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5 Things To Do While You Still Have a Job

November 16, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 10 Comments

Last week I had called a friend, with the idea of pitching our newsletter services. However the conversation rapidly turned to the unhappy state of affairs in my friend’s company. Layoffs, spending cuts and a lock on the stationery cupboard (okay, I made that one up!) My friend was expecting the axe to fall again (& yet again, definitely on spending if not on people) and hoping that he’d survive. Of course having taken the job less than three months earlier, he was not keen to move — even if the job market were good — which it most definitely wasn’t.

While I commiserated with my friend on the call, it set me thinking. A little bit of calling around made me realize that my friend was by no means alone. There seem to be hordes of folks, just hanging in there — some who actually like their companies but are caught in semi-stasis and yet others would like to get the heck outta there, but can’t, till the market gets better. The shameless fellow I am, I urged all of them to quit and start their own business. Being good friends (at least one of them) they curbed their urge to lug something at me. For the rest of the folks that are hanging in there, here are five things to do, while you still have a job.

Read – no, reading this blog does not count (not you mom!) – read stuff that you had intended to; whether the speeches of Cicero, The Artist’s Way, Writing Down the Bones, RK Narayan or What Color is Your Parachute? The classics whether the Mahabharata, modern renditions of the Ramayana or Homer’s Illiad will also do nicely. Or the first book that you come across next. Do this with a clear and committed goal (tell a friend to keep you honest) – one book a week or whatever turns you on. But treat this as you’d a project at work. Before you know it you’d be one well read person or at least on the road to becoming one.

Share – the simplest is to write about the book you’ve just read. Or if that seems too heavy – write little things that others might find useful at work – first aid at home, How to get a PAN card, MS Excel tricks, FAQs, Employee Stock Options in plain English. Or if you are truly inspired convert the whole thing into a blog and share it with the world. Remember to teach is to learn! If you aren’t ready, start with a journal – doesn’t have to be a blog. Just a good old diary, of your thoughts, aspirations, desires and dreams and share with a friend to start with.
Track your time – this is as good a time as any to see where your time goes – how much of it is spent Googling Daniel Craig or Sarah Palin, or just checking email or gossiping at the water cooler (“Can you believe what she wore to work today?”) How much time do your kids, spouse or significant other get from you? How much of it could have been spent on a treadmill or a nice weekend hike? The sweetest thing about being in limbo, is you’d have all the time in the world — put it to good use.
Network In the past, whenever someone gave me this advice, I always felt slimy — like one of those multi-level marketing guys approaching you at the grocery store or gas station (Don’t ask!) But thanks to the Internet, you can now pass it off as learning about Web 2.0. So sign up on LinkedIn, Plaxo (they are getting better), get your family on to Geni and if that’s not enough try Spock, FaceBook and MySpace. However keep point 3 in mind and track your time. Kidding apart, a slow business environment is the right time to re-connecting with all those folks from your past and meeting new folks. Of course with all your reading and writing you’d have much to share, yourself.
Create three CVs It never hurts to keep your powder dry. At the least you will get a good blog post or maybe even a full fledged article on “How to write a killer CV” if you prepare three CVs. It can be a useful exercise to reflect on where you are professionally and where you’d like to head towards actively. So create a professional CV, much like you’d have in the past, create a personal CV, stripping the professional parts out or re-stating them as useful life-skills, as though you were going to run for political office and finally create one as you’d like it to look like five years from now. Of course the reading, ‘riting and reflecting you’d have done would make this a piece of cake.

Once you are done with these five steps, still have job and time on your hands, start over at step one. Good luck!

The right time to start a business is NOW

November 16, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo: Theen … via Compfight

“As soon as I get enough experience, I will start my own business,” is a common refrain of many prospective, usually young, entrepreneurs. “I need to understand how the value chain in retail works,” or “I will work in a small/large firm to learn this, that or the other,” are all reasons that I hear soon-to-be entrepreneurs give to put off getting started. I would assert that there is never going to be a better time to start your business than now, particularly with the current financial troubles that are roiling global markets and making everyone in business antsy. Even if it gets worse before it gets better, a downturn such as this is the best time to start a business.

The reason a downturn is a good time to start a business is three-fold in my view. First, prospective customers, though not always willing to part with money, will be prepared to give their time. Their time, which would be hard to come by in good times, will help you build meaningful relationships for the future. Even more importantly, it will help you comprehend what issues your customers truly care about and fold that into your product or service offerings. Finally, bad times are good times to learn how to make your dollar, pound or rupee go much further. Once you have learnt this lesson, it will serve you well through the rest of your business life. That being said, you don’t have to wait for a downturn to start your business. The sooner you get started, the sooner you will realise that you know even less than you thought you did and the sooner you will begin learning what you need to, and you will be far too busy to wonder if you have timed it right!

