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CulTure MaTrIx What it takes to build a great company culture Page 18
are you holding women back? Page 42
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How lalit agarwal scaled up V-Mart Retail Page 34
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28 Focus or Bust
Digital distraction and lack of focus in the workplace is getting the attention not only of authors and researchers but businesses too. Is this lack of focus on the job a big concern for you too? by brian dumaine
contents
34 How I Did It Lalit Agarwal In ten years, Lalit Agarwal has
18 Cracking the Culture Code
Not enough founders realise the power of culture, and the huge business impact it can have on their organisations—may be because the journey to a great workplace culture is so hard won. Fortunately, the companies in our story are distinguishing themselves by building a culture that’s good both for the head and the heart.
built V-Mart Retail into a `575crore business with 91 stores in 79 cities across 11 states. He’s now prepping to get to 200 stores. Read his account of taking the modern retail experience to India’s small towns. as told to meenakshi kumar
photograph by subhojit paul
by sonal khetarpal
This edition of Inc. magazine is published under licence from Mansueto Ventures LLC, New York, New York. Editorial items appearing on pages 12-13, 15, 28-33, 42-43 were all originally published in the United States edition of Inc. magazine and are the copyright property of Mansueto Ventures, LLC, which reserves all rights. Copyright © 2009 and 2010 Mansueto Ventures, LLC. The following are trademarks of Mansueto Ventures, LLC: Inc., Inc. 500.
on the cover
Lalit Agarwal, founder, V-Mart Retail. Cover design by Anil VK. Photograph by Subhojit Paul.
JUNE 2014 | INC. | 1
contents
June 2014
42
9
06
16
05 Editor’s Letter
06 Behind the Scenes
Companies that ensure paintball is smashing fun
09 Launch
What goes into making a viral brand campaign Entrepreneurs find new models for giving back If you want a secure IT policy, make sure your GenY employees are in tune with it
15 Get Real
By Jason Fried Looking for the best hires? They do more than write a great cover letter.
2 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
16 Guest Column
By Sahil Parikh Do you have emails coming out of your ears? May be it’s time to introduce a project management system.
48 Founders Forum Ten questions on work, life and business for Ajay Goenka, managing director at Rainbow Papers
Strategy 39 Marketing How LimeRoad has built a social shopping platform with the help of its enthusiastic scrapbookers’ community 42 Managing Could your company’s hiring practices be inadvertently holding women back?
44 the Way I work
Chumbak Design’s Vivek Prabhakar seems to be living the entrepreneurial dream. What’s not to like about building hip, cool products, working out of an office that looks like a design studio, and seeing your brand become cool in Japan?
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inc.com
Contents
Top Videos on Inc.com Inc.com/Human Resources
4 Ways to Get Good at Hiring Making a bad hire hurts morale and your bottom line. Inc.com columnist Suzanne Lucas shares tips on how to get it right the first time.
Inc.com/Founders-forum
Alexis Ohanian Co-founder of Reddit On startup growth
“ There’s no blueprint for gaining satisfaction. It’s basically just trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what works.”
Inc.com/How I Did It
Aviv Grill Co-founder of Miso Media On failure
“ I’m not very good at losing. I hate the losses more than I love the wins.”
Use their characteristics as a guideline for your next hires. If you haven’t identified what makes someone a star, how will you know how to spot the next one?
4 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
2. Hire people for their potential
Don’t focus too much on resumes. Otherwise, you may get someone who fulfils your current requirements but isn’t able to meet your company’s future needs.
3. Go for quality
Looking for the cheapest employee who can do the job is shortsighted. Try hiring fewer employees but of a higher calibre.
4. Carefully define the role
If you have just a vague idea that you have too much work and need more help, you won’t hire the right person. Be specific about what you really need.
illustration by thinkstockphotos.in
1. Identify your star employees
editor’s letter
MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr Pramath Raj Sinha Printer & Publisher: Anuradha Das Mathur Editorial managing Editor: shreyasi singh assistant editor: Sonal Khetarpal DEsign Sr. Creative Director: Jayan K Narayanan Sr. Art Director: Anil VK Associate Art Director: Anil T Sr. Visualisers: Shigil Narayanan & Sristi Maurya Visualiser: NV Baiju Sr. Designers: Haridas Balan, Manoj Kumar VP Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ & Dinesh Devgan Designers: Pradeep G Nair & Vikas Sharma
Where are the women? I recently moderated a session of mid-sized textile and food product companies in Panipat. It was an interesting evening with insightful sessions by the chief economist of the Kotak Mahindra Bank, and the Director General of the Federation of Indian Export Organisations (FIEO). Through the evening though, I couldn’t but notice that apart from me, there was not a single woman at the event. This isn’t an isolated trend. The glaring lack of women at business conferences is evident in every city Inc. India has held roundtables in—Chandigarh, Goa, Vadodara, Indore, Mysore, Guwahati. There’s a spattering of women in conferences in Mumbai, Delhi or Bangalore but at best they make up 15 per cent of the audience, and a tiny minority of that slice are business owners. Unequal participation isn’t an Indian reality alone. What Holds Women Back on Page 42 highlights the gender gap even in an evolved economy like the US. Social conditioning, individual choices and gendered corporate structures have held women back despite the huge education leaps Indian women have taken, and the great advantages they bring to a workplace. Isn’t there undeniable logic and merit then in aiming to be a company with the ability to attract, retain and nurture women managers and leaders? Would it be too optimistic for Inc. India to hope that someday soon we can profile a mid-sized Indian company that has made this focus a cornerstone of their company culture? That won’t happen without vision and perseverance though. The audacious task of building a unique culture is often tougher than launching new products and capturing higher market share. In Cracking the Culture Code on Page 18, we see how founders embed values they hold dear into their company’s DNA. These are case studies of worthy ideas but even more of the hard task of persistent implementation. I hope they help you think more deeply about the company culture you’re building.
ONLINE & MARCOM DESIGN Associate Art Director: Shokeen Saifi Sr.Designer: Rahul Babu Web Designer: Om Prakash PHOTOGRAPHY Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi Community Team SENioR Manager: Astha Nagrath Khanna Associate: Akarshan Sapra Sales & Marketing Vice president: NC Singh (+91 9901300772) National Manager (Print & Online) Rajesh Kandari (+91 98111 40424) National Manager (Special Projects) Arjun Sawhney (+91 95822 20507) Senior Manager (Business Development) Anshu Kumar (+91 95914 55661) Manager (Business Development) Sukhvinder Singh (+91 8802689684) Production & Logistics Sr. General manager (Operations): Shivshankar M Hiremath Manager Operations: Rakesh upadhyay Assistant Manager (Logistics): Vijay Menon Executive Logistics: Nilesh Shiravadekar Production Executive: Vilas Mhatre Logistics MP Singh, Mohd. Ansari OFFICE ADDRESS nine dot nine mediaworx Pvt Ltd A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024 For any queries, please contact us at help@9dot9.in Published, Printed and Owned by Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx Private Limited. Published and printed on their behalf by Anuradha Das Mathur. Published at A-262, Defence Colony, New Delhi–110 024. printed at Tara Art Printers Pvt ltd. A-46-47, Sector-5, NOIDA (U.P.) 201301 Editor: Anuradha Das Mathur
Shreyasi Singh shreyasi.singh@9dot9.in June 2014 | INC. | 5
BEHIND THE SCENES
Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life
Sound system All the sound systems, AV equipment and lights in and around the paintball field are provided by Sound Shaft. Founded by Bharat Bajaj, this 17-year-old company provides technical equipment to concerts, weddings, conferences and stage shows. Their team of 20 engineers have provided audio systems and lights to more than 40 shows of Sonu Nigam and Adnan Sami.
6   |  INC. |
june 2014
The Paintball Co. Gaming Arena, Gurgaon
19.05.14, 4:00 P.M.
Events coordinator Whenever a corporate or a big group comes to play, the team of Ten Events & Entertainment takes care of the coordination, arrangement for refreshments and music for the participants. From May 2014, this seven-year-old company founded by Amanveer Singh, has set-up a permanent F&B cafeteria in this location. The company’s 19-people are based in Gurgaon, Ahmedabad and in their recently opened office in Bangkok.
Equipment supplier The Paintball Co. created the ecosystem in India for paintball, a new sport that people hadn’t heard of till a few years. Founder Sumeet Sandhu started this adventure sport company in November 2005 by opening their flagship paintball field in Gurgaon (in picture). Initially they imported all the equipment and safety gear, but as paintball gained popularity, they started their own manufacturing plant in 2011. Their team of 34 professionals has provided end-to-end training and consulting services to help Karnataka Tourism and Chhattisgarh Tourism Boards to set up their paintball arenas.
photograph by subhojit Paul
reported bY sonal Khetarpal
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News, Ideas & Trends in Brief
launch Sparking Conversations TrulyMadly’s Breaking Stereotypes campaign profiled real people, with many requesting to be included.
courtesy subject
Let’s Go Viral! How to make a marketing splash without breaking the bank That the world of marketing is more and more determined by swipes, tweets and posts is undeniable. Yet, even as marketing blogs and successful marketers extol the virtues of digital marketing, very few Indian companies have managed to craft brands using digital media as a central medium. It’s why Breaking Stereotypes, a social media campaign run by TrulyMadly,
a four month old “modern matchmaking” company is an interesting case study of how to use the medium effectively. TrulyMadly was launched on February 14, 2014. Although it’s in the somewhat crowded matrimonial space, founders Sachin Bhatia, Hitesh Dhingra and Rahul Kumar, all of whom come with many years of e-commerce experience in earlier ven-
tures such as LetsBuy.com and MakeMyTrip, believe their site stands apart. “Nothing has really happened in the matrimonial space since the late 1990s. Even the payment plans of the three major sites are identical. Plus, the profiles on these sites are mostly used by parents. Many young people don’t associate with these sites,” says Dhingra. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 9
launch
So, TrulyMadly was conceived as a medium for young people in their mid-20s to connect—both for meeting new people and long-term relationships. To tap into this segment, the founding team knew they had to get some basics right—a stringent verification process that kept fake profiles out, an equal mix of men and women, and the element of being a social site that appealed to their social media driven target group. With the parents being out of the picture, they also had to figure out what young singles look for in their partners. “We had many conversations with young people, and compatibility is the word we kept hearing. It’s an ambiguous word—so we said, okay, let’s define compatibility,” Kumar said. The TrulyMadly team set out to build a compatibility algorithm where profiles are matched not on religion, caste, astrological charts but hobbies, interests and socioeconomic filters. “Because we saw ourselves as breaking the stereotype of conventional matchmaking, we wanted a campaign that also talked about doing so—of making your independent decisions based on who the person really is and not falling for lazy clichés,” says Kumar. “We knew we couldn’t market this like other e-commerce companies. It’s not a transactional site. We had to have an emotional connect,” Dhingra says. So, when their digital marketing agency Drizzlin came up with this idea, TrulyMadly knew it was going 10 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
All In The Pull Deepak Goel, founder, Drizzlin Media, a social media marketing agency, conceptualised and executed the Breaking Stereotypes campaign for TrulyMadly. The campaign’s success, he hopes, will create a pull towards digital marketing for other Indian brands. What was the brief from the TrulyMadly team? TrulyMadly exists in a market dominated by the matrimonial sites. Much of that interaction and conversation actually happens amongst parents, not the beneficiaries. Plus, that conversation is focused on issues such as caste, education, salaries and jobs. TrulyMadly wanted to encourage people to seek their own partners, and to decide for themselves whether they’re compatible or not. Compatibility gets lost when parents drive the conversation. They wanted to question the stereotypes inherent in today’s marriage market, and to make independent choices. You can really do that when you see people as individuals, not as lazy stereotypes. This was the first idea we pitched to the team at TrulyMadly, and they liked it immediately. To be honest, we had butterflies in our stomach when we came up with it—it’s one of those ideas you know is going to work.
