Co-optition, The Quest for Access, or, Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

Narayana Heart Centre at M S Ramaiah Memorial Hospital

We moved houses a few months ago, and I needed to go to a completely new hospital for a check up. Imagine my surprise (and relief actually), when I saw the Cardiac Care department at M S Ramaiah, a large, old and reputed Hospital and Medical College, run by – Narayana Hrudayalaya, also a large, reputed and old Cardiac Care Hospital started by the eminent Dr. Devi Shetty! Now, this was a hospital I was very familiar with. It was hugely reassuring to get my check ups done there – and even see the familiar blue saree for the customer service folks – almost like being home. 

It set me thinking about the world now collaborating in newer ways, even with erstwhile competitors, in a bid to win access to customers. (I saw later that the Oncology centre at Ramaiah was run by HCG, a cancer specialist).

Narayana itself, from being headquartered almost outside of Bangalore in a large “health city’, has of late started smaller branch centres all over at least south and south east Bangalore. And now, this shop in shop in Ramaiah!

So this is smart business, right, exemplifying a few business imperatives:

A) Core competency specialisation 

B) Outsourcing of non core work to other experts

C) Competition changing to Co-optition (or, everything being fair in love, war and business)

And right then, I saw pop up on my screen, an ad for a sale at Nykaa, an online turned clicks and mortar retailer of beauty and personal care products (a retailer that my teenage daughter had first told me about some 4-5 years ago as her friends were all buying discounted toiletries and make up from there), of products by Fable Street, another online retailer that sells very attractive work wear clothes and accessories (this one run by an IIM alumna). 

It kind of messed with my brain for a bit (I mean, I understand cross usage of channel, but direct competitors using each other as channels?), till I reasoned that this was the true value of the market place model that Amazon had pioneered. (An article I read recently put the figure of third party sales from Amazon at 58% of total revenue). This is Amazon’s stated intent of “helping independent retailers meet the needs of Amazon customers around the globe”. I think Amazon really made the transition from an e-tailer to a channel provider to a technology company very very smoothly and logically.

So what scenarios work best for this co-optition, or collaboration amongst competitors:

A) Multi party Industry nature collaborations

This is normally for Big Problems – setting standards/ fighting common causes like climate change/ defence and security/ energy/ epidemics/ education/ poverty. 

For example, at the recent NRF 2020, one of the biggest panels featured executives from Target, Chipotle, and Best Buy who discussed the power of cyber security industry collaboration. 

Similarly, Facebook, Amazon, Google and more met with WHO recently to figure out how to stop misinformation on the dreaded Coronavirus. 

Or, in 2013/14 post the Rana Plaza disaster in Bangladesh, consortiums were formed between Walmart, H&M, Zara, Nike, Adidas to ensure safety and better working conditions for their workers 

Open source was probably the earliest version of this co-optition – where varying competing organisations would come together for development. 

IOT is a great area nowadays which needs to see, and is slowly seeing, collaboration between competitors to develop platforms and utilities for seamless customer experiences. Recently, Google, Apple and Amazon, probably the most acrimonious competitors amongst tech giants, unveiled a smart home collaboration, Connected Home over IP. This is inviting device manufacturers, silicon providers and developers across the smart home industry to join and develop new connectivity standards. 

Another area is self drive cars – the trio of Ford, GM and Toyota has formed what they are calling the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium

Ofcourse, when competitors work together, data security/ patent protection become critical areas, and most companies work well on solving for those. In case of any leaks, these collaborations dissolve.

B) Collaboration between select parties to develop new technologies/ products; to address client needs, or to fight a common competitor: 

Probably the most celebrated example of co-opetition success is the 2004 Sony-Samsung JV to develop and produce LCD panels for flat-screen TVs.  “Bravia” and “Bordeaux” came out of this collaboration, more than doubling the combined market share of these two companies.

In 2012, Harvard University and MIT formed EDX, a non-profit organisation that provides free online courses, each investing $US30 million. By end 2019, there were about 20 million students that it had served. 

In 2017, a consortium of automakers including Ford, Toyota and Suzuki, planned to develop standards for in-vehicle car telematics as an alternative to Google’s Android Auto and Apple’s CarPlay. 

In 2016, Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft came together to create a historic partnership on AI. Apple, Google, Facebook, participated in a twitter data sharing project in 2019.  Google supported Mozilla (Firefox web-browser), a rival to Google Chrome, in order to limit the expanding influence of Microsoft Internet Explorer and Apple Safari. At Samsung’s Galaxy Unpacked event in Aug 2019, the company announced four partnerships – of which Microsoft was one, to bundle its Android apps on the Note 10.

Even in the B2B world of tech services that I was briefly a part of, one has seen big competitors work together to win a large contract. TCS in 2018 was in talks with Wipro and Infosys to market its automation software Ignio, though nothing really fructified as Wipro ran the AI platform Holmes and Infosys its Nia.