Build relationships

Lest I have not said it enough, businesses are about relationships. And relationships take time; often much longer than your business can afford and far more time than your customers can afford to give you. In that regard, the sooner you begin building relationships, the better off you are. Ideally you’d have embarked on this way before you started your enterprise. It’s worth pausing for a second here to comprehend what ‘building a relationship’ constitutes. Most of us intuitively understand the word relationship in the context of families, even though we may grimace or smile at the thought; friends; and social acquaintances, folks we know such as neighbours, friends of friends and relatives of friends. So what does it mean in the context of a business?

In my view, simply put, a relationship in a business context, much like in the rest of our life can range from casual acquaintances all the way to life-long friends or occasionally a spouse. A relationship moves from being one of merely dealing with one another (cold calling in sales or collecting a purchase order or payment from finance) to a more meaningful one, when both parties are prepared to share and give of their knowledge, time and energy. This could be sharing thoughts on the marketplace in general, what other companies or folks are doing, all the way to each others’ key care-abouts, concerns and plans.

Meetings over coffee, attending a trade show or seminar together, playing together (from billiards to white-water rafting) or dinner followed by karaoke all help build a relationship. Not all relationship building need be done face-to-face — SMS or texting breaking news or a thought for the week, e-mailing interesting items of business or personal interest, newsletters, telephone calls or even the occasional instant message (IM or chat) can all help build relationships. Of course, be sensitive to the needs of the other party; you don’t want to be seen as a spammer or worse yet, a stalker! When in doubt, err on the side of less not more.

Notice most methods of building relationships are not transactional and even when interacting for a transaction, doing what your mother advised you to do — making small talk, being polite, saying thank you, all go to building a better relationship. And there is no better time to build relationships than now, so get started.

Validate market needs

One of the sheer joys of being an entrepreneur is the number of times you get turned down for appointments, let alone capital, loans or purchase orders. The fact that we persist and actually thrive despite this speaks of our faith in what we are doing. While such faith is good and even necessary, it can be just plain wrong. A good way to ensure that you don’t expend all your cash, emotion and energy barking up the wrong tree is to validate what the market needs. Such validation is a lot easier said than done.

Most consumers or customers don’t know if they really need something, especially if it is not something they have encountered before. Prior to Hotmail or more recently FaceBook people were not clamouring that their lives were incomplete; nor did the absence of mini-vans or flat panel plasma displays or soap in Re 1 sachets lead to consumer revolts. As Badri Seshadri, founder of New Horizon Media, a leading publisher of non-fiction in Tamil stated, “Supply has to lead demand, sometimes.” It is here that having built relationships with others in the business, you can seek to have your ideas reviewed, critiqued and if lucky validated.

As with New Horizon, sometimes there is no alternative but to get your product out there, but even then, you can validate the market need through calibrated testing be it pricing, and in their case distribution channels and different book titles. The market not being a static entity will require you to continuously measure it and tweak your response. Downturns are again good times for this for customers and the marketplace will be willing to provide you more time and greater feedback. However, given the ongoing need for testing the market, the sooner you embark on it the better. So once again, there is no better time to validate market needs than now.

Learn frugality

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I first considered starting a business was to blow nearly $200 (yes, two hundred dollars) on fancy business cards. Granted this was 12 years ago, when I was a callow youth and some credit must go to my printer who up-sold me on the expenditure. Besides never doing business again with that printer, I learnt the hard lesson that money is better spent (or not) on so many other things than fancy business cards. But it is never too early to learn the lesson of frugality.

No company, however big, can afford to not watch its spending and particularly its cash position — this was true even before Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. While there is a fine line between being frugal and being a miser, it is best learnt by constant practice. Yes, money has to be spent in order to build and grow a business, but how much and when is always a matter of debate. Most folks entreat employees to spend the company’s money as if it is their own, but then again most folks don’t manage their own money too well. It’s best to ask yourself ‘why’ three times — Why am I spending this money? Why now? Why this much? Bad economic times are good times to learn about frugality for you see so many people around you — your customers, partners and suppliers — practising it. Don’t be a laggard and don’t wait for bad times to practise it.

As with most advice, take this entreaty to be frugal as a good thumb rule, but use your own judgment on each occasion for there will be good times, particularly in downturns, to invest for the future.

Trust your instincts and if you have built relationships and continuously validated the market needs you’d have good reason to back your instincts.

This article first appeared in the Hindu BusinessLine in November 3, 2008.

