and stars – be it our chess champions, our women boxers, snooker kings or trap shooters, not to mention our hockey and football teams. It’s also important to recognize that there are a million entrepreneurs struggling and thriving, not only the billion-dollar barons who seem to hog the printing ink.

Nasscom’s product conclave and several other nascent entrepreneur forums are a small step in the right direction. India needs its own version of the Inc. 1000 to recognize, encourage and celebrate its toiling entrepreneurial masses. We could call it the “India 10,000.*”

I am sure Mr. Mahindra would agree with me.

A shorter version of this article first appeared in Wall Street Journal in May 2010.

postscript
Two years on, after I first wrote this article, NASSCOM launched their 10,000 startups program in March, 2013. NextBigWhat, organizers of Unpluggd have themselves partnered with NASSCOM.

Dedicated startup sites, including YourStory.com, NextBigWhat and startup-focused weekly coverage have arrived at all major business papers, including, Economic Times, Hindu Businessline, and Mint.

Getting rid of our Sir-ji culture

April 12, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 4 Comments

Photo Credit: Alex E. Proimos via cc

“Saif sir and Shah Rukh sir, I appreciate your question…”

I had turned on the television soon after getting home from work in the hope of wiping out a rough day. The FilmFare awards — Bollywood’s tribute to its own – were on. The speaker was Neil Nitin Mukesh, an up and coming heartthrob in Tinseltown. He was addressing superstars Shah Rukh Khan and Saif Ali Khan, the comperes for the awards ceremony.

The two Khans, in an attempt to inject humor into the proceedings, were posing questions to other actors in the audience. Those questioned, in turn, were expected to respond with creative insults, tongue-in-cheek, to the two Khans — all in good humor.

Shah Rukh is in his mid-forties and Saif, I suspect, just turned 40. Wikipedia tells me Neil Nitin Mukesh is 28. When I heard Neil speak, it made me stop and wonder why a grown man was addressing the two Khans as “Sir.”

My first thought was that it was the sheer inadequacy of the English language. In Spanish there is usted — a respectful form of you. And of course nearly every Indian language has the Hindi equivalent of aap — a pronoun reserved to demonstrate respect to someone senior, elderly or even, at times, a respected colleague. The use of these forms, from Bhojpur to Chettinad, is rarely about status or inequality but largely about courtesy and culture.

But there remained a niggling feeling: What if this is not a linguistic shortcoming but something deeper?

I shared my theory the next morning with my two business partners, who were actually working instead of wondering about Bollywood’s sociological makeup. I felt that the movie industry was far too hierarchical. Even Shah Rukh, at the same event, referred to Mani-sir (Mani Ratnam, the award-winning director). And, I asserted, this was emblematic of Indian society at large: far too much groveling and far too little respect.

To their credit, my partners argued in reasoned tones that it was language rather than any feudal attitudes or the need for social debasement that lead to the use of the word “Sir” when addressing an industry peer. They went on to propound their own theory — by which time you can be sure all pretense of work was done away with — that this is likely an urban phenomenon.

Did not most Tamil folks in Chennai use “Sir,” abandoning the more archaic (and potentially feudal) “ayya,” they argued. The Tamil movie industry, too, is rife with Rajni-sir and Kamal-sir, though I wasn’t sure if that bolstered their case or not. By that point anyway they had returned to doing real work.

What is my gripe with “Sir,” you ask? Yes, it is perfectly serviceable for class 8 students to use it when addressing their English or even their Hindi teacher. Possibly it works for the maitre d’ at a fancy Euro restaurant since his snooty attitude does away with any illusion of who’s the master.

Any other time, there’s far too much of the servile tone of a colonial job applicant imbued into “Sir,” which 60-odd years of Babudom have only cemented further.

Spend an afternoon sitting in a bank manager’s office, on a manufacturing shop floor or in a police or income tax commissioner’s office and you are likely to encounter “Sir” enunciated in every imaginable accent. If you have been in a hospital, you can’t but help see the doctors get their share of “Sir,” many a times as “Dr.-Sir.” Even within the information technology industry — despite its global exposure and purported performance-based culture -– deference, at times even subservience, follows the “Sir.”

I am by no means advocating the use of first names alone. When my good friend, college buddy and now nearly-50 year old university professor tells my 12-year-old to call him by his first name, I will be the first one to admit that I am not at all comfortable. I’d rather my daughter call him Uncle Jaap. Yet when 25-year-old engineers address me as “Sir,” I squirm. While I choose to think that half the mails I get addressing me as “Sir” have merely misspelled my first name, I know I am fighting a losing battle.

