Tag: Dad (Page 1 of 2)

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Let me tell you what happened to my friend…

March 7, 2024 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Capture the stories you already tell. “

This is one of the first exercises we ask students in our course—Personal Success through Persuasive Storytelling to do.

This creates a variety of interesting responses. There’s always the one person who immediately begins jotting down all the stories they tell—be that at work, at a party, wedding or reunion.

Then there’s the person who can’t recall a single story that they tell. And of course most folks fall somewhere in between.

I find myself telling three or four three kinds of stories. These include those

from my own experiences and idiocy as an entrepreneur,
of young (& not so young) entrepreneurs that I mentor/encounter
I’ve learnt as the parent of two young women and
that I’ve heard others tell—primarily my father and business partners

Though my father passed in 2011, my appreciation and understanding of him has only grown—primarily as his stories keep popping out of my mouth.

While many stories my father told were situated firmly at work or around business interactions, the occasional personal stories he shared, usually with a life lesson, have always been special. One particular story of his experience as 17 or 18-year old apprentice in Shimla, was the cause of much ribbing by his kids for the rest of his life.

My father came to the city—Chennai as a 16-year old, two years after he lost his father. An uncle who he’d hoped would help him go to college didn’t do so. With a widowed mother, younger sister to be married and two younger brothers still in school, he felt he had little or no options.

So he “ran away” (only his mother knew) to New Delhi. There a couple of friends he’d made in Chennai helped him get work as an apprentice at an accounting firm, they worked at.

One month the three friends were sent to Shimla, to conduct the quarterly audit at client’s offices. Shimla, set in the foothills of the Himalayas was the summer capital for the Brits (who were still running India in 1945/6). Once they day’s work was done, the three young men (boys?) would hang out at The Mall, what Wikipedia quaintly calls a pedestrian avenue. ie the main drag!

As my father tells it, one evening a young woman walked up to them, grabbed my father’s friend‘s hand, and declared, “Marry me!”

Keep in mind this is 1945 or 46. If this happened even today in 2024, it would be a scandal. So as you can imagine my father and his friends were flabbergasted. One of them squeaked out, “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve seen you here everyday staring at me,” she said. “So if you like me so much, you should then marry me!”

My father’s friend was so mortified, that he could barely get his hand free and run away as fast as he could. My father and his other friend ran after him, and never again did they hang out at The Mall.

At this point in the story, one of us—sure if it was my mom or one of my sisters asked, “Was it really your friend’s hand she grabbed or yours?

My dad gave an enigmatic smile and said no more. From then on, whenever my dad narrated a story, we all ribbed my father with “And, this happened to your friend?”

Now every time I tell a story, my daughters ask me the question, “And, this happened to your friend?” So the story and traditions continue.

My father would have turned 95 earlier this week. I miss your stories, dad!

Entrepreneurship is a Team Sport

May 4, 2022 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

As entrepreneurs it is easy to miss or even gloss over lessons that other entrepreneurs have learnt and more importantly shared! It is human nature I suspect to avoid or deny things that we don’t want to face! I suspect i won’t be th last one to have thought “Oh, I’d never do or feel that way” or “Not going to happen! These are different times or circumstances!”

Umang Gupta, founder of Gupta Technologies recently passed away. As someone who lived in the Bay Area through the mid-80s and 90s, I knew him as one of the many pioneering Indian-American entrepreneurs who paved the way for all the others who’ve followed.

His obituary in the Wall Street Journal recounted his journey as an entrepreneur and brought to fore many nuggets, one of which I resonated with me. It was advice given by my Umang’s father—much like my own did often.

Oracle considered acquiring Mr. Gupta’s company in 1994, but he couldn’t bear the idea of selling what he called his baby—a decision he later regretted. In 1996, he resigned as chief executive and left the company.
“My dad once told me, ‘No victory is final, and no defeat is fatal,’” he said. “I hadn’t paid attention.”
James r. hagerty wall street journal

Mr. Gupta went on to speak about the lessons he took away from this.