In tech industries, the need for co-opetition is felt more due to the pace of evolution of technology, shorter life-cycle and high R&D costs. The cost of introducing new technology can be prohibitive for one company. Another perspective could be that these partnerships are short-term co-branding and marketing opportunities.

Pharma sees a lot of these in a bid to discover and trial new cures – In 2014, Pfizer and Merck collaborated on a study evaluating a novel Anti Cancer regimen. More recently, in 2019, Pfizer and Merck KGaA, joined BioXcel Therapeutics in its clinical collaboration with Nektar Therapeutics, creating a partnership to assess a triple combination therapy in pancreatic cancer. And then in 2020, Genome & Company entered into a clinical trial collaboration and supply agreement with Merck KGaA, and Pfizer to evaluate the safety, tolerability, biological and clinical activities of some combination therapies, in multiple cancer indications.

The risks of collaborating with rivals might seem huge but a study by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute found that co-optition, when it lasted from three to five years, had more than a 50% chance of mutually reducing company costs.

But co-optition is not really new – There have been enough examples in History, as well as in ancient legends, mythology and fiction of strategic collaboration between enemies to defeat a rival enemy.

In India, the Rajputs occasionally united against foreign invaders – once under Bappa Rawal, then under Shakti Kumar of Mewar and Jaypal Tomar roughly in the 11th/ 12th century. Once the foreign invasions stopped, the Rajputs fought each other.  Then, the rajputs under Rana Sanga managed to defend their confederation against Sultanates of Malwa, Gujarat and also Ibrahim Lodi, Sultan of Delhi.

Some historians think that Rana Sanga also invited Babur to fight against Ibrahim Lodhi, plotting that he himself would move over to Delhi after both warring sides were weakened. As it happened, Babur was very strong, he defeated Rana Sanga, and started the Mughal Dynasty. 

Globally, while the US and the Soviet Union had not exactly been friends in the times before the WWII, it was their collaboration as allies that had a large part in defeating Nazi Germany. 

Hagrid Looking at the Giant Colony

Pic Credit

Recent popular fiction e.g. Harry Potter, saw both the Dark Lord’s side and the Order of the Phoenix wanting to ally with the giants to defeat the other side (this despite a fair degree of mistreatment accorded to the giants ordinarily by both sides). Ultimately, the Giants joined the Death Eaters. In the famous Game Of Thrones, Starks, Arryns and Targaryens allied with a few key House of Lannister members like Tyrion and Jamie and fought against the White Walkers, the army of dead in the battle of Winterfell.

Why go so far – Indian Politics sees a lot of co-optition – in 2018, the Karnataka state assembly elections saw a farcical situation when the party with the majority (BJP) first claimed the right to form the government, but then had to resign as its two competitors (The Congress which actually had the least votes, and the JD(S)) formed a post poll alliance and staked claim – it is another matter that the government didn’t last very long.

Apparently, in the NASCAR world, co-optition means one racer helping another by working together to go faster until the last lap, before they start competing against each other.

In teen patti/ cards, one has side shows with a competitor in a group to ensure the larger enemy gets slain.

Side Show in Teen Patti

 As the iconic Godfather line said, “keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”

C) Cost Optimization/ Capacity Sharing 

Don’t even get me started about this – the hardware guys want to make software and vice versa, the gaming guys are making voice assistants and so on and so forth. And competitors supply parts and components to direct competitors while their finished goods are fighting for share of wallet! It’s all over the place, and hugely incestuous! 

Apple and Samsung for heaven’s sake! While Samsung’s Galaxy and Apple’s iPhone are arch rivals, Samsung at the same time continues to be one of Apple’s main suppliers of screens.

Microsoft and Intel were “married” to each other for ever it seemed (their Wintel alliance) till the advent of mobile technologies created a split. 

The Star Alliance network of competing airlines, which included Air New Zealand, Thai, United, Air China, Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines, to name a few, was established to save on logistics, marketing and ticketing costs . But we travellers benefitted also as can share loyalty points :).

Peugeot Citroen and Toyota used to have an arrangement to share components for their city cars to the extent that critics said it was one car with three names.

And then there is branding/ white labelling in retail, and actually tech services. Essentially everybody plays happy families in order to lower the burden of capital intensive businesses.

Happy Families / Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam

D) Arising from a partner eco system  

Then there are the companies who are building entire eco systems – Salesforce was one of the earliest. Now there is Amazon Web Services. And the participants in these eco systems are competitors but benefit from the network. I mentor an AWS / cloud computing consulting services startup called Rapyder – they do good work, have a solid client base, and are growing excitingly. Obviously helped on by AWS. Don’t yet exploit the advantage of co-optition – but could very soon. 

