The Magazine for Growing Companies
Our first list of India’s most innovative mid-sized companies...
decemBER 2013 | `150 | Volume 04 | Issue 11 A 9.9 Media Publication | inc.com Facebook.com/Inc
@inc
contents December 2013
06 The 1
st
Innovative100 list
Here’s presenting our first list of India’s most innovative mid-sized companies under `1,500 crore
10 The List of 100 Innovations
The complete list
14 JuRY
Meet our jury
20 The Business
Savvy of a “Missed Call”
Pranay Chulet of online and mobile classifieds portal Quikr
photograph by jiten gandhi
SAFE TRAVELS Ashok Goyal, MD, BLR Logistiks has brought some smart thinking to the way supply chains move in India.
This edition of Inc. magazine is published under license from Mansueto Ventures LLC, New York, New York. Editorial items appearing on pages 49, 53-57, 60-72 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.
Cover 1 design by Anil VK, Cover 2 design by Sristi Maurya
december 2013 | INC. | 1
contents December 2013
30
A perfect Business match
photograph by jodi clickers
Anupam Mittal of matrimonial website Shaadi.com
22
32
38
44
Srikant Somany of the tiles manufacturing company, Somany Ceramics
Makrand and Rinku Appalwar of technical textile manufacturing company EMMBI Industries
Ashok Goyal of transportation and logistics enterprise BLR Logistiks
Inderpreet Wadhwa of Azure Power, a solar power producer
Keeping an ear to the ground
24
“The Md should see himself as a Movie actor”
Pramoud Rao of home security systems company Zicom
2 | INC. | December 2013
The game of multiple moulds
34
“why it is important to be perceived as fair” Dr Amarnath Gupta of commerical explosives company Premier Explosives
getting a move on it
40
A cloud lined with dollars
Vishal Dhar and Uday Challu of the tech support company iYogi
The Shining Light of Profit and Impact
contents
Gutter Credit here
August 2012
Photograph by name tk
december 2013 | INC. | 3
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: Manav Sachdev Shokeen Saifi & Sristi Maurya Visualiser: NV Baiju Sr. Designers: Shigil Narayanan Haridas Balan & Manoj Kumar VP Designers: Charu Dwivedi, Peterson PJ Pradeep G Nair, Dinesh Devgan & Vikas Sharma MARCOM Designer: Rahul Babu STUDIO Chief Photographer: Subhojit Paul Sr. Photographer: Jiten Gandhi Community Team Manager: Rajat Gupta Associate: Akarshan Sapra RESEARCH MANAGER: amAN shUKLA 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
Walking the talk! Innovation is a much-used business lexicon of our times. Everywhere you look, there is a case study, research or consultant either exhorting you to innovate with gusto and talking about setting in place a framework that helps in generating, piloting and implementing ideas that lead to stupendous business impact. With this issue, it might seem like we’re propelling the innovation hype as well. Of course, it’s tough to argue with what new and future-ready ideas can achieve if you’ve been lucky enough to have one, recognise it and institutionalise it in your companies. This utopia isn’t common. Instead of mould-busting ideas, we believe successful companies become innovation magnets when they demonstrate an ability to stack up their small innovative tweaks, and make those count. Innovative100 highlights such companies. They have grown because they’ve shown the ability to craft unique solutions to problems that plague similar companies, and benefit from opportunities that others believed were too difficult to tap with some hatke—to borrow a Bollywoood idiom—approaches and strategies. I hope you enjoy our first ever listing on India’s most innovative mid-sized business. I look forward to your feedback, and suggestions on how we can refine our methodology further. Also, don’t miss reading How To Make People Believe, the brilliant special feature we’ve picked from our US edition, on Page 60. A successful entrepreneur’s real litmus test is the skill with which she can tell the story of her company’s vision, and energise others to believe in and achieve those objectives. This story is a treasure chest of best practices to do that right. It’s a good piece to end the year on, and to get armed for 2014.
Shreyasi Singh shreyasi.singh@9dot9.in
Celebrating India’s BusinesS Innovations
Building companies is a challenging uphill climb anywhere. In India, doing it right is infinitely more mountainous. Beyond getting the business fundamentals of product, people and pricing right, companies, and the entrepreneurs who run them, need agility, responsiveness and the skill to engineer smart solutions to unique problems. The result of this trek is what we call a constant innovativeness. Our special issue, a listing of innovative mid-sized companies in IndiaÂ, celebrates and highlights this quality.
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 7
The Genesis
After five years of bringing you the Inc. India 500, our annual ranking of India’s fastest-growing private companies under `1,500 crore, we are now proud to launch our first edition of the Innovative100, our new initiative to identify and recognise innovative mid-sized companies in India. Our winning companies have demonstrated a smart and fresh approach of looking at business problems in a tough environment, and have come out with successes that aren’t just profitable, but also serve as fascinating case studies of growing and managing companies in India. The list of 100 companies has emerged after a four-month long nomination and evaluation 1 campaign where we received 368 Innovation in Marketing: This category nominations. rewards innovations that Each firm are helping enterprises offer greater value to their was allowed customers/clients on core to nominate themselves elements of marketing— in a maximum of three the company’s pricing model, distribution/placecategories, but could ment network, promotional only win in two out strategy and the value additions in the product/ of those three after service itself. being vetted by our very capable jury.
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DECEMBER 2013
Innovation in Branding & Communication: This category rewards innovation that help companies manage and build their brand perception, communicate with their customers, and support them in ways that were previously not possible.
2
3 Innovation in People Practices: This category is for innovative HR approaches through which companies have been able to work their way around the resource crunch and craft successful strategies to attract, nurture, manage and retain talent.
The Eligibility
The Methodology
Each innovation—across the 10 categories of business functions in which we sought nominations—was judged on four parameters: uniqueness of idea, replicability, scalability, and tangible business impact. Innovation in Technology: This category will recognise companies that have used innovative approaches to save the cost of implementation, speed up roll-out, and build key stakeholder buy-in while deploying, designing or implementing business imperative technologies.
4
Our jury members used the below scale of weighted averages to evaluate the companies Parameters
Weight
Maximum Score
Uniqueness
30%
10
Replicability
10%
10
Scalability
20%
10
Business Metrics
40%
10
Innovation in Responsible Business: This category rewards businesses that are conscious of, and committed to improving, their impact on the environment and community around them, and are integrating responsible practices in the way they operate their businesses.
5 Innovation in Corporate Governance: This category will recognise companies with innovative approaches to institutionalising transparency for all their stakeholders (clients, employees, industry), and establishing a robust Board and running it with rigour (even when not mandated to).
6
Innovation in Product: This category recognises breakthrough products that have redefined markets and/ or created new ones by improving usability, access and value, and deploying cuttingedge design and R&D.
7 Innovation in Supply Chain: This category highlights the innovations carried out across the supply chain—procurement and vendor management, inventory management, and logistics—that have supplemented the go-to market strategies of companies and gained them competitive advantage quickly.
8
Innovation in Manufacturing: This award will go to companies who have demonstrated an ability to achieve world-class manufacturing standards—benchmarking against best practices, achievement of high efficiency norms, use of systems for continuous and sustained improvement like Six Sigma and lean manufacturing.
9 Innovation in Smart Money: Companies in this category should have demonstrated innovative approaches in managing their working capital, mainly bringing costs down, improving margins and shortening collection cycles.
Companies that satisfied the following criteria were eligible to participate: 1. FY2013 revenue between `50- `1,500 crore 2. An independent company that is not part of a group larger than `1,500 crore in revenue 3. Company was founded, and is headquartered in India
10
Our first class of Innovative100. They have walked the talk on innovation, and are reaping the benefits. Enjoy meeting them! NO.