“I started to think of all the things I should have done to make the company outlast me,” he said.
One of his conclusions was that he should have hired people willing to challenge his ideas. “Decisions can’t be based just on what the founder knows or his gut feels,” he said.

This has been my experience too. Having good people around you, who can question or challenge you and hold you to account make all the difference between achievable success and avoidable failure!

Ask yourself who around you, whether a business partner, colleague, mentor or a spouse can hold you to account! Better and cultivate that ecosystem starting today!

Carpenters, dads & markets

March 10, 2022 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“Measure twice and cut once” is an aphorism that reminds us to “plan and prepare in a careful and thorough manner before acting. [wiktionary]” The origin of the saying lies in carpentry where if you cut a piece of wood too short, it is wasted and if too long, you’d have to cut again! This week as my class worked on figuring out who their target customers and which markets they should go after, the discussion of measurement and choices came up. Of course the class began by arguing that we should go after the biggest markets and then a few voices piped up that it might be better to focus narrower.

Even as the discussion went back and forth, my mind turned to my father who’d have turned 93 earlier this week. Whenever I was faced with a choice, he’d ask me to figure out, “Are you plain Srikrishna, or Lord Srikrishna?” By that he meant know yourself, be realistic as to scale you want to act upon and focus on what needs to be accomplished.

As my class and I watched a video of Professor John Mullins of the London Business School , talking about how to size and go after a market. He recommends in the video that it might be better to go after a smaller market that you can dominate than a seek a tiny share of a large market (a common fallacy most of do in computing top-down market size). Certainly true especially when we are getting started.

As entrepreneurs it is critical to dream big, but it is even more important to have a good measure of ourselves, before we act. Thanks Dad for the faith, support and evergreen advice. I miss you!

The Art of a Happy Exit

March 4, 2021 / Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Yesterday my father would have turned 92. Though my father had worked for 37 years at the same firm—rising from accounting intern to the CEO of multiple group companies—he was my biggest supporter when I decided to quit my job and become an entrepreneur.

As a miniscule shareholder in my first startup but a major lender of working capital, he was our first angel. While I was in high school, my father used to regale me with a variety of tales, a surprising number of which came in handy during my own entrepreneurial journey.

As I’ve continued to learn from all that he’d shared, I’ve also had the good fortune to working with some incredible people who’ve mentored, coached, supported me and kept me honest.

Yesterday was also the day my first book, “The Art of a Happy Exit – How Successful Entrepreneurs Sell Their Businesses” went on pre-sale on Amazon (USA India). While I wish my dad were here to see it, hopefully some of his stories will live on and help other entrepreneurs.

I love you dad and miss you.

Getting to the promised land – inspiring yourself & others

January 19, 2019 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: wyliepoon via Compfight cc

Last week, my daughter had a question for me about Transformational Leadership. While individually the words make sense, I can’t say I’ve kept up with all the kinds of leadership that’s in the literature, be it servant leadership or Attila-the-Hun leadership. In fact I’m still learning from my students and others. As I read up and discussed with my daughter, I understood that transformational leaders

transform themselves and their audiences in visualizing and implementing big ideas.

With that it’s easy to see why Dr. Martin Luther King and MK Gandhi who inspired him were both transformational leaders. I also realized how this lesson had been shared by my dad but not necessarily learnt by me that day.

“I want you to have this home for the aged built.” Jayendra Saraswati, then the head of the Kanchi Kamakoti Mutt, and our family’s spiritual guru had told my father. This was in the late ’80s. My father, who’d lost his father early in life, had come up the hard way and was keen that he help as many people as he could, particularly when it came to matters of education. By the time of this conversation, he was in a good place financially and willing to spend, what he’d earned and saved, to serve others.

However, the family’s spiritual guru had one additional stricture, “I don’t want you to build it with your money. I want you to raise the money from others in the community and have it built!”

As my father found out, paying for something yourself is a whole lot easier, than getting others to pay for it. It is not that people were unprepared to give to a charitable or deserving cause, but most people in a position to do so, already had their favorite causes to give to. Thus began my father’s journey of getting people in the community to buy into the vision of an old-age home, one ideally that was co-situated with an orphanage, allowing for young and old to both interact, learn and grow with one another.

