Sunday Posts

Before I make the case for hiring failed entrepreneurs, I must state that I have heard this - for the first time - from someone else. Sure, I can passionately argue about the failed entrepreneurs, having been an entrepreneur and having failed a few times. But that I heard this first from Jim Sphor, Global Head of IBM's University Partnership Programme makes it more than my own idle chatter. When Jim Spohr said that, in a workshop about Higher Education's future where I was present, there was a visible excitement in the room, hashtags rippling into Twitter with surprise and deja-vu feeling in equal measure. That very cold morning in Utah, Jim's main point was about T-Skills, how the ideal employee for IBM should possess one or two deep expertise and a lot of different abilities and interests at the same time. He would go on to arrange the annual T-Skills summit at Michigan State soon after. But it's really when he made the comment about failed entrepreneu...

The big question for many college graduates is whether to work for a start-up or, wait and look for opportunities with more stable companies. In my straw poll, the opinions are split right in the middle.  About half the people think start-ups are cool and fun, and therefore, better to work for. The more practically minded make the point that they offer a range of opportunities, to grow and to learn, which an established corporation wouldn't allow.  The other half feels that working for start-ups are the worst of both the worlds. They offer no security - the point of a job - and rarely big rewards, as most of it is usually reserved for the Founders. Most start-ups also fail. There is little transparency with regard to the finances and working practices of a start-up, and therefore, very little to make a well-informed decision. And, finally, while the learning value is undeniable, the value of that learning is questionable. Even the start-ups themselves often pay a...

That governments are so enthusiastically trying to promote start-up cultures, handing out investment grants and building fancy new hubs, would make Milton Friedman turn in his grave: One can anticipate his protest - it is not the business of government to do business!  But then, democracy in its 'for the middle class, by the middle class' incarnation expects the government to be a job creation machine, and when all else fails, the Ministers say 'let start-ups be'! In fact, they celebrate it: In this affair, failure, the hallmark of government programmes, is some sort of credit. It allows the governments to celebrate the doctrine of creative destruction - ever so cool - while destructively creating a self-blaming proletariat, whose revolutions are limited to ventures and whose idea of nirvana is an Exit. There was never a better mantra invented to justify a permanent bureaucracy. But, at this point, I must stop and make an important distinction. My post is abou...

It only seems natural to hire people who fit the organisation's culture. In fact, the most common excuse for executive failure is the inability to fit into the culture of an organisation. We all have our own stories about colleagues or bosses who were complete misfits and caused havoc. However, a recent post on Linkedin presented the downsides of hiring for culture and that is this: That it breeds conformity. Seen from this perspective, hiring for culture is another 'corporate creep' that at least the Start-ups must avoid, as the objective of a start-up as an organisational form is to confront the status quo. I have observed in my life with the start-ups that while many, most of them, want to change the world, they don't want to change themselves. While their motto is to upturn entrenched industries and introduce new ways of doing things, organisationally and structurally, many start-ups are derivatives of some defunct organisation of the past. This is human: We a...

As the crisis in jobs becomes apparent, many think that the way to maintain the Middle Class society is to be found in entrepreneurship. In their mind, it is a straightforward transition: People not finding jobs would start businesses. In some quarters, those look for jobs are already maligned - 'Job Takers' they are called - as opposed to those committing themselves to entrepreneurial journey, the 'Job Creators'. As always, the reality is harsher than the theory. But my point is not to challenge the idea that there should be more entrepreneurs. It is how to get there I have questions about. More specifically, my doubts are about the new trend of creating university-based incubators, US style, in the universities in developing countries. The incubators are taking the place of 'Placement Offices' or what was euphemistically called the 'Industry Collaboration Office', becoming the last mile of the students' life cycle in an university or a busine...

Wrong question, perhaps! Some of the times I asked the question, I got awkward pauses in return. This is a dinosaur question, so dated, reactions indicated: Going global means being on the Cloud, countries are totally irrelevant in this conversation. As I wrote in an earlier post, Global or Multinational , I think this is one of the big mistakes companies make. Their assumption of flat world is totally off the mark. One has to touch the ground as long as they involve people from different nations as customers. This idea of 'global market', borrowed mostly from the playbook of hedge funds who seem to move money from one place to another seamlessly, does not apply to most businesses dealing with customers. One has to be 'national', multi-national if you like, because markets are national. And, that claim of being on the cloud is based on complete innocence of how marketing and product development work in real life. Once I get past the mistaken assumption of ...

There was a way of developing a business: A company captured its local market first and then went abroad. Indeed, we are excluding Trading Companies such as the East India Company, which was set up as an overseas trade monopoly, and restricting ourselves here to more everyday sort of business. While not comparable to the spectacular rise and ignominious fall of the East India Company, many other businesses trading globally were spectacularly successful. The pinnacle of the 20th Century corporation was the Multinational Corporation, which attained unparallelled power, prestige and profits.  But in the Twenty-first century, even this shining example of business success is considered dated. 'Global' took place of 'multinational'. The usual model of building advantages in the home market before venturing abroad fell out of favour and we had born-global start-ups instead. And, a decade into the new millennium, this idea has spread from the domains of purel on line serv...