Company
Categories
18
Capillary Technologies
Product, Technology
1
Aakash Educational Services
Marketing
19
Century Ply
Product
2
Allied Digital Services
Technology
20
Claris Lifesciences
Marketing
3
Amines & Plasticides
Technology
21
Compton Computers
Technology
4
Amrut Distilleries
Product
22
Cross Tab
Technology
5
Anjani Portland
Manufacturing
23
Devi Sea Foods
Supply Chain
6
Aries Agro
Product, Responsible Business
24
Dhanuka Agritech
Product
7
Astral Polytechnik
Technology
25
Dollar
Marketing
8
Azure Power
Responsible Business
26
ElectroMech
Product
9
b4S Solutions
People Practice
27
Emami
Marketing
10
Badve Polymers
Manufacturing
28
EMMBI Industries
Manufacturing
11
Bartronics
Technology
29
Excelsoft
Responsible Business
12
Base Corporation
Marketing
30
Fenda Audio
Technology
13
Biostadt India
Branding & Communication
31
Fusion Charts
Product
14
Bliss GVS
Product
32
Geodesic
Product
15
BLR Logistiks
Supply Chain
33
Goli Vada Pav
Supply Chain
16
C&S Electric
Product
34
Gujarat Pipavav
Corporate Governance
17
Camson Bio Technology
Product, Responsible Business
35
Happiest Minds
Branding & Communication
10   |  INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
an ISO 9001 : 2008 company
THE COMPLETE LIST
36
Harvel AGUA
Technology
69
Provogue
Marketing
37
Holostik
Technology
70
Quick Heal
Product
38
Indian Energy Exchange
Product, Technology
71
Quikr
Marketing, Product
39
Indian Immunologicals
Corporate Governance, Marketing
72
Rainbow Papers
Technology
40
Indus Health
Product
73
Rays Power Experts
Marketing, Smart Money
41
Infinite Computer Solutions
Product
74
Real Ispat
Manufacturing
42
Insecticides
Marketing
75
Rooms XML
Product, Technology
43
iYogi
Product, Technology
76
Safexpress
Marketing, Supply Chain
44
Jai Hind Projects
Responsible Business
77
Sequel Logistics
Supply Chain
45
Jakson Power
Product
78
Shaadi.com
Branding & Communication
46
Just Dial
Product
79
Siesta Hospitality
Marketing
47
Kent RO Sytems
Product, Technology
80
Somany Ceramics
Manufacturing
48
Kryfs Components
Responsible Business
81
Su-Kam
Product
49
Lite Bite Foods
Smart Money, Supply Chain
82
Sunshine Hospitals
Marketing, Responsible Business
50
Luxor
Product
83
Siddhivinayak Agri Processing
Supply Chain
51
Machino Polymers
Technology
84
Talwalkars Better Value Fitness
Branding & Communication
52
Mecgale Pneumatics
Responsible Business
53
Motif India
Responsible Business
85
Tirupati Inks
Product
54
My Mobile Payments
Technology
86
Tree House Education
Product
55
Myntra
Marketing
87
Ujjivan Financial
Responsible Business
56
Narayana Health
Responsible Business, Technology
88
Venus
Product
89
V-Guard
Product
57
New Globe Logistics
Supply Chain
90
Vinati Organics
Manufacturing
58
Nitin Fire
Manufacturing
91
Vinfinet
Product
59
Nova Medical
Responsible Business
60
One 97 Communication
Product
92
Visesh Infotechnics
Corporate Governance
61
Online Recharge
Marketing
93
VLCC
People Practice
62
Paladion
Product
94
Vortex Engineering
Product, Technology
63
Parag Milk Foods
Product
95
V-Trans
Technology
64
Path Infotech
Product
96
Wagh Bakri
Branding & Communication
65
Persistent Systems
Technology
97
Waree Energies
Technology
66
Prabha Energies
People Practice
98
Wim Plast
Product
67
Precision Infomatic
People Practice
99
Zicom
Product
68
Premier Explosives
Technology
100
Zydex Industries
Technology
12   |  INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
The Jury
We are privileged and delighted to have a diverse jury—made up of investors, corporate professionals and serial entrepreneurs—to help us conceptualise the awards, and to evaluate the nominations we received. We leaned on our jury members to guide us through the entire four-month long campaign. Needless to say, without their patient and supportive cooperation, and the many, many pages of nomination forms they went through, we wouldn’t have been able to bring out the first Inc. India Innovative100. We owe them much gratitude.
Navin Talreja
President, Mumbai & Kolkata Ogilvy & Mather (India) Over the last 16 years, he has worked with BBDO and Ogilvy in India and DDB in Dubai. At DDB in Dubai, he handled the businesses for Sony, HSBC and Volkswagen across Middle East and Africa. His best years in his own words have been at Ogilvy. He won Ogilvy India its first Cannes Lion for a Media innovation on Kodak in 1999, and was a Business Development Person of the year finalist at the Media Asia Awards in 2010. Continued on page 16 14 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
the jury
Continued from page 14
Punit Modhgil
Founding Editor, Indian Marketing Review; MD, Octane Marketing, Gurgaon Punit Modhgil is the MD & Co-founder of Octane, and the founding editor of Indian Marketing Review. He has been an entreprenuer three times over and also has held a number of senior positions with some of the world’s leading technology brands like Microsoft, Oracle, Siebel Systems and NIIT. At Microsoft, he led marketing for India’s largest software license business with annual revenues of over $500 million.
L R Natarajan
CEO, New Business Division, Titan Co., Bangalore Natarajan has been with Titan Company since 2003. He has around 30 years of experience in various capacities. His innovative concepts were instrumental in securing international acclaim for Supply Chain and Goldplus. He drives the innovation initiatives within the company, and has been instrumental in setting up their Innovation School of Management.
Rahul Chandra
Co-founder & Managing Director, Helion Advisors, Gurgaon Rahul Chandra has 15 years of venture capital investing and corporate development experience in technology product and services companies in India and the US. He serves on the Boards of Shubham, UnitedLex, Netambit, Mindworks and manages investments in Spandana and Equitas.
Continued on page 18 16 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
the jury
Continued from page 16
R Giridhar
Group Editor, Technology; 9.9 Media, Noida R Giridhar is Group Editor at 9.9 Media and is responsible for the editorial strategy and direction of the company’s print and online properties. He has more than 24 years of experience, and has been actively involved in publications that cover IT, electronics, telecom, and manufacturing industries, both in India and the Far East.
Krishnan Ganesh
Founder & CEO, Tutor Vista; Serial entrepreneur & investor, Bangalore He is a successful serial entrepreneur with four successful green field ventures and exits. His last venture TutorVista was acquired by US and UK listed education leader Pearson for $213 million. He was among the top 5 nominee for the Economic Times Entrepreneur of the Year 2012 Award. He serves as a member of Board of Governors of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.
Alok Mittal
Managing Director, Canaan Partners, Gurgaon He currently leads India operations of Canaan Partners, a premier US based venture capital firm, specialising in IT, healthcare and technology investments. He is also a founding member of band of angels, India, which is a forum for making angel investments. Earlier, he co-founded JobsAhead.com in 1999. JobsAhead.com is the leading e-recruitment business focussed on the Indian market, and was acquired by Monster.com.