I’d like to imagine that borrowing the good old Hindi suffix “ji” — or for those of you opposed to Hindi dominance, the Japanese suffix “san” — would do away with “Sir.” And create a work culture that’s respectful without having to be deferential or, worse yet, servile. If the central government ran a contest for a Hinglish term to replace “Sir,” I suspect it would find more support and takers than trying to come up with an international symbol for the rupee. And, for sure, it’s likely to do far greater good – for a whole lot more people – than a rupee symbol will.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal online as To Sir Without Love.

Be Forgiving – Lessons from my dad

March 7, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 6 Comments

“Look at the boy – short & dark. He wants to go places and thinks too much of himself.”

Photographs of my dad taken in his mid twenties, still show him slim as a teenager. The pictures show an intense lad with twinkling eyes. In his wedding pictures with his kohl lined eyes he cuts a dashing figure. By the time he got to his early forties he is at his most suave – despite the long, hairy sideburns, that make him look like a young Isaac Asimov! However my father, I suspect, always felt a little self conscious about his complexion and height. So when his uncle said these words he was cut to the quick.

My father had lost his own father when he was barely fifteen. With a widowed mother, a still in high-school elder brother, two younger brothers and a younger sister, my father did not have it easy. So he came to city, barely 16 to seek help from his father’s brother. His uncle had already made it big at an insurance firm and with no children of his own had few other commitments. On the day my father had finally picked up courage to ask his uncle for help to pay for college, is when this incident happened. It was a typical, sultry afternoon in Madras (“the city”) and his uncle was sitting in a large swing in the central hall of his house, gently swinging himself after lunch as he received some visitors. My dad had laid down in one corner of the room, to get some sleep. The stress of working up his courage to ask for his uncle’s help,being declined and the hot afternoon had all rendered him half asleep.

My father may have nodded off, but these words certainly woke him up and they rankled. Forty years later, as my dad narrated this incident to me, he recalled that his first thoughts were “I’ll prove to this man what I’m worth. Who the hell does he think he is?” Of course, he continued to pretend that he was asleep and said nothing to his uncle that day. Less than two weeks later, with a friend’s help, he “ran away” to Delhi, traveling on a free 3rd class servant pass that 1st class passengers got. Only his mom knew where he had gone.

Less than two years later, my father returned – a year in Delhi and an eventful one in Shimla had instilled great confidence in him, some money in his pocket and a steady job and paycheck as an auditor in a reputable chartered accountant firm. And all this with just a high school diploma and an apprenticeship. He headed straight to his uncle’s house, eager to flaunt his new found success.

“The moment I entered my uncle’s house and saw him, still seated on that swing – I was taken aback. He had aged so much in the two years!” My father’s voice quivered at the recollection. “He was a mere shadow of his former self. I was ashamed, that I had even thought of telling him off – of having actually looked forward to showing him how wrong he had been about me. I felt really small and petty minded. I didn’t say any of what I have thought of saying.”

It was in that moment that my father had the realization, that he shared with me, all those years later.

“Success is fleeting. Don’t carry a grudge and be forgiving.”

Photo by Taariq Hendricks on Unsplash

Are Marketers Leading us off a Precipice?

March 3, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Steve and Sara via Compfight

We’ve all heard the story of the boiled frog. The one that’s so comfortable in a pot of water, that’s being slowly heated, that it cooks to death. Wikipedia claims that the scientific evidence for such a boiled frog scenario is contradictory at best. But the metaphor’s worked well enough for innumerous editorial writers, from the Cold War to climate change. In keeping with this hoary tradition, I’m compelled to warn of an impending doom – my own personal amphibian aquatic tipping point – that is close upon us.

It is one, alas, that is perpetrated, aided, abetted by marketers.

I speak not of Lady Gaga or boy bands (though they are bad enough, I can tell you, as the parent of two teen girls) but of nothing less than the beginning of the end of Indian civilization. And if we fall, can the rest of the world be far behind?

I know that for at least several thousand years, since the start of the Kali Yug, we have been proclaiming the fall of Indian civilization. More recently, the tearing down of the Babri Masjid, the riots in Gujarat and weekly news of the Naxal attacks in middle India seem indicative of an imminent civilizational demise. And I am sure that between the Shiv Sena, the MNS, and the Telengana agitators – along with their lesser known brethren from Assam to Tamil Nadu — various people of dubious motives are busy chipping away at the edifice of what our ancestors have built.

Yet, as an optimist, I have not let any of this even bother me, let alone drag me down.

Not a bit. And here’s why. First, we now actually have an identity of being Indian rather than merely Madrasis or Gujaratis or Thakurs from Ballia! This is in itself worth celebrating. And more than Akbar or the British Raj, it is Bollywood, cricket and Pakistan that have been the primary contributors to the creation of this new pan-Indian identity.