3 Keys to Making Your Board Effective

November 15, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

When I wrote my first article for Outlook Business, on why a board of advisors is important for start-ups, a couple of folks wrote to me asking about best to handle having a “wrong” board member. Jack and Suzy Welch have discussed this at some length in a BusinessWeek column of theirs.

I decided to added my two-cents to the discussion.

Photo: nateOne via Compfight

“Anybody can just ask questions! I bring up a problem because I need help. What’s the point of asking questions or giving a lecture without offering any help?” This lament came from a friend, who was VP-Engineering at a technology firm. He had just returned from a board meeting, where he had presented a paper on the development status of the company’s newest product, only to have a board member bombard him with questions. “And the chairman just sat silently.” My friend’s predicament reflects the question on the role of a good board member. As a reader recently posed: “What if you get the ‘wrong’ person on your board?”

Start-ups particularly, and entrepreneurial firms in general, can use the benevolent oversight of an experienced team that a good board of directors can be. If finding the right people for the board is an important task, getting an inappropriate or incompetent member off the board is even tougher. Therefore, one needs to have a clear understanding of who would be a good board member for a company.

Picking out a director is not always in one’s control, unlike hiring a key employee. Therefore, this should be treated with care and due diligence. Even if venture capitalists or bankers supporting a company want to have someone specific on the company’s board, or if a company or entrepreneur invites an eminent personality to the board, following some basic ground rules can help avoid problems that may arise later.

Expectation setting To start with, list down your expectations from an incoming board member. This can be specific, as in structuring employee shareholding or other equity matters, or be more generic, as in strategic review or industry networking. Meet the member outside, ideally prior to a board meeting, to comprehend and get acquainted with his motivations for being a board member.

Role setting At the meetings, designate clear roles, particularly that of a discussion leader, so that participation can be both balanced and, where needed, encouraged. Most importantly, run the meetings on the clock, hard as it will be, to prevent it being hijacked. At the end of each meeting, ensure feedback is captured and, later, circulated with the meeting minutes to keep board members informed and accountable.

Weeding non-performers Despite one’s best efforts, as in hiring, occasionally one runs into a poor fit with a board member. A typical board will rather avoid having to deal with a non-performing member than address what could be a potentially embarrassing and even painful process of persuading a non-performing director to leave. Often, board members tend to be seniors or retired executives, and this makes it difficult to pull up non-performing board members. In India, age and culture are further barriers to holding senior board members accountable. However, an entrepreneur rarely has the luxury of carrying the dead weight of a couple of bench warmers.

The best way to deal with this situation is directly, but subtly. Work with your Chairman, assuming he’s not the problem, and validate your concerns and perceptions. Sit down with the board member with whom you have issues and try to find common ground. Insist on the board assessing itself twice a year, ideally against benchmarks, so that any conversation with individual board members can be held in the context of the board’s own benchmarking data. Pose all challenges and concerns in the context of the company, and never make them personal. Finally, ensure that any solution is face-saving for the individual board member concerned, as you never know whom you might have to work with again.

This article first appeared in Outlook Business in November 2008.

Managing Time – your most precious resource

October 31, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Remember that time is money,” said Benjamin Franklin, statesman, philosopher and one of the founding fathers of the US. Maybe it’s because he made this statement nearly three centuries ago in 1748 that many of us don’t remember it. Capital, people and even technology can be obtained by debt or equity, hiring or licensing. However, the one thing that no entrepreneur can get more of is time. Yet most of us treat our own time as a fungible commodity available in endless supply. Bankruptcies, broken marriages, debt traps and nervous breakdowns have not cured many of this fallacy. To be successful as entrepreneurs, it is critical that we recognise time is a perishable commodity.

Just as our favourite foods are probably the least healthy, we will discover that many of our favourite activities as founders and entrepreneurs are the biggest waste of time. Even as crash diets don’t work, and diets have to be combined with exercise, using our time effectively calls for both a balancing of our activities with objectives and a good deal of self-discipline. Self-discipline, in particular, is not a strength of many of us entrepreneurs. At times, we even wear our lack of it as a badge of honour, mistaking ad hoc behaviour for freedom and lack of discipline for being creative and unfettered.

At the other end of the spectrum, young or first-time entrepreneurs and particularly Indian entrepreneurs are loathe to appear rude to elders, be they advisors, board members, customers or suppliers. Neither of these behaviours contributes to success at work.

If time is indeed our most precious resource, how do we save and deploy it better? And how do we find the time for this new “time-saving” project? Much like brushing your teeth, make planning your day a daily habit, done before you embark on anything else. And here is one way to go about it.