In the social impact sector, there are platforms like Lets Do Some Good run by my ex business partner. Her concept when she started was to weed out the inefficiencies of “random acts of kindness” (e.g., too much funding and CSR efforts going to a school close to many corporates, and none going to one a little distance away), and give small NGOs and ISR folks the ability to synergise their efforts. Cooperatives and marketplaces are other such instances – Social Alpha, as an example, has incubated a farmer cooperative called Farmveda, that has enabled better market access and profits directly to a network of farmers in the South of India. Similarly, a market place called Habba, run by RangDe, that enables artisans to sell and reap the benefits of their crafts. Many countries do this, e.g New Zealand enables its wine growers export their products  – all constituents can be viewed as competitors, but in the cooperative model, they leverage a common entity to come together for “the greater good” and enjoy the benefits. 

(As an aside, while the greater good, also known as win -win is a really praiseworthy ambition, it can have very dark results as we know – after all, Hitler convinced a vast population that homophobia of various kinds was for the greater good. In recent times, a good metaphor for Hitler has been Grindelwald of the Fantastic Beasts/ Harry Potter franchise. Anyway, this is a deviation…)

Grindelwald giving the Greater Good Speech

E) Access to a whole new world

This is the pure commercial/ channel play, cross sell to allow mutual benefit, ensuring ubiquity of a familiar brand. The online world made this possible – when instead of customers needing to go destination shopping (including for medical services – a la me going to Narayana), they expected manufacturers and service providers to come to them. The battle for access became fiercer – with players realising the benefit of selective partnerships to ensure visibility across forums – the power of decision then lay in the customer’s hand, influenced less by “location”, and more by other factors – it really became survival of the fittest.

Vimeo, a competitor to youtube one would have thought, allowed publishing of its videos to youtube (as well as others like Facebook/ Linkedin etc) via its “publish to social” feature  – this maybe underlines Vimeo’s shift from a video content making company to one that is making tools for content makers and publishers.

Microsoft offers Xbox games via Xbox live – on Nintendo Switch – its a partnership that is mutually beneficial, though there are claims that it may be ending soon. (It started with Minecraft, and post that, despite ongoing “exclusives” for each platform, the gaming companies started collaborating for better access. Sony has less incentive for this partnership, but there is certainly cross play gaming going on).

SAP used to run Oracle database  and  Microsoft Office is available on Apple computers (Macs and iPads). Similarly, Apple and Amazon combine for Kindle – Apple has a kindle app for iPads, which one would think is counter intuitive. But this is because Apple needs content for its devices, while Amazon needs people to buy more and more (e) books. In this case, it is because the strategic imperatives are different for the competitors for the collaboration.  

Samsung and Apple have tied up for TV services, an area where both have been slow to grow.  

This cooptition also helps small scale companies scale up by pooling resources too (a bit like the cooperative model, but not wider/ multiparty). It’s a rising tide, that raises all boats. 

Overall, there is a time, place and reason for competition, and then one for collaboration – and increasingly, as we are seeing, the same two people can be competitors or collaborators. The world is becoming one large happy family – the Upanishads called it Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam. 

As Abraham Lincoln said, “Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”, and (not to be outdone), Sigmund Freud said “an intimate friend and a hated enemy have always been indispensable to my emotional life…not infrequently…friend and enemy have coincided in the same person”

And as my daughter would say, Ma, duh! Frenemies! 

Communication, the Hallmark of Success

Most working moms and dads recognize these little notes – i used to get about 5 a day, mostly shoved under my nose, and, most importantly, on top of the computer screen – thus MANDATING that i finally pay attention to my child! (I remember visiting a client at a leading FMCG in lovely Vevey once, and his bulletin board chock full of post-its with messages from his 6 year old saying – daad – u missed the ski-ing competition yet again! and such stuff..)

The point is, that kids figure out really early HOW to catch an (unreceptive) audience’s attention to get their point across.

As an organisation that worked in multiple geographies, and so each one having remote team mates/ clients to communicate with often, this was a really big deal. It started with us four partners (who by the way, hadn’t even all met each other when we started! – so ours was a bit more unusual situation than most!) getting on daily calls – in those days, we discussed fairly mundane issues (in retrospect) but we talked every single day, and ofcourse had the email on pretty much 24X7. We still got many “cultural” things wrong! Like:

– One early employee apparently spied a rat in our first office, and wrote an “annonymous” letter to a co founder who was based in the U.S. saying – “is this what you want your employees to be facing?” Ofcourse that co – founder, having never been to India, got very hot and bothered. It took the two of us who were managing the Indian ops to tell him to chillax since almost every house had rats – infact, we should count ourselves lucky that was the only vermin we got!!

– We were a “secondary research” organization, which meant we trawled publicly available data sources for our analysis. Our analysts would call the “raw research” material – a data dump, and often abbreviate it to “dump”. Imagine their horror when Kyung told them that dump in America meant poop!

