K Srikrishna

The Entrepreneur Life

Tag: Stories

mad formal executive man yelling at camera
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Throwing your laptop—not the best negotiating tactic!

March 2, 2023 / / 0 Comments

“Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?” 

I was in the company pantry, at a major client’s office. They’d licensed a critical software component from my startup which would be bundled with their radio chips to sell to electronic manufacturers.

For the previous half-hour their new VP of Sales, the entire engineering team and I had been in a meeting. Notionally the meeting was between THEIR sales and engineering folks and I was in the meeting as part of the ‘engineering’ team, representing the ‘application’ group. 

The VP of Sales, who had been recently hired for his deep relationships and track record with manufacturers had just returned from a trip to Taiwan and China. We’d been discussing delivery dates and it was clear that the sales vp had made commitments to the customers that there was no way the engineering teams, either the clients or mine would be able to deliver on.  

Yet no one spoke up from the engineering team. Not their VP or any of the project managers. And the VP of sales was not asking but telling what the delivery dates would be. Finally the VP of engineering responded. 

“It’ll take us four weeks for us to be ready, once we have the software.” 

At this point all eyes turned towards me. 

“When will you deliver the software?” the VP of Sales asked. 

Thus far I’d not spoken up in the meeting as I felt it was their meeting. Which it was. But I was not happy! The engineering vp knew that our ability to deliver software depended on their providing us their new hardware and firmware. 

“The software delivery is scheduled for early May. And that’s the best case,” I said.

“Are you friggin’ kidding me?” Their vp of sales lost it. 

I didn’t blame him. I suspect he’d been given optimistic dates by the engineering team and he’d taken them at their word. Worse yet he’d committed things to the customer and was just finding out that we’d not be able to meet them.

I looked at their CEO who seemed happy to let sales tell engineering what they should do. And that too not necessarily in a pleasant manner. When the vp sales continued to press the engineering team and they remained silent, I just lost it. 

“Why am I the ONLY one one telling the truth?” I screamed at their engineering team. “Why aren’t you guys telling him that there’s no way you are going to deliver this in May?”

I then stood up and threw the laptop that was in my hand on to the conference table and said “That’s it—if this is how you want to do business then I don’t want to your business.”

Luckily before anyone else said anything, their CEO intervened.

“We’re going to take a short break. Everybody needs to cool down. Get a drink of water or soda. Or walk around the block. We’ll reconvene in 10!” 

That’s how I found myself in the pantry. That’s when their VP of engineering posed his question, “Is this some kind of negotiating tactic?” 

I looked at him to see if he was serious. And boy was he serious. He was perplexed by my outburst and thought I was trying to play hardball to get the VP of Sales to agree to a new date.

It was my turn to ask a question. “You know there’s no way we are going to be ready. Why aren’t you pushing back?”

When we got back into the conference room, I first apologized for my outburst. Then I made my case that we need to both communicate better while being realistic! 

“Folks I know we’ve all worked so hard this past year and a half. I don’t envy the job sales has to do. Trust me, I do.  But I don’t think we are helping them by not being realistic. Worse yet we’ll hurt their credibility and burn bridges with our customers, which I don’t think any of us want.” 

We then began to have a productive meeting.

Surprisingly the vp of sales and I ended up becoming really good friends, so much so many years later he offered us the use of his cottage in Tahoe when I had family visting. We found we were both similar in being plainspoken and blunt. We both angered slowly but cooled down fast. 

Both our companies ended up being acquired by different buyers and all of us have learned much from one another, prior to that and since. 

I share this story with other clients, entrepreneurs that I advice or mentor and my students for a variety of different reasons

  • The need for clear communications to avoid misunderstandings
  • Being aligned internally before making customer commitments
  • Things that I’ve done that I’m not to proud of
  • How not to handle or resolve conflicts  
  • When do you walk away from a client (or not)
  • – How company culture can hinder or help success
  • Just because we speak in English doesn’t mean we are hearing the same thing
  • Even in prospecting calls as an illustration of how we’ll hold them accountable (of course without the throwing laptops around part!)

I’m sure you have many such stories that you tell. Question is do you have them handy? Written down even if it’s just four or five words? And do you repurpose and reuse them for different audiences, places and purposes? I’d love to hear from you. Share your favorite one!