Measure it

Even when I have walked for just one day, I find myself checking my weight. (Okay I admit, more than once a day). And the reason I do that (and am pretty sure I am not the only one) is we can only change what we measure. If your plan is to save time (or lose weight, or make money) if you don’t measure it, you cannot address it, let alone fix it. So right after reading this article, take a piece of paper and once every hour write down what you did. You don’t need software or a PDA — a pencil and a sheet of paper are sufficient. Begin with your workday — say 9 am to 5 pm and do this for the next five working days.

Be honest with yourself — write down “read the newspaper” if that is what you did, or “idled in the cafeteria,” “worked on Jameson proposal,” “weekly staff meeting,” or “browsing the Internet”. Even this exercise will show how much time is unaccounted for. As with taking antibiotics, if you miss one dose (or hour), continue with the subsequent dose (next hour) and write down your hourly activities for 40 hours.

As with exercise, let a colleague or an administrative assistant or if you are bold enough your spouse, know about the little project you are doing and they will ensure that you follow through.

Once you have a week’s worth of data, analyse it. This again does not require college math — just break it down into simple categories relevant to your business. For instance, it could be simply high-level categories of what you deem are value-added activities — customer contact time, employee contact time, planning, product development and activities such as lunch, entertainment, travel, other phone calls and meetings. Alternately, if you are analytical, you could break this down into greater detail. Either way, the idea is to first identify where your time goes and what activities cumulatively consume how much of your time. Most people report that meetings and interruptions are the biggest thieves of time. Depending on your business and your personal style, you may find other categories of activities to be your largest time sinks.

Prioritise it

Assuming that you have not keeled over in surprise to see where your time truly goes, you are ready to take charge of your time budget. Stephen Covey, author of First Things First, narrates the story of a speaker who walks his audience through the process of filling an empty bucket, first with rocks, then with gravel, sand and finally water. When he first fills the bucket with rocks, the audience responds positively to his question whether the bucket is full. But watching him pour gravel into the rock-filled bucket, they realise the bucket can take more. Only when he finally fills it with water and states that the bucket is full, do they agree it truly is. The insight from this exercise, Stephen Covey narrates, is that if they had tried to fill the bucket in any other order, not as many of the large rocks would have been accommodated. In this story, your day/time is the bucket and the truly important things that you want to get accomplished, the big rocks. All the other stuff — browsing the Internet, reading the newspaper, tea breaks — are all water and sand taking up space that should have rightly gone for your important tasks.

So having analysed how your time is being spent, you need to prioritise what is important — for the week and for the day. Begin by doing those that are of the highest priority first. Then move on to lower priority items. This is harder than it sounds as all too often something of a lower priority will be (or at least seem) a whole lot easier to get done — make that phone call, pay that bill. So it takes self-discipline (there’s that word again) and focus to ensure that time does not get away from you. But once you make it a habit to work on the high-priority items first, you will find it easier and the time you save will be reward enough to continue the practice.

Value it

If all of us worked by ourselves, measuring and prioritising would be sufficient to deliver significant time-saving and productivity gain. However, few of us have that luxury (in my case punishment, if I had to work by myself) and this brings us to a large source of time wastage — meetings and interactions with other people. Contrary to popular belief, it is not others who cause us to waste our time but ourselves. How often have we communicated how valuable that new iPhone is or how precious that autographed book? Yet, we rarely assert that time is precious.

So this source of wasted time can only be tamed by us valuing our time and demonstrating that we value our time. This begins with being punctual, staying on schedule and demonstrating through our actions that we value our (and others’) time. This is the hardest of the three steps I have outlined. If not done right, you will at best come across as insensitive or at worst insufferable and self-important. In that event, it might not hurt to have a bucket, some rocks, and sand handy or at least a copy of this article.

An earlier version of this article first appeared in The Hindu BusinessLine.

3 Steps to Build Your Startup’s Brand

September 8, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 4 Comments

If I had a dollar for every prospective employee who said he loves what he’s seen and heard at our company but his father/spouse/friends feel more comfortable if he joins ‘Giant Co Ltd’ next door, I’d be a rich man. And every one of those prospects was honest enough to admit that their father/spouse/friends felt far more comfortable with the safety, reputation and BRAND of ‘Giant Co Ltd’.

Brand, the very word seems to connote a variety of images. Advertisements, billboards and neon signs, models and Bollywood stars are what many people associate with the word. If you probe further, you may hear AirTel, Britannia, Disney, Coca-Cola and Pepsi or Sony and Samsung as companies that people think of as brands.

People in the trade, be it marketers or financiers, talk of brand equity, brand loyalty, and brand names. When you talk to entrepreneurs about brands and what it means to them, they, particularly those in the early stages of their business, admit that brand is important and something that they aspire to build one of these days. However, right now they have to run and take care of this cash flow matter or woo that key hire, so they will get back to it when they have more time and when it’s more appropriate!