Yes, we attack one another, at times kill a number of our fellow citizens gruesomely and get away with it as well. I’d argue, though, that we are doing this at much lower rates than we have historically.

Of course, the trucks plying our highways continue to kill far more people with far less provocation. We possess a unique ability to be rude to one another while driving or jostling in queues. The need to grease palms for nearly anything may even be growing. Our public spaces are littered with garbage and graffiti. Our parks, such as they are, are encroached on by politicians. Our rivers, despite the reverence we allegedly hold them in, are polluted.

But these are all problems that can be fixed. We still keep our homes clean, we continue to show respect to our elders in private and at times in public. We believe education is important as is saving for the future. We continue to volunteer to help the poor, the needy and the very many who are challenged one way or another. We have a newfound confidence in ourselves, in our identities as Indians. We are, in many ways, irrepressible.

All this had kept me hopeful about our continued growth and prosperity.

Repeat: Had.

The first time I saw six young lasses sitting in a circle at the local mall, each texting or talking to someone who was not in the circle, is when I glimpsed the beginning of the end. Soon it seemed that at no occasion were people, not merely youngsters, ever in the present. Be it at the movies (“Hello, I’m watching My Name is Khan…”), a classical music concert or even at dinner at a restaurant with their family.

Marketers, the same people who have caused the littering of every corner of our nation with the detritus of one rupee plastic sachets, have gotten the water boiling.

I realized it when I saw the invasion of flat panel advertising in every remaining social space. Be it the local Cafe Coffee Day, Chinese or Punjabi restaurant and, oh no, my local hole-in-the-wall tea stall. Finally, even eye contact, which was the only thing left after the cell phone onslaught, has been done away with.

So you have a family of four, the wife on a call with her friend, the boy busy with his iPhone, the girl watching Katrina Kaif slithering across the screen and Dad trying hard not to drool, even as he keeps an eye on his Blackberry.

The out-of-home advertising flatscreen. God help us all.

3 Steps to Improve Our Hiring Situation

January 29, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Can you please talk to my father? I had just finished explaining the offer of a full-time job we were extending to one of our contract engineers.

“Your father? Why?” I asked.

“That way I can honestly tell my friends, who want me to take another job, that my father insisted that I take this one.”

Despite the decade long boom, mini-busts and other bumps along the way, the Indian information technology job market and prospective employee behavior has remained as consistent and confounding as ever.

The recession helped managers find better candidates given the overall market slowdown. Now, the challenge of candidates who’ve accepted your offer actually showing up is likely to reappear. It almost seems as though we have a cultural inability to handle the simple matter of accepting a job or quitting one in a forthright manner.

A hundred years ago the nationalist poet Subramanya Bharati wrote of domestic help and the stories they’d make up for absenteeism: “It was the 12th day since my grandmother’s death” and “there was a scorpion in the rice bowl and it bit me with its teeth” were two of the more outrageous – some say creative – excuses.

Present day job seekers (and changers) have dwarfed Bharati’s imagination with their far greater range of reasons for quitting or not joining after negotiating — often hard — for a better deal.

“I want to work only on communication systems” (or Java or some other flavor of the month.) This from a boy who can barely spell his name. Or, “I plan to go to business or graduate school.” Those are among the most common (and rarely truthful) reasons I’ve heard.

Two of my perennial favorites, even when not true, resonate since they build on the cultural reality of the family’s still influential role in a candidate’s career decision.

“My (future) father-in-law wants to me to work for a multinational corporation” or
“My father wants me to join the family business.”

Of course, none of this can hold up a candle to the candidate who just plain disappears. Emails are not responded to, phone calls are not returned and old-fashioned registered mails are returned undelivered.

Talking with folks who work for us and with peers elsewhere helped identify a number of reasons for this behavior.

“I felt they’d pressure me and I wouldn’t be able to say no.”
Or, “I didn’t want to lie, which is why I didn’t return the calls.”
Or, “I had another offer and was just shopping.”
Or, “I was too embarrassed.”

A surprisingly large number of reasons seem to be about a prospective employer not losing face or potential dire consequences with their present employer. Which makes me wonder about our hiring practices!

As a reader of a previous column suggested, rather than merely wring our hands, here are three things I feel each of us can do to change this.

Talk about it with the folks you interview, with your employees and hiring managers in your company and with your peers in other companies. While all of us have moaned about it to others, moaning is not talking. Talking about it makes it easier for all to admit we have a problem and to begin discussing ways to solve it: through greater visibility for hiring managers and HR folks and greater comfort for prospective candidates or resigning staff.
Having a simple script that emphasizes the need for honest and full disclosure and committing to your part of it, as an employer, is a great place to start.