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DECEMBER 2013
Innovation In
MARKETING
company: Quikr
founder: Pranay Chulet
The business savvy of a “missed call”
With a simple (and, inspired) tweak of marketing strategy, Pranay Chulet, founder of online and mobile classifieds portal Quikr, got three crore Indians to use his website every month. As told to Sonal Khetarpal | Photograph by Jiten Gandhi
While working in New York for management consulting bigwigs Booz & Co and Mitchell Madison Group, I saw how the print classifieds business was severely demolished by the digital classifieds. I was certain a similar trend would follow in India too. So, I moved back to India and started Quikr in 2008. Only five to seven per cent of the population in India, at that time, was online. Initially, I wanted to focus on that group. So, in the first three years we promoted Quikr through online advertising, mostly with Google Ads. Advertising on a mass medium such as television wasn’t an option then. We wanted to grow the volume of ad listings before we started mass media advertising. It was in June 2011 when we had around nine million visitors on our portal that we started mass media advertising. We hired the advertising company Scarecrow Communications. Initially we concentrated more on informational advertising, telling people who we are and what we do. Doing that helped us increase our users to more than 11 million visitors in a couple of months, most of whom were regular internet users. But, we knew the real game was in capturing non-internet users. For non-internet users, the personal element of a commercial transaction is an absolute must. They can’t buy the product without a physical touch-and-feel, a voice, or a person on the other end. The ubiquitous mobile phone could drive this for us, we realised. That’s how our “missed call” idea came up. Missed calls are a uniquely Indian phenomenon. Through the campaign, people could give us missed calls instead of logging on to our website. Our call centre would then call them back and assist them to find, rent, sell or buy any product or service. The rationale behind the campaign was spot-on—missed calls are free so low income groups would prefer it. Higher income people would like its convenience. From a business point of view, it was cost-effective because calling users on their mobile is cheaper than when users call us on a toll free line. The campaign had other benefits we hadn’t anticipated. Talking to users helped us get direct feedback. Also, conversion rates of an ad being listed are higher when we have conversations with people. Our creative, the Bob Biswas advertisement, also hugely helped the campaign become successful. The ad starts with a character named Bob Biswas (enacted by Saswata Chatterjee who played the assassin in the movie Kahaani) who starts stripping to get the crowd’s attention in a busy cafe. His objective—to announce an apartment he’d like to rent. An onlooker comes up with the campaign’s tagline—“Quikr ko missed call maar na.” After we aired this ad, we When trying out a new marketing strategy, it’s were flooded with missed calls. We had staffed our call centre with 25 people but important to scale fast we still couldn’t fulfil the deluge of calls we got. or fail fast. Just keep it Thanks to this great response, we increased the number of “missed call” ads simple and don’t overover our repertoire of informational ads on television. We added new creatives intellectualise. Execute it to the missed call campaign, including the “Riot film” in February 2013 where a in a small space and if it works well, build on it. If police inspector appeals to a rioting mob to buy his household stuff as he has not, just move on. been transferred. One of the stunned rioters then asks him to give Quikr a missed call. All our ads have a common theme—they reaffirm Quikr’s image as a quirky brand, and use characters or themes that are very Indian. Today, we have more than 30 million users a month. In fact, we can proudly claim that one in every five internet users in India has used Quikr at least once.
Innovative Tip
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 2 1
Keeping an ear to the ground
Srikant Somany’s fresh thinking on talent management with concepts like Performance Clinix and Stay Interview is helping his `1,100 crore Somany Ceramics build a workplace culture that is productive and happy. As told to Ira Swasti | Photograph by Subhojit Paul
The greatest challenge for a business today is to get the best out of its people. Most people want to perform at work but are not always able to, whether because of their peers, their bosses or a lack of guidance and mentorship. We decided to take that challenge on. So, in July this year, our general manager, HR, Biju Sebastian constituted the Performance Clinix. Just like a health clinic, the Performance Clinix is the place employees are encouraged to go to when they feel they are not able to perform and need expert guidance. When we launched this, we first built a 12-people team, picked from our inhouse HR staff, for our 1,100-people strong cadre. We soon realised that people are quite hesitant to talk about their work problems with internal HR managers. They fear objectivity. We decided to reconstitute the team. We brought in four external professional HR managers, a college psychology teacher and a sociologist. Only one of our internal HR managers is in the Clinix, mostly to help coordinate. Reconstituting this team of “doctors” has worked well. Nearly 20 people have come forward to talk abouth their issues. For instance, an employee recently complained that he felt his boss favoured another colleague over him despite that the fact that this employee brought in more sales for the company. Even if that was only a perception, it would lead to mistrust and a not-so-great working environment between his manager and him. We decided to move this to a different location. He’s a star performer there. In the past couple of years, we were constantly challenged when it came to retaining talent. Even in a tough environment climater where job offers dried up, we were shocked to lose 132 front line sales people. Many of them hadn’t completed even nine months here. During the exit interviews, most said better salaries was their main reason for leaving us. But, we had corrected our salaries as per industry standards, and knew the real problem lay elsewhere. It’s why we thought of launching “Stay Interviews” to get a sense of how people were feeling when they were still with the company. In the first phase, we spoke to people who had worked for us for less than a year. Our Gujarat HR manager asked about 110 of our territory managers across the country: what makes them stay in the company, the challenges they faced, what they would change about the organisation, and the triggers that would make them want to leave. These interviews took about three months but provided great onground insights. We found out logistics was the primary reason for anxiety and stress. We deployed custom IT tools that would help teams keep better track of logistics. Over the years, I’ve also learnt that you don’t always need formal training to improve people’s performance at work. Earlier this year, we introduced a Personal Excellence Masters Course where our employees were mandated to read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In a few months, we will conduct a three-hour exam based on the book, and the five top scorers of this exam will be awarded to attend a four-day course at the Stephen Covey Institute. To keep people motivated, we send out quizzes based on the book twice a month. Choose your boss, not We reward winners with little gifts. Sixty-three people have enrolled for the your job. It’s the difference between average and course so far. Even if each of them imbibes one good habit from the book, the outstanding performance. company will benefit 63 times over. I strongly believe that learning takes place Also, learning to work without when knowledge is converted into a skill, and that skill is honed and masrecognition is a skill. Work on tered into a lifelong competence. mastering that. 2 2 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
Photograph by name tk
Gutter Credit here
Innovative Tip
Innovation In
PEOPLE PRACTICE
company: Somany Ceramics
founder: Srikant Somany
Innovation in
PRODUCT
company: Zicom Electronic Security Systems founder: Pramoud Rao
“The MD of a company should see himself as an actor of a movie.”
“The increasing number of terrorist attacks in India since 2001 has helped my company grow,” says Pramoud Rao, founder of Zicom, a leading home security systems company in India. Before his eyebrow-raising statement puts you off, Rao quickly clarifies what he means is that the increasing need for surveillance due to terrorism has necessitated a demand for security products. So, Zicom, which struggled to keep afloat for a decade after starting out in 1994 now boasts of annual sales of more than `691 crores and a customer base upwards of 10 lakhs. Here’s a glimpse into the leadership style and management techniques that has Rao armed himself with to help Zicom grow. as told to Sonal Khetarpal | Photographs by Jiten Gandhi
I get up around 6:30am and have a glass of aloe vera juice. I have been drinking it for the
last 20 years. Then, I rush to the temple—my gym. I am a gym rat. No day ever passes without me paying a visit to my holy shrine. I got hooked to working out in 2004. Before that, I was quite overweight. I remember the surprised look on the client’s face when I wouldgo for sales calls. It seemed my weight didn’t go down well with the company I ran. Clients just wouldn’t take me seriously. It’s when I realised how important a role one’s personality plays in business. So, I began working on my physique and there has been no looking back. Now, I sport six-pack abs at the age of 55, and ride a Harley-Davidson to office. Apart from that benefit, I learnt that an entrepreneur should see themselves as an actor of a movie. Just as an actor takes on the role of a movie character, similarly people in top management must be a personification of what they do, or what their company believes in. I have a 30 minute ride to work and I am typically in office by 10.30am. The first hour, when all the people are busy settling in, I use the solitude to analyse reports from different departments. I do not check my mailbox. As far as planning my to-dos is concerned, I plan it one day in advance. This is usually during my second silent hour, around 7pm when most of the people have left office. It is then that I diligently write notes of the day’s happenings. Jotting down helps me ascertain which part of business needs my utmost attention. I try to be involved in all aspects of the company but I do have my focus areas. I concentrate more on partnerships, acquisitions, technology, marketing and sales. But, that doesn’t mean I don’t know what is happening in operations. I don’t think top management should concentrate only on the decision-making aspect. It is equally important to know the reality of groundwork. It helps to make better and more achievable long-term plans for the company. To do that, I work closely with all the teams. That way I know how work is progressing and which problems need to be resolved. I think that is an DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 2 5
absolute must, especially in India, where I feel many people lack a sense of initiative and ownership in their work. It also gives me ample opportunities to ingrain in people the kind of results I expect and want. I see constant interaction as an opportunity to share my passion for Zicom with everyone. Passion is contagious. This is important because in 25 years of my experience I haven’t seen any manager or professional CEO have the kind of enthusiasm for the company that an entrepreneur has. As the company’s founder and MD, I try to be around my people to motivate them to give their best. Another thing that I try, and very hard too, is to inculcate the vision of our company in the team. Many a times, in committee meetings, everyone tends to express their own personality and personal choices even for a professional decision. I have to then play the role of a referee reminding people about the bigger picture—that they do not work for a company that provides just security equipment. I want people to think that they work for a company that provides a sense of safety to its customers. The logic is simple—when a customer buys a CCTV camera from us, they are not buying the hardware but the benefit they will get from the camera, which is the feeling of being safe. It is important that each one of us remember this so we can bring out new security products for our customers. It is because of this vision that we have been able to drive innovation in our company. We realised that most mishaps occur in the absence of the users. And, the security solutions are redundant if they inform the customer about the occurrence after it has happened. That gave us the idea to open the first Command Centre in India in 1995. It helps us manage all our security products remotely. We connected all the cameras and fire alarms to it so in case the alarm is triggered or if it is tampered with, we can immediately notify the customer. Continued on page 28 2 6 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
“when i was overweight, Clients just wouldn’t take me seriously. I realised then how importanT a role one’s personality plays in business.”