What has been for you the biggest high from this campaign? I think the show is still on—the campaign is growing. I don’t have a sense of conclusion yet. In fact, we want to extend it in so many different ways. The first batch of people profiled was from our social networks. Then, we began to get requests from people to be featured in the campaign. We’re now extending it online by building an application that will enable people to create their own profiles with the placard. The enthusiasm of people has been very exciting. At Drizzlin, we don’t believe in push marketing. Our philosophy is driven by pull. I believe advertising is the last resort for a marketer. You do it only when your communication is not compelling, or when you’re shown up to be unable to come up with an imaginative idea. In fact, when we speak to our clients, we really try to bring down the urge to spend money because we don’t think mega spends give you engaged, genuine connections with your consumers. Connect isn’t only related to money— you need to co-create and converse. Breaking Stereotypes did all of that. Encouragingly, more and more companies understand the value in that. Over the last year, it’s been wonderful that several mid-sized companies have approached us for their social media campaigns.
launch
As You “Like” It
Social media’s influence isn’t limited to the world of business. As was recently seen in the general elections, social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube played a key role in the political campaign. Here are some interesting numbers to mull over, and may be a question to ponder over—could you brands have plugged into any of these conversations?
to work. The Breaking Stereotypes campaign started with creating profiles of people in the founders’ social networks. It was a simple idea, says Dhingra, but one that managed to tap into a conversation larger than the company’s product. “All we did was send a photographer and a placard to create these shots. I doubt if we spent more than `1,000 per profile. It’s just that the content resonated with our target group.” Finding the way to make a campaign go viral is the Holy Grail for today’s marketers. On this account, the Breaking Stereotypes did well. Since it was launched on April 9, it has reached out to 4.5 lakh people through social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Considering that TrulyMadly is a four-month old company, this impressive outreach has significant business impact. Dhingra and Kumar say the Breaking Stereotypes blog received more than 7,400 unique visitors. Approximately 29,000 people have engaged with the company’s Facebook page, and there have been more than 3,000 interactions on Twitter. Together, these social media buzz has resulted in close to a 330 per cent jump in unique users on TrulyMadly. The campaign was also aimed at appealing to both genders, and to focus on a few geographies, mainly Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai to boost membership. It achieved that and has helped the startup further the brand positioning they want. —Shreyasi Singh
Social Media & Lok Sabha Elections, a study by IRIS Knowledge Foundation and supported by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) last year, had said there were 160 high impact constituencies out of the total of 543 constituencies, which were likely to be influenced by social media during the next general elections. Sixty seven constituencies were identified as medium impact constituencies. High impact constituencies are those where the number of Facebook users are more than the margin of victory of the winner in the last Lok Sabha election, or where Facebook users account for over 10 per cent of the voting population. A USA Today article which hailed social media as the biggest winner of the Indian elections said that in the 24 hours following the announcement of the results on May 16, mentions of the word “election” increased by 561 per cent, and mentions of the Lok Sabha rose 150 per cent among people on Facebook in India. The same article also highlighted that Narendra Modi has 14.3 million fans on Facebook, the fastest-growing number of any political figure worldwide for the past day, week and month. That’s pushed him up to second, behind only President Barack Obama, among the world’s most popular political figures on the site. A Times of India article found that after the seventh round of polling, there were more than 50 million (and growing) Indian elections-related conversations on Twitter, more than double the 20 million Indian elections-related conversations on Twitter for all of 2013. There are more than 100 million Indians on Facebook, another estimated 30 million on Twitter. In 2009, the popular vote of the BJP was 78 million and that of the Congress was 119 million. The number of Indians on social media platforms matched those numbers this year, and has likely influenced choices and votes. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 11
launch
A Guide to Modern Giving Entrepreneurs are thinking about philanthropic activities in new ways—and on new timetables changed a lot. You can instantly crowdFrom Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, fund a charity just by tapping your social the titans of American business have long networks, even if your personal contribubeen associated with impressive acts of tion is relatively modest.” philanthropy. So impressive, in fact, that Some people go further, arguing that an entrepreneur sweating the budget for philanthropy shouldn’t be a point-andthe company picnic might think that charclick side project but an integral part of itable giving is something to address down your business. “Community engagement the road—like, posthumously. should be part of every But the days when entrepreneur’s busiyour charitable Light on Cash? ness plan,” says Mark impulses were Not to Worry Feldman, founder and expressed as clauses in As Inc. columnist Naveen managing director of your will are over. Jain, founder of World InnoCause Consulting, a Today, you can pursue vation Institute, Moon Boston-based busia huge range of chariExpress, and InfoSpace, has ness-strategy firm. “It’s table endeavours even noted, “Philanthropy is not about giving money but solvgreat for employee if you don’t have any ing problems.” Solving big morale, productivity, actual money to give. problems, he says, has a lot and brand awareness, “Philanthropy may in common with building and it helps define your be age-old,” says Eileen large companies: Disruption, corporate culture.” Heisman, CEO of the innovation, and sustainability are the keys to success. Apparel maker Life Philadelphia-based Money is part of the equation, Is Good enthusiastically National Philanhe says, but without entreticks all those boxes. thropic Trust, “but preneurial “zest and agility,” it “We make T-shirts, but how we act on it has won’t be enough.
Founders and their Foundations
Like you, they launched businesses from spare rooms, garages and home offices. Today, they devote significant time and energy to their charitable works. 12 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
$61 million
Amount Patagonia has given to date to environmental programmes Purpose: Preserve and restore the natural environment. Founded in 1972 by Yvon Chouinard, Patagonia has donated 1 per cent of sales to such causes since 1985.
one of our founding mantras was to make the world a better place as well,” says cofounder John Jacobs. “Our charitable efforts have increased our sales and helped us forge important long-term business relationships.” Thinking Outside The Greenbacks
Increasingly, business leaders don’t think about charities in terms of writing checks but as causes that can unite employees, customers, and communities—and make people feel good about helping in a variety of ways. Blake Mycoskie, founder and “Chief Shoe Giver” of Toms, started out by
$1.2 million
Amount Mario Batali Foundation has granted to hunger, literacy, and medical research groups Purpose: Batali’s foundation supports several efforts to improve children’s health. Illustration by shigil narayanan
launch
From Good Intentions to Tangible Results
How to be smart about charitable giving Make a plan
There are so many ways to give— and so many organisations to give to—that it can become paralysing. Decide what you want to focus on and why before sweating how and how much. Side benefit: It helps you feel better about turning down worthy requests that don’t map to your plan.
It’s not all about money
Identify the assets and resources you can put against that cause, which may include internal expertise, the donation of products and services, or tapping the resources of your business and personal networks. Look for causes that will boost employee morale and fit with your brand.
Don’t make it about you
donating one pair of shoes to a child in need for every pair purchased. Since 2006, Toms has supplied more than 10 million shoes to impoverished children, and it has taken the same concept to its eyewear line. “Having a purpose behind our products creates a passionate, engaged, and loyal customer base,” Mycoskie says. “Our customers are our biggest evangelists—they spread our story far beyond what any traditional marketing would.” For other companies, the focus isn’t on far and wide so much as on near and dear. Marty Tuzman, president and CEO of
$3.25 million Amount John Paul DeJoria’s Peace Love & Happiness Foundation has given to its Grow Appalachia effort Purpose: To help impoverished residents of the Appalachian region learn to grow much of their own food.
Jenkintown Building Services, a Philadelphia-based exterior building maintenance company with 90 employees, donates the company’s services to local causes. “Some of my guys dressed up like Spider-Man and visited the local children’s hospital,” he says. “We recently did free window cleaning for a homeless shelter after they told us how great it would be to brighten the environment for women who are in some pretty dark places. One of my employees got choked up—he couldn’t believe that he was in a position of giving.”
$20 million
Amount donated by the Spanx by Sara Blakely Foundation since 2006 Purpose: To aid and empower women around the world through a variety of education and business programmes
Beware the temptation to devote your employees’ efforts to your pet charity. You’ll miss a chance to boost engagement. “We ask clients what they love and what’s important to them,” Marty Tuzman of Jenkintown Building Services says.
Don’t do it for the tax write-off
You’ll be disappointed, says Jeffrey Porter, chair of the American Institute of CPAs, because from a financial point of view, “it doesn’t make sense.” But a tax expert can help you avoid common misconceptions about what’s deductible. Your time, for example, isn’t.
$100 million
Ultimate fundraising goal set by SF Gives and Tipping Point Purpose: Spearheaded by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff, SF Gives rallies area tech companies to fund anti-poverty projects in the San Francisco area. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 13
launch
Widespread use of personal cloud accounts for sensitive corporate data: 70 per cent of Generation Y
employees have used their personal cloud accounts for work purposes. The rate of usage goes hand-in-hand with a high level of faith in the personal cloud, with 32 per cent stating they “trusted it fully”.
Wearable technology set to enter the workplace: 50 per cent of par-
ticipants agreed that they would use wearable technology in their workspace when available, or affordable, or had appropriate apps.
BYOD attacks really do happen:
Is Gen Y in Tune with your IT Policy? Report finds younger employees happy to break rules they find restrictive Fortinet’s Internet Security Census 2013 found that up to 51 per cent of respondents (aged 21 to 32 years) admitted they would contravene company policies restricting use of own devices, cloud storage and wearable technologies for work. The research showed a 42 per cent increase in the willingness to break usage rules compared to a similar survey conducted in 2012. The findings clearly demonstrate Generation Y workers’ hardening stance against corporate BYOD and Bring-YourOwn-Cloud policies. The Fortinet Internet Security Census 2013, undertaken in October 2013, surveyed 3,200 university graduate level individuals aged 21 to 32 and in full time employment, who own their own smartphone, tablet or laptop. The scope of the survey covers Generation Y’s stance and attitudes on corporate policies regarding BYOD, cloud applications and emerging 14 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
technologies that are entering the workplace. The research also surveyed the extent to which respondents within this group have been victims of cybercrime on their own devices, and their “threat literacy”. The report also shows the widespread practice among Generation Y employees for storing corporate assets on personal cloud accounts. These trends and tendencies therefore are important for companies to understand as they put together their IT strategy and employee productivity policies. Take a look at some key findings from the report: Strong view that BYOD empowers workers: The survey revealed that 45 per cent of
participants found that use of personal devices empowers them in their work. This reflected a positive upward trend for BYOD as compared to the 2012 survey where only 26 per cent believed it improved effectiveness.
There are high instances of sample respondents being victims of cybercrime, and suffering tangible damage. The proportion losing corporate data as a consequence of having their smartphones attacked, or experiencing loss of productivity from attacks on their tablet devices, are of particular concern. Threat literacy remains an issue:
There is scope for respondents to become more educated about IT threats, and better equipped to mitigate them. Around 20-25 per cent of the sample was able to consistently demonstrate familiarity with the most advanced threats such as APTs and DDoS. However, at the other end of the spectrum a worrying minority claimed never to have heard of terms like cybercrime (11 per cent). There are interesting regional variations when it comes to some of these factors. India has the highest penetration (76 per cent) of BYOD policies and a high level of authorisation (42 per cent) for use of personal devices, whereas South Korean participants reported the lowest level of BYOD at their workplace. Participants in India were also found to have the highest usage of personal accounts for storing financial information (31 per cent). For Indian companies, the findings clearly show a robust need to educate employees on “threat literacy” as they enthusiastically use their devices for critical information. Illustration by shigil narayanan
Get Real
BY
Jason Fried
Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software company. He is a man, not a machine.