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If you tell stories (and who doesn’t) and want to be a better storyteller check out the upcoming cohort of our course “Personal Success Through Persuasive Storytelling” on Maven.

Photo by Abby Chung via Pexels

Crafting Powerful Stories in Tech Marketing

February 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

“It doesn’t need any marketing. The technology sells itself.” 

That was our CTO at a nearly billion-dollar firm talking to our sales folks. This was back in 1999. The marketers in the room, including me, looked at one another and tried not to roll out eyes.

As Don Draper famously put it “Technology is a glittering lure!” So it is easy to fall into the trap that customers will be just as enamored of it. 

Ok, here’s the bad news. Technology does not sell itself. 

Stories are what sell whether the brand, a person, a product or a service. 

Good stories usually have a protagonist that the customer can identify with.

It can be someone the customer relates in their present role, whether as a project or sales manager or parent. Or aspires to be such as an athlete or leader or awesome human. 

Great stories are ones that they can make their own and retell!

Don’t get me wrong. Stories, however great, aren’t going to create sustainable demand without real substance in your product, service or offering. 

The customer should not only benefit but it needs to be apparent to them how they will benefit.

And they shouldn’t need a 1-unit college course to get it! 

This is the power of well-crafted stories. They meet three needs:

  • Relatable through empathy with the customer and their problem or need, 
  • Relevance how they will benefit and a vision of what the future is
  • Reason addresses why you are the right companion for the journey from here to there 

As you’ll see in the famous scene from Mad Men where Don Draper pitches to Kodak why their product isn’t a wheel but a carousel!

japanese food in a bento
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The Japanese Salad that nearly broke our team

February 14, 2023 / / 0 Comments

“I can’t believe that you praised that da*n salad!” My colleague and engineering manager was furious. His team mate joined right in, “It’s one thing to be polite, but to go overboard like that!”

We’d just spent the whole day in a conference room at a Japanese customer’s divisional headquarters. My colleagues and I had flown in from India.

We’d then taken the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Osaka. Then a local train and finally a cab to get to the village outside which their factory and offices were.

As we were scheduled to spend two days in discussions and negotiations our hosts had kindly arranged for lunch to be served in the conference room. Not just that, but they had accommodated our needs as vegetarians by preparing a special meal for us. 

It was this meal that had made my colleagues mad! No strike that. It was my praise of this meal that had made them mad.

The meal that was served in rather large bento boxes had vegetable tempura (not unlike Indian pakoras) and a variety of colorful and green salads with sauces. Having spent the previous two decades in California, I found the salads to be exquisite—fresh, subtle and tasty. 

My colleagues on the other hand found the experience most dissatisfactory—“as though we were chewing on grass” in their words. They ate the tempura and had politely made as though they were eating the salads, which were left largely untouched. I was oblivious of their travails whilst busily tucking in!

When we got started on the post-lunch session, our ever considerate hosts enquired how we’d enjoyed our lunch, whereupon I’d waxed at length how amazing it had been! 

I must admit I like my food and do tend to get carried away. 

By the time we returned to the hotel, my colleagues were not just hungry and grumpy but absolutely livid with me.

“Because of your dang praise, they are now going to serve the same da*n lunch tomorrow!” 

And they were right. 

My colleagues did eventually forgive me but never failed to share this story with anyone who was willing to hear it. 

Nowadays we get a good laugh out of it and even share it with customers and partners, who in turn get to share their own stories.

Each of us have stories like this – personal and professional, sometimes funny other times poignant or even sad. Stories allow us to connect with others and build relationships. Business at the end of the day all about relationships.

What stories do you have? And find yourself telling frequently?

If you’d like to learn to be a great storyteller, join us at the upcoming cohort-based Success Through Persuasive Storytelling course.

A Stake in the Outcome – Building a Culture of Ownership

March 12, 2008 / / 0 Comments

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

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

Chapter 3 titled The Design of a Business, begins:

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

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

Ownership Rule #1
The company is the product

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

Storytelling and Culture in Companies

January 25, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Storytelling

Photo Credit: Bindaas Madhavi via Compfight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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