Pramoud Rao,
Zicom Electronic Security Systems
Gutter Credit here
innovative 100
innovative 100
A Vigil Watcher L
ike mobile phones aren’t used just to make calls, Zicom wanted to be much more than just a vanilla security products company. To grow, Rao said he understood his company and his team need to think solutions, not gadgets. A market survey of security products highlighted the fact that most current products don’t notify the user in case of a mishap. The user of the product finds out about the occurrence after it has already happened. This gives them little or no chance to salvage the situation. To fill in this gap, Zicom launched inTouch, a camera with push technology which sends a live video feed to the user’s mobile whenever an event occurs. Once the user switches on this feature, the camera pushes the recorded clip on to the user’s smartphone within five seconds of detecting an event. The playback video then helps the user decide which action to take. In case the user doesn’t check the video, the camera automatically forwards the recorded clip to Zicom’s Command Centre. They can then talk to the intruder through its twoway audio system or trigger the alarm remotely to alert the neighbours or call the user/emergency contact person. inTouch was launched in August 2013. Nearly a thousand units were sold in the first three months although Zicom did not advertise because they wanted to get customer insights first. Most customers, predominantly working couples with kids or senior citizens at home bought it to monitor their households remotely. Zicom realised the demand for surveillance applications from inTouch’s early customers. Armed with this insight, the company is planning to launch a big marketing push next year. Cost: `15,000.
Advantages: •U ser doesn’t have to monitor the video footage continuously
• Have Passive Infra Red (PIR) sensor for human detection which helps to avoid false alarms
• Send out instant notifications and provide real-time playback
• Built-in pre-alarm recording allows to see the entire course of an event rather than searching for the footage in the whole recording
• All recordings are stored in its 32GB SD card
• Accessible through internet by
logging in through specific login ID and password
2 8 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
Continued from page 26 The culture of innovation is surely, top driven but it is not only about me trying to influence the team. I am a product of my team members as well. I don’t have any business or management degree. I am a science graduate. All I have learnt about entrepreneurship and managing people comes from the people I work with. In 2010, I went to make a presentation at a client’s office with our services head Ravi Malhan. It was such an education for me. I saw how he prepared for the meeting. He did a background check on all the people who were going to be there, and intentionally reached half an hour earlier so he could talk to them informally before the presentation. He referenced those conversations in his talk, and began his presentation by articluating their company’s needs instead of talking about Zicom. His connect with that audience was incredible. Watching him in action was a great learning for me. From then on, I’ve followed the exact same routine. See, learning is all about observing and applying common sense. I picked this mantra from my father. It’s a continuous process. That’s how I live now. I prove to myself every day of my life that I am good at what I do. I compete with myself every day, and try to outdo myself. I do this because I don’t want to die thinking I didn’t achieve as much as I could have, or should have.
A perfect business match!
Anupam Mittal didn’t need to tell people he was one of India’s leading matchmakers. After all, Shaadi.com has helped 3.2 million people find spouses. To conquer the marriage mindspace, his company launched a digital campaign that celebrated love and life; and helped the website get 2.6 million new profiles in just one month.
as told to sonal Khetarpal | Photograph by JODI Clickers
3 0 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
Gutter Credit here
Shaadi.com has been matchmaking for the past 15 years. We have helped nearly 3.2 million people find their better halves. So, we decided earlier this year that we didn’t need to merely tell people what we do. Instead, we wanted to celebrate the institution of marriage and the beauty of love with everyone—not just our members. We roped in advertising agency JWT to help create a digital campaign for this. After weeks of brainstorming between their and our marketing team, we launched the campaign, “Love, Arranged by Shaadi.com” on May 17 this year. We continued this campaign through the highly-viewed 2013 Indian Premier League (IPL) matches, until the end of July, to reach maximum viewers. Our first commercial tells the story of a couple who found each other through Shaadi.com and captures their moment of expression of love. We also got bestselling author Chetan Bhagat to narrate their story. That was a great pull since Chetan is a big draw with young people. Instead of just airing the ad on television, we uploaded the ad on You Tube as well. The video went viral on internet. Our first commercial got 5,49,981 views online. In fact, in June 2013, it was the most watched video on YouTube. We launched the second TV ad on May 31 along the same lines—a real life story of a couple who met online, got married and found love. Again it was a hit on the internet as well with 2,86,083 times. To promote the campaign and engage with the fans directly, our social media team ran several Facebook and Twitter contests. We started a series of Facebook contests on May 15. The first contest was to guess the new member of our team, and build up excitement about Chetan Bhagat as our brand ambassador. We followed that up with two more contests—the first of which asked viewers about Bhagat’s message in the ad, and the second contest asked them about the jingle in the ad to which the boy dances. The purpose was to get more and more people to watch these commercials. We also leveraged social media to talk to people about relationships in general. It helped us engage with a much larger group. Again, we did this through two contests—the first asked viewers about attributes for better relationships; and MyShaadi.ComPartner contest where people told us about the qualities they look for in a partner. From these two Facebook contests, we got 3,293 replies and 48,145 “likes”. We posted the MyShaadi.ComPartner contest on Twitter too. We received 80,000 tweets. At one point, the contest was trending in India for more than 36 hours. It trended globally for six hours! The success of this campaign helped us realise the power of Twitter, especially to help us engage internationally. The entire campaign has significantly increased the profile uploads on our portal. According to the Internet Economy Watch data by IAMAI & IMRB, our profile uploads increased to 2.16 million in June from 0.64 million in April 2013. That is an increase of 237 per cent! Photograph by name tk
founder: Anupam Mittal
Innovation in
BRANDING
Gutter Credit here
company: Shaadi.com
Photograph by name tk
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 3 1
3 2 | INC. |
Manufacturing DECEMBER 2013
company: EMMBI Industries co-founders: Makrand Appalwar and Rinku Appalwar Photograph by name tk
Gutter Credit here
Innovation in
the game of multiple moulds
Makrand and Rinku Appalwar, co-founders of the Mumbaibased `150-crore technical textile manufacturing company EMMBI, would turn down small orders for nearly 15 years—their big clients kept them busy enough. But, a smart manufacturing innovation enabled them to court the small, and scale up to becoming one of the top three exporters of technical textile in India. as told to Sonal Khetarpal | Photograph by Jiten Gandhi
In business, the conventional rule of thumb is to get as many customers as possible. But till 2009, after 15 years of EMMBI’s incorporation, we would supply technical textiles only to big clients—Indian majors such as Hindustan Unilever and Tata Chemicals, and international players like Honda Motors and Dow Chemicals Inc. We would have to refuse all orders less than 10 tonnes because smaller orders just weren’t economically feasible. At our Silvassa manufacturing unit, we had the capacity to produce 12 tonnes of polymer daily per machine run. So, an order less than that quantity would lead to extra stock in our warehouse, and add to our inventory cost. But, we began to realise that since there were so many queries for small orders, clearly there was a market need, and by saying no to it, we were sending business to our competitors. Somebody, somewhere was fulfilling these demands, and had the capacity to produce smaller quantities. We should be able to do so too. My core team of seven engineers set out to find a solution. Since they work with the machinery every day, they were the best people to brainstorm on alternatives. I believe that people who experience the problems first-hand come up with the most innovative solutions. The first idea was to buy machinery with a smaller production capacity but then we would lose out on economies of scale. The other idea was to change the polymer yarn after every run. We do three machine runs a day for the most efficient utilisation of our machinery. Changing the yarn after every run would bring down that efficiency because every yarn change takes up to two hours. In effect, the machines would be idle every day for six hours. We finally decided to test/pilot the third idea we came up with— making different dyes for the machines. We experimented with moulds which could produce two qualities together and that worked. We took it further and tried a three-mould approach. It clicked! It allowed us to make three kinds of polymer yarn in one cycle and produced four tonnes of each kind (total 12 tonnes) in a day. This gave us the ability to service smaller orders without compromising on the productivity of the machines. We could If an employee comes to me with a problem, I ask also cater to more customers and could rapidly increase our smaller client base. them to tell me the soluDoing so had a huge impact on our business. First, it increased our margins tion. One who is facing the because selling in smaller quantities is more profitable than selling in bulk. We problem will know the best decreased our inventory carrying cost by one-third and overall production cost solution. I don’t believe in by 12-13 per cent. We brought down stock keeping to four days from the initial the management thinking, and the others acting. We all seven to 10 days. There was also an increase of six per cent in the net production think and we all act. of the company. From 12,000 tonnes in 2009, we moved up to 20,000 tonnes of polymer yarn by 2010. With the growth in production, increase in profit margin and reduction in inventory costs, in just one year we became one of the top three exporters of technical textile in India.