illustration by thinkstockphotos.in
Nice Resume. What else you got? We have tons of qualified candidates for a key open position—but I’m looking for more than qualifications. Recently, I posted an ad for a product-designer position at Basecamp. Product designers lead the visual design of individual projects. They also lead the process of figuring out what we should be working on. We don’t hire often, so it’s a unique opportunity for someone, and for us as a company. For this position, I’m on the lookout for the usual set of design skills: clear thinking and communication, great taste, the vision to connect disparate ideas, and the ability not just to dream up new projects but also to implement them. But there’s something else I look for before all that. This quality has never let me down. When I see it in someone, the person shoots to the top of the candidate list. And when I don’t see it, off the list the person goes. It’s effort. I hire people on the basis of the effort they put into getting the job. We don’t define effort; we just ask for it. It’s up to individuals to decide what it means and demonstrate it in their own way. The latest ad for a designer says simply, “Send relevant work samples, and anything else that will make you stand out, to jason@basecamp.com. Extra effort and personal touches will be looked upon favourably.” Unfortunately, effort is rare. Out of the nearly 200 applications we’ve received so far for this position, only about 10 per cent show a level of effort that gets our attention. What does effort look like when someone’s applying for a job? Let’s start with what it doesn’t look like: sending in a standard résumé and cover letter or, worse, just a link to LinkedIn. Compare that with the candidate who sent a link to a custom-designed website that’s all about getting this particular job. People who really want it don’t toss their whole portfolio at me; they pick TION relevant examples and explain the ON FIUCAALIFICATI LIQ A U Q thinking behind them. They don’t speak in
generalities about what makes them great; they speak specifically about how they would be a great addition to Basecamp. As more and more people battle for jobs, making more of an effort than everyone else is a great way to stand out. It says so much about that person’s work ethic and ability to sell his or her ideas. If someone isn’t going to demonstrate those things to get the job, why would I think the person would show them after being hired? Effort also tends to create unique opportunities. In fact, I met my business partner, David Heinemeier Hansson, because he put in more effort than anyone else. Back in 2001, David was a student at Copenhagen Business School. He didn’t have a résumé, and he didn’t have a lot of experience. But he went out of his way to help me with something, and that spoke much louder than anything else he could have done. Back then, I was learning how to programme in PHP, and I posted a message on our blog saying I was stuck on something that I just couldn’t figure out. A bunch of people wrote in, but David’s response was thoughtful, complete, and easy to follow. We traded a flurry of emails, and his responses were equally helpful. He wasn’t even applying for a job, but he made a huge impression on me. Ultimately, I hired David on a contract basis to do some programming. When he graduated, I hired him full time, and eventually he became my business partner. It all started because I asked for a little help and he gave back a lot. Never underestimate the power of extra effort. It’s not taught in school. It’s not mentioned on resumes. But it’s the one thing a candidate can offer to really stand out—and a powerful thing employers can look for to identify a great hire. Make it your own little secret weapon. Follow Jason Fried on Twitter: @jasonfried. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 15
GUEST COLUMN
BY
Sahil Parikh
Sahil Parikh is the founder of Brightpod, a cloud-based project managment and time tracking software.
At a coffee shop last week, I overheard a team of five talk about their next client pitch and what each of them needed to be working on. Like all services businesses, a company such as theirs was built on a model where revenues are directly related to how many projects the team can work on simultaneously. I heard them complain about how they couldn’t keep track of what their teams were working on, and as a growing company it was increasingly frustrating to stay on top of everything. Each day, their inboxes grew exponentially with team discussions, client requests and numerous tasks. Cleaning up their inboxes (deleting spam, responding to people) was almost like being sucked into a black hole that zaps away all productivity. Just like most companies do, the team at this company was also doing all their planning (scheduling meetings, brainstorming, back and forth on budgets), and delegating via email. Having experienced building project collaboration systems, I politely introduced myself and told them they really needed to think about introducing a project collaboration system within their company, and how much that would help what they did. Of course, they were hesitant. Most people don’t like learning new software, and these guys also had the “oh no, not another software to get a hang of” look. So, I proceeded with caution to tell them about Brightpod, a team collaboration system my company Synage Software developed in 2013, and which is currently helping 1,800 businesses across 85 countries streamline their team workflows. I had recently read an interesting article about Apple’s giant checklist to get their products out the door. A big point the article made was not to rely on “tribal knowledge” that is haphazardly passed from one team member to another. Instead, the article 16 | INC. |
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urged everyone to rely on a process that documents all tasks, checkslists and workflows for future teams to follow. I started a brief discussion on educating them all about how a project management software can help them alleviate the pain of inbox overload. Smooth communication Wouldn’t you want everyone’s feedback, discussions and meeting notes in one place and not in individual inboxes? Email was built for one-to-one communication and not one-tomany. Email completely breaks down if you are managing more
ILLUSTRATION FROM THINKSTOCKPHOTOS.IN
Work Smart! How to scale up projects without drowning in email
GUEST COLUMN
than a couple of projects with a few people. A smart project management tool will let you assign tasks, setup reminders and even let everyone in your team to add comments so everyone is looped in. Best of all, everything you enter is searchable so you can find a client feedback from early 2012 in a matter of seconds. Satisfied clients Wouldn’t you want your clients to not flood you with emails? Keeping your clients updated and letting them review your work is just as important as collaborating with internal teams. Don’t finish your project and then involve the client. Instead, make the feedback loop right from the beginning. Add your client to your project management software and let them see your progress. You can even go one step further and let your clients add tasks within their projects. This way, you don’t have to deal with getting a ton of email from your client and then copy-pasting the content of the email to your project management software. Single source of truth Wouldn’t you want to have zero confusion as to when a task is due? Just like we keep a track of our expenses and go back to it when we need to refer to something, a project management software will let you review assignments by going back in time. I call it the “single source of truth” for every tasks assigned and comment discussed. Protect yourself against “this wasn’t included in the plan” or “I didn’t know I had to get this across to the client today” scenarios.
Work visibility Wouldn’t you want to know who is doing what? When you plan everything in one system you will know who is doing what and when something is due. As people complete their work or when clients give feedback, everything will be in one place—no more hunting for emails and looking up spreadsheets. Sharing ideas and docs Do you want to preserve ideas from the team or lose them in your inbox? Imagine developing your business strategy and plan for all your clients in a document and then sharing the document as an attachment with all your team members. Nightmare? Instead, use Google Docs, Dropbox or Box to write/store your content and then choose a project management software that can integrate with these tools. This way, you can easily link your content within your projects but still have version control done by the apps that do files sharing the best.
Email was built for oneto-one communication and not one-to-many. Email breaks down completely if you are managing more than a couple of projects with a few people.
Planning Wouldn’t you want to plan better so you can balance work and life? Success of a project is highly dependent on the planning that goes into it. It is like warming up before a big game. Poor planning may lead to two people doing the exact same thing and losing time. A project management tool is perfect for identifying roles, prioritising tasks and adding dependencies. Make a plan, put it up in your system, follow it and get everyone in-sync.
Meet those deadlines Unlike your inbox, a project management system will let you know when something is due or upcoming. When working with multiple projects and clients, it is important to have a central place to check deadlines and make sure everything is on track. This can only be possible if you implement a project management software that also has a calendar feature so you can see at a glance which project is lagging behind and which ones are on schedule.
Protect against attrition When people come and go, your system will be mightier than the inbox. Losing a team member can lead to losing valuable information. If he was communicating with a client (via email) about an important deal then what happens to all his communication? It’s trapped within his inbox. If all your processes and workflows are in your project management software then everyone has access to everything, even when they are travelling.
Follow Parikh on Twitter: @sahilparikh or read his blog at www.sahilparikh.com. His motto: Life is short. Work smart. Have fun. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 17
Cracking the Culture Code Explained simply, culture is how the people of an organisation think, act and behave with all internal and external stakeholders. While there is no right or wrong culture, there
are effective and ineffective cultures. A great corporate culture can be seen as a strategy that helps to make the organisation more productive. Research at IBM has shown how 25 per cent of the business result is actually affected by the culture of your workplace. Job satisfaction, creativity, and employee motivation all directly flow from an enabling, positive vibe. Read on for examples of companies that seemed to have cracked the code, and are profiting from the wins.
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IMAGES FROM THINKSTOCKPHOTOS.IN
By Sonal khetarpal
Design By Sristi
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Cracking THE Culture CODE
Where
Work is Fun
Aditi Technologies belies the belief that gobsmacking employee perks—a hot air balloon ride over the Grand Canyon or a night cruise to Alaska—is the preserve of Fortune 500 companies. Pradeep Singh, founder of the outsourced product development company, says making his employees fall in love with Aditi has been a huge factor in their success. It’s won them three consecutive outings in the Great Place to Work India list. Singh takes us through why putting their employees’ welfare and enjoyment at the centre has resulted in a great culture the company is proud of.
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What they want to build: When Pradeep Singh founded Aditi Technologies in 1994, he wanted to create a workplace where people would come to work every day, excited. “I wanted to build a company which is like a playground, where people can learn and have fun at the same time.” His outlook on a people-centric
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organisation has been shaped by his nine year stint at Microsoft. In fact, some of the practices at Aditi are indicative of those that Microsoft practised in its early days. Singh was deeply inspired by the start-up culture (think being open, progressive, vibrant) of Microsoft in the late 1980s. Microsoft was much smaller then, yet it aspired to change the world and wanted people to have fun doing it, says Singh. This is the kind of culture that Singh aspired for Aditi. How they’re implementing it: Singh wanted to build a culture with the simple idea that since people spend more time at work than home, they should have an office that offers the comforts of one’s home. So, from the very beginning, Singh ensured
that their office has enough space for leisure activities so that it has an exciting environment for employees to be at. A rooftop cafeteria, carom boards at several corners, a video game room, an indoor cricket field and a gym occupy a large part of their office space. They wanted these recreational spaces to not only let people de-stress but help people connect, loosen up at work and work better as a team. Apart from the fun places to hang out, Aditi’s employee engagement team organises on an average 30 events monthly such as gully cricket and foosball tournaments, floor activities like fireless cooking contest, bay
COURTESY SUBJECT
The Next Fun Move: Pradeep Singh wanted to create a workplace culture at Aditi where people would come to work every day, excited.
decoration competitions, hackathons and celebrations on events such as Women’s Day and Valentine’s Day. “We don’t need a big reason to celebrate at Aditi. We celebrate everything. When new people join in, we have games like treasure hunt, or making butter milk and lemonade activities.” Singh also throws in regular beer bashes or pizza parties in the office every time a target is achieved, however small. Although people warned him against having so many fun activities that people wouldn’t work, Singh dismissed the fear. “Having these leisure spaces and keeping an eagle eye on people’s movements would have made the purpose of the whole exercise futile. We don’t monitor people,” claims Singh. He says at Aditi they are output-focused, and it doesn’t
matter to him how and when people do their tasks. He laughs though, “Sometimes, I do wonder how the hell we get work done. I see so many people in the cafeteria all the time. Some are always at the video game console.” He adds, “I think the freedom we give the people instills the sense of accountability and ownership. There is a feeling of not letting their peers let down.” To demonstrate their commitment to their employee’s well being, Aditi also has an in-house counsellor. Pradeep Rathinam, the company’s CEO, says they want their people to have long term success in life, not just improve their work performance. In most companies, the HR person takes on the role of a counsellor but since HR is seen as a management’s accomplice, Singh and Rathinam were certain they wanted a trained, external practitioner people could go to.
“Today, people share even their matrimonial problems with the counsellor,” says Rathinam. Apart from helping them with life skills, Aditi invests a lot on learning and development initiatives for its people, including management and leadership workshops in India and abroad. There are regular speaker sessions in their office in Bangalore as well. Last year alone, they conducted a staggering 540 different workshops and training sessions across their seven offices in North American, Europe and India. There are also different forums for management and people engagement. One of the biggest hits is their twohour Ask Me Anything (AMA) session which happens once every two months. In this informal forum, Continue on page 22 JUNE 2014 | INC. | 2 1
Hard work Payouts
Perks that people at Aditi Technologies enjoyed in the last nine months for their good work.
Night cruise to Alaska
Balloon ride across Grand Canyon
Wine tasting at Napa valley
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LAS VEGAS
Seven standup comedy acts live in the office
Three magic shows and one mind reading gig
19 parties
12 beer bashes
LAPHROAIG
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Nine bottles of Laphroaig
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Continued from page 21
senior folks that are planning some changes in the organisation are on the hot seat, and anyone in the company can ask questions online and expect to be answered in real-time. During organisational changes, COO or CEO or both will be on the hot seat, and during appraisal cycle, the HR person would be on it. This is done through company’s social media interface, Yammer, which is like a Facebook wall page where people post their questions. “People engage very enthusiastically in that process. I usually get around 40 questions in just two hours. My hands always get tired typing,” says Rathinam. The fact that employees feel they can be vocal in the questions they can ask, and expect to be answered is a testimony to the culture of trust and connectedness, Singh says. “We don’t have a monologue, our conversations with our people is a dialogue.” This culture of conversation, healthy dissent and irreverence has also been partly possible because of the company’s liberal social media policies. Unlike several companies where
access to social media sites is blocked, at Aditi, people are encouraged to express themselves. The company’s Facebook page teems with a range of employee activities such as the cooking contest or the cricket tournament. That page has nearly 30,000 fans— surprising, considering Aditi Technologies is a 2,000 people company. The buzz is evident in the company’s blog where there are numerous entries about people’s musical talents and favourite video games. Together, this has created an environment where people feel entitled to speak out, and have an independent voice. “Every time I give a talk in office, my Twitter handle gets flooded with comments of what people did or didn’t like,” says Rathinam.
photo COURTESY SUBJECT
Three nights in Vegas
At Aditi Technologies’ office, where work and fun happens at the same time.
Cracking THE Culture CODE
Business Savvy In a conversation with Inc. India, Aniruddha Limaye, director, Great Place to Work India, tells us that culture isn’t about soft, feelgood factors (not that those aren’t important!) alone. A distinctive, abiding company culture is good for business, and often massively underleveraged as a medium for profitable growth.
Q
How do you define a great culture? And, what are the tangible business benefits of having one that not enough founders and CEOs understand? A great workplace is where employees trust the leaders and managers they work for and that trust is reciprocated; they take pride in what they do individually and collectively as a team and as an organisation; and they have bonds of camaraderie and friendship with fellow colleagues. As per our experience, we have found that great workplaces are more productive, innovative, deliver better quality of products and services and as a consequence of this they deliver far more customer delight. They have lower employee attrition, low absenteeism, their employees act as brand ambassadors for the company and finally they have high degree of profitability and tremendous shareholder value. RSM Astute Consulting (Member of the global accounting and consulting firm RSM International) carried out a study at the suggestion of Great Place to Work Institute, India, of total shareholder return of 50 top companies that our organisation had classified as great places to work, which are listed on Indian stock exchanges, from the period of July 2008 to July 2012, and they found that these great workplaces, in terms of total shareholder returns, outperformed the market by a margin of three times. Is there a direct correlation between culture and business growth? Not only is there a direct correlation; a great workplace culture is an important causal factor in an organisation’s sustained success. This can be very well seen from the study our US parent did of Scripps Health, a San Diego-based non-profit, health care organisation. From 2008 to 2013, Scripps Health has been continuously among the annual lists of “100 Best Companies to Work for in the United States,” (published by Fortune Magazine in partnership with our parent organisation). In the early 2000s though, the place was
in a very bad state—attrition rates were high, employee and patient satisfaction was low, treatment success rates had dipped and operating surplus was very low. Every stakeholder was unhappy with the current situation. Even the patrons had threatened to stop donating their money to the organisation. Things began to change when the company appointed Chris Van Gorder as the CEO in 2000. His fact-finding led him to the root cause of the problems at Scripps. Every feedback he got said the organisation was neither people friendly nor employee centric. After introducing a host of initiatives from 2002 onwards their people metric and every operational metric has been going up year on year. In fact, their success continued throughout the economic turbulence and regulatory health care changes in the US. The Great Place US team found out that Scripps Health turnaround was because they created tremendous mutual trust among the employees and management, and created a caring workplace. Companies in the mid-sized segment in India aren’t known to consciously work on a definitive culture. Please give us an example of a mid-sized Indian company whose workplace culture you’ve been impressed by, and believe is a case study for others to follow? Our experience suggests that great workplace culture does not come into existence by chance. It is the result of conscious and committed actions that begin with top leadership. Here is an example of an organisation that from its inception has worked to create a great workplace culture. It is a Mumbai-based manufacturer of automotive graphic decals called Classic Stripes. On July 26, 2005, there was 100 cm of rain, in less than 24 hours in and around Mumbai. People got stranded in offices, on roads, in cars, many died in the rain, some suffocating in their cars. Lot of property was damaged by the flooding. After some semblance of normalcy was restored, the founder chairman Kishore Musale, went around the factory floor and offices comforted his people and said that the flooding may have caused extensive damage to things in their households. He said they had always treated each other as family, and in that spirit, he offered them financial help from the company. He asked those who got affected to give HR a list of things they had lost due to the deluge, with the approximate cost of replacement. This was virtually a blank cheque, with no conditions attached. He didn’t ask the affected employees to show HR any proof that they owned those goods or that they had got damaged. Such was the level of mutual trust created by their consciously created great workplace culture that Musale could, without hesitation, make this open and generous offer and no employee abused it. Only a handful, who had suffered extensively, took this help. However, we can be sure the tremendous goodwill wouldn’t have been there, if Musale would have asked people to provide a proof that they owned those goods and also a proof that they were actually damaged due to the deluge. This one caveat, signifying lack of complete trust in employees, would have depleted the effect of the generous offer that he had made. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 2 3
Cracking THE Culture CODE
Aprameya Radhakrishna and Raghunandan G want their taxi aggregating marketplace company, TaxiForSure, to reflect the values they cherish as individuals. Their effort to build a company culture has resulted in a surprisingly detailed 76-page culture document. TaxiForSure is a young company (they launched in February 2011) so the jury is out on whether they are able to implement, embed and sustain these lofty ambitions. But it’s impossible to doubt that they’ve started off very well. Let’s take a ride through their culture roadmap—where it started, and how it’s being powered. 2 4 | INC. |
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What they’re out to build: Three key values—transparency, integrity and respect for every individual—are the pillars of the culture Radhakrishna and Raghunandan aim to build their company TaxiForSure on. The duo says these values have been ingrained in them through their childhood. “We both belong to south Indian middle class families where being disrespectful is frowned upon,” says Raghunandan. They wanted their company to reflect those values. How they’re implementing it: TaxiForSure received funding of $10 million from Bessemer Venture Partners in April 2014. They plan to
use the fund to expand to 20 new cities over the next 18 months. As they expand their company’s footprint and hire nearly 600 people over the next year, the co-founders wanted to nail down a culture that can expand uniformly to all their offices. “As we grow bigger, the founding team won’t be physically present so it was important for us to delineate our company’s values clearly,” says Raghunandan. One of the tricks that has worked for the 400 people across three offices in Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai when it comes to building a transparent culture is free seating, or what is known as “hot seating” in start-up management lingo. Raghunandan says the benefit of this simple idea has been substantial. “We don’t have designated seating. Everyone just sits wherever they find space. Thanks to
COURTESY SUBJECT
Talking Easy
The Bigger Picture
How markets define culture
The Hot Seat Raghunandan (on right) says free seating has helped them build a transparent culture.
this, I sit with a new set of people every day.” It has broken the silos of departments, management bands and seniority, and enabled company-wide bonding and interactivity. Chance encounters aside, Raghunandan says sometimes he’s happy to force people to participate and interact. Every Tuesday evening, the company organises a quiz, a game of dumb charades or a photography contest. “On some days, we literally force people to get up and participate in the games we’re playing.” For those who don’t enjoy board or indoor games, there are cricket and football matches on Tuesday mornings. “Everyone has to participate in one of the activities so that each week they team up with, and meet new people.” This emphasis on communication, across hierarchies and functions, helps to inculcate the value of transparency in the company. That it’s working is evident in the company’s town halls
and meetings, Radhakrishna adds. And, roughly 12 direct emails they get from people every month by way of feedback and ideas. To encourage feedback from people who might not be comfortable in direct mails, there is also an anonymous whistleblower system in their office called Dhwani. If any employee has any suggestion or feedback, they can anonymously send an email to the management. Or, they can even anonymously drop a note in the Dhwani boxes placed in quiet corners where there are no CCTV cameras. This might be a practice that is in place in most of the offices but what the duo say they ensure is they try to act upon it immediately. And, then they send a mail to the entire team informing that the request they got from Dhwani has been met. This small practice, they say Continued on page 26
T D Chandrashekhar, leadership consultant, and executive coach at IIM Lucknow and Harvard Business School Publishing, says smart CEOs design their company’s culture with an innate understanding of how people, societies and markets work. Here, he lays out the three big trends you must factor into when building a great workplace for today. The average age of senior management is decreasing. A survey conducted by Ernst & Young in the US revealed that from 12 per cent in 2003, managers in the age group of 18-32 increased to 87 per cent between 2008-2013. A similar trend is evident in India also. Companies are hiring young talent because they bring in freshness in thinking and the ability of adopt newer strategy and technologies much faster than older employees. There is a growing bent towards those who think like entrepreneurs, rather than being “yes men”. This is a very significant trend because even the larger companies are aiming to want to act like smaller firms to be more agile and keep pace with the fast changing technology. There is a substantial difference in the job expectations of the workforce now. Earlier, people had a deeper focus on job stability. That has turned on its head now. According to MSL Group’s report The Millennial Compass, 43 per cent of Indian employees surveyed said they intend to leave their organisations in the next two years. Loyalty isn’t a strong work value and the new company culture must understand the other triggers that have taken its place. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 2 5
Cracking THE Culture CODE
Continued from page 25
makes people feel that we listen to them, take their feedback seriously and act upon it too. That, Radhakrishna says, is the biggest motivator for people to speak up. This has also kept the number of feedback they get from Dhwani high. On average, they get six to seven requests every month, informs Raghunandan. They have received several suggestions to improve their office infrastructure. There were several complaints that people didn’t like the coffee vending machine and wanted the office boy to make coffee for them.
head. This particular branch head, Raghunandan says, was very rude to the call centre executives and expected them to stand up to greet every time he entered the office. Since his behaviour breached the value of respect of people, Raghunandan and Radhakrishna, went to the Delhi office to investigate. The manager’s explanation—that this sort of behaviour was the norm for Delhi—didn’t cut much ice with the co-founders. “He refused to mend his ways so we let him go the very day same. Irrespective of his seniority and dependency we had on him, we didn’t hesitate to ask him to leave,” adds Radhakrishna. It was after this incident that they decided to bring the entire senior management team of the new branches (generally its top five to six people) to the corporate office in Bangalore for two to three weeks to get a sense of the company culture. Earlier they would get only the branch heads from different cities to spend time in Bangalore, but after the Delhi incident they realised that putting the entire responsibility to drive the company’s culture on one person was not a workable idea. “People watch and form judgements on the basis of what leaders do and behave, not what they say and pitch. The only way to effectively implement the cultural values in the organisation is for its founders and top 10-15 leaders to demonstrate these values every day, in whatever they do—whether it is a casual interaction, a meeting or a formal interview, similarly in all the offices,” adds Radhakrishna.
One of the tricks that has worked for TaxiForSure when it comes to building a transparent culture is free seating, or what is known as “hot seating” in start-up management lingo. TaxiForSure implemented that change within a week. There were also suggestions like getting a TV room and a separate recreation room with table tennis and foosball table. The founders couldn’t meet this demand then. Their previous office wasn’t spacious enough. But, as they have recently moved to a bigger office in Bangalore two months back, they have earmarked space for such activities. Suggestions on Dhwani also lead to serious business change. Las year, somebody wrote in from their Delhi office to complain against the branch 2 6 | INC. |
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Mirr Best practices from companies that walk the corporate culture talk
Embedding a culture isn’t about lofty visions and ambitious ideas. Version of oftrepeated values— transparency, integrity, out-of-thebox thinking—sprout up on most corporate websites. The grunt work of establishing a culture is more often than not a result of a founder’s perseverance and focus, management conviction, and the stamina to implement policies that give way to a composite culture. Here are some best practices of successful cultures from mid-sized companies in India. Aniruddha Limaye, director, Great Place to Work India, says some of these examples might not seem unusual in their vision at first but they have played an instrumental role in these companies scaling up.
**Source—Great Place to Work Institute, India
Cracking THE Culture CODE
or, Mirror Diversity:
Lemon Tree Hotels
Mid-scale hotel chain Lemon Tree Hotels (LTH) has an inclusive employability policy. It does that by employing people with physical challenges and special needs. Around 7.5 per cent of their employee strength consists of such employees. The induction of newly joined employees with physical challenges and special needs is personally handled by their functional supervisor along with the HR team. This includes sensitisation sessions with the entire team so that they are sensitive, supportive and respectful towards these colleagues. A specially designed induction for speech and hearing impaired (SHI) colleagues is delivered with the help of an interpreter (an expert in Indian Sign Language).
Hiring:
thinkstockphotos.in
Tavant Technologies India Software services and solutions company Tavant Technologies tries to follow a variety of practices that can help raise the standard and quality of talent hired. To ensure that this standard is upheld all the time, Top 10 per cent of key performers in Tavant are assigned the role of bar raisers. They form a mandatory part of the selection pro-
cess, in which they have a VETO power in the selection of candidates. They have a direct and immediate access to the chief delivery officer to enable them to raise issues and convey their veto and in case of non-concurrence in hiring (that is selection of candidates whose capability and cultural fit does not meet the goal of hiring the best). Interviewers who help Tavant in identifying the right talent are rewarded with interviewer incentives. Tavantians who play a significant role in the hiring process, through their interviewing skill, are felicitated with The Best Interviewer Award.
Training:
Classic Stripes
In automotive graphics manufacturing company Classic Stripes employees who are identified as “fast track employees,” are given opportunities to work with senior management. Sixteen employees were identified last year as potential fast track leaders and were given higher responsibilities to staff vacant and new higher level positions. They were provided external mentors and experts from various countries like USA, UK and Japan for training and improving their technical knowledge.
profiles and photographs in the website enabled existing Aspirians, across the globe, to welcome new members by posting personalised welcome messages on the web. This made the new team members feel genuinely welcomed and as part of the Aspire family, rather than outsiders—members of an acquired entity.
FEEDBACK: CitiusTech
The healthcare IT company CitiusTech asks its employees, as part of its feedback exercise to rate the company by comparing itself to the employee’s past workplaces. For example, if an employee has worked for three organisations in the past, then she/he is to rank CitiusTech out of four. From this feedback, the company gets an overall idea of how it is being collectively ranked (benchmarked) by its employees in relation to other organisations. This provides the company a good idea of how strong or vulnerable CitiusTech’s position is as an employer in relation to other organisations competing for talent.
WELCOMING:
Aspire Systems (India)
The product development IT firm Aspire Systems acquired Versant Technologies last year. During the early phase of postacquisition integration, Aspire created an internal website http://versant.aspiresys.com/ that shared with the existing Aspire team, information about the new team members (from former Versant). The individual
APpreciation: JM Financial
At financial services company JM Financial, recognition and rewards come not only by promotions, bonuses and awards but through a variety of other ways. Every deal is celebrated publicly through congratulatory emails from management. Any good client ratings/reviews is followed by appreciation mails by CEO to team members. There is also an online recognition platform, iCheer that encourages employees to appreciate the work of their peers and juniors, thereby inspiring them to continue to give their best. It provides everyone an opportunity to appreciate and motivate their colleagues across levels and functions for their initiative, support and contribution to create a climate of appreciation and positive reinforcement.
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focus or bust
Focus or Bust
Cognitive Overload Is Killing Your Business. Can You Fix That? By Brian Dumaine
A
s you read this article, chances are your brain at some point will start sending you distracting, and familiar, messages. “Hmm, I wonder if I have any new emails or texts?” “What are my customers saying about us on Twitter right now? I better check!” “Oh yeah … I’ve been meaning to read up on that new Sonos sound system on Amazon.” If you’re still reading, congratulations! You’ve been able to overcome—at least momentarily—one of the most insidious, productivity-sapping maladies afflicting today’s managers: cognitive overload. Business owners don’t have to be reminded how their lives are being taken over by email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, the Web, and other annoying electronic static. (That on top of the usual day-to-day tasks, such as laundry, kids, and showers.) Email alone is overwhelming. Icebreaker, a consulting firm, reckons you spend about 28 per cent of work time managing it. The typical CEO gets about 200 to 300 emails per day. Some illustration by vikas sharma
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Focus or bust
chief executive clients of Icebreaker had banked up to 70,000—yes, 70,000—unread messages. How big a problem is this? Some estimate, as you will see later, that distraction costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says a worker distracted by something like a Web search gone wild or a new text popping up on the phone can take about 25 minutes to return to the task at hand. What’s certain is that the subject of digital distraction and lack of focus in the workplace is getting the attention of not only authors and researchers but businesses large and small. When Inc. called the CEOs of fast-growing companies such as Instagram, Box and Zumba, they were all eager to be, you guessed it, interrupted for an interview. In other words: The lack of focus on the job is a big concern for them. In fact, these entrepreneurs are part of an emerging trend. Call it the focus movement. Those three companies and other successful startups are joining corporations such as Google and SAP in a grand experiment: testing new ways to mitigate cognitive overload and put the spotlight on what’s important. At Google, employees take courses that help sharpen attention skills. At smaller companies such as Zumba and Box, the founders have devised their own methods, including putting aside large blocks of time to reflect, far from the madding crowd. Why is focus so important to success? Academics such as Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel say the best way to understand your competition, learn from your employees, chart a long-term strategy, or innovate is to have the mental discipline to
home in on what really matters to your business. Only by intensely concentrating can you link new ideas and facts “meaningfully and systematically with knowledge already well established in memory,” Kandel writes in his 2006 book In Search of Memory. Simply put, if you have the presence of mind to absorb new data, trends, and events—and then synthesise them with what you already know— you will be more likely to formulate the breakthrough idea. Juggling digital tasks certainly doesn’t help with that process. In 2009, researchers at Stanford University’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab gave cognitive tests to 49 subjects who spent a lot of time surfing the Internet, watching TV, and hanging out on Facebook. They gave the same tests to 52 people who multitasked significantly less often. The conventional wisdom, at the time, was that the Internet actually sharpened cognitive skills: fast-fingered gamers would make great fighter pilots and brain surgeons, the digital cheerleaders said. But wait! To the researchers’ surprise, the heavy online users actually scored poorly. Among other things, they had less control over their attention and were much less able to distinguish important information from trivia. “They’re suckers for irrelevancy,” says Stanford communication professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Everything distracts them.”
How to Escape Email Hell
Everyone complains about being swamped by email, but how many actually do something about it? Inc. asked some busy managers how they escape the deluge.
Alberto Perlman founder, Zumba
Perlman just refuses to read long emails. If one gets through? He returns it and asks for a short summary graph on top of the original. If a run-on phone message arrives from an outsider, he asks for a summary. Perlman also practices what he calls the “four D’s”: do, don’t do, delay, and delegate. The result: He can get through 150 emails in an hour or two.
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Aaron Levie founder and CEO, Box
“It took me a while, but I’ve given up feeling I have to answer everyone,” says Levie. Deciding how long to spend on those emails he does answer is always a tradeoff. “You over-email and you overmeet, so you have to balance which medium allows you to get the most done.” One of his pet peeves: email volleying. “If I see a thread where people are going in circles, I cut it off.”
Chade-Meng Tan jolly good fellow, Google
How does Meng decide what to do with email? Get this answer: “I make myself aware of death. I think to myself that someday I will die, so I want to do only things that are important and I won’t regret doing.” An email from CEO Larry Page? Meng, of course, answers it right away. Others? Borrowing from Suzy Welch, he asks himself: What are the consequences of not answering this email in 10 days? 10 months? 10 years?
focus or bust
So what’s to be done? Science shows that there’s only one near-universal strategy to improve focus—practice doing it. Michael Merzenich, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, explains: The more you focus, the more your brain releases a chemical called noradrenaline, which helps you concentrate on the task at hand. Says Merzenich: “If you’re constantly on alert rather than buckling down and shutting out disruptions, you can weaken the physiological processes that keep distraction under control. Simply, you can program your body to produce less noradrenaline if you never force yourself to focus.” The first step in this focus training, some experts contend, is to understand your own cognitive processes. Leading this camp is Harvard-trained psychologist Daniel Goleman, best known for his 2005 blockbuster book, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ. His thesis: selfawareness, altruism, personal mastery, and empathy are strong indicators of human success. More recently, Goleman became interested in the topic of focus. “Clarity,” he says, “begins with realising what we don’t notice.” In his latest book, Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, Goleman explores why people become distracted in the first place. In layman’s terms, he explains that the prefrontal cortex of our brain, the outer layer that controls your executive functions—concentrating, planning, and synthesising—is in a constant tug-of-war with the deeper, more atavistic sector where your impulses arise. Think of it as a good and bad angel sitting on either shoulder and whispering into your ears. Once you understand that the primordial part of your brain—the mischievous part— wants you to be distracted, the challenge is to find ways to ignore that dark angel on your shoulder. Every time an urge to switch your attention arises, you need to muster the wherewithal to pull yourself back to the task at hand. One approach to improve your concentration, says Goleman, is to make yourself aware of the three basic types of focus you apply from time to time: inner, other, and outer. Inner focus is the ability to listen to your deepest self, your “true north.” Who are you, what are your values, why are you doing the work you’re doing? Other focus enables us to zero in on what others are saying, thinking, and feeling by not only paying attention to words, but also picking up on nonverbal signals, such as facial expressions
and body language. Outer focus is the ability to look at what’s going on in the world at large, assimilating only what’s relevant to your business. Entrepreneurship professor Steve Blank, who teaches at Columbia, Stanford, and Berkeley and has co-founded four Silicon Valley startups, including MIPS Technologies, says Goleman’s framework is perfect for entrepreneurs. Blank says leaders who can focus inwardly have a competitive advantage: They can function in turmoil—like great generals who can see through the fog of battle. “When a company is young and growing, it can be chaotic. In the same way, a good general knows a battle never goes according to plan so he needs to have the composure and focus to do triage in real time.” Other focus helps leaders pick up on the employee who says everything’s OK but whose body language suggests that there indeed might be a problem. Outer focus—keying into what’s going on in the outside world—fits, too. Blank has seen many startups fail because the CEO didn’t absorb and integrate external signals. Think of Research in Motion’s BlackBerry missing out on the later stages of the smartphone revolution, he says, adding that “the Apple and Samsung managers weren’t smarter, they were just focused differently...they focused on broader issues, like the importance of being able to search the Web on a smartphone.” hen there’s the Google approach to focus. The company took the topic seriously enough to start offering a course on it in 2007, and so far has put 1,500 of its employees through the multi-hour sessions. Search Inside Yourself, as the course is called, is the brainstorm of Chade-Meng Tan, a software engineer who was Google employee No. 107. Meng, as he’s known around the Mountain View campus, came up with the idea in 2003 when he was taking a walk and suddenly knew what to do with the rest of his life: “I realised I wanted to create world peace in my lifetime,” he says. “I also realised that I couldn’t spread goodness without profits.” Moving to the HR department, Meng, whose title now is “Jolly Good Fellow,” created a curriculum around attention and selfmastery that’s loosely based on Eastern religious teachings. The goal: to improve performance. The course has taken off, and now Meng has a best-selling book, Search Inside Yourself, endorsed by Google chairman Eric Schmidt and by John Mackey of Whole Foods Market. Two former U.S. Presidents—Carter and Clinton— and President Obama have praised his work, and the Dalai Lama June 2014 | INC. | 3 1
Focus or bust
Losing Focus? It’s hard to concentrate on what’s best for your business if you’re multitasking to the point of distraction. The following are a few questions, adapted in part from Daniel Goleman’s book Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence, that you can ask yourself each day to see whether you’re really in the right frame of mind for success. (The answers are Inc.’s.)
hugged him on his 40th birthday. of 1 to 7. He’s now offering the The gist of the Search Inside course in other SAP offices. “We Yourself course is simple: to make didn’t call it meditation,” he says. everyone more compassionate, “We called it attention training. The which is good for business. (Treatterm mindfulness sounds too Do you have trouble remembering what ing co-workers kindly results in touchy-feely.” someone just told you during a conversation? happy co-workers, which means Formal courses aren’t the only Yes No more productive workers.) But way to improve focus. Some sucIf so, you are not connecting with your employees and customers, and could miss here’s the catch. Becoming more cessful entrepreneurs have figured information vital to your company. Slow down compassionate, Meng explains, out their own ways to deal with and listen! requires the ability to focus deeply information overload. Alberto and constantly on yourself and on Perlman is the founder and CEO of Can you clearly state the five-year plan for those around you. Zumba, the dance-exercise comyour business? At Google, employees who pany and Inc.’s 2012 Company of Yes No take the class first spend an entire the Year. To survive the flood of Chances are you’re focusing on minor crises or product details instead of what’s really imporday practicing better focus. For emails he gets, Perlman schedules tant—the long-term health of your company example, when they find their an hour or two each day to apply attention wandering while readwhat he calls the “four D’s”: do, Can you remember your morning commute? ing, they practice bringing it back don’t do, delay, and delegate. By Yes No to the page. taking one of these actions with If not, you’re so preoccupied with daily trivia “It’s like doing bicep curls for the each email, he can get through 150 that you’re not allowing your brain to synthemind,” Meng tells me. “If you keep in an hour or two, with a little help sise those new ideas that could lead to the next bringing your attention back, you from his assistant. Next, Perlman innovative breakthrough. begin mastering the ability to focus, weeds out everything he doesn’t Do you pay more attention to your iPhone and before long, you can come to have time to do. “I decided that I than the person you’re with? attention on demand.” Employees only had time for three things: famYes No also learn meditation techniques to ily, work, and exercise, in that You’re sending signals to your staff members clear their heads of distractions. order,” he says. “If something that you would rather focus on someone not Another Google focus exercise: doesn’t fit—like going out with the in the room than on them, a downer for comMeng has someone speak for three guys or doing a hobby—I don’t do pany morale. minutes and then asks the listener it.” He also disconnects completely Are you skimming this article? to repeat what the speaker said. from work for 24 hours each week, Yes No Meng says some Google employees spending each Saturday with his If you are, go back, redo the quiz, and really use this technique in a work setting family instead of answering emails focus on what your answers mean. by saying: “What you just told me is or fielding calls. important. Would you mind if I For some, a day away from the repeat it back to you?” bustle of work isn’t enough. Google, of course, has a very West Coast, youth-oriented culAaron Levie is the 29-year-old CEO and founder of the ture. Would such an approach to focus fly in a more traditional billion-dollar cloud-storage company Box—and Inc.’s 2013 Entreprecompany? Well, yes. neur of the Year. To free up time to reflect, Levie breaks his workday SAP is a $23.4 billion-a-year German enterprise software comin two. He spends the first half of his day, from 10:30 a.m. to 6 p.m., in pany known for no-nonsense managers like Peter Bostelmann, a back-to-back meetings, making sure the company is running on all German industrial engineer who has been at SAP for 15 years. He has cylinders. He then takes a dinner break and a nap. His second half of become a self-described “mindfulness ambassador.” After taking the day runs from 8:30 or so in the evening until 2 a.m. (It perhaps Meng’s course in San Francisco, Bostelmann decided to offer it at SAP. goes without saying that Levie doesn’t have kids.) During this quiet Senior executives were skeptical but let Bostelmann take the time, he does deep and strategic thinking—and cleans out his inbox a idea for a test drive. So far, he has trained 75 people, and survey bit. “The night work gives me the time to focus on emails and texts, results were impressive. His students gave the course a 6.4 on a scale and on setting up for the next days or weeks,” he says. 3 2 | INC. | June 2014
focus or bust
“A no-meeting policy simplified here,” says instagram co-founder mike Krieger, “sort of like Steve Jobs wearing the same black turtleneck each day." Mike Krieger, the co-founder of the wildly popular socialmedia app Instagram, which was acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1 billion, took a novel pro-focus approach. When he and Kevin Systrom launched the company in 2010, he had a blanket “no meetings” policy. He turned down every request from outsiders. “A no-meeting policy,” says Krieger, “simplified life, sort of like Steve Jobs wearing the same black turtleneck each day, and it means saving lots of time by not having to decide whether or not to take meetings.” But Instagram has grown beyond the startup stage— it employs more than 50 people and now takes meetings from outsiders. And like Levie, Krieger stresses the importance of being able to focus on the long term. Two things, Krieger says, have really helped him: “I make
intentional free time—marked out on the calendar as ‘Mike time’—and then I make sure to schedule a follow-up on what it is I want to focus on.”
S
o is this infatuation with focus just another fad—or will it be with us for the long run? Well, consider this. Nine years back, info-tech researcher Basex surveyed 1,000 office workers. It found that distractions cost U.S. companies $588 billion per year in lost productivity. That’s quite a price to pay to let your employees chat each other up and shop on Amazon. And the tsunami of digital distraction isn’t going away anytime soon—not in your lifetime, anyway. Our verdict? Goleman, Blank, and the Jolly Good Fellow are really onto something.
HOW I DID IT
Value for Money Lalit Agarwal V-Mart Retail
For more than a decade, Lalit Agarwal has been selling denim jeans and dreams to people in far-flung areas such as Motihari in Bihar and Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Agarwal launched V-Mart, a chain of value retail stores, in 2003. V-Mart was based on the concept of providing a growing segment of an aspirational middle class in Tier II and Tier III towns with the glitzy retail experience of swanky malls of the metros. Today, Agarwal owns and operates 91 stores in 79 cities across 11 states and union territories. His growth has been brisk and steady. In the first year, V-Mart had sales of `6-crore. It close FY2013-2014 with a turnover of `575-crore. Not one to rest on his success, Agarwal hopes to expand to 200 stores by 2018. This doubling of physical stores in six years might sound steep but Agarwal believes his signature style—a healthy dose of ambition and caution—will easily help them get there. As told to Meenakshi Kumar / Photographs by Subhojit Paul
Retail runs in my blood. My father was a
first generation entrepreneur who started his own garments store in 1975 in Kolkata. But when work for the metro started right in front of the store, it affected the business. My father was not one of those people who called it quits easily. He gave the shop to his elder brother and moved to Cuttack, Odisha in 1979. He was familiar with the town and knew there were business opportunities there. Here he opened a tailoring shop and also sold cloth pieces and ready-made garments. Back then, it was a bold step that he took and I believe it’s something that I have learnt from him: Never to give up.
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Childhood was a nursery of learning. My
parents were clear that education was important. I would go to the school in the morning and after returning, spend time at my father’s shop. I enjoyed being part of the activities there. At times when my father had to leave the shop for few hours, I would be given the task to attend to the customers. I thoroughly enjoyed it. As a 12-year-old, I felt grown up. It made me feel important. I would happily do the odd jobs in the shop as I found them more exciting than studies. Little did I realise then that whatever I was learning at my father’s shop would help me in the future. I
Smile of Success As a teenager, Agarwal preferred doing odd jobs in his father’s shop over studying. Those learnings have come in handy through the journey of building a `575-crore retail empire.
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HOW I DID IT
I didn’t know then though that I was going to be an entrepreneur too. My first opportunity in business came right after college. After completing my graduation in commerce, I went to Mumbai to pursue a diploma in financial management. Soon, it dawned on me that I had ample time and nothing much to do once classes were over. I was initially staying in Mumbai with my brother-in-law and together both of us decided that we should start a small business of printing and packaging. My brother-in-law already had a small business and saw an opportunity in printing and packaging. I would attend classes in the morning and would visit clients in the afternoon for our business. Our first job was for Godrej Soaps. We were given a small order of about `1.5 lakhs to make soap wrappers. Those were exciting times. I was glad that I was utilising my free time intelligently, working hard and earning some money too. Along with the business and management studies, I even squeezed in a fashion designing course. Clothes interested me and I wanted to channelise my creative energies. By the time my studies finished, the busi-
ness bug had bitten me. I returned to Kolkata after my courses were done, and along with my cousin R.C. Agarwal started Vishal Mega Mart in 1999. It was the first-of-its kind retail store in Kolkata. Since I had my roots in the city, I felt I owed it something. Plus, it was also my comfort zone. I was only 28 years old then and had big dreams of becoming successful. A year after starting Vishal Mega Mart, we opened Aquatica in Kolkata—the first of its kind water park in not just the city but the entire eastern region. The idea for this came when I visited the water park in Mumbai. But, Aquatica was a big gamble because we didn’t know many things about running a water park— architecture and design, water filtration system, horticulture and the rides. Besides, there were basic infrastructure problems in
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“Every time we open a new store in a small town, it gives me immense pleasure. For me, my customers in Tier II and III towns are the people who matter the most to me. I feel great joy in making products available to them.” the area we had set up the park in. Despite the challenges, we went ahead and launched the park. We were overwhelmed by the positive response. Luckily for us, both our ideas clicked and we found ourselves riding on the wave of success. The smooth sailing didn’t continue for
very long. Initially, both the businesses did well but labour problems plagued Vishal Mega Mart in Kolkata. We had to shut our store and shift out of Kolkata. We incurred huge losses. Meanwhile, misunderstanding between my cousin and me started affecting the business. It reached a point where we decided to go our separate ways. I moved out of Vishal Mega Mart and Aquatica in 2002.
It was time to strike it out alone. While
travelling in Gujarat I realised how the lower middle class didn’t have access to good quality goods. They would need to travel for miles even for everyday items. This got me thinking that there was an opportunity for a value retail store which would cater to the growing middle class in smaller cities by bringing them good quality products sold in a mall-like ambience. In 2003, I launched the first V-Mart store in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. I conceived of it as a chain of value retail stores which sold apparels, accessories, footwear, luggage, toys and home stuff. I started with 50 people and invested `75 lakhs. I put in all my effort and hard work into making this a success. Within five years, by 2008, we had
opened 32 stores in Tier II and Tier III cities across the country. The turning point came in 2008. I was sur-
prised when Aditya Birla Group came forward to invest in our business through their private equity fund Naman Finance and Investments. They took a stake of 23 per cent and invested `20 crore. This was their maiden investment and helped us a great deal to grow. It was a tremendous boost to our growing enterprise. I consider this incident as pure serendipity as it happened out of the blue. At that point in time, we were still small in size. This investment gave us the confidence to move ahead.
But, setbacks which we hadn’t anticipated
loomed ahead for us. After the funding came in from Aditya Birla Group in July 2008, we had big plans to expand. Obviously, we hadn’t foreseen the global recession that set in later that year. We bore the brunt. Some of our stores made losses and overall profitability went down. We had to shut eight-nine loss-making stores in western and northern part of India in places such as Navi Mumbai, Patiala, Kohlapur.
It is painful for me when stores shut because each store is important for me. Every time we open a new store in a small town or a semi-urban area, it gives me immense pleasure. For me, my customers in Tier II and III towns are the people who matter most to me. They are the game changers and I feel great joy in making
HOW I DID IT
stores, employ 4,240 people and cater to around two million customers a month. The big moment for the company came in
2013. We went for an initial public offer (IPO) and were able to raise `122 crore. Now we can go ahead with our future plans—I would like to open 200 stores by 2018 but that doesn’t mean I’ll rush into things. I would like to grow at the present 30 per cent for some time now and later scale up. I’ll try to inch and not fly.
Weekly catch-ups with employees has
helped the business to grow. Without good employees it is difficult to sustain a business. I strongly believe that it’s important to have patience, the ability to listen, to create an environment where ideas and creativity flow. Only then can one expect employees to give their hundred per cent. For the past year, I have devised a system by which I meet a junior employee for 20 minutes every day. He or she can come to my room and speak on anything they wish to. The idea is to make them feel special. These informal interactions have been a revelation. People have talked about things they may not share even with their friends or family.