Unlike in his professional experience, where purpose stemmed from the organization and unlike at home, were as the head of our rather large extended family, he could set the direction, this project required the learning and practice of transformational leadership. In my dad’s time, he did accomplish one half of his dream—getting a functional old-age home off the ground and operating for over nearly twenty years in his life time. And surviving two transfers in operating leadership, when his co-founder passed, then my father’s own Parkinson’s and subsequent demise.

He not only internalized this lesson on transforming himself and others, through visualizing an idea and executing on it, but shared it with me and others. Today as I listened to Dr. King’s last speech in Memphis, Tennessee on April 3, 1968 — the day before he was assassinated, I heard him say

I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I’m happy, tonight.
Dr. martin Luther king Jr.

Keep your needs simple – Lessons from my dad

March 25, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

Photo Credit: visualpanic via Compfight

“Why do you take the bus? Couldn’t you at least take an auto (3-wheeler cab)?”

My father never stopped asking his friend, a Gujarati Jain gentleman, this question each time he visited. Even the times he did come to our doorstep in an auto, my father whispered to me conspiratorially, “He probably took the bus to Adyar and took the auto for the last kilometer.“

The said gentleman, had like my dad, landed in Chennai as a teen with less than Rs. 10 in his pocket. He’d then gone on to amass a considerable fortune in the plastics business. Yet, he maintained a disarmingly simple, nearly spartan, lifestyle. While my father pulled his friend’s leg about his frugality, his own actions were not all that different.

As kids we were always embarrassed, when my father would order idli–sambar – steamed rice cakes with spicy lentil – at even the fanciest of restaurants. Likewise we were flummoxed that he’d check in at the 5-Star Taj hotel with his boss, but choose to spend the night at his sister’s duplex in Karol Bagh. It took us more than twenty years to try and get him to wear anything other than the white shirt and pant that he wore every day to work – even then we only managed to get him try solid pastel color shirts!

My dad lived and breathed his belief to keeping his needs simple. Without my realizing it he’d trained me from day one to be an entrepreneur. Not that I was a good student. In my first foray at being an entrepreneur, I blew nearly $250 (yep, dollars) on business cards. Let’s just say I was a slow learner. But luckily I returned to my roots – when we bootstrapped our first startup. We didn’t buy a computer, we didn’t hire a coder – we began pitching customers. We kept it simple – emails and presentations. We operated out of my co-founder’s apartment and held day jobs while we tried to land our first paying customer.

The lesson I learned was not just frugality but to keep every element of life (and business) simple.

Keep your

business simple, so others understand it. Stay focused
offerings simple, so customers just get it
pricing simple so buying what you sell is easy
cash tracking simple – know where it goes, what you need and have
organization simple – so your team is clear about their roles & what’s expected of them
life simple – early to bed, early to rise, love, affection & exercise

Thanks dad!

Experience Matters – Lessons from my dad

March 4, 2014 / Sri Srikrishna / 4 Comments

“I can line up ten old and experienced fools in front of you this evening.”

My father always began his story with this line. As the professional CEO of a family-owned business, one of the challenges my father had to contend with was the different working styles of the younger generation. The speaker in this instance was one of the founder’s grandsons, who was being groomed to run the business.

The discussion was about the relative strengths and weaknesses of a potential new employee that they’d just interviewed. My father, a big believer in hiring the best person for the job, had expressed the thought that this particular candidate was not experienced enough.

My father’s contention was the young clearly had a big advantage, in both the energy they brought and in not being tied down to the way things were done. But for their business, a fast-growing company in a commodity market, experience mattered and could just not be replaced.

Thereupon a debate ensued on the relative merits of youth versus experience, before the young executive made this assertion about old fools. My father always laughed when he recounted the passion and vehemence with which his young protege made this statement. His response always was that no amount of education – whether football, swimming or sex education in a classroom was as practical as getting out in the real world (or in that field or pool) and experiencing it.