(See some references to how communication across different cultures has led to interesting gaffes in my earlier post)

But this daily call/ email sure forged a bond – something really really important in a startup! I remember my co founder Debjani being interviewed for a journal, and saying – our big emphasis – commmunicate communicate communicate! Its true, and Debjani specially was paranoid about communication to the point of getting up at 2 am her time to repeat/ emphasise a point to the teams that needed to work on her clients’ requests!

But the outsourced world apart, communication is almost the most important “tool” that you need in business. In fact, at senior levels, that’s all you do – whether it is talking to the street to get their expectations right in a publicly listed company; pitching your co./ products/ services/ people to the next prospective buyer; getting ‘alignment” with your boss or the other department’s key folks on the right way to do things; motivating your team members to work the extra 2 hours when all they want to do is go watch the latest release in theatres and have a glass of beer after! Actually, now that I think about it, the “communication” is almost interchangeable with ‘sales” (see my earlier post on why we all are/ should be sales people . Interestingly, that features my 7 yr old too 🙂 )

It is why there is a whole industry on “soft skills” training, and many dollars being made in teaching the “art of presentation”.

Having made a living almost all my life out of maybe this skill to “communicate” well, I now have a very different perspective – that of how important even basic facility in a language (well, actually not A language, but the English Language) is, to really get ahead in life. This gets set for me personally in perspective now when I teach a class in a government (read public) school in my community. I teach the English language to 3rd graders. These are kids who come from the locality, and have parents from the lower income strata. Some of the kids are really really bright – all of them have that bright spark in their eyes – but, they cannot speak English (the vernacular language they know is Kannada, one of India’s many languages). And it almost breaks my heart to think that these kids in general, (barring the success of our volunteer teaching program) will never have an equal shot at many careers because they cannot communicate in the English language!

Coming back to Achchu, and her figuring out multi modal communication to get my attention, she once sent me an e-mail from the other room saying – Ma! I have to write an essay on a movie for H.W., and I can’t think of a title! (She figured that while I was behind closed doors at my home office, the ONLY way to get me responding to an “urgent” need was email! She was right – I told her to write on Sound of Music!) She even gets the subtleties of – “I know mom is on a con-call, so let me ask her if I can eat forbidden candy. And, I know she will say “no” once, then twice, but the third time she WILL say yes!” Talk about “in your face” communication!

StartUp Dilemma – 3 (When to Stop Doing Everything Yourself)

Last week I got a call from the founder of an ex vendor partner. She is CEO of a customer software and apps development company that is roughly 10 years old. She basically called me for a ref check on a key hire. They are now 65 people, want to expand geographically – not just from a sales perspective, but also wants to open an entity in the U.S., is thinking of maybe creating an employee stock option plan; and ofcourse is beginning to think of exit options – not necessarily now, but atleast consider a possibility in the very distant future. On the HR side, she is saying while she does have a solid core of early employees, she is thinking of hiring senior talent, and of offering her employees benefits that will make her competitive in the market.

So far, her way of dealing with all of this was to do it herself. She said – she’s read more books on finance and accounting now than she ever did before, and she has even attended conferences about company structure etc.

Now ofcourse she has finally realized it’s high time she stopped stretching her own self thin enough to do everything, but more importantly, its stopping her from focusing on what she really should be doing – business development!

Her question to me, as we were discussing this issue, was – what is the right time to start hiring “support functions”. Is it a waste of precious money to get someone early on when you can so easily do it yourself – specially, as in the case with a lot of start ups, you are self funded! Familiar, right?

My advice/ experience as follows:

a) In the beginning in many cases you will deal with these issues yourself. But, it would be prudent to get some degree of expertise in these functions you don’t really consider important – the expertise could be friends and family if you are lucky. But if you are not, talk to as many people in your network to get different points of view. Most importantly, contract some degree of expertise to an expert service provider – you don’t have to hire; but you can outsource – if you don’t need full time help, you could use a project based, or a consultancy model. But think of what can happen if you don’t:

i. Enterprise structure: In our case, we were 4 partners, with very different citizenship statuses (should it be statii?) – In the beginning, we just created a Delaware LLC on our own, and had one of the partners appointed as the defacto “CFO”. Thank god we figured out soon that we didn’t want to do this – and contracted out to a small but respectable accounting firm both in India and the U.S. Otherwise, at exit, we may not have been able to exploit the full valuation due to a problem in what was “seed money” – we faced a hotly debated issue on whether sweat equity was considered enough investment! Uff!!!