So what is a brand and how much should entrepreneurs care about it? And when should they care about it? Doesn’t it cost a lot of money to build a brand? Is it a luxury for a struggling start-up? These are a few questions worth considering and answering even as you embark on your business.

Brands, simply put, are what people think they are. In other words, when people associate Amul with butter, Kissan with jam, Disney with TV (if you are an Indian child) or with Mickey (if you are a 40-year-old American) that is what those brands are. Beyond word association, they often denote something specific — what marketers such as Al Ries, co-author of Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind call the brand promise. For instance, among cars BMW promises performance, Mercedes luxury, Toyota reliability, and Volvo safety.

The key point that Al Ries has been making for the better part of three decades is that a brand’s positioning or promise is determined by how it is perceived by the consumer and not what you as the product or service’s maker believe or state it to be. In the simplest sense, as a start-up or an entrepreneur, if you comprehend and internalise this, you are already on the road to building a differentiated brand.

Know yourself

You have already persuaded some friends and a few former colleagues to join your start-up and are now trying to hire a few more key people. “I am quite happy where I am right now. I am not really looking for a change,” is what you’d usually hear from really good people, the kind you’d want to hire for your start-up. One of the key factors in their decision-making will be your brand and what it’s perceived as. At this stage, when you have just started or have not even become operational, it may seem counter-intuitive to talk about your ‘brand’ — don’t be fooled, the day you began dealing with people other than the founders, you began building your brand.

The reality is that your candidate is thinking about the pros and cons of staying at his present job and the alternative opportunities he may have elsewhere . In other words, he is positioning this opportunity against others and the moment he does that, he is associating a brand such as ‘risky’ or ‘unique opportunity’ or ‘great technology’ with your company. If you want to participate in this mental conversation and persuade him to indeed make the leap to your organisation, having clarity about your brand and what it connotes is critical.

The best way to build your brand is to have clarity — namely knowing yourself — as in what does your business stand for, what do you promise your employees, your customers, and other stakeholders. Once you have the clarity, state it and act on it each day. The day you open shop, your brand matters, and if you don’t state it and shape it yourself, the other guys will be they competitors or prospective employees and, most importantly, the spouses of your current employees.

Be yourself

As Anthony J. D’Angelo, creator of The Inspiration Book Series put it: “If you talk the talk, you damn well better walk the walk.” If you thought knowing yourself and stating it succinctly for others was hard, being yourself consistently is harder still. At this point, particularly in the context of start-ups and entrepreneurs, it’s worth pointing out that ‘brand’ is not something people associate with your product alone, but with your company and many times with your employees and you.

Southwest Airlines is one of the best examples of such brand value and perception permeating not merely the flights and on-board service, but also the founder and first CEO Herb Kelleher and all employees of Southwest from gate agents to in-flight staff be they pilots or cabin crew. So if your image is one of love and fun (as it is with Southwest), you had better exhibit it every day and everywhere.

Nearer home, the Tata brand as personified most recently in the Nano announcement or how Ratan Tata himself is perceived or how an entire earlier generation views the Tata Administrative Service, speaks of knowing and being oneself.

Just as it is a good idea to get a friend signed up when you embark on any new and often difficult activity (running three miles a day or yoga), walking your talk as an entrepreneur is easier if you get your team signed up. They are with you every day and will be (much like your spouse) the first to point out when you stray from the path of walking your talk. So if you make that guy who has come to interview with you wait interminably while you finish something, you are not walking your talk of “individuals matter” (if that is your position). Similarly, if you say “Ship it so that we can make the billing and we can fix it afterwards,” you are not walking the talk of “quality at affordable prices”. As any married person will vouch, telling the truth is always the less expensive option (regardless of near-term consequences). Similarly, being true to who you say you are as a business is the best way to building a brand. Who said it would be easy?

Sell yourself

Jack Stack, founder and CEO of Springfield ReManufacturing Corp (SRC) in his book A Stake in the Outcome states: “The company is the product.” For an entrepreneur and a start-up, there is no truer statement of their raison d’etre. It is easy to ascribe a brand or positioning to your products or services, but much harder to both conceive of and work on your company itself as the product. Great entrepreneurs, be it Dhirubhai Ambani or Richard Branson, have known this intuitively and Reliance and Virgin are a direct result of this ‘company is the product’ philosophy.

From day one, it is this vision of what your company is (or will be) that you need to sell, starting with your team all the way to your customers and their customers (the reason Intel advertises its products to consumers, who are its customers’ customers). Some of you may feel uncomfortable with the idea of ‘selling’, be it your products, your company or yourself. The lesson you need to draw from good sales people is that selling is less about talking and all about listening!

