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http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/swaroopch/~3/344867146/ http://www.swaroopch.com/blog/proto4/ I attended the proto.in 4 conference last week (held at the beautiful IIT Delhi campus) and had a very productive and thought-provoking time.
Day 1 was the fastrack “startup school” sessions.
The keynote session was Kiran Karnik, ex-President of NASSCOM, who pointed out that this “recession” is not a bad thing. Just like the BPO and Outsourcing outfits reinvented themselves in the last dotcom bust, this is a great opportunity to reinvent ourselves again during this phase. Why? Because when things are going good, nobody is willing to change or tinker with the processes. And when things are not going well, people are willing to take more chances and bet on newer/different things so that they can survive, such as big companies working with startups or risking new ideas.
The story of BharatMatrimony.com by the founder Murugavel Janakiram was inspiring. The concept maybe so simple and maybe even creating such a website maybe simple, but the kind of business model, customer understanding and outreach, and constant trial of new ideas that they went through was simply amazing. For example, sticking to his gumption that the site should be a paid one and that was the only viable business model, to things like collection of payment at the doorstep. After this talk, I had new-found admiration of his matrimonial site.
The third session was a talk on “Business is a Game” by Bhavin Turakhia, of Directi. I had never known about Bhavin until this day, and after this talk, most of the audience were his new fans, including me. The first audience question was “Do you have an opening in your company? I want to join.”
The talk was about the lessons we should learn from games and sports, and how to apply it to business. And it made so much sense. Sometimes it is the basics that we overlook that make all the difference. This was pretty much in line with my off-late philosophy of “Enough Fundas. Back to Fundamentals.”
Bhavin said that he has read many books and stories about successful companies, and trying to distill why they succeeded, he came down to just two things to run a successful company:
- Gather the right players
- Empower them to make the right decisions, most of the time.
He said the first point is fairly obvious but hard to do. In this talk, he concentrated on the second point, and gave 7 principles on how to do achieve this:
- Teach the Game
- When you play a game, say cricket, all the team players need to know how to play the game - the rules, the strategies, the howtos. If only few of them know it, and the rest don’t, the team collectively will suffer, right? Same for business.
- Share the macrovision
- What is the final objective? Why are you playing this game?
- Near-term targets.
- A team usually plays for a season or a championship. That consists of multiple games, which means there are milestones and targets to achieve. Same for business.
- Keep score
- Bhavin says he likes games like cricket where every kind of statistic possible is analyzed, right from the average score of the batsman on this particular ground to the average scores of the teams overseas, etc.
- In a game, the score is always visible on a public scoreboard, which drives the team in achieving real scores.
- Recommends reading a book by John Hayes called “Open Book Management”
- Measure everything. Don’t focus on more than 2-3 critical numbers. This reminded me of a quote by Bob Parsons (of GoDaddy fame): “Anything that is measured and watched, improves.”
- Keep changing critical numbers.
- Explain why these critical numbers are critical.
- Statistics are fun, make it a game, have real targets, because no one wants to fail a target.
- Bhavin explained that most of Directi employees have 3-4 monitors at their desk - 1-2 for work, the other 1-2 for monitoring live statistics. People love to watch scoreboards and feel joy when they achieve their targets whether they are number of downloads or response times.
- Line of sight
- Each player should be able to link their actions to the outcome of a game i.e. how they contributed to the outcome directly.
- This makes the player feel he/she is contributing to the team and feel he/she is a part of the team.
- Celebrate your victories
- Celebrate the small milestones, especially achieving targets.
- Have a Victory Party
- The act of recognizing > how you recognize
- Align everyone’s interests
- To the victor(s), belong the spoils
- In a game, everyone’s equal and aligned, no separate us vs management, because success of each other is interlinked
- Linden Labs has an internal website to “give love” to other employees who have done good work
- How direct is the co-relation?
- Company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the business
- American universities are run mostly by student communities and the knowledge is passed on to each new batch. And there’s this feeling that “I belong to my alma mater” vs “I belong to my organization” which people hardly say.
When asked if these ideas put a constraint on the size of the company, Bhavin said this is the only way that you can scale a company. To specifically note, if everybody is not able to take the same decision as you, you become the bottleneck ⇒ size constraint on the company.
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© Swaroop for Swaroop C H, The Dreamer, 2008. |
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