ii. Funding/ ownership status: More in the U.S., there are restrictions on what type of funding allows what kinds of benefit – hopelessly complicated to folks not in the know, and you want to make sure while you take angel/ seed money you are getting the right bang for the buck

iii. Tax Breaks: A decision we didn’t take in the beginning – because we thought – why hurry/ we are too small/ its not worth it – came back to haunt us very often. This was the registering of our entity under the then prevalent STPI – if we had done it at the beginning, we would have saved us a lot of cash in tax breaks – as it happened, when we did finally get advice, we kept resisting it – and when we finally made the conversion, we could only do it for a small part of the entity – and it was too little too late (the STPI law expired soon thereafter anyway)

iv. Perfect Book Keeping: Thanks to having hired our CA firm on a retainer and over a cple of years having bargained for a dedicated resource on our account, we had our financial books in perfect order. When we did finally start/ hire our finance department, this resource was one of the first people we took onboard – he remains with us still – and so our history was intact in people as well as ofcourse documentation

v. Finally, during exit : As our acquiring company was undertaking accounting due diligence, our financial MIS/ processes and books were in perfect order – so much so, that a company 150 times ours in size, and an expert at financial services processes to boot had to confess that we beat them at the process game!

The most important part in all of this was – we never – really never, struggled with the boring details of audits and books – we just left it to the experts. Ofcourse, it’s important to therefore get the RIGHT experts – in our cases, our partner was a firm of really experienced accountants, who kind of “took us under their wings” and pretty much mentored us on all aspects. More importantly, realizing the stage of startup – their retainer fees for us was smallish. – it grew as we grew, so it wasn’t entirely charity!

Some 3 years down the line, when we were like a hundred people, we figured – like the CEO who had the problem to begin with – that we did need to take our finances inhouse. Here there was not only accounting issues, but we really wanted to start using our money effectively. So, we started our finance department – our CFO essentially helped us invest wisely, got the accounts streamlined; put in place super practices for sales invoicing in the U.S. as well; helped us quasi – start a financial services business; helped set up our employee phantom stock option plan; in short – became a friend, philosopher guide. In addition, he was the first person outside of the partners that knew of the potential acquisition – and he pretty much single handedly navigated those waters. He made many fans in the process amongst the investment bankers and in the acquiring company ☺. Again, we were maybe fortunate in the person we had join us, but he ensured that we never took the load of “non core” activities.

A similar story can be told for all our support functions – in the beginning we used the services of agencies for Hiring; of a consultant for devising some initial HR process including appraisal ones; and of-course did our own ‘welfare” programs such as they were :). Year 2 we hired the HR Manager – and almost overnight we became almost a copybook HR entity – we started developing documented processes; started formal programs of welfare and engagement/ motivation; in short, became a “company” and not just a “startup”. Our HR folks also helped set up our third service division – which needed hiring of 100 people within a month, thus catapulting us from a small start up to an SMB! And then worked out a really innovative outsourcing solution for ramp up and down headcount – repeatedly! A practice which is still in place.

The same was true of IT, infrastructure and admin support – sporadically outsource in the beginning (we had an all-jobs-man-Friday for the longest time – not very highly skilled but really handy at miscellaneous jobs from getting generator diesel when the power was out (with deadlines of multiple daily reports looming large, and not world class bandwidth, this was our biggest nightmare – how often have we had to cart all folks with USB keys to Cyber Cafes!) to chasing down defaulting carpenters; to arranging bribes to policemen; to fixing transport arrangement for guests; and to finding new office space each time we grew out of the old one – he was invaluable!); but then hire first one, then another, specialised resources till we had a fully functional admin department towards the end. We did have a vendor sponsored resource for IT just like Finance, who soon became our first IT hire! Infact, our head of Ops was probably our first “non-core” hire – we got him when we were maybe 40 – 50 people and had started experiencing the beginnings of growing pains in a people business. Over time, the number of odd jobs this poor gent carried out was astonishing (he got such variety at his job, that it may have spoiled him forever from working at a more staid/ structured environment 🙂 ) – he created valuation spreadsheets when the first few investors started sniffing around (at that time, we had no interest in any kind of fund raising (see post on when to acquire funds here) – but did need to show “professionalism” – so poor Prashanth did that, to moving a few offices, to setting admin and ops processes in place – to getting our first functional process documentation – which later led to our getting the ISO certification; and in general being a good sounding board apart from providing enormous entertainment with his mean dance moves on the party floor!

The good news, the kind of folks that made up the senior guys in these functions became very much our core senior management – they were/ are ALL without exception the kinds you need helping you in an entrepreneurial venture – all wear many hats; all can be generalists as well as specialsist; all are clearly domain experts; but can spot and take on myriad roles. This dynamism/ ability to work – nay thrive in, an unstructured atmosphere – is what after all you need as you grow a start-up!

So, from my perspective, if you are running a start-up, specially one wbich is people intensive i.e., in the services area; and specially if you live in a country where services are not formidably expensive (but even if you are) – just as you have client milestones – set yourself up with milestones for first outsourcing , and then hiring teams for support functions. In our case the milestones seem to have been 50 people/ 100, then 200 and 400..