So listen to what the world is telling you and be consistent and true to yourself, and the brand will take care of itself.

This article was first published in the Business Line print edition dated September 8, 2008

Capt Kirk’s Leadership Style – Is it right for entrepreneurs?

August 25, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo: pds209 cc

A casual search of the blogosphere, with the words “Capt. Kirk” and leadership spews a long list of largely positive descriptions of Capt. Kirk’s leadership style. In fact, a secondary school principal, has actually written a referred article on Captain Kirk, His Leadership Style as a Model for Principals in the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Bulletin!

For those of us old enough to have caught William Shatner as Capt. Kirk, admiration is usually the first response (especially if we were lucky enough to miss the priceline.com ads – I had to move out of the country for this). Capt. Kirk cut a dashing figure – a man who surrounded himself with smarter folks (Spock the scientific officer, Bones the Doc and Scotty the engineer), always prepared to lead from the front and always got the girl! I am sure I am not the only 40+ fella who wished he were in Capt Kirk’s shoes, when we first encountered him.

Albert J. Bernstein and Sydney Craft Rozen, in their book “Dinosaur Brains – Dealing with All Those Impossible People at Work” speak of cheering Capt. Kirk as he staved off an attack by the Romulans, even as he just recovered from a problem of rapid aging. “What a manager!” was their first feeling. Then they began wondering “Or was he?” They go on to say:

In our culture there is some confusion between management and heroics. The distinction is quite simple: The hero handles everything single-handedly; the manager delegates. If a manager is indispensable, is he or she really managing?

What is true for managers is truer (in spades) for entrepreneurs, who inevitably are in leadership roles which they play all too often from Capt Kirk’s heroics’ handbook! I am certainly competent to speak, having been an adrenaline junkie till recently (others may argue I still am) – always charging off (in my strapped sandals, we don’t have much use for steeds, white or any other color) to solve problems. Luckily having great people around me, who were neither shy nor too polite, cured me off this, I’d like to think. However, as Capt. Kirk himself has shown, having good people (“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a miracle worker!”) around is not a sufficient reason for not falling into the “I’m here and will take care of everything” habit.

So stop for a moment and take a look at the ol’ mug in the nearest mirror and ask yourself “Am I a leader or merely a hero?

Mentoring folks – can start-ups afford to not do it?

August 25, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Maybe you can tell your team about your desire to partner with us.”

As soon as these words left my mouth, I realised that I had made a major faux pas. The words were addressed to the visiting CEO of one of our major prospects; one we had been trying to get interested in our products and services for nearly a year.

I was young and probably viewed myself as the hotshot marketing guy and the words had rushed out due to my frustration at dealing with the lack of coherence within their company.

Our chairman, who had put his personal credibility on the line to bring this gentleman in, was still reeling from the shock and the look on the face of our CEO made his desire to eviscerate me amply clear. In this instance, except for some ruffled egos, no permanent damage resulted from my inopportune directness. It could have been a lot worse.

It is through such avoidable mistakes that many of us learn the nuances and subtleties of doing business. In this particular instance, our chairman — luckily — did not confine himself to dressing me down (in private), but counselled me on what I had done wrong and how it could have been handled better, even while getting my message across.

I wish I could say such specific feedback and mentoring happens all the time in companies, let alone start-ups, but this seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

A common excuse in most start-ups is that “We are running at a hundred miles an hour, you just have to dive in and swim.”

So training, if at all, is mostly confined to a quick orientation session: “This is where the bathrooms are, here is where the hardware team sits and finance is over in that corner and oh, here’s your team and your desk. Good luck!” But it is in start-ups that we need to pay attention to mentoring.

The very word with its connotations of ongoing and consistent, if not continuous, investment of an already overworked person’s time seems such a luxury — which explains why most of us fail to give mentoring its due. Big mistake! Particularly since start-ups, with a small group of people, try to hire the best, and that Linux guru or penny pinching accountant we hired are often worth their weight in gold for their technical skills, but are often just not fit for normal human company.

When you have taken the trouble to hire the best, you often find they have come with as large a set of challenges to overcome as they have key skills.

And if they happen to be fresh graduates, then you have your work cut out!

Who mentors whom?
You have resolved that mentoring is the way to go to take your company to the next level. Now all you have to figure out is who needs to be mentored. This may not always be an easy thing to figure out. A simple rule of thumb I’d suggest is that anyone who has moved into a new role, particularly if he or she is being promoted, needs to be mentored. While this is true even for lateral moves such as the engineer who moves into marketing or the finance guy who wants to move into sales, all individuals you hope to grow into a leadership role have to be mentored. Lest you groan loudly or at the very least roll your eyes at the thought of all that overhead, mentoring, while very important, if done right need not be a major time drain.

