Challenging the status quo ….

Over the years I have had a chance to work with a very different teams – startups, large, small, culturaly diverse etc. Often it wasn’t just the size of the team but what differentiated them was also how successful their products or services were, how they dealt with the ups & downs of the business.
Here’s what differentiated great teams
- successful teams had diverse talents who had their strengths and weakness, but they also shared common values and most importantly a common dream
- It wasn’t filled with ‘yes yes types’ but had people who challenged each other and thats how the shared knowledge and experience grew
- Over the years, their successes further nourished their fierce and independent thinking abilities, they thrived on that.
- during high pressure times, shared values, shared dreams became the bond which carried them through

Now coming to unsuccessful teams, the management continuously surrounded people below them who were the yes sayers.
Guess what happens then,
– the management has no one they can brainstorm with
– there are no independent thinkers
– no one challenges the management even if the management is wrong
– each is on his own,
– there are no shared common values because no one even knows what their own value system is, forget that of the company
A big business problem – either competition, economy, changes in technology – is enough to lead that company down the road to disaster.

So next time you are looking to hire for a startup, think carefully about the long term. The ups and downs are going to be inevitable. You will want people who don’t just say yes to you but those who will challenge you, will brainstorm with you and help you grow to the next level.

At Cornell, I had the opportunity to study under Prof Stuart Hart, co-author with Prof CK Prahland on the orginal paper – Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Among all the courses I took as part of my MBA, the Sustainable Enterprise Course taught by Prof Hart, connected with me the most not just because he is a wonderful teacher but also because of his passion and content of the course. Being a product engineer at Cisco in my previous life, I had often wondered how products that were priced so high be able to meet the dream of bringing the internet within the reach of every child on every part of the planet. Internet has truly allowed more people to participate in a global economy. However, its reach is not still happening at the pace at which it should happen and thats primarily because of the cost of broadband being so high. Technology companies in the west have often built products and priced them based on what was affordable to the local customers. Now the same products are being pushed in the Indian market. Because of lack of choice, the Indian telecom players have to make huge investments, and infact they have been quite aggressively making the investments on equipment especially in the mobile space. However, when it comes to broadband, the costs are still high, and the customer adoption is slow. The PC costs have also not come down enough, so the progress to reach out to every town and village has been really slow.
The Tenet group at IIT chennai has been trying to address this problem by creating an ecosystem of product companies, services companies that can leverage the broadband, and applications that will help drive the adoption. There are several such initiatives happening across India. What I percieve the lack of is the full-fledged commercialization strategies as well as serious venture capital funding to really take these experiments/technologies to the next level.
Going back to Prof Hart’s book, ‘Capitalism at the Crossroads’, where he discusses the challenges faced by the current model of capitalism, and why there has been such a backlash against it, it becomes much more important for us to focus and invest more in emerging technologies which will truly help us to design products suited for the local market.

The mobile phone makers – Nokia, Motorola – have seen the opportunities that become available especially in volumes as they introduce the more low end phones. Its time the other MNCs having their local engineering operations start looking at products for the local market which will infact benefit the global market.

This is just the precussor to more writing I plan to have on this topic. More in the the coming weeks/months.