After all, you yourself have code to write, teams to build, clients to persuade – a dream to fulfill – that’s why you became an entrepreneur – NOT to figure out how to balance balance sheets (mine never did – even in Accounting class in B School!!!)

Coming back to the lady who called me, I think she will finally hire the guy but as a part time resource – her business doesn’t necessarily have the requirement and the spare cash for a full time resource; but she will still be better off than trying to solve for all these activities herself…

Playing to Your Strengths? Really?

I came across this article from the CEO of Gallup Jim Clifton about how his dad advised him to “follow his strengths”, saying “Your weaknesses will never develop,” he told me, “while your strengths will develop infinitely.” This mantra was then a big reason for his success. Apparently this also allied with the Gallup Strength Finder, a tool that has been used across enterprise for a lot of psychographic profiling.

You know, I actually agree with this in general – to be successful, it is important that you work in an area of your strength – this will a) make you work well, b) enable you to give your best to your organization, c) make you happy, and finally d) be the incentive to become even better at it – like the Gallup CEO above said.

But I think to do the above you first need to take a simple step – this sometimes takes a LOT of time even though it shouldn’t – it is finding out what a person’s strength is. It is something that education should direct you towards finding, but very often doesn’t really.

I wonder about this thing fairly often – my kids go to umpteen classes – Dance, Hindustani classical vocal, Western classical guitar/ piano, Tennis, Swimming, Drama – really, they try everything. And this by the way is a continuously rotating thing – in the last 8ish years we have tried skating, basketball, art, soccer, ballet, robotics, chess – what have you. Many of these we give up because the kids protested loudly – it was such a struggle to send them to those classes every week – they would call at really inconvenient times at work – and whine and whine and whine! Others we gave up because it was not sustainable to take them way out logistically.

But what was clear – or started becoming clear was that my kids really did NOT like certain things – and more often than not those very classes were skills they were not good at/ showed no signs of developing. Ofcourse, they very often did not like some things they were good at as well! And herein was my dilemma – should I keep encouraging them to go to classes that they showed promise at (dance and drama for my older one and skating and swimming for my younger one), or atleast kept them at classes that they weren’t good at, but I thought were good for them – till atleast they acquired a threshold level of dexterity at those. I think most parents deal with this, specially if u throw in the “like” equation on top of the “good at/ good for them” one.

I think what I ended up doing probably works for parenting just as it does in corp life – you give everyone exposure to all business functions – so u allow them to test all, and you get a chance to evaluate their inclinations at it (I’m talking freshers here obviously). This is why “management traineeship” in most orgs is a fairly successful one year program. Then you slot folks according to their interest and aptitude.

This allows them to find out what they are good at, and then build on it. One also has to recognize that the more u rise in the hierarchy, you need to have atleast a working knowledge of many functions whilst you keep your specialization active. This is what I had referred to in my earlier blog on focus vs. multi-tasking. Typical corp journey makes you first a generalist, then a specialist and finally a generalist again! (On multi-tasking btw, my 7 year old Achchu has caught on like fire! The other day sitting at the pot executing bodily functions 🙂 before school in the morning – she said “mom, why don’t u change my T shirt while I’m pooping – see we will multi task then!”)

I see this in my aerobics class also – Niru sets up a routine that basically through the week works each set of muscles in a particular, pre determined order – they’re not all done the same day, they aren’t even done in the same sequence, and as I wrote earlier, she varies her routine EVERYDAY (in two months I have yet to see her repeat something – I guess that’s what a true artist does!). But she does work every muscle individually – and THEN builds some up more than the others — the “threshold level of competence; with a view to attaining strength in others” principle.

Look at how academics runs it – most higher level studies have a “core” level – basic knowledge, and then an “elective” level – where you specialize!

What spices up this from time to time is if u throw in a little bit of change – at Gillette we used to have a program of Job Rotation where folks sat at any other employees desk for – hmm – actually I forget how long. I think it was a month.. The idea was, one cross trained a bit, changed the routine of one’s work, and more importantly, developed empathy for the “other guy’s issues” – so it facilitated team work and collaboration. Pretty nifty I thought.

I remember seeing an old Hindi Movie – I think it was called Nayak – where a common man gets to be the Prime Minister of the country for a day. Ofcourse, being a Bollywood movie, he got to perform all kinds of miracles despite insurmountable odds, but the basic premise really was job rotation.

Then ofcourse you have the actual/ real job rotation – my earlier company Genpact was pretty good at this. The head of infrastructure and admin, as an example, had never done it before in her life – she was a lawyer. There were senior folks in HR from business and vice versa. And ofcourse everyone was/ had been – in sales (that’s my next post btw – so watch this space). In that space, maybe it made sense – as one of the HR folks once told me – we are all BPO people – we made this industry, we grew it, and that’s all we understand ☺. Like most home-grown business, early pioneers pretty much have to wear many hats at different times – sometimes many hats at the same time. But the concept is the same.