Easy Profits The turning point for Agarwal came in 2008 when Aditya Birla Group invested `20-crore in V-Mart for a 23 per cent stake.
products available to them. There have been instances where V-Mart has been the first of its kind big store in a particular city. Three and a half years ago, I opened a store in Srinagar. It was a bold decision because people discouraged me. They cautioned me against the unsafe conditions and terrorist attacks but when I had first visited the city, I had seen the aspiration among the people for latest products and clothes. That made me firm up my plans. In the future, I would like to open a store, say in a
place like Azamgarh. Most business houses would shy away from this town notorious for its terrorist links but I would take it up as a challenge. Transparency and honesty matter the
most to me. All throughout my business journey, I have tried to ensure that in all my dealings with vendors and customers alike, even when things are not going well. It’s impossible to run a `575-crore business without that. Today, we operate 91
My father has been my greatest mentor. Whatever I have learnt and applied in my business is all thanks to my father. As a child, in our Cuttack showroom I would observe him closely when he was dealing with customers. The other person whose life I closely follow is Richard Branson. His life inspires me and has made me realise that being creative and innovative is the only way forward. But, every time I had a doubt or faced neg-
ative, challenging times, I reached inwards. I believe in what my inner sense of logic tells me. All major business decisions have to be scientific, well-argued and based on pure logic. At the same time, it’s important to listen to one’s heart—which I often do—and have self belief and faith in oneself. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 3 7
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Tactics. Trends. Best Practices.
COURTESY SUBJECT
Marketing When Shopping becomes Social Success comes from building a community that doesn’t only buy, but also creates
Strategy Inspired Fashion It was Suchi Mukherjee’s love for browsing through magazines that led her to start LimeRoad.
For Suchi Mukherjee, the inspiration for starting Limeroad, an online discovery platform for apparel, beauty products, bags, accessories and footwear for women, grew from her love for flipping through fashion magazines. “Every time I liked something in the magazine, I would often wish I could buy those products easily,” says Mukherjee. Making this possible became the premise on which Mukherjee, who has worked with Skype, eBay and Gumtree in the UK, started LimeRoad with Ankush Mehra. Mehra used to be the head of supply chain at Reliance Hypermarkets. Together, Mukherjee and Mehra brought in a unique blend of e-commerce and hard logistics to make their new venture work. When LimeRoad was launched in JUNE 2014 | INC. | 3 9
October 2012, it was designed to have the look and feel of a glossy fashion catalogue. “We didn’t want to look like a transactional website that just lists inventory.” Users could flip through the pages to go through the collection of clothes, bags and accessories that vendors offered on the LimeRoad platform—essentially mirroring the experience of using a fashion magazine offline. What’s more, to build the concept of social interactivity, the LimeRoad team introduced the Scrapbook feature. Here, users could mix and match different apparels, accessories and bags. Scrapbook lets users create different “looks” by dragging and dropping different products available on the platform to the scrapbook box, for instance, pairing the bag, jewellery and shoes to go with the right dress. “When getting dressed up, everybody decides on a top or trousers first and then thinks about the different accessory options to go with the outfit. Here, they ask their family and friends to suggest the scarves, belt and earrings that go nicely with the look. This is such an intrinsic part of human behaviour that we wanted LimeRoad to provide it,” explains Mukherjee. So, Scrapbook allowed users to share the “looks” they created with their friends through Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. This tool made LimeRoad much like a social network platform where women could discover products, and share it with their friends to get a second opinion. They can then buy it if their friends approve of it too. Social shopping and its integration with social media help to initiate conversations among users about the product and the website, thereby creating more user engagement, says Mehra. This also gives other users ideas on how to wear a particular dress differently. “LimeRoad isn’t just an online store—it is a discover, share and shop platform in the true sense,” he adds. The scrapbook community grew slowly 4 0 | INC. |
JUNE 2014
for the first three-four months. From March 2013 onwards though, it has been growing at 40 per cent month on month. Mukherjee says they’ve noticed that many women use the Scrapbook like a hobby, almost like sketching or doodling. In their free time, they create looks and share it with their friends through social media. “Without us realising, Scrapbook has become their way of expression for style,” says Mukherjee. Even when they don’t end up buying the products, the sharing leads to getting more women interested in LimeRoad. For instance, a regular user studying at Aligarh Muslim University, has made 353 scrapbook looks in eight months. There are similar examples in places such as Ranchi, Kalyan, Chandigarh and Chennai who have become city leaders and help create buzz about LimeRoad in their respective communities. To
encourage these scrapbookers, Prashant Malik, who joined the co-founding team of LimeRoad in March 2013, decided playing up these scrapbooks on their home page to maintain the scrapbookers’ enthusiasm. Their earlier static magazine-like format didn’t allow that. In June 2013, LimeRoad re-designed their homepage to be a live feed, much like the Facebook newsfeed. It gets updated every 30 seconds, and comes with an infinite scroll. That way, users can see three new “looks” or products every 30 seconds, informs Malik. More scrapbook updates on the homepage has helped increase page views for LimeRoad, which recently raised Series B funding of $15 million from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Ventures. In standard e-commerce sites people load eight pages per visit, but in LimeRoad they load around 20-plus pages, says Mukherjee. This
The scrapbook feature has made LimeRoad much like a social network platform where women can discover products, share it with their friends and get a second opinion before making the actual purchase.
photo COURTESY COMPANY
Strategy
Strategy A quick glance at the “looks” fashioned by scrapbookers on LimeRoad
means users generate thrice the amount of action and page views per session on LimeRoad versus any other alternative available to them in the market. This also gives more visibility to the products on the website. For instance, in September 2013, apparel brand Femella had posted a red dress on the LimeRoad website. That dress become quite popular among the scrapbook community and was used to create around 80-90 “looks”. That meant the dress was being shown at 90 different pages. Generally, a vendor like Femella blocks two-three pieces for a particular website. But, thanks to the scrapbooks, ten pieces of this dress were quickly sold out on LimeRoad, says Deepti Bhadauria, the company’s head of marketing. In fact, Bhadauria adds that Femella blocked all its ten pieces for them—some of that stock they had earlier put on Jabong which hadn’t got sold as quickly there. Keeping their vendors interested is a big win for a company like LimeRoad as it operates on a marketplace model. It’s only logical that vendors are engaged when they sell more. Today, LimeRoad has 450-plus vendors, a big jump from the 25 they began with in October 2012. What’s more— nearly 50 per cent of the products displayed by vendors are exclusively for LimeRoad customers. “The high conversion rate of
sales is the reason why vendors have agreed to enter into exclusivity agreement with us,” Mukherjee explains. LimeRoad’s sales figure has been growing 25-30 per cent every month for the past seven month despite no increase in their marketing spend, she adds. There are other benefits too—bringing down cost of content creation, for one. “We’re not only able to engage users but also generate content created by them. Most other brands pay for such content creation, informs Mehra. In September 2013, to provide scrapbookers the opportunity to earn from the looks they create, LimeRoad introduced a “create & earn” feature in their business model. Every time someone buys a product from one of the scrapbooks, the creator of that scrapbook would earn a certain percentage of the price of the product sold. Though Mukherjee doesn’t share the exact percentage of earning, she estimates that active scrapbookers can earn up to `10,000-20,000 per month. “Scrapbook is their creation so it is only fair that they should be able to make money out of it.” To foster more engagement amongst their scrapbookers and to get others interested, LimeRoad introduced the Style Council. The Council is essentially made up of a group of women who are considered
an authority on style such as former Miss India Neha Dhupia, fashion and lifestyle blogger Malini Agarwal of the popular Miss Malini blog, and fashion and lifestyle blogger Gia Kashyap. These women share their styling tips and interact with the scrapbooking community. They also create their own Scrapbook looks and bring in interest from their loyal followership. Because of these two new introductions their scrapbook community has seen fastpaced growth in the last six months. It has been growing 40 per cent month on month. They now have 2,50,000 scrapbook looks and 10,000-plus registered scrapbookers. Today, LimeRoad boasts of 26 million page views per month and one million active users. Mukherjee says, “LimeRoad is the top engagement user platform in Indian e-commerce with its registered users growing at 200 per cent month on month.” Bejul Somaia, managing director of Lightspeed Advisory Services India, the early stage investor that had invested $5 million in LimeRoad in October 2012 along with Matrix Partners adds, “The LimeRoad team has disproved the notion that Indian users aren’t savvy enough to embrace deep social activities like scrapbooking, curating collections or sharing.” —Sonal Khetarpal JUNE 2014 | INC. | 41
Strategy
Margery Kraus is a rarity, and it frustrates her. As founder and CEO of APCO Worldwide, a $120 million, 650-plus-employee consulting company based in Washington, D.C., she has made it to the top of the corporate heap at a time when female CEOs remain a distinct minority. She’s eager to help other women advance, but too often, she says, they don’t help themselves. “I’ve been in more than one situation,” she says, “where I offer a man and a woman the same job—a promotion—and the woman’s response is ‘You know, I’ve never done that before and I don’t know if I’m totally qualified,’ while the man says, ‘That’s great. I’m ready to go.’ “ The big question, both for women looking to climb the ranks and for executives looking to fill senior positions, is whether a woman who responds as Kraus describes is woefully underconfident or refreshingly—and usefully—realistic. Sydney Finkelstein, a professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, says there’s a Catch-22 at work. Conspicuous selfconfidence “helps you land the jobs that lead to the top but then works against you once you’re the leader.” There’s plenty of research, he says, that shows that the ability to admit your approach may not be the best, and your willingness to seek out other viewpoints, are 4 2 | INC. |
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far better traits for a leader to have than overconfidence. “Enron, WorldCom, and other companies blew up because they didn’t have any of that,” he says. No one knows women’s leadership capacities better than a female entrepreneur such as Kraus, but even she finds herself wishing that women were more comfortable advocating for themselves. “The person who’s hiring wants the candidate to express confidence that they can do the job,” she says. Kraus, who is board chair for the Women Presidents’ Organisation and a member of the C200, a global organisation of women entrepreneurs, knows a lot about what it takes for women to succeed at the highest levels. “Other things being equal, verbal confidence can tip the scales,” she says. Your company can contribute to the scaletipping through a deep review of operations, argues Deborah Kolb, professor emerita at Simmons College School of Management. Longstanding, often unexamined practices that she labels “second-generation gender bias” have an insidious impact on how business leaders evaluate women candidates. The solution, she argues, is not to require that women job applicants learn to strut like men but for employers to identify and rectify the often hidden ways their hiring and advancement can inadvertently favour men. As one example, she points to how most job descriptions are written. Hiring managers will typically describe an ideal candidate, asking for a litany of qualifications and experience that no job seeker is likely to have. Men tend, she says, to be undaunted by the gap between what’s on their résumés and what’s being asked for, and will make the strongest possible case for themselves. Women are more likely to take the job description at face value and not apply if they feel they aren’t a good on-paper fit. Write more realistic descriptions and more women are likely to apply. “Even employers who think of themselves as very employeefriendly,” Kolb says, “may not realise the implications of their policies. Consider Silicon Valley companies, which offer all kinds of on-site perks—many of which are designed to make it easier for you to work 24/7. But what if you have a family? More amenities in the office doesn’t address that issue.” Kolb is on a mission to educate everyone about these subtle barriers, which she believes both aspiring women and the companies they work for need to tackle more overtly. “When women realise these biases are real, even if unintentional,” she says, “they feel empowered rather than victimised, because now they see specific ways they can ‘lean in.’” For example, women can be more aware of opportunities to ask
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Managing What Holds Women Back Could your companies hiring practices be inadvertently keeping women out of top management jobs?
Strategy
For One Woman, A Different Elevator Pitch
In her quest for funding she was often a minority of one, but Rebekah Campbell didn’t let that stop her. Rebekah Campbell, founder and CEO of Posse, an Australia-based social search engine, once pitched her
business to a group of 60 angel investors—59 of whom were male. This was at an Australian “gentleman’s club,” no less, where a porter insisted that she use the elevator rather than the stairs—because she was a woman. She eventually secured more than $4 million from 50 investors—all male. Campbell cautions that women founders in a sector in which three per cent of entrepreneurs and fewer than 10 per
for work arrangements that allow them to perform at their highest level while also accommodating their nonwork responsibilities. Harking back to that gap between what a job requires and how it might be described, they can advocate for themselves more effectively by keeping the conversation focused on why their qualifications map well to the most critical aspects of a position, and not be dissuaded by a lack of nice-to-haves. Once hired, she adds, women can benefit from mentoring programmes and should seek out sponsors, but neither they nor their employers should assume that’s enough. What really helps is to understand that becoming a leader is a process: Women need opportunities to show themselves as leaders and to win support when they do. The more often that happens, the more confident women become; leadership becomes baked into their identity, which influences how they perceive themselves—and how everyone else perceives them as well.
cent of venture capitalists are women should prepare for the reality “that people tend to be somewhat prejudiced against others who are not like them. If you’re in tech and you’re not a white male in your 20s or 30s, you’re a minority.” She also advises tapping into a support group of other founders— but “avoid any man who relates to you as a wife or daughter!” —I.M.