Who should do the mentoring?
Conventional wisdom (or if we are to believe Hollywood) paints a mentor as middle-aged guy, greying if not balding, teaching the young buck a thing or two. Experience matters, not just to be knowledgeable, but for credibility as well. Such experience could reside in a young but proven manufacturing supervisor who has managed a unionised workforce, just as easily it could in a white collar vice-president of engineering. So knowledge that stems from direct experience, a willingness to share and patience are key attributes that a mentor should possess for the whole mentoring programme to work. It certainly helps if the mentor is well thought of in the organisation and experienced in multiple domains if not in multiple departments. Many a time, a mentor may come from outside the organisation — for instance, an up and coming woman manager may only find a mentor who has both the experience and empathy outside her company. An executive staff member may look to a member of the board for guidance and mentoring. The key to successfully mentoring your future stars is for such mentoring to be sought by the employee rather than it being prescribed like medicine! Of course, your actions and culture will have a good deal to do with whether people seek such mentoring.

How do you mentor?
In one word, gingerly. Mentoring has far too much in common with parenting, most of all in that there are many ways to mess it up, calling for therapy for all concerned! As this has not stopped us from having children, clearly it is not sufficient cause to avoid mentoring.

Albert J. Bernstein and Sydney Craft Rozen in their book Dinosaur Brains – Dealing with All Those Impossible People at Work talk about the rules of a mentoring relationship. They advise prospective mentors to think in terms of a contract and ask “What would you like me to do,” so that a mentoring relationship doesn’t fall into a parent-child role or a courtship role in the case of people of opposite genders. As a mentor, they warn, if you don’t consciously think and state your expectations, you may end up with vague emotional ties that result in anger or guilt from unmet expectations.

Once all the parties have stated their expectations, mentoring can be a very enlightening, fulfilling and rewarding experience. For practical reasons, it is important to have some regularity (monthly, quarterly) to your interactions and sustain these meetings, whether in person or on the phone, even when there seems to be “nothing” to discuss. Being available in times of crises certainly helps, but there is a fine line between being helpful and becoming a crutch, that you should not cross and must monitor to keep both of you honest. Asking questions, open-ended ones at that, is a sure fire way to do this, rather than providing the solutions that you know will work.

Mentoring Successfully
If mentoring at times seems like crossing a minefield, you need only to talk to parents of adolescents to know you have the easier job. With all the energy and emotions that need to be expended, mentoring, when done well, pays off in spades. Otherwise, every one of your promising employees is learning all the lessons the hard way. Mentoring with its real life coaching, the occasional nudge and shove will make it a lot less painful and a lot more productive. The hard part of mentoring is resisting the urge to act yourself when decisive action is called for; for the person being mentored, these are the best opportunities to learn, so allow them to do so by cajoling, pleading or where required threatening if plain old reasoning doesn’t work. The harder part is knowing when the bird is ready to leave the nest and providing the autonomy and respect for them to do just that. Mentors who can do that are the ones who are truly successful.

This article first appeared in the Hindu BusinessLine in August 2008.

Is a Board of Advisors important for a startup?

August 24, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo: Esthr via Compfight

“I am trying to hire a CEO for my manufacturing business. If I give him equity, what should I do for my existing GMs?” One of my early-morning jogging partners shot this at me recently. Mine was a group of men, all in their early- to mid-forties. Many members of the walking (some ambling) group run their own businesses. Many a morning, we end up discussing the challenges someone in the group faces that week.

It surprises me to see that many firms lack a truly functional board of directors or, at the very least, an active board of advisors, though they have become reasonably successful. Each of these firms fulfils the mandatory requirements for the appropriate number of directors and periodic board meetings and minutes—often honoured more in the breach than in the observance. Ironically, this state is probably truest in entrepreneurial firms that would benefit the most in having such a functional board of directors or advisors.

Many entrepreneurial firms start off as proprietorships. They do so for a number of reasons, which range from the simplicity of the business to a founder feeling uncomfortable having partners or other equity owners. As the business grows, the more successful ones—even while staying private and closely held—end up having additional partners, external investors or employee shareholders. The ones that go public are beholden to a new set of statutory and practical rules of operations. However, proprietorships, partnerships and most limited companies are run far too long with little external help or advice, let alone oversight, that a well-constituted board of advisors or directors can provide.

Company Law and the law of the land recognise, empower and hold responsible the members of a company’s board of directors, to stringent legal and statutory criteria; for all intent and purposes, it doesn’t recognise any locus standi for a member of the board of advisors. For this very reason, people who don’t want to deal with the legal liabilities of being board members may be open to being a member of a company’s board of advisors.