In our entrepreneurship journey, we kind of took turns at doing both these – but at different stages of our lifecycle. In the beginning, all four of us did everything – sometimes all together, but we certainly consulted one another on every single thing! This was very inefficient probably but great fun and also immensely comforting – remember we were all first time entrepreneurs, with NO clue about what to do – so there was comfort in consensus. As time elapsed, and we became comfortable with each other and also with the whole entrepreneurial thingie, we graduated to our areas of respective strength – Debjani the eternal striver and super networker/ convincer to Business Development, Kyung the troubleshooter and Mr. Client Man to Account Management, Shoma the meticulous process person and executor par excellence to all admin etc support functions and Media Monitoring, our division that was very process oriented; and yours truly into making something out of nothing – i.e. creating solutions where none exist – both in research and information support services divisions.

It doesn’t work in some situations by the way – think Sports – and what would happen if your quarterback was made your goalkeeper – or, as we see very often in India at moments of desperation, when the 7 down/ bowler/ allrounder is sent in to bat at 2 down! There IS something to be said for specialization and making sure you win competitions!

Where it does work ofcourse is the outsourcing industry – this was the very fundamentals of the industry – concentrate on your strengths, and outsource the others. I am sure most of you have seen this funny parody of 12 days of christmas – you should be Indian to appreciate many of the allusions) (specially focus on the 9th day for context), but for those that havn’t, enjoy!

And then not to forget there is the SWOT! I think all Marketing 101 techniques are great – even though simplistic, they really apply to most situations, and can help analyse even contemporary problems. SWOT was one construct we used a lot in our initial days as a business research company. Ofcourse, we always had difficulty finding the “O” and the “T” – we essentially ended up making up really obvious/ simplistic stuff but couched it cleverly – like “macro economics ordain that marginal utility of xyz product is diminishing so there will be a competitive share of wallet participant that will usurp this fm its leadership position” – just kidding – this sentence made no sense, did it ☺?

But all said and done, there is immense merit in finding out stuff you are good at – and then working in that area to hone it further. Now, the problem arises when what you are good at is not what you like doing (and vice versa) – I think that’s what triggers many start ups and alternate careers….book writing anyone? (that’s my future career, you know ☺ )

If all above is true, isn’t it a pity that most performance appraisals focus on weaknesses and how to improve them rather than strengths and how to “make them develop infinitely” ? Is it time to abolish the bell curve? Your vote?

Doing vs. Managing – the Queen Bee vs. Drone syndrome

This last couple of weeks many folks asked me – so why did you slow down on the blogging? Problem was, Tulasi, my Woman Friday for 7 plus years; the queen of our household; my children’s mom and dad, sister and teacher, friend, philosopher, guide – left – to get married.

While this in itself is great news for all of us, and we really lived it up at the wedding; it did leave me with a household to run…

Like any good manager, I have a warm pipeline of resources to backfill any attrition – in this case, my erstwhile second in command Rupa got a promotion, and has now taken over running the household – and I will “decrease household running cost” by hiring resources for cleaning chores lower down the value chain, thereby “also guaranteeing job rotation”.

Whilst all these HR practices were playing out in their usual way in our house, I did have to spend a fair amount of time on different from usual activities – cooking/ cleaning/ grocery shopping/ advising gardener/ pet care ( this last is a LONG story – of how we thought we had 2 girl rabbits named Sita and Gita, and one fine day 7 really ugly looking things plopped out of one of those girls – sending our entire household into a googling tizzy – on care of newborn rabbits. My nephew Dhruv and daughter Riddhi were most active. For those interested, this one is a good resource. Rabbits had to be renamed Ram and Sita) – that I had not even touched – for a good 7 years.

Made me think of the whole “doing” vs. “getting done” thing, and how your attitude towards this split in your management tasks affects your behavior, your people policies, your time management, your pleasure in your work, your motivation and ultimately your success..

I think “doing” is kind of ingrained in us Indians – even our epics teach us the value of “doing” – the Bhagwad Gita’s most famous quote by far is the one which loosely translated means – keep focused on your work, don’t worry about the reward. karmanyewadhikarasthey ma faleshu kadachana. (this being Lord Krishna’s sage advise to Arjuna as he was agonizing over fighting and killing his own kith and kin)

My mom is a prime example – she just can NOT understand our slavery to our domestic help. She has had a speedily revolving door on her help – because she sets high standards, and is not afraid of managing the daily chores herself if she doesn’t have anyone to help – at nearly 70 (the nearly is really important if I don’t want her to skin my hide!) she sweeps, swabs, dish-washes, cooks, disposes garbage AND goes for her 5 miler walks everyday when required. The good part – her house is always sparkling clean and her food is always mummy yummy. The not so good part – she pretty much kills herself doing all this, not leaving a lot of “me” time for her.