Gutter Credit here
Innovative Tip
Photograph by name tk
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 3 3
Innovation In
Technology
company: Premier Explosives
founder: Dr Amarnath Gupta
“One needn’t only make fair decisions, it’s important to be perceived as fair also.”
Founded in 1980 by Dr Amarnath Gupta, Premier Explosives has several firsts to its credit. It claims to be the first small scale private enterprise to produce commercial explosives in India. It was the first private company to get the DRDO contract to manufacture propellants for the Agni and Aakash missiles. Today, this `111-crore company with its 1152-people team is the first company in the world to have developed the technology to produce NHN detonators, considered much safer, than the more commonly used ASA detonators on a commercial scale. as told to Ira Swasti | PhotographS by A. Prabhakar Rao
I wake up around 5.45am and go for a walk every morning. After that, I read newspaper and get ready for office. Morning is when I get some of my best ideas. In fact, it was during a newspaper reading session when I was thinking about Premier that I decided on my company logo. I had seen a headline in the Indian Express about the US launching a rocket into space the day I got our company registered. I decided we’d have the rocket as our logo. At that time, I had founded Premier as a producer of commercial explosives for mining. That was my expertise. I never knew then that I’d end up making propellants for India’s defence industry—the Aakash and Agni missiles. The rocket logo was a premonition, almost. My office is very close to my home and I usually reach there by 9.30am. The first thing I do is check my e-mails and make a list of what needs to be done that day. Most of my time is spent in meetings with my people. Having worked in the technical department of Indian Explosives Limited for seven years, my focus at Premier continues to be on R&D. I visit our factory once or twice a week. When I am there, I usually get a heads up on what problems our department heads may be facing and give them my inputs. Over the years, a big lesson I’ve learnt is that not only do you need to make fair decisions when you are dealing with people, it’s important to be perceived as fair also. I work hard to involve people in the decision making process—to discuss things with operators, supervisors and officers’ working in all our departments to get their views. This way, people don’t feel as if it is only the CMD’s decision. Decisions tend to be more balanced, and seen to be fair when they are collaborative. If you do that well, the implementation of the decision is faster and more effective. Effective collaboration and communication become all the more important in an explosives business because we have a lot of buildings and people spread across locations. The many buildings help to spread out explosives operation, for the simple safety reason that if there is an accident in one building, it won’t affect people who are not part of the operation. We also split the explosives in each building into smaller portions so that damage is minimised. But despite these precautions, a deadly accident took place at our factory in Peddakandukuru in July last year which changed everything. I was in Serbia attending an explosives conference, at the time when I got a call from Srinivasa Rao, our director of production, that two of our workers had died in an explosion and six others had been injured. We also lost production of about 30 million detonators in that financial year. When I came back to India after two days, we conducted an internal Knowledge is the only thing in the world that inquiry to find out why and how the incident had taken place. multiplies by division. As all other manufacturers in India and abroad, Premier also was using ASA or lead Always keep your ears and Azide, lead Styphnate and Aluminium powder, as the primary explosive in the produceyes open to learn from tion of detonators. We had taken all safety measures in the manufacturing process using your peers and competitors ASA, such as training our personnel on its proper use, and deploying remote controls in the industry. and devices like hydraulic power for driving the reactors. But one of the workers had
Innovative Tip
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 3 5
about three to four years but we hadn’t tasted success on that front yet. Actually, this chemical has only been tested at lab scale and no one in the world has used it on a commercial scale. But we took it up as a challenge. I told my team that we’d be building a new facility, not for the production of ASA detonators, but for NHN detonators. There were a lot of reservations from our R&D team because they weren’t ready with the product. But I told that that constructing a new facility will take around two to three months and that’s when I want the finished product. There were two challenges before our team—the synthesis of NHN and the production of detonators with NHN as primer. While we had started synthesising NHN using the technology from Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Trivandrum, we found that the output was very low on sensitivity. It required consolidation at a high pressure for getting detonated and the technology couldn’t have been used as it is. So our R&D team continued its trails to improve the sensitivity of the product and developed a method to manufacture a 5kg batch of detonators. The final formula is totally different from what our company had started with. As for the production of detonators, we had conducted several trials to make a reliable detonator with NHN in place of ASA by changing process parameters such as the minimum quantity of NHN to detonate PETN, the secondary charge, the consolidation pressure and the dwell time. And I am proud to say that my team didn’t let me down. They perfected the process of manufacturing all kinds of detonators with the new component NHN in the allocated time, without any major changes to our present infrastructure. I spent all my knowledge and time in monitoring the product and this innovative initiative consumed a lot of our time. But it was worth it. While we had to forego some revenue in 2012-13, production came back to normal levels in the first two months of FY 2013-14. Today, we have a product which is much safer and technically better than the one we were using earlier. NHN assures safety in production to both human lives and physical assets. NHN detonators are also safer to operate. Plus, as these detonators have no lead content and generate fewer effluents, they are less harmful to the environment. For the technically inclined, NHN is also known to have a higher Velocity of Detonation compared to other primary explosives under optimum conditions. Premier’s innovativeness lies in ensuring those optimum conditions are met in the production of detonators with NHN. Since we have started using NHN as a primer charge in our detonators, the company has produced more than 20 million detonators. It’s heartening to know that we are the first company in the world to have accomplished this enormous feat and we have already applied for a national and global patent for the same.
“we are the first company in the world to use the more safer nhn as a primer charge.” Dr Amarnath Gupta, Premier Explosives
inadvertently dropped a box containing wet Lead Azide, which detonated the content and materials lying on his working table. As the walls of the cubicle and the heavy 15cm RCC roof of the reactor section collapsed, another worker in the next cubicle got crushed under the wall and six others got injured. While it is a known fact in the industry that ASA is a highly sensitive component, it has been used in the absence of other reliable alternatives around the world to produce detonators. But after this incident, things changed. Those two gentlemen had worked with us for 20 years. We couldn’t afford to lose any of our team members. So when our production heads sat together to discuss our plan of action, they said that we should repair the damages and get back on production. But I put my foot down. We had been working on using an alternative molecule called NHN or Nickel Hydrazine Nitrate to replace ASA in the manufacturing process for 3 6 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
Innovation In
Supply Chain
company: BLR Logistiks
MD: Ashok Goyal
Getting A Move On It!