The reason why am I so bullish on a board of directors or advisors is that I see a board playing the same role for a company that a good mentor would play for an individual. In other words, it acts as a sounding board, an experienced hand to guide through the shoals of business and someone to keep honesty intact.

In the case of my friend who wondered whether to give his CEO-candidate equity in the company; and if so, how to structure the vesting or earn-out of the equity, and how to handle equity to his current general managers, he sought help from us, his peers, as well as an HR consultant from the local management institute. Consultants can bring value with their external viewpoint, domain expertise and articulate the options available. But they do this with little context about the business.

On the other hand, a board member would have the larger context of a business, the history of the key staff and the challenges the business faces. So, when they bring their expertise of having seen and handled equity structuring in other companies and make recommendations, they do so within the specific context of your business.

Such a context may include constraints that one has, commitments one has already made, and contributions other long time employees have made. They may also understand the blind spots, prejudices and weaknesses, and be in a position to champion a course of action in a far more an effective manner than a consultant.

As business operational heads, most of us don’t think twice about seeking external expertise, like hiring an IT or a PR consultant or an intellectual property lawyer. We would be better off constituting an operational board of advisors, who can not only bring in such subject-matter experts, but can also provide a sustained, steadying hand over time to our businesses and ourselves as leaders.

This article first appeared in Outlook Business in August 2008.

Hiring for a startup

August 12, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

From my latest article, the first in the second phase of the Start-up Logic entrepreneurship series in the Hindu BusinessLine.

Her father is in the lobby, waiting to meet you,” I was told. I wasn’t sure I had heard right, so when I stepped out into the little passage that served as the “lobby” of our start-up, there was indeed a gentleman, probably in his late fifties, waiting there. Granted it’s not every new employee’s father who travels 2,000 km to meet her prospective employers, but as a start-up you should expect the unexpected. More importantly, be prepar ed to do the unexpected to find, hire and retain the right people.

Read the rest here.

Five reasons why you should switch to Open Office today…

July 11, 2008 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

In these last ninety days I have learnt a whole lot more than any forty-five year old should legitimately have to learn about software – but the good news is that it has all been good. A couple of posts ago, I talked, ok likely gushed, about how I have been using Zoho.writer and Zoho.sheet in a quest to be free of my desktop Microsoft Office suite. I have been using Microsoft Word at least since the mid to late eighties (yep, that’s 198x) when I wrote my PhD thesis with it (I think I used WordStar for my MS thesis). Since then having spent most of my working life in marketing and trying to raise money meant working Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint like there is no tomorrow. In the late nineties I actually prototyped application UIs with PowerPoint, including mouseovers and sliding drop-down menus. In other words I could make both PowerPoint and Word sing – why be modest!

This was all the more reason I was surprised at how well both Writer and Sheet in Zoho worked. Somewhere in the dawn of time or maybe the early 2000s, when I got the bright idea to transition to free software, I downloaded OpenOffice and within one use session got so disenchanted and had to wait until this year to even try Zoho. But neither Zoho, nor Google docs, who’s spreadsheet application is pretty good, could hold a candle to Microsoft Powerpoint. Guess just to build my character further, the new laptops my lovely wife (LW) and I got had Microsoft Works, which for reasons I can’t fathom has its own native format. Thank god for Rich Text (RTF) that I could move documents around – assuming we remembered (each time) to switch the Save As filetype to Rich Text Format (of course our friends at Microsoft have not deemed it necessary for users to set, say Rich Text Format .rtf or Word 97 .doc as the native format). Which brings me to the point of this post.

I went back to OpenOffice.org and downloaded the latest OpenOffice 2.4.1 and what an epiphany! The acid test for me was in opening, editing and saving some reasonably complicated PowerPoint presentations my colleagues had created (in MS PowerPoint 2003) with no loss of fidelity! Since then I have written a couple of articles in OpenOffice.org Writer, laid out a (short) magazine, worked with a number of my old Excel sheets including creating a few new ones and really gone to town with their presentation software OpenOffice.org Impress (can’t say I am too hot about the name).

So here are my top 5 reasons

[5] Its Free; OpenSource and extensibilityPublish Post
[4] Cross platform, Zoho and Googledocs support
[3] OpenOffice.org Writer (word processor)
[2] OpenOffice.org Calc (the spreadsheet)
[1] OpenOffice.org Impress (presentation)

Of course I have not yet used the database, math or drawing tools – all of which seem promising and make OpenOffice far more than Microsoft Office and make only give us more reasons to switch sooner!

K Srikrishna