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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Being The First Writing in 90 s, Al Ries and Jack Trout made the Law of the First their first law in the celebrated 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing . The proposition simply was - It is better to be FIRST than to be BETTER! Citing a rage of examples from Yuri Gagarin, Charles Lindbergh, IBM and Harvard, their point was that customers always remember the first, and the second person/ brand doing the same, even if they did it better, is usually forgotten. Presented as a Law, this may not really stand up to any scrutiny. IBM was never really the first, as were not a host of brands that came to dominate the market. In fact, Ries and Trout themselves added all those qualifications in their later laws - like, it is not First in the market but first in the mind! To be fair, what they were trying to do is not create new laws based on evidence, but rather presenting the generally accepted marketing wisdom and marshaling the evidence to support it. But, it held - and we got obsessed wi...

In the world of Unicorn companies , privately held start-ups with valuations of $1 billion or more,  global strategy is no longer what it used to be. In fact, the old, dated idea that one goes global only after securing its home market, and having cash flows to sustain far-flung operations, is as good as dead. Getting global fast, rather, is the thing to do, as the copy-and-catchup innovation, as popular in many fast-growing emerging markets, can alter the dynamic for a start-up quite dramatically by capturing large market share in foreign markets and becoming a threat almost instantly. Whatever we may think of them, copycats, imitators, etc., the copy-and-catchup ecosystem in India, China, Middle East and Africa, are made of very smart entrepreneurs, savvy technologists, and investors who are ready to back them either looking to exit in a global M&A or going global through acquisitions themselves. With this, right now, start-ups are usually born-global rather than not, and d...

There is a conflict at the heart of management - the question of culture. Culture will eat strategy for breakfast, said Peter Drucker, and he, as always, was right on the money. And, yet, culture gets insufficient attention in management practise, although not in management theory. Many small companies, who collectively employ more people than ever, think of the question of culture really as a big company thing.  The underlying view is simple - you worry about culture when you are a big company! It is logical too, because big companies are large, somewhat inorganic entity, having to align diverse elements all the time in pursuit of certain objectives. In contrast, small companies are, well, small, organic entities often consisting of a man and his dog, where the business is defined by the opportunity of the day. The day-to-day reality of the small company makes the question of culture, which is often long term both as a concept and in impact, a luxury. But, the point ...

Recent discussions with a couple of start-up entrepreneurs brought up a topic that used to be my favourite: Obsessive Branding Disorder (OBD). This was the title of 2008 book by Lucas Conley which made it to the Best Business Books list of Strategy&Business that year, with a simple and powerful idea that you can indeed brand too much! This was a difficult idea to grasp for anyone involved in marketing, because our worldview can be summed up as, Brands eating the World! Our job, we tend to think, is to claim every piece of estate, real or virtual for the brands that we are custodians of. In the rush to better competition, we intend to leave nothing, urinals to the sky, if we can afford, to imprint our brands. We want to claim words, how cool is when someone talks about Googling something, and even emotions - feeling very Apple, anyone? The idea that we can overshoot the mark is indeed quite unsettling. But, if we look to others, it becomes quite obvious. We suddenly start...