Many years later, when hiring in my first managerial job in California or my startup in India, I found this to be repeatedly true. The fresh college grads, almost were always smarter, had studied stuff that we had not even heard of and thought of absolutely new ways to accomplish things often getting things done just because they didn’t know it couldn’t be.

Yet like with good design (or a good meal) no amount of studying prepares us as having done it before – ideally more than once. Riding a bicycle or banking a car on the curve or setting up a website or negotiating with a Japanese customer all works much better once you’ve done it before.

My father hired more than a hundred folks, with absolutely no experience – often young men who were looking for their first break. Several of them are running their own businesses or in leadership roles today. Nevertheless, he taught me, that for many roles or jobs, experience trumps all. The trick is knowing when you can’t do without it!

My father would have turned 85 yesterday.

Photo by Aleksandar Popovski on Unsplash

Test the waters – Lessons from my Dad

December 11, 2011 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

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“I think I’ll just study the scriptures, meditate and focus on things spiritual.” My dad must have been in his late thirties or mid-forties when he said this to his father-in-law. To the latter’s credit, he did not tumble out of his wheel chair nor sputter and scream at my dad. “That’s a very good aspiration, Kuppuswamy,” was his response.

My dad was recounting how he went through a phase, when he was just plain tired of the rat race— all the traveling, business headaches, dealing with debtors and I suspect a fair amount of family drama—given our joint family, truant nephews and nieces and all the financial responsibilities that came with it.

My grandfather continued, “I’m happy to hear that you are thinking of studying the scriptures and focusing on matters spiritual. Let me help you. Why don’t I arrange a teacher to come to your house, early in the morning, so that before you leave for work you can begin studying the scriptures. Once you’ve done it for six months, you can quit your job and do this full time.”

My dad was greatly overjoyed. I’m not sure if he expected his father-in-law to accept what he was contemplating, let alone to actually help him with it. So indeed as my grandfather had promised, the purohit, a Brahmin teacher complete with shaved head and bare upper body showed up at 5AM the following Monday at my father’s place.

That first day they began with a simple recital of the sloka to the guru (hymn to the teacher). The following day they started with the Purusha Suktam, from the Rig Veda which seeks to explain the origin of the Universe. And on to the third morning. On the fourth morning my father had to leave for Nagpur on an unplanned business trip for several days. The following week, I think he managed to squeeze in two classes before another trip to Delhi. The week after he had to head out on a week long trip overseas. So the classes got fewer and farther. The purohit was persistent but polite. By month two my dad’s travel schedule pretty much precluded any classes. At the beginning of month three, my grandfather let my father know that when his schedule permitted more time, the purohit would return. Nothing further was said and my father never raised the matter of giving up things material and focusing on the spiritual!

For both my dad and me, there were two lessons packed into this one story. When he first approached my grandfather, he was clear in his mind what he wanted to do and was convinced that he should do it immediately and wholeheartedly. My grandfather of course convinced him to test the waters first – which obviously was a good thing. It was not my dad’s travel schedule that kept him from the lessons and his onward spiritual journey – it was that his desire to give up on everything was a passing fancy, a possible reaction to a stressful period, rather than a deeply felt life goal. And thanks to my grandfather he had neither burnt his bridges by resigning his job or caused immense worry to his family by seemingly losing interest in matters of the world.

The more useful lesson, particularly as a parent, was not to react to anything, however insane sounding, with visceral opposition as sometimes my wife and I do with our teen daughters, but to listen, even agree and demonstrate through action that what’s contemplated might not be the best course of action.

My grandfather despite being wheelchair-bound was a jujitsu master par excellence, pulling when pushed and pushing when pulled.

Be Generous – Lessons from my dad

June 22, 2011 / Sri Srikrishna / 10 Comments

As in my worst fears, the call came early in the morning, just before 3AM California time. When the phone rang the first time, I rejected the call, reckoning it was a colleague in India, who’d lost track of time. When the phone rang again within minutes, this time with caller ID showing another colleague’s name, I knew something was amiss.