In sharp contrast is the principle of outsourcing non core activities – which led to the whole BPO/ even IT boom in India. That one says – do what you NEED to do, the rest – get someone else to do – someone who is more qualified, probably does it faster better cheaper than you and therefore optimize overall cost time and resources

But most of us essentially vary the ‘doing” vs “getting done” or “managing” bit in different degrees – and this proportion of one vs. the other actually changes as we rise in the corporate hierarchy.

That actually makes sense – this inverted triangle is good sound horse sense. I think the problem comes when we do too much of one to the exclusion of the other. Essentially, what I’m saying is that there has to be a limiting factor at each end of the spectrum – so, there IS an optimal range – which determines the min-max of “doing” just as it does of “managing”, that we would be wise to stay within.

I know of senior leaders who are so enchanted by their “doing” – that they don’t learn to delegate – and, more importantly, therefore cannot/ will not be able to pay attention to “higher order” tasks that need to be done by someone in their role – so, it’s the Vice President who still does/ looks at every report that needs to be sent out, hence not spending enough time on core business development or people issues. Now this syndrome – the “doer” syndrome in general will happen when the manager is almost “scared” to graduate to “managing” – his comfort level is in the “doing” – it’s stuff that he was/is good at – that’s why after all he kept getting promoted, and he has probably now reached his Peter’s level of incompetence. (This is a fascinating theory – for those who would like to know more, click here)

Ofcourse, the flip side of the coin – and probably more prevalent is the manager who has so lost touch with “doing” that she is only “managing”. Reminds me of when my daughter once asked me – mom, if all you are doing is telecons and meetings, when do you actually work? I had to explain to her how at the meetings we were actually taking decisions – so it was the culmination of a lot of work, and also therefore qualified as work.

This is reality, right? – at senior levels, you generally manage resources who manage resources who maybe manage more resources who actually do the work – much like the beehive. But you know, then, one has to have really well developed systems to a) enable the worker bees to judge those components of the “work” which need to be showcased to the next level – and/ or escalated as needing help; or b) at the Queen bee level a very fine knowledge of the work and the people involved to sniff out that which needs attention/ correction/ decision…

Corporate science and all, this is NOT a small deal – it is WHY the cadre of MBAs was born and grew. And despite the armies of MBAs, it is still not foolproof – witness the hours spent trouble shooting/ fire fighting rather than doing proactive business development.

I think it may be worthwhile therefore for even senior management to keep in touch with the “core” of the work – there SHOULD be elements of your organisation’s scope of activities that you can do better than most others – and, if those elements are changing – then you jolly well stay abreast of those changes. Its why doctors, lawyers and chartered accountants have to clock hours at “continuing education”. This enables one to be able to fine tune that antenna or, at the enterprise level, those systems that ensure smoother running of the organization, very often enabling value addition via innovative ideas (one doesn’t have to rely on a think tank or “lab” all the time, you know!).

But, more importantly, it helps engender respect amongst your subordinates for your abilities. Its like, in my aerobics classes, I am always more motivated to work-out harder since I see Niru the trainer herself “do” all the really complicated steps – and – better than anyone else! If she just stood and instructed – I don’t think I would have seen the energy I see/ feel in the class (I have seen dance and swimming classes for my kids where the coaches have managed by gesticulation! – those classes were really short lived, as you can imagine!).

Finally, I think for folks used to dealing all the time with earth shattering, world shaking decisions and situations, its almost a “relief” at times to get back to the basics of “doing” – honestly, I used to LOVE brainstorming sessions when folks said – can we figure out how to evolve this framework for a client?

On the other hand, if you don’t “do”, sometimes its almost a negative – someone told me a few months ago, “Sangita, in this company, the minute someone becomes an AVP – you can’t ask them how to do work – their standard answer is – “go figure it out yourself”. After all, I already tried figuring it out myself – I couldn’t and that’s why I went to him! I don’t know whether they forget/ they are too scared to do it, or they just don’t think its worth their while!”

So there you have it – coaching vs. empowerment / doing vs. managing / drone vs queen…. There is no way you can be both fully – and its not wise to be one at the expense of the other.

Maybe this strikes at the root of the dignity of labor question? Its infra-dig to “do” and better to “manage”? Tulasi’s new husband told me with a really fine sneer on his face – “she won’t do “this kind of work” – ie, household chores, any longer – we will train her in tailoring, and she will do that”

Which means, I will be without her – and have to spend time and energy training and transitioniong the new help. In addition, Ram and Sita gave birth to their second litter of 11 babies – heaven help me – I think they are headed to the Ghosts of Ram-Sita Future :(! (see picture! )