Mumbai-based BLR Logistiks is trying to bring much-needed innovativeness and skill to a segment of industry that in India is constantly beset by unprofessionalism, tardy schedules and a grossly underdeveloped ecosystem. Ashok Goyal, the company’s MD, takes us down their journey of smart new routes to efficiency. by Shreyasi Singh | Photograph by Jiten Gandhi
an importer of cotton bales based in Madhya Pradesh came to BLR Logistiks, a Mumbai-based transportation and logistics company, to help figure out a crucial problem plaguing their supply chain. Their usual chain of movement was flawed. Cargo came into the Container Freight Station (CFS) and got unloaded by forklifts from the container. The cotton bales were damaged and soiled when de-stuffed on the ground, and further damaged when pushed into conventional trucks for onward transportation. BLR suggested a different route. Instead of the load container going from the port to the CFS, BLR brought the container from Mandideep to their Bangalore warehouse. Then, BLR trans shipped the material to an empty export container without putting cargo on the floor; thus eliminating transit losses. Plus, there was a significant reduction in cost, made possible by using export containers, which normally run empty from port to factory. The volume carried per container is also much higher than by conventional trucks therefore reducing vehicle runs and saving precious fuel. “In India, the logistics industry is at nascent stage. The annual logistics cost in India is estimated to be 14 per cent of the GDP as compared to 9 per cent in countries like the US. If India can bring down its logistics cost from 14 to 9 per cent, savings of USD 50 billion will be realised at the current GDP level, making Indian goods more competitive in the global market,” says Ashok Goyal, MD, BLR Logistiks. For this to happen, logistics companies will have to innovate and provide efficient solutions, Goyal adds. It’s what he says his company—which has grown to a `291-crore logistics enterprise with a pan India network of more than 80 offices and a fleet upwards of 400 self-owned vehicles—has been trying to do for its 2,000 plus clients. In the absence of great infrastructure and the many challenges that weigh down logistics in India, thinking innovatively is par for the course. For example, shortage of skilled drivers is a crippling obstacle in logistics. “Drivers are important stakeholders for our business. But, they are considered low in the value chain. We changed that,” says Goyal. BLR launched a scheme where the ownership of trucks and trailors was transferred to drivers. They paid for this from the savings they made at BLR. After four or five years, the drivers have an asset of `5-6 lakhs with them.” Some of the pain of expanding their fleet because of a lack of drivers has been offset by such schemes. Response from businesses to these innovations has been encouraging. “Everybody is looking for solutions that are value for money. For most, the main focus on supply chain is Know your business cost of logistics. People have been adaptable to the changes we have made.” upside down and inside out. We’ve been in the Of course, the fact that maximum business is still with the foreign players, and that trade for such a long logistics hasn’t been granted industry status, slows down growth, Goyal says. Plus, the time that all we have to do Indian customer is extremely price sensitive, mainly because of a large unorganised is tweak ideas. Also, trust sector in logistics which survives because it cuts prices. “They want innovation but at your people. Most of our a good price.” So, some initiatives haven’t got off to a great start, such as their online ideas come from those who work on our docks. tracking system. Each BLR Logistiks transport vehicle was fitted with GPS so customers could track their shipment online without any human interference. But getting people to pay for this service hasn’t been smooth sailing. Yet, Goyal is confident that his business solutions-centric approach and a growing network of both fleet and warehouses will continue to motor their journey.
Innovative Tip
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 3 9
Innovation in
PRODUCT
company: iYogi
Co-founders: Uday Challu and Vishal Dhar
A cloud lined with dollars
Uday Challu and Vishal Dhar have been driven by billion-dollar dreams since they co-founded tech support company iYogi in 2007. Today, they are brimming with confidence at moving towards that goal, thanks to Digital Service Cloud, their cloud-based repository of customer information. Fortified with more than six million customer interactions, DSC has helped iYogi get a huge spike in subscriptions, and a 210 per cent up in revenue per subscriber. as told to Sonal Khetarpal | Photographs by Subhojit Paul
We started iYogi as the first tech support company based out of India with one main idea—to massively scale it into a global consumer services brand. We saw a growing opportunity to create a company that could be worth a couple of billion dollars in revenue and have millions of customers. From the very first year, in 2007, we focussed on what we want the company to look like in 10 years and we started doing things that will take us there. Initially, we concentrated on providing tech support to the US only. In 2008, technology support was a $30 billion market in the US alone and we wanted to focus on that. But, we knew we wanted to expand to UK, Canada and Australia as well. This meant that we had to scale our infrastructure in India very fast to be able to provide tech support remotely in different countries. So, in the first two years itself, we hired 500 people. But we realised that with the proliferation of technology products—smartphones, tablets, laptops, printers, smart TVs—and the increase in available softwares—operating systems, applications etcetera—it was impossible for any one of our “Yogi”, the tech support person, to have the knowledge base and competence to efficiently resolve all service requests they receive from our consumers in a day. This traditional model of providing tech support depended too much on one person’s ability to resolve tech problems. Certainly, it wasn’t the solution for us. We wanted all our tech experts to have a uniform skill set and technology to fix problems across multiple devices and software applications. So, 2009 onwards, we started working towards standardising the tech support delivery process by documenting the customer interactions—user’s problem and the provided resolution—in a cloud-based platform Digital Service Cloud (DSC). What we also did was use DSC to manage a customer’s life cycle. We would capture all details in DSC about the consumer, their tech devices, the software applications they used, their network provider details and usage behaviour. Keeping a track of customer’s history drastically reduced the time required to resolve their queries and helped maintain a personalised relation with them. So much so that 50 per cent of our customers moved to multi-year service plans. This also increased the average lifetime of our subscribers by 66 per cent. We continuously worked to automate this platform by keying in more and more consumer queries. With every request that is keyed in it, this platform only gets smarter and helps improve the quality of service delivery. Till date, we have provided tech support to 13.5 million incidents. And, our product team of 200 members has automated almost 50 per cent of the incidents in this platform. Digital Service Cloud now supports over 500 software applications, 35 different hardware devices and 15 peripherals (scanners, printers etc). This huge knowledge base has resulted in a better resolution rate in solving customer problems. Ours is 20 per cent higher than the average industry rate, even the large computer and software manufacturers are at 50-60 per cent. DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 41
“in next few years 25 per cent of our revenue will come from DSC.” Vishal Dhar (on the left), iYogi
Also, in 2010, we leveraged this platform as an opportunity for additional revenue generation. We started partnering with retailers, OEMs, anti-virus companies, independent software vendors to market their products to consumers. Since we knew about the user’s technology ecosystem, we could suggest to them the additional products they might require from our partners. This is a great opportunity for us to convert the tech support service request into a revenue opportunity. This has increased our revenue from each subscriber by over 210 per cent. In all, now 35 per cent of our total revenue comes from this revenue stream. Such high numbers made us realise the potential of this portal. Globally, the market for cloud applications is expected to be over $250 billion by 2020 as per Forrester Research with the India market estimated at $800 million according to Zinnov Management Consulting. With a unique platform as this, we wanted to benefit from it even further. And, from May 2013, we started offering it to other companies as a hosted solution. We knew companies especially OEMs, telcos, retailers and service providers who need to provide customer support will readily avail the service of DSC. First, because other players in the industry either have SaaS application or CRM software for various applications, but, no one has customer details, service history, use of tech devices, demographics all in one platform, like we do. Also, with the commoditisation of technology, profit margins on the computing devices have gone down tremendously. Due to this, for cost saving, the quality of customer support has also come down. So, through DSC, companies will be able to provide better customer service and use the support call to up-sell and cross-sell—as we did it in our company—turning the tech support call from an incurred cost to a revenue source. As we offered it to other companies, we made this platform more customer-friendly, multilingual, adaptable in different demographics and accessible for different kinds of users. Since, it is a SaaS (Software as a Service) solution, it can be easily integrated into the existing infrastructure of any enterprise and is highly scalable and secure.
The Shining Light of Profit and Impact Inderpreet Wadhwa’s mega-watt smile is well-deserved. In the past six years, his company Azure Power, a solar power producer, has more than found its place in the sun with an installed capacity of 54.5MW across its projects in Gujarat, Rajasthan and Punjab. In these five years, they have also more than halved the cost of solar power. As told to Shreyasi Singh | Photograph by Subhojit Paul
The solar industry in India has seen a lot of action in the past few years, thanks to the push by the National Solar Mission. But, if you look closely, a lot of players in the solar infrastructure space right now are large conglomerates. They are doing solar because they can make a certain percentage of return. Tomorrow, if that return can come from wind, biomass, thermal, or even soap manufacturing, they would probably go do that. Azure Power is the only company that has imbibed the principle of low cost clean energy as our core. Our mission is that—to be the lowest-cost power producer in the world. Every year, we have brought the cost of solar power down. Our first project in Awan, Punjab which was operationalised in 2009 generated power at `17 per unit. The price per unit is `7.49 at our most recent project in Kathauti, Rajasthan. But, that hasn’t been our only focus—inclusive growth is our guiding mandate as well. So, in terms of land, we decided that we’re not going to look for premium land which has 20 other alternative uses. We looked for worst-possible land, and turned it into a productive unit. Second, we didn’t try to acquire the land, we leased it. In the leased mode, the owners feel part of the project because they are also making annual cash flows. We also work with the local community right from the beginning. We tell them that we are going to create both permanent and temporary jobs. This twin approach has worked well. We can operationalise projects in six months’ time. And because we work on a SaaS (solar as a service model where we operate and maintain the plants) model, the quick timelines don’t mean we cut corners. We have to run these plants. We do it right the first time. We’re now expanding into other areas of opportunity. We recently won an award by the World Bank for our project in Gandhinagar where we’ve taken 250 roofs to install solar panels. We’ve turned the city of Gandhinagar into a solar power generator. In April 2013, Solar Energy Corporation of India asked us to put up rooftop 0.5 MW (total) solar power projects in Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi and Gurgaon each. It’s a very small beginning but has a huge future. Solar is the only clean energy option available in cities. And, it’s already almost the same price as per unit of coal power. BSES gives power at `7.25 per unit in Delhi. We’re also developing micro grids in rural areas. That’s bound to have a huge impact. Almost 400 million people are not connected to the grid in India right now. I don’t see myself as some do-gooder. Social entrepreneurship is an overly used word in India. I shy away from it. Our bottom line is driven by “socio-economic” profit maximisation, not revenue maximisation. We’ve imbibed being responsible from the word go—we implement solar street lighting and rainwater harvesting at our sites. All our projects are water positive. Hopefully, by their seventh year, each project will be energy positive also. So far, we’ve offset 83,719,419 kWh of energy, and 63,404,432 kgs of carbon. I hope we can begin to include these metrics in our P&L statements. I’ve been working with KPMG’s International Practice out of Netherlands where they are trying to come up with some international benchmarks on how you measure and track your energy usage. I think every company should work towards mitigating their environmental impact. 4 4 | INC. |
DECEMBER 2013
company: Azure Power
founder: Inderpreet Wadhwa
Innovation In
Responsible Business
Innovative Tip
Gutter Credit here
Always build a product that has a demand for a billion dollars, or from a billion people. Don’t build for a million dollars. Set the goal really large. And, if the product has relevance for a billion people, then you really have a shot at building an interesting company.
Photograph by name tk
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 4 5
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Apps to keep you on the clock Productivity Apps Every CEO Must Have Pg 58
december 2013 | `150 | Volume 04 | Issue 11 A 9.9 Media Publication | inc.com Facebook.com/Inc
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Lights, Camera, Action Get visual to build your social media following Pg 54
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Contents
Inc.com/leadership
4 Steps to Achieving Great Things How do you move from delivering “good” to delivering “holy cow!” every time? Inc.com columnist Les McKeown shares four tips.
Top Videos on Inc.com
Inc.com/INC-LIVE
lexa von Tobel A Founder of LearnVest.com On her company’s financial strategy
“ To this day, I spend every single dollar like it is our last.”
Inc.com/INC-LIVE
Nick Woodman Founder of GoPro On overcoming the fear of failure
First things first. If you want to achieve something great, first decide what it’s going to be. As my mother used to say, “If you aim at nuthin’, you’ll hit it”. Can you jot down on a notepad the two or three great things you want to achieve? No? Then start there.
2. Execute relentlessly
Once you start implementing, don’t stop until you’ve finished. Adapt on the fly, improvise as best as you can, and unless something truly horrendous happens, keep going.
3. Don’t obsess over your inbox
Here’s the thing: if you’re in thrall to your inbox, you’re working to other people’s agenda, not your own. It may be over-promoted but the ability to achieve Inbox Zero isn’t optional for great leaders.
4. Get out of the office
Your office desk, chair and computer monitor is where you do the 80 per cent of merely good work. Find a retreat space, a unique corner somewhere, where you can specifically go to work on your major achievements.
Leadership: photos.com
1. Prioritise
“ Have confidence in yourself. You figure it out as you go. If I can do it, you can do it. I was an art major.”
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BEHIND THE SCENES
Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life
Connectivity Whether it was lap-by-lap coverage of drivers or winner Sebastian Vettel’s victory doughnuts, each split-second detail of the race action was efficiently transmitted in real time from the race track to the Formula 1 headquarters in the UK. Tata Communications kept Formula 1 fans enthralled around the globe through its global subsea cable network by doing this. The $3.2 billion company provided global hosting and content delivery services to Formula1. com as well as the racing team Mercedes AMG Petronas. Formerly founded as VSNL in 1986, it was taken over and renamed by the Tata Group in 2008.
Logistics With about 10 international teams and 20 drivers (two for each team), participating in the race at the Buddh International Circuit, Greater Noida, logistical movement of cargo is one of the biggest challenges in putting together a successful race. RE Rogers took on the challenge to transport the 20 cars, spares, tyres, engines and staff including chefs, engineers and telemetry specialists from the IGI Airport to the venue—a distance of almost 50 kilometres. Founded in 1986 by Ravinder Sethi, this 80-people company has provided exhibition logistics as well as warehousing for large scale events such as the Himalayan Car Rally, The Rolling Stone concert and the Renault Formula1 race.
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Indian Grand Prix, Greater Noida
25.10.13, 4:00 P.M.
Medical aid As exciting as high speed car racing is, it’s equally dangerous. To ensure that everybody—on and off the track—such as extrication teams and spectators at the third edition of the Indian Grand Prix was safe, Fortis Healthcare provided a team of 60 persons including doctors, nurses and other paramedical staff, during the race. Founded by Malvinder Singh in 1996, the company provided five critical care ambulances at the circuit that were specially designed to provide acute cardiac and trauma support. The 17,000-plus people company also readied a helipad to air-lift patients in case of an emergency from the circuit to the nearest hospital.
photograph Courtesy Buddh International Circuit
reported bY Ira swasti
News, Ideas & Trends in Brief
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Repeat After Me: The customer is always human HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah recently did something unsettling. He’s a self-described evangelist for inbound marketing, or the idea that you use content to pull in customers, rather than ads that push them away. But in front of 5,000 employees and customers, he declared, “Inbound marketing is not the answer.” Shah tells Inc.’s Jeff Haden why, as the balance of information power shifts more toward the consumer, the best strategy is to “solve for humans.”
W
Courtesy: Flikr jdlasica
hy is inbound marketing not the answer? You’ve built a big business on just that. Imagine you want to buy something. You find an incredibly helpful e-book or video, so you reach out to the company that produced it (a perfect example of the power of inbound marketing). Unfortunately, your experience with the sales team is miserable. Now, you don’t ever think, The sales experience was awful, but I don’t mind because their marketing was so awesome! A mediocre sales experience far outweighs even extraordinary inbound marketing experiences.
So the process can’t begin and end with your marketing.
Many companies have forgotten they sell to actual people.
Humans care about the entire experience, not just marketing or sales. To really win in the modern age, you must solve for humans. Every process should be optimised for what is best for the customer—not your organisation. But every company claims to already do that. Most brand statements say some version of, “We put people first.”
Brand was once the perception people have of your company. But brand no longer lives just in the minds of humans—it also lives inside algorithms. For example, the Google algorithm predicts whether a given webpage contains quality content, so your success depends partly on Google’s algorithmic assessment of your brand. What does that mean for the future of brands?
In the future, you won’t just hit Ignore when you get an annoying sales call; you’ll also be able to down-vote that phone number. Someday, we won’t just see caller ID on our phones but also caller reputation. As new tools are developed, algorithms will do a much better job of evaluating a brand than an individual can, because algorithms will be based on thousands of data reactions. In short, harnessing the power of consumer advocacy is the answer.
A delighted B2B customer is a long-term customer: He will tell friends and colleagues, and if he leaves his job, he’ll take your business with him. But forget about Customer Lifetime Value. Person Lifetime Value matters most. Humans don’t buy from companies; humans buy from humans.