“Sri, I am sorry to inform you your father has passed away!” At first, I was not sure I had heard right. My first thought strangely was for my colleague who had the unpleasant task of having to call me with bad news. I almost felt apologetic that I had put him in such a position. Maybe it was shock and I was not ready to hear that my father was no more.

Rushed calls to my travel agent, wondering what to tell the kids sleeping in the next room – the next thirty-six hours were a blur – neither Icelandic volcanoes spewing ash, nor delayed flights and uncooperative flight supervisors would get in the way of our making it back to India. The nearly two hour trip from the tarmac to my father’s home felt longer than the whole journey.

“Your father paid for me to go to college and then got me started on my Chartered Accountancy apprenticeship,” said the stranger, who’d come to the funeral. He looked to be about 40 years old. “Your dad was also the one who helped my brother go the United States,” he continued. There were nearly 150 people at home when I got in from the airport, most of them extended family and a good many folks that I didn’t know. Much of the afternoon, was spent recounting tales of how my father had helped someone buy a house, another furnish one and still another get a compound wall put in.

Second cousins who’d grown up in my house abounded and had their own tales of getting jobs with my dad’s help. I recall when I was a young teen, some relative admiring my father’s watch. I was aghast when my father removed it and insisted that the relative have the watch.

That evening I recall my sister and I arguing with my dad, that if he just gives away stuff, we’d probably not have anything – not that we knew what we had. My dad just laughed at first. Then when he saw how serious we were, he said “There’s great pleasure in giving – I’d say more so than even receiving.” My sister, ever the smart alec quickly retorted, “Then you’ll be happy to give and I will be happy to receive.”

It was only many years later that I learnt about my father’s journey to the city as an impoverished young man with three rupees in his pocket. While he became a successful man over the years, he never stopped giving regardless of his own financial status. His life itself was one critical lesson – “Be Generous”

My father Dr. K. Kuppuswamy passed away on the 24th of May 2011.

Be Grateful – Lessons from my dad

August 25, 2010 / Sri Srikrishna / 0 Comments

“I was in 9th grade – nearly 15 years old, when my father passed away.” I could see that my father was already in the past living through those first few traumatic months after his father’s death. “We continued in the same village where my father hand been the karnam – the village accountant.” My older brother was still in high school, two younger brothers and a sister in middle and primary schools. My mother did not know how she was going to put us through school – which she was clear we should complete at all costs.”

“At one end of our village lived the Mirasdar – there were two brothers, the peria (elder) and chinna (younger) mirasdar. I remember their house being a big pukka house. A family friend approached the younger mirasdar for help, when he learned that my mother could pay for only my elder brother to go to school. The mirasdar offered to pay my school fees. The amount of money involved, though small by today’s standards, was a huge boon and put me through high school. I don’t think I thought about it much at that time, besides being grateful for their support. After all in our eyes the mirasdars were the richest family in our village.”

My father after graduating from high school left his village for the “city” – Chennai and then onwards to Delhi seeking his fortune. After three years of being away, my father returned to his village for a visit. He was now employed as an accounting apprentice in Delhi earning a princely 300 rupees. In the meantime he had his share of adventures with his uncle declining to support his college education, running away to Delhi and landing a job, travelling to Shimla and other towns on his job. Wanting to share his good fortune and to thank his first benefactors he visited the mirasdar family.

“I was shocked to discover that the mirasdar family was not at all well-to-do. They lived in a dilapidated house and in talking to others in the village I realized that they had probably been living in genteel poverty for the last decade or more. My youth and naivete, when I still lived in the village, was probably what lead me to believe that they were wealthy. I was all the more grateful and overwhelmed by their act of kindness and charity in paying for my education, when they could probably ill afford it themselves.” My father’s eyes were no longer dry as he recounted this tale of magnanimity.

His story did have a good ending, in that the children of the mirasdar family themselves went out to seek their fortunes and did well – which my father attributes, at least in part, to the good deeds of their parents.

“Things are not always what they seem,” was my father’s advice to me. “Keep an open mind and recognize that we often see what we want – which may be far from reality.”

“Be grateful for what you have and strive to help other people whenever you can.”

Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash