Milk of Value : Entrepreneurial Nectar

More than 20 years ago, I found fancy with a line of curiosity. It was this. What do entrepreneurs do to make their firms ‘professional’? If we had answers to this question, we would know what new entrepreneurs could do to scale businesses, grow revenues and provide employment to India’s teeming millions.

I was amply warned. “You’re going after a tough problem”, said my research guide. College friends and scholars said “entrepreneurs don’t give that time for us researchers in real life”. Suffice it to say, I persisted. I came close to the phenomenon of my original question. I was fortunate to present the linkage between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning styles at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India. Prof. Dwijendra Tripathi’s words for me were very encouraging. He announced at the panel, that my research was at once ‘exploratory’ and ‘intuitive’ in design. But that is another story.

Let me first say I am glad I at least tried with the resources I had to meet with Dr. Verghese Kurien, whose memory today is commemorated as National Milk Day in India. On one of my trips to Village Bhat, I took a detour to Anand, where my mother’s cousin and her husband had served for years in social service and community health. Their local knowledge helped me at least see the utilities of the place and the rural economic engine. Folklore has it there, that Dr. Kurien impressed a Swedish delegation enough that he too was seized by the opportunity in reciprocation. That his cousin Ravi Mathai was IIM’s first founder came a distant second in reasons for the Amul Story. For some reason, the cause was so overpowering, that some of Dr. Kurien’s approaches were domineering enough to keep away middlemen and their support systems. In hindsight, the ‘situation’ he experienced may have had clues to his style, and the survival of the institution beyond his lifetime!

I saw some entrepreneurs from up close. One was Clyde Cooper, the dashing and energetic Managing Director of Blue Dart Express. He probably slept less than most professionals, and when at work, had the attention of an eagle. To pass Blue Dart’s Personnel Policy Manual through him was an experience in itself. When I saw the draft return to me via my supervisor, the affable Vasudevan Srinivasan; I was in for a ride of my lifetime. With bold red upward revisions of per diem allowances for drivers of inter-city surface transport trucks, I realized; Clyde paid more than an opportunity cost to operationalize his ‘fleet’. He knew operating realities from up close. In another instance, the grand big-hearted Homi Mistry took me to witness the entrepreneur’s dealing with ethics. He asked me to accompany him to a consignee’s address. He took a letter from Clyde explaining how a shipment was wrongly passed through the operations hub, due to poor vigilance, and a compensation amount was given to the consignee. Clyde was not a mere perfectionist. He set standards, despite infrastructure constraints through example and untiring consistency.

I visited Narendra Kumar Dhand, the creator of this unique firm called Parishuddha Sadhan Yantra in Ghaziabad. An engineer from California, but at heart the patriotic Indian, he set a shining contrast for manufacturing firms. His firm had no unions. They created India’s finest CNC machines for clients such as Mico-Bosch, and other automobile giants. Sensing my zeal, he gave me 90 minutes and more in interview. The lasting impression I have of him is his generosity of character. To endear an industrial worker in a restive manufacturing cluster required extraordinary compassion and focus. Extended further, the practices on the floor spoke for the mind-set of their products. Quality circles for continuous improvement, meant that the intrinsic worth of employees, irrespective of their educational backgrounds was core to the sustenance of the organization!

Another entrepreneur I only had a peep of was the indomitable spirit - Rohinton Aga. Suave, commanding in respect and empowering in accountability, his writing spoke more for me than any direct experience. But his wife Anu Aga witnessed a summer project I did during my post-graduation at Thermax. In those little interactions I had then, I realized that running a scaled up enterprise, was not just about ethics, professionalism and commitment, but also about integrating several roles in a life time- spouse, son-in-law, leader, industry spokesperson and influencer of business policy.

Today, we live in an era of serial start-up stories, none as epic as the ones I have quoted for their tenure, but gargantuan in appetite and perhaps unrealistic in valuation. I pause to reflect the innocent questions I had about what entrepreneurs do to make their firms successful. Two decades removed, there’s much in the original question to sustain interest, but the context has shifted on several counts. So apart from whole systems that have institutional perimeters or boundaries, there’s also the question of environmental impact and sustainability of livelihoods per se . I offer four questions as spin-off in an entrepreneur’s context.

1. Is the proposition local or global in vision?
2. Is the cause powerful enough and potent to endear commitment of employees?
3. Is the business proposition reasoned enough to summon risks of economic and psychological nature?
4. Is the model of the human being at work and the human being as customer congruent in the entrepreneur’s own estimation?

What has been your experience in these respects? If not a Milk Day, would it be Energy Day or Bio-Diversity day you will be remembered for?

What's an Entrepreneurial Orientation? Nuggets from Research and Experience

Since the GFC (Global Financial Crisis) of 2008, around the world, optimism in business has not swayed to sparks of excitement or any exuberance of self-deception.  The danger in this situation is the default neglect of patterns that may merit risk-taking. The joke as it were is on us again. We now defend passive behaviors in the guise of safety. There are a wide variety of start-ups that merit our attention. I have had the fortune to mingle with a variety of small and medium sized enterprise who have in them the distant drum frequencies of a distinctly vibrant future, on the edge of sustainable enterprise design considerations and employees wiser from the delight of authentic service.

I am naming just a few to buttress readers' sense of reality. Consider Rajeev Pathak, for example, ex-Wipro. He rushes from village road to city squares between schools of a myriad kind. Consider Vipul Redey, my junior from school  – same space, different approach, after kicking his job at CISCO. Or consider Vinay Joshi in Pune, who is pure play computing and analytics. All in all, am reminded of days, when I wished to formally research the transition phase when entrepreneurs in the quest for growth managed the ‘professionalization’ of their ventures.   While that became a difficult dream then, I am now fortunate to observe the process from up close. Here are some glimpses from the journey for leaders, entrepreneurs, and professionals who may wish to reflect on the dynamics of that transition.

1.       Paradoxes Galore : Entrepreneurial journeys are full of surprising paradoxes. Laymen may find these difficult expectations of themselves. Let us look at some of them.

a.       Weak-Tie Strong-Network : Entrepreneurs network relentlessly. In-person interactions with people who have complementary capabilities and interests are a general interaction pattern  for entrepreneurs. The paradox is that they ‘use’ relationships for an ‘end’ in mind, so their focus is not on the depth of the relationship, but of the ‘value’ in the interaction. Whether they embellish the relationship with affection, authenticity or warmth is secondary to what they wish to accomplish in the near to immediate term. You may find it surprising how they land up to a second interaction long after the first as if there were no break in time!

b.      Autonomy : Interdependence Polarity : Sociologically speaking, entrepreneurs, especially first-generation ones are social misfits, who seek to stamp out of expectations of conformance through a journey of individuation. They take a psychological risk of alienation, and the more successful ones, come to depend on the society they rebel in only to seek the support of those they first distanced themselves before.  

c.       Self-Help : Formalization Paradox  : Entrepreneurs are known to tie-up informally to enable each other. However, as expansion becomes inevitable, the remnants of bureaucracy or formalization could undermine self-help in entrepreneurial networks too. Hence CEO forum retreats, and even recent attempts in India to formalize expansionist modes of American style business networks over breakfast or lunches hinge on norms and rules of membership.

2.       Entrepreneurial Orientation : I first came across this term in the 1990s when Lumpkin and Dess made it to the Strategic Management Journal with their pentagon like constructs. They have a process view rather than a content view to the concept of entrepreneurship, and as such if any among the five below are diminished, entrepreneurial orientation would suffer. I now offer a distillation of the same given hairs lost on my head in coming to terms with the phenomena that holds these terms up.

a.       Competitive Aggressiveness : This is the entrepreneur’s parallel to the day job employee’s need for achievement or the drive to acquire. It is about venturing all parts of the chain in entirety  ahead of competition – opportunity, organisation set-up and the commercial exchange between customer and the firm.

b.      Pro-activeness : This is a judgement formed in anticipatory readiness distinct from mere initiative taking in the everyday life of an organisation man. If it were Kasturbhai Lalbhai who revolutionised textile manufacturing in Gujarat, today, perhaps Chiddanand’s characters in his book The Horse that flew stand out in context.

c.       Autonomy : An entrepreneur’s autonomy is deep grit of will rising far above mere freedom to pursue an approach to implementing formal processes at the work-place.

d.      Innovation : Essentially of Schumpeterian origin, any disruptive introduction into the value stream of the marketplace was considered innovation. Today, we know that intangible process innovations deflect economic value far in excess of algorithmic proportion than discrete manufacturing or high-sea trading of the past.

e.      Risk-Taking : As alluded to before, entrepreneurial risk is about going against the grain of societal trends and is marked by the willingness to be ostracised for such deviance. Entrepreneurs run twin risks of financial and psychological kind. Intrapreneurs count on being shielded of financial risks. Entrepreneurs also develop the fine art of distinguishing between impulsive hyper-activity and measured stretch of unprecedented nature.  This is also distinct from much touted risk-taking that is spoken of in professional circles as mark of exemplary business acumen.

3.       Glimpse of a Human Dynamic : There is a distinct relationship between entrepreneurial orientation and learning styles of professionals. In my own research it was known to us that engineers in middle-management cadres saw their firms as entrepreneurially oriented or not depending on their learning styles. 

 To put it crisply, the phenomenon we observed was this : If managers adapted in formal organisations such that they gave in to context, by examining inter-personally rich learning, they saw their firms as more organic and flexibly postured to interpret signals from their business environment. As against this, those who retained the concept intensive, rule, norm and logic laden learning styles laced in symbols of organisational policy, procedure and formality, saw their firms as rigid, conservatively postured and thus of low entrepreneurial orientation.

Well that in itself is quite a lot for a blog, I think. Am sure, you may like to respond if you need to dwell deeper.  Would you not be curious to know, for example, what with the advent of mature angel investors, what kind of moral imagination and deeply held beliefs are waiting to fruition in the embryonic ecosystem of Indian entrepreneurship today? Let me give you a clue – there’s hardly any formal academics I know of on the psycho-dynamics of such processes in India. Economists still dominate the discourse in linear extension of a vocabulary they gave us on ‘market’ and ‘value’.

Am looking forward to conducting research on some related themes of ambidexterity, innovation climate and leadership in Indian firms this year. Would you know of institutions or individuals willing to fund this effort? Do write in.

As we think, so do we become?

In the last few weeks I have seen many busy hours of toil. They were followed by many hours of restful activity – as in soulful conversations with people from ages 84, old school and college mates  to teen-age children. Witnessed meditative sculptors, handicraft hands, painters, and interacted with writers 

of Indian diaspora of different genres. The tales they hold in their expressions have lessons for me in the way frenzied corporate denizens get about their days at work. Let me share a few reflections.

Anu Kumar, Author

1.       Employees get unrelated development, and employers may not know it. This is an amazing occurrence, when the employee gets to participate in learning events and feels satiated by what is on offer. The employer feels that the arrangement was apt and both go about their businesses without critically reflecting on how they co-designed their experiences. Employers fail to recognise that employees do not challenge their own conditions enough to challenge the relevance of the employer’s offerings in learning and development. At one such organisation, the conundrum was this – the employer felt they did better than they ever did in caring for employee development, whereas the employees felt that the employer’s efforts lacked alignment with business focus areas!

Diaspora in LA

2.       Employers rarely reflect within of what they may be missing in their situation. A consultant’s vantage point is to hear from a myriad voices. While one employee voice was to do with unchecked deceit and overt manipulation of innocent employees, another was to do with short-sightedness of top management in the nature of decisions they made regarding business growth. The folly of assuming omnipotence in turning employee and organisational capability 'on' or 'off'. Authenticity at the workplace is most signaled by those who have control over resources. Yet the vulnerability to face unknowns seems a mirage. In the bargain, unknowns like global warming, mass inequities in wealth sharing and unmindful citizenship rear their ugly forms.

3.       The need to defend status quo needs a healthy challenge from those who want to challenge the status quo. The paradox of defending the indefensible lurks round the corner. The Abilene paradox is a great reminder of human perceptual processes in a group setting. Teams end up committing to outcomes that they do not want. At one organisation, the HR fraternity recognised the signs of their times, but furiously wished to defend what their management wanted to listen to. When the top management listened to consultants they seemed more taken by what they could contribute to larger society than in marshalling the potential of their own employees. Now, why would the consultant be more committed to their clients’ employees than their own management?

Mandakini Mathur of the Devrai Farm, Panchgani 

4.       Whole system is not in the room. The bane of high power-distance cultures is the untended potential of the minions. I have been often met the optimism of an entrepreneur, on whose convictions a possibility in engagement is born. Midwife like facilitation begins almost thereafter, because the entrepreneur’s real difficulty is in getting his team to express themselves more fully to the moments that they see their firm in. Most such organisations have a painful realization that organisational capabilities are group or team orchestrations than about messianic release from constraints.

5.       Rationality makes for superficial defense, reality descends in tears of wisdom. Finally a word about the individual in our times. Schools of influence like Cialdini’s and Hogan’s all remind us that emotionality trumps rationality. Yet, in armors that are put forth as façade, individuals within and outside corporations hold out rationalisations that do not connect with people they try to relate to. In defense of their ‘intellect’ they overstretch generalisations to the extent of mis-reading their situations. When I get proximate enough in calibrating their stances, they recognise their folly, but alas, it may take a lifetime to bring their being to their moments. In avoiding tears, we deny a part of our under-nourished selves. People chase mirages of achievement with such predictability that it may put the solar system’s regularity to shame.

In the noble traditions of Organisation Development (OD), the model of the human being is not just a philosophical alignment with humanism, truth and justice. It is a rapport of congruence and a statement of capability. Like what the Naked Liberal George Menezes shared with me about the origins of Integrity : it is from the word ‘integer’ – the whole. Do we accept the whole person in ourselves? For what greater purpose would people want to avoid becoming who they can fully become? 

Musing on Risk as action

The accomplished Dr. Verghese Kurien passed away yesterday. Some say he orphaned the little girl who appears in Amul advertisements. Social innovation was a huge risk in Dr. Kurien's times. He influenced millions of farmers to cooperate in milk distribution so that animal husbandry became a well supported activity. On my first visit to Gujarat in the 1990s, I desired to meet him, but am glad that I at least got the opportunity to visit the city of Anand to know from up close what the impact has been.Was shown around by my mother's cousin a resident doctor in the area then. He was traveling when I visited in the context of a conference organised by EDI - the Entrepreneurship Development Institute. That was my first brush with entrepreneurship theory and a first-hand exploration too. That was my first paper presentation outside of my alma mater (TISS).

In the same week as of this legend passing away, Kochuouseph Chittilapally of V-Gurad and Veegaland or Wonder-La fame was being honoured by the National Institute of Personnel Management in Kochi on the occasion of its National Conference. 
Mr. Sreedharan of the Konkan railways and Delhi Metro fame was being consulted for his prowess in the same space of time. The contrasts between the 3 profiles, an illustration of risk and innovation ingredients in accomplishments. It is also fascinating that cousins Ravi J Mathai and Verghese Kurien traveled to Gujarat to make their mark on the nation. That some who take risk also innovate may also be true. 

Last week, we went on a social visit to my dad's cousin. Innovative he still is. But risk is not a feature he would take to the marketplace. He has designed and crafted his own furniture, laid marble on the floor himself, developed a functional coconut scraper with his own hands on the welding machine; but he won't sell his ideas nor take it to an entrepreneur. That robs the joy out of doing it he says.

His late elder brother on the other hand was a maintenance engineer in paper factories. He learnt economic aspects of the production process and in his retired life had husk of grain and related material to make for water proof paper, which in bundles, he exported to other countries, from his own backyard.

Perhaps, he cultivated a business orientation during his career, that inspired the output side of his endeavours. 
The younger brother lacked the desire to engage the people in the commercial world. Am not saying the elder one was more adept at risk, but am sure, the brothers defined meanings in opportunities differently.

A friend recently wrote thus : “It has been my experience when moving deeply out of my comfort zone and watching others that it depends what part of a life is being put at risk and how important that part is in those moments.  There is the magic of the pull of the  moment--the taste of the challenge--the internal terror-the adrenalin"...My few bits of learning on this for now as below.

1.     Risk can easily be confused with impulsivity.

2.     Risk is a personally invested experience in the unknowns.

3.     Anxiety can impel risk, it can also grip in ways that control others. 

4.     Intuition and risk being related can make for innovation at times. Reducing risk to a logical procedure of finite steps is mocking at its essence.

5.     Mindfulness may help the self to engage in acts considered risky. Rationality may have little explanation for such choices, as presence in authentic form could augur higher outcomes than one plans for. 

What actions will make for your PRESENCE in our world? Will it be 'risky' to act so?

Small and Medium Enterprise Paradoxes - Scale, Scope and Growth apart

Of late, I am beginning to at least experience a love with enquiry I nursed long ago, and had to forego. That was when I first studied linkages between Entrepreneurial Orientation and Learning styles. It is of some lament that in a world gone global, my understanding is largely from one nation - India. It is also my joy, that being here in India, I have seasoned professionals with whom I can bounce such reflections. I write this short piece as a token of my appreciation for those who’ve helped my understanding.

1.     Venture creation is often a leap of individual faith and investor confidence at times. Beyond the proof of concept and business model success, CEOs and their top teams have less influence over their organisations than they believe they do. An institutional effect in the ecology of the business sector is more at play. Small and medium industry may mistake their size for comfort in autonomy, when they may be skating on the thin ice of a disappearing glacier. Such is the role of the business environment as well.

2.     Scale trumps scope in the near-term for some firms. Scale is trumped when volume loses differentiation. Like the current state of the Indian IT services industry, where low cost begat scale, and now differentiated value eludes the customer. The CEO cannot determine such ecological balance of his or her own accord. The paradox of entrepreneurship is about traversing from social misfit to innovator to community champion. It is a paradox of identity shifts across stages in the institution’s life cycle.

3.     CEOs and their teams can orchestrate firm performance, provided they share a mind-set around what results they want from a shared vision. CEOs need to abandon their ‘leader’ image and mould with the wisdom in the group for which collaboration produces value that none in the group could produce alone. Leaders with individual power often dread giving up for the insecurity of processes for leadership in organisational systems. Such tipping points are moments of deep dialogue or shallow disconnects for the entrepreneur and his/her team.

4.     A Renter or Trader mind-set in governance afflicts early design of organisations in risk-averse firms. Structures and communication protocols that serve such designs will not be able to generate passion for intellectual property or pioneering innovation. A change in such mind-set is about leadership courage and vulnerability, both. The Renter can become a Statesman, provided he or she embraces the technocracy of pioneers in the team. The paradox is of staying on a accreting value chain without having to invest incremental time in acquiring the unnatural identity of pioneering innovation.

5.     Markets are not decided by hard figures of funnel size and feasibility studies as much as by buyer or sponsor intent and motivation in the zone most proximate to value creation. Qualifying for purchase intent is market intelligence as opposed to post-facto wisdom in lessons learnt in pitching for business.

Facilitating such moments are a challenge and joy. The challenge comes from lack of precedent in the relationship. The joy comes from the opportunity to raise questions that delightfully make for progress. The progress in small enterprise is not a function of ‘leader’ development alone. It is about fuelling the aspirations of a team in alignment with shared purpose for which the firm is created. Do small firms retain size specific autonomy? Do they rise to overcome issues of size with a maturing team that enables even more people to experience development of markets, customers and the ecosystem?
This is not a matter of policy paralysis in itself. It is the mitigation of risk in an environment where perceptions shift faster than providers can retain customer attention.