Confidence and invisible biases notwithstanding, Finkelstein believes the outlook is improving. He offers two pieces of evidence. Exhibit A is mathematical: Women now outnumber men in terms of undergraduate enrollment and performance, which is boosting the number of women attending top-tier business schools. That will increase the odds that more women will land top management roles. Given that an M.B.A. isn’t a sure ticket to the executive suite, however, his Exhibit B may be more compelling: The fact that women have recently become CEOs at such male-dominated businesses as General Motors, General Dynamics, and several Silicon Valley companies will encourage more women to reach for the brass ring—and make men more accepting of the idea. From the corporate boardroom to your own business, leading by example works. —Ilan Mochari and Scott Leibs
strategy
The Way I Work | Vivek Prabhakar, Chumbak Design
“Mistakes happen. But, I’d rather focus on what’s gone right and replicate that.” In 2002, travel enthusiasts Vivek Prabhakar and Shubhra Chadda realised that India doesn’t have a lot to offer in terms of fun souvenirs. Every time they came back from their trips abroad, the married couple had a bevy of whacky fridge magnets to gift to friends and family but when in India, they could only find traditional handicrafts or textiles to take as souvenir gifts. The idea to start their own business was always there but it wasn’t until 2010 that they actually started Chumbak (magnets), a company that would sell kitschy, pop Indian souvenirs. They started out making only fridge magnets. In the four years since, Chumbak has grown to become a 150-people firm with several product ranges—pens, posters, boxer shorts and laptop bags. What they haven’t lost is the quirky, irreverent take on the symbols and ideas that define Indian-ness. Today, they retail across 100 stores in India and 60 stores in Japan and claim to have a sales growth of 250 per cent year on year. Prabhakar pins the brand’s magnetism to its knack of knowing what their customers want. As told to ira Swasti | Photographs by paulomi 4 4 | INC. |
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I start my day quite early at about 6.30am every day. Shubhra, my wife and the co-founder of Chumbak, and I have a six-year old daughter who goes to school. So, our routine is pretty set. My wife does an hour of yoga which she has been practicing for the past 15 years and I get half an hour of general exercise every morning. After getting our daughter ready for school, we both drive to office together around 8:45am. Our office is an interesting workplace. Last year, we shifted to a new building which used to be an abandoned plywood factory spread over two acres in the Nimbaikaypura suburb of Bangalore. We used the old factory’s warehousing area to store and package our products now. Shubhra and I make sure we keep a close eye on our warehouse because that gives us better control over logistics. We can also monitor the quality and delivery schedule of our products if we’re close by. Our company office—a low-roofed, two-floor glass and brick cube—is actually located within the warehouse. Because it is on the mezzanine floor, the 6,000 square feet office looks like a design studio with the vibrant blues and yellows we have used for paint. We even have
Unmatched Joyride Vivek Prabhakar who co-founded Chumbak Designs with his wife Shubhra Chadda says working on their quirky, India-inspired designs has been “killer fun”.
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strategy
“In a fast-growing company, you don’t have the luxury to linger on fights.” a couple of organic gardens, mango trees and coconut trees on our office premises. The outdoors is my favourite place in the office, and I usually take all my phone calls there. We normally start the work week with a meeting at 9am on Monday. On the rest of the weekdays, we begin by 9.30am. Most people are in by that time but we have given our team the flexibility to choose their own working styles. There are some people who like to start work late and work till late while others who like to be in the office by 8:30am and leave by 5pm. Shubhra and I have clearly defined roles in the company. While I look after sales, finance, logistics and warehousing, Shubhra heads product and design. When we first started the company, it was very tough getting used to working together. We are very different people, especially when it comes to the way we work. And, suddenly we were spending 24 hours together! We didn’t know how to draw the line between a fight at home, and a disagreement in office so we would be constantly bickering over something or the other. With time, we’ve learnt to pick our battles. I know her strengths are my weaknesses and my weaknesses are her strengths. There are some tasks in the office that we both love doing and we make sure we do them together such as working on product design. Then, if Shubhra is fighting hard for something, I know it’s important to her and I let it go. She does the same when I feel passionately about something. Honestly, in a dynamic, young company, you don’t even have the luxury to argue or linger on fights with your team members for too long, especially when that person is your co-founder! Moreover, as the team has grown, we spend much less time together at work. Today, Chumbak products are sold in about 100 stores across India and 60 stores in Japan. We entered Japan in 2012 when Japanese retailer Amina Collections saw our magnets collection on our website and wanted to sell them in Japan. They said there’s a big market for well-designed products in Japan and tested them in 10 of their stores. Our products were a great hit because the market loved the vibrant colours, the art and design. A Japanese person doesn’t see an autorickshaw T-shirt the way Indians do because they might never have seen an autorickshaw in their life. They are attracted to the design, not the symbolism. Thanks to the great response, Amina decided to sell our products to large design stores in Japan such as Village Vanguard. We’re now available in 60 stores across Japan and sell our products under our own brand name.
Shubhra and I had actually planned to have Chumbak branded stores after a year or two of starting the company but we soon realised retail operations need a lot of capital. It made more sense for a company like ours to get a distribution system in place first. We opened our first own branded store in June 2013, a little more than three years after we started the company. The biggest challenge with your own store is to find the right location. For our first five stores, it was difficult to get mall owners to take us seriously. Our sheer persistence helped us overcome that. We followed up with mall owners aggressively but it was eventually because of the uniqueness of our products that they gave in. Today, we have about 18 company-owned branded stores across India.
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hile I am in charge of sales, finance and warehousing, what I enjoy most is getting feedback from our customers. I go to a Chumbak store once or twice a week. Nine times out of ten, I don’t introduce myself to the customers. I personally try and sell at least one of our products to a customer. It’s thrilling to see the smile your product can put on a customers’ face. Apart from store visits, I have our company’s email id hooked to my account so that I can answer the angry or critical emails that come from our customers about an issue in quality or availability. In fact, customer service is something everybody gets into at Chumbak. It’s not just Shubhra and I who go through the inbound emails from customers. People in sales, logistics and production go through them as well so they know the broad issues our customers are facing. Usually, the solution to the problem a customer is facing isn’t restricted to one department. It requires coordination from all departments, and we’ve found that when everyone knows what the issue is, problems get resolved faster. It also reduces the blame game. Actually, the one thing Shubhra and I are really proud about is that as a company, we’re not scared of admitting we did something wrong. If we made a mistake, we prefer to say it upfront to the customer. From the word go, we’ve consciously tried to build that culture. We encourage people to make mistakes but if someone makes a mistake, we don’t like to waste a lot of time and effort on dwelling what went wrong. I’d rather focus on what went right for the company. So if the sales in a particular store are going up, I want to know why that is happening so that we can replicate it. Thinking about what went wrong often brings down morale in the team and then people become afraid of making mistakes.
strategy
have people from other departments interview somebody who has applied for a position in a totally different department. For instance, an applicant for a position in finance will be interviewed by somebody from our design team. This part of the interview may or may not have a bearing on the person’s eventual hiring but it helps us gauge the person’s personality fit. Like most entrepreneurs, I look more for attitude than skill when hiring. That has always paid off in terms of the energy level and drive people bring to the office. When new stores open, 10-12 people from Chumbak are always there—doing this and that to get the store up and running. It’s during those times that we spot people’s strength like figuring out that the accounts guy is actually a great salesman. In fact, even though we don’t have a policy dictating so, about 80 per cent of the Chumbak staff visits our stores on weekends to get customer feedback on their own. We usually talk about that in our Monday morning meetings. Getting to know what we can do differently and Stacked Up On Fun Vivek Prabhakar loves going to a Chumbak store and playing a salesman. “It’s thrilling to see the smile a what the customer is looking for is golden inforproduct can bring to our customers’ face.” mation that you can’t get anywhere except talking to your customers in the store. Just last week, thanks to a visit like that, our The culture of a company is set by making sure the founders marketing team discovered that some customers would walk into and the first couple of people they hire set examples for others to our stores and ask to redeem their online gift certificates. It was an follow. We have a fairly relaxed environment in the office. I am a issue that no one in our sales team had anticipated and the person in flexible manager. I don’t like to be a nitpicker hovering over peothe store had no idea how to handle the request. All our gift certifiple’s desks to check if they are working or not. I prefer to be a cates are actually only redeemable online. The customer had walked problem solver who people can come to whenever they need help. off by the time the store manager could do anything about their Our setup is quite non-hierarchical and we have lunch together at request. So now we have devised a process wherein the certificates about 1: 30pm in a common lunch area. can be redeemed offline as well. This feedback may have never come We don’t have formal review sessions for our team mates. We up in a customer complaint online. believe feedback is a two way process. By that I mean, a 21-year-old Even though our teams take customer feedback on weekends, in his first job at Chumbak has the freedom to come up to me or our office (except the warehouse team) is officially open only for five Shubhra and give us feedback. Whenever I have to give individual days. We may end up on the phone on one or two Saturdays a feedback to someone, I make sure I don’t do it in front of the whole month, but that’s about it. I believe that people need those two days team. We let our new hires know about what’s done and what’s not to spend time with their families and relax so we don’t stress on done in our office on the first day of their onboarding process. It working on weekends. I sometimes have to work with our warehelps them to grasp the company culture faster. house teams on Saturdays but Sundays are strictly off work. I still interview some of the people we hire at Chumbak and On weekdays, I switch off work around 6-6.30pm. Back home, I when I am hiring, I always ask two questions that help me underspend time with my daughter, have dinner and then from 11pm to stand the person and his or her motivations much better. One is, if 12.30, I spend most of the time thinking ahead. These are random your money is taken care of, what’s the one job you’d do for free? I’ve thoughts that I know I can use in the future, not necessarily about found the most creative, random answers to this question. Someone the next day or the next week. I’ll be reading stuff and trying to put once told me they would want to play cricket for India. One person my thoughts together. That’s probably when I am the most producsaid he wanted to work in Cuba, another wanted to build lego struc- tive during the day. Working at Chumbak is killer fun because I get tures with his children and one of our finance guys said he would to see such great designs come to life every day. Even though we’ve want to do farming in his village. These answers help me understand been around for four years now, every morning I go to work, I think people’s passions. The next question is why aren’t you doing that what the company will be three or five years from now and I don’t right now? The other approach we use during the hiring process is to need anything else to keep me motivated. JUNE 2014 | INC. | 47
founders forum Ten Questions for Ajay Goenka
The 54-year-old founder and CMD of Rainbow Papers started his career as a paper trader at the age of 19 and now wishes to go back to school and relive the carefree days he’s never had since. What is the one thing your employees would be surprised to know about you? That I am a very quiet and shy person What company do you not want to start but wish someone else would?
Which TV or movie character you would like to go into business with?
The character of Shivaji Rao from the movie Nayak because he was extremely effective and focused on results.
What’s the toughest part of being in charge?
Not a company, but most definitely a school
Keeping your mind alert 24X7
What’s the one thing you wish you knew before you started the business?
The period from the start of a project to its completion is much longer than anticipated despite research and analysis.
What is the best advice you have given your children?
When my daughters graduated, I told them that in the real world there is no distinction between theory and practice. To be successful, you need to rely on common sense, not only theoretical knowledge. The biggest myth in business
What have you learnt about yourself while running your business?
That I have a lot of grit and analytical power.
Who gives you the best advice?
I believe in the adage, “listen to all, but follow your instinct”.
What’s the best part of the day?
Early morning when I go to the temple—my mind is at peace and it helps me gear up for the day ahead.
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courtesy Subject
That success is about making money. Entrepreneurs cannot focus only on getting rich. Focus on creating value, cash flow for the company and financial rewards will follow. as told to Sonal Khetarpal
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