Stayzilla, an Indian start-up which offered homestays, like AirBnB, is in the news, for wrong reasons. That Stayzilla decided to down shutters would have made it to the trade press, and further, would have signalled to the start-up community that the age of easy investor money is well and truly over. However, the reason why Stayzilla is making national headlines though is because one of its founders has been arrested by the police, for unpaid bills to one of its vendors, and the big ticket start-up entrepreneurs have requested for intervention from the Central Government as this indicates 'India is no place for start-ups'. In the meantime, evidence emerged that the Stayzilla founders threatened the aggrieved vendors with 'dire consequences' if they pursue them and the Court has refused bail to the accused, creating a bigger furore. ( See story here ) There are always many sides of stories such as these, and it is best not to hazard guesses about what really happen...

I am sure 'career indulgences' appears an oxymoron, there can't be such a thing! But in my quest to do things I love, and also to work with people I like, I have created, at least, the possibility. At this time, a penny-dropping moment of sorts, I am reflecting when I started indulging in dreams! And, indeed, there are many forkways to look back at, like these: 1. Walking out a secure job and an impending promotion, I jumped on the dotcom boat in 1998: Not many people around me were doing that at the time and I had no idea how to deal with investors and their contracts.  2. A couple of years later, when the enterprise became boring and investors became bosses, I pursued my dreams of adventure - going to a country in the middle of political turmoil and business decline - and lived through bomb threats, general strikes and all that.  3. When all that was sorted out and I had won, four years later, I gave up yet another promotion and promises of a predict...

Here is a conversation in preparation: What have I learnt about Product Development through my years of hustle in my quest to build Education-to-Employment and Education-to-Enterprise pathways? Three things, essentially. 1. Most Start-Ups fail because they over-engineer the product.  It is the quest of perfect product that kills most start-ups. Of course, this is what Steven Gary Blank and the conversation around Lean Start-up is all about.  However, I think this problem is not just about the cost, but about the culture it implicitly builds. One can argue that if the monies are available, costs of product development should not be a huge problem.  But, even if product development is well resourced, too much focus on it creates a number of other fatal problems:  First, it makes product introductions really slow, and makes the company fall behind in fast-moving markets.  Second, and more crucially, this creates an inward-looking cultu...

Everyone, it seems, loves an Org Chart. The little boxes of power, those straight lines of responsibility, that one page definition of the hustle of start-up life - neat, tangible and reassuring! It is loved by those who make them, as they see themselves securely placed in one box or another, and by those who demand them, investors, accreditation agencies and bankers, so that they know how to give credit and how to apportion blame! When they are given out publicly, as is usual in countries that thrive on hierarchy, customers treasure them for writing complaints to the big man at the top and salesmen treasure them to cut the chase. But, it is also one of those old-fashioned things that everybody loves to hate. Particularly in the start-ups, where the rough and tumble of daily lives often do not follow neat structures and fixed boundaries, a secure spot towards the top is as desirable as the lovely cabin at the upper decks of the Titanic. In a world where rolling up the sleeves and...

I have always maintained that Start-ups and established companies, small, medium or big, are two kinds of organisations. Rules that make one thrive at Start-ups do not necessarily hold in larger companies, and indeed, they could jeopardise one's prospects seriously. But then, it is hard to distinguish between Start-ups and Small companies. This is because, however much we talk about company cultures and values, it is people who carry them. So, it is not whether a company is a start-up or not, but whether the people that run the company are company-people or startup-people. And, indeed, one could have a start-up full of people who succeeded at big companies, because that is what investors really want. The other is quite rare - companies full of start-up people - though it is now a deliberate cultural objective, and even IBM would say that they want to hire 'failed entrepreneurs'. All this is relevant because of a strange third kind of people, who work for start-ups...

How to create a model of global Higher Education fit for post-recession world? This is not about private equity initiatives spanning the world, the kinds that the American majors such as Apollo and Laureate do: That is about global finance capital buying out assets in different geographies. Nor this should be about what the Academic community dubs as TNE, Trans-National Education, which is essentially about exporting degrees from metropolitan centres to the hungry nations in the periphery.  Indeed, global is, in common use, all about finance capital buying out assets in poorer countries, and extending the cultural influences of the metropolitan centres. But that model is coming under pressure lately: The 'Global' steamroller has perhaps gone too far. The richer nations are increasingly wary of the immigrants, and the poorer nations are facing existential crisis as its 'comprador bougeois', the ones that collaborate and benefit from global finance capital, has ...

Martin Reeves' TED talk, below, makes an important point: That there are other ways of thinking about strategy, business strategy, than the usual, mechanical, pursuit of efficiency. Whether or not you agree with Mr Reeves' point about building a business around the principles of the human immune system, you would perhaps agree that there is not much point in a strategy that crash and burn all too quickly. As for me, I would want to see this conversation, though this is NOT the point of the talk, as a part of a broader conversation about making businesses 'More Human', the title of a book by Steve Hilton (his arguments summarised in the video below). This is not what Martin Reeves is talking about - he is indeed arguing about a cleverer way of making strategy and rightly pointing out that the current methods of optimising is getting us nowhere - but one should remember that Corporate Strategy is built and executed within an environment of ideas, which is mechanica...

I have been through quite a bit - big companies, small companies, failed start-ups and successful ones, big companies pretending to be start-ups and start-ups pretending to be big companies - and despite my sincere efforts, I am yet to discover how to market a start-up. One could indeed say that about Marketing itself: John Wanamaker's " Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half " has been embraced as the justification of the marketing practise. However, while this may sound playful or funny in a big company, such an approach is plain fatal. The company could easily die, and mostly die, before ever reaching the useful part of marketing. But, then, this is perhaps a starting point to talk about marketing a start-up. That there is no money to waste, and therefore, no money to spend on marketing without knowing what works. Which is basically to say that start-ups must market itself differently from the big companies...