Rope in colleges & recruiters The sooner we catch ’em the better. Sharing expectations and observed behavior with colleges and headhunters helps bring on board folks who have a stake in the outcome. They can influence the candidates a lot sooner. Much like interviewing or presentation skills, how to handle an offer or to decline one can be discussed with — if not taught to — job candidates who, all too often, rely on their peer group. In the Indian context, I’d extend it to building bridges with the families of your employees in a sensitive and non-patronizing manner.

Don’t contribute to it How often have you pressured a prospective employee to come on board right away? To buy out their notice period or even to renege on their commitments to a current employer or prospective alternate employers? Quit doing that and we’d have taken a small step towards a better – OK maybe not better — but more predictable and professional staffing scenario.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal as My Father-in-Law Wants Me to Work for a MNC & Other Fables online.

Indian Standard Time Warp

January 1, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

NYC: Dali at Time Warner Center – Nobility of Time (Photo credit: wallyg)

“I’ve already spent more time on this than this deal is worth to me.”

That’s what a prospective business partner said to me, complaining about the 45 minutes we had spent in a meeting together.

I was taken aback. I had just flown most of the previous 20 hours (from Bangalore to Chennai to Frankfurt then onward to Stockholm before taking my final transfer to get to Gothenburg, Sweden) to get to the meeting.

I had merely asked him to help me understand why I should pay $100,000 to represent his company in India (but that’s another story). While I did manage to keep my cool that day, it brought home to me how direct people can be in a business setting.

Having worked most of my adult life in the U.S. – most of that in California’s laid back Silicon Valley – I was used to plain speaking. However in the year I had been back in India before the Gothenburg trip, I had clearly lost the habit of being direct. I had acquired a more fluid sense of both time and speech.

The move to India opened my eyes to the way things are done in the Valley, sort of like watching an unflattering video of myself at a stag party.

While working in San Jose, I had never quite noticed how rude we were when we failed to return voice mails or in moved meetings at the last minute, even when people had flown in from overseas to attend them.

This was in stark contrast to Japan where a great deal of my business was coming from in the first years back in India. In my first business meeting in Japan, two managers from a $40 billion firm spent two hours with me (the marketing guy from a $5 million dollar Indian company) to understand why we were charging “so much more” than the competition.

Of course, many people have apocryphal stories of negotiating in Japan or China where indirection and opacity seem the norm. In one, two-day session I found out only at dinner that the guy that seemed to spend most his time taking pictures was actually the key decision maker and the two people we hadn’t been introduced to were competitors

India, in many ways, straddles these two very different business cultures. The almost unquestioning acceptance of seniority, the acute awareness of hierarchy and near-obsession with not losing face that Japanese businesses are known for can be found in Indian companies as well.

Still, the Japanese put much more importance on time schedules. In India you could never imagine a client instructing you to take the 7:52 express train to the transfer station where the client would join you at 8:24 to reach their office at 8:50 – the requisite ten minutes before your 9:00 a.m. meeting. I regularly get detailed directions like this from our Japanese clients.

In India “Let’s meet at 11” is generally a suggestion. It means “We should connect around that time and it’s likely that I’ll call you at 10:45 to tell you I am stuck in traffic and will be late by 30 minutes or more.”

This has been the biggest lesson for me about doing business in India. Time and communication (and even space if you try to drive here) take on a sponge-like quality here.

In my unending naiveté, I initially believed that the inability to stick to schedules was the fault of the sales and marketing folks or overburdened C-level executives. That illusion didn’t last long. I started to understand what really happens after sitting through a weekly customer call with my engineering team.

“How can the deliverable slip by a month when we were on schedule last week?” the customer asked. I could visualize the apoplectic look on the client’s face even without a webcam.

Our engineers, I found out, were well aware of the delay that was accumulating daily but had redoubled their efforts to crack the problem on time. They had been confident they’d solve the problem and recover the lost month and wanted to avoid causing anxiety to the poor client.

The most positive way I have found to look at this delivery dilemma is to figure we Indians are eternally optimistic. We are optimistic to a fault. We are certain that we will clutch victory from the jaws of defeat much like a Bollywood hero gets his girl at the end of the movie, just as the police drag away the dastardly villain. When we say the report will be done this evening or we’ll get there in 15 minutes, we believe it – the laws of physics be damned!

As with all understanding about India, there may be exceptions. You might meet an ex-military type or maybe a Bengali or Tamil gentleman who will confound you by always being on time. Worse still, they might expect you to be on time like the Japanese or direct and brash like the Valley types.

Fortunately India is so vast that such encounters are likely to be rare.

This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal’s India Journal