Shah’s rules for solving for humans: Humans dislike interruption. People hate ads—especially popups—when they’re trying to do something else. It’s an irritating experience, and irritated people won’t buy from you. Humans power algorithms. Vocal customers will increasingly power the algorithms that determine the perception—and success—of your business. Pay attention to what they say and where they say it. Humans don’t just care about what you sell. They also care how you sell it. Most buyers are halfway through the buying process before talking to you. Give them the info they need so they can sell themselves. Humans crave a total experience. Marketing, sales, service, delivery, follow-up—you need to deliver a whole package that caters to the customer. DECember 2013 | INC. | 5 3
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Lights, Camera, Action Want to build your social media following? Get visual photos and videos are driving customer engagement on social media. On Facebook’s top brand pages, videos are shared 12 times more often than text and links, and photos receive twice as many likes as text updates. Meanwhile, Instagram is growing faster than Facebook did. And Pinterest now refers more traffic to outside websites than Twitter. To churn out visuals that can engage customers in this new social-media era, many companies have had to create their own mini studios—and assign employees additional roles as staff photographers and videographers. At Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams in Columbus, Ohio, a 2,000-pound delivery of summer strawberries draws a small army of social-media paparazzi. The company’s “visual lead” (a.k.a. staff photographer) hops around snapping lush, sunlit shots and shooting HD video of the haul. Within days, that content will be curated, edited, and posted on Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Vimeo, and the company blog. Other staff members use their smartphones to shoot close-ups of a
On Instagram Most of the pictures on Jeni’s Instagram feed are quick snapshorts taken by staff members using their smartphones.
On VIMEO This is where Jeni’s posts its slickly edited videos, with music and graphics. Most videos are a minute or less and get cross-posted to YouTube.
tray of berries to post to Instagram. At Threadless, a Chicago company that sells products designed by a community of artists, three marketing employees and a multimedia specialist each take a platform: Facebook, Tumblr, Vine, and Instagram. They primarily rely on iPhone cameras and Adobe Premiere, editing software that sells for less than $1,000. “These social-media channels allow a company to live its brand, not just talk about
it,” says Paul M. Rand, CEO of Zocalo Group, a social-media marketing agency. For Jeni’s, that means portraying a company dedicated to sourcing farm-fresh ingredients such as sweet corn and black raspberries. “What sets us apart is how we make our ice cream and the ingredients we use,” says Ryan Morgan, Jeni’s social-media director. “We could post pretty pictures of our ice cream all day long, but that does nothing to differentiate us.”
Want to make the most of your Instagram and Pinterest accounts? Try these smart new tools for visual social media. 5 4 | INC. |
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Best for: Mass publishing
Brandcast What it does: Brandcast is sort of like a Hootsuite for visual social media. Snap a picture or shoot some video, and you can publish it on Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter—even Etsy—from a single platform. Brandcast also includes analytic tools. Cost: Free for the first 1,000 beta users, then about $5 to $10 a month
Courtesy: subject
Forget about 140 characters. Increasingly,
launch
Visuals Go Viral
How three innovative companies get results with visual social media A Store Powered by YouTube Known for her makeup tutorials, Michelle Phan is one of YouTube’s biggest stars, with some 4.9 million subscribers—more than Lady Gaga. In August, Phan teamed with L’Oréal to launch a makeup line—em michelle phan. Customers are encouraged to upload their own makeup videos on em’s website. In the future, they will also be able to film and upload videos inside em’s retail store, which launched this fall in New York City.
Plucking the Vines
On Pinterest In addition to its own product shots, Jeni’s uses Pinterest to showcase photos taken by customers.
On Tumblr This feed is a grab bag of snapshots, videos, and—most important for Tumblr—animated GIFs.
For Threadless, the visuals often showcase the company’s connection to artists or tie existing products to something happening in pop culture, such as a particularly riveting episode of Homeland. “It’s about keeping your brand relevant to what’s happening in the wider world,” says Threadless marketing coordinator Kyle Geib. Companies are careful not to appear overly promotional. At Poler, a Portland, Oregon, outdoor gear retailer, all the images
posted to Tumblr radiate the youthful, freespirited ethos the brand embodies. One shot shows three pairs of legs in front of a campsite—male legs in the middle, female legs on either side—all wearing hiking shoes, Poler socks, and possibly nothing else. Cofounder Benji Wagner is cautious about coming across as less than authentic to the platform’s young users. “But anytime you can sell where people are,” he says, “that’s a good thing.” —Ryan Underwood
Vacation rental service Airbnb partnered with up-and-coming director Miles Jay to create a short film out of six-second Vine videos crowdsourced via Twitter. More than 750 people submitted videos. The result, Hollywood & Vines, is a 4.5-minute visual journey of a paper airplane travelling the globe. It quickly racked up more than 1,50,000 views when it debuted on YouTube in September.
From Pinterest to Product
The Grommet, which markets and sells products from small companies and inventors, uses Pinterest to help determine which products to promote online. Entrepreneurs submit pictures of their inventions to an online gallery, where customers can pin them, tweet them, or post them to Facebook. If an item gains traction, the Grommet will sell it
Best for: Tracking engagement
Best for: Selling products
Piqora
BlkDot
What it does: Piqora tracks the most popular (and profitable) images your company posts on Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumlr, providing metrics such as revenue per pin. It also identifies your most influential followers.
What it does: Posting product shots? BlkDot lets you embed a subtle black Buy button on Tumblr photos. (You can cross-post the link to Facebook and other platforms). The technology works with Strip’s payment-processing service.
Cost: Annual subscription fees range from about $3,000 to $15,000.
Cost: 3 per cent of each transaction. DECember 2013 | INC. | 5 5
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they focus more on iterations, doing experiments. Thomas Edison said that one of the greatest measures of your ability is how many experiments you can do within 24 hours. David: Deadlines are kind of arbitrary anyway. I can spend the rest of my life designing a wastebasket and just keep making it better. You run out of time and budget. In our world it’s just how many iterations can you get done given that they call time.
Creative Minds Brothers Tom (left) and David Kelley of IDEO
Does virtually every conscious choice a person makes to change something involve design on some level? David: Once you have that kind of design
Everyone is born creative, but schools and jobs and the hegemony of the conventionally
minded steamroller it out of us. So argue David and Tom Kelley, who as leaders of iconic innovation firm IDEO have unparalleled cred on this subject. In their new book, Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All, the brothers urge a universal uncorseting of our creative selves. Editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan spoke with the Kelley brothers about how companies can tap this undeveloped human resource.
D
efine “creative confidence.” Tom: Creative confidence is the natu-
ral human ability to come up with breakthrough ideas combined with the courage to act on them. The courage turns out to be a really important part. Because lots of people have these ideas in passing but are too timid to put them into action. Why hasn’t companies’ obsession with innovation and risk-taking translated into greater creative confidence among employees? Tom: Culturally we’re trained—in business
schools at least—to trust the analytical side and to trust the things you measure. And most companies are measured on this
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short-term stuff. To do the breakthrough innovations, sometimes you have to defer gratification. You’ve got to take a leap that may not pay off today or this month but that builds your brand and builds your company for the future.
If playfulness and experimentation are important to creativity, should managers think differently about scheduling and deadlines? David: You can have a deadline and have a
first not-that-great idea and get it done. The trick is to get as many iterations in and as many generations in as possible before the deadline. Tom: When people get creative confidence
You advise getting out into the field, observing potential users or customers. Who in the organisation should do that? And how often do you have to observe a particular behaviour before you consider it pervasive enough to address in your design? Tom: In response to who does it, the
answer is everyone in the organisation. In response to how many: just to be clear, we’re not sizing a market. We’re not saying 82 per cent of people do it this way or need this. You are looking for inspiration. And for inspiration, one person can be enough. In the book we talk about the team from a non-profit called Embrace going out in rural India with the prototype of an infant warmer for premature babies. They find this one woman who tells them that in her village they think Western medicine can be too potent. The product is supposed to be set to warm the baby to 37 degrees centigrade. She will only go to 31 or 32 degrees, just to be “safe.” They changed the design based on a sample of one. Because lives were at stake.
Photograph by winni wintermeyer
Why Creativity is like Karaoke IDEO founders on building a creative culture
bias, everything you do is with intent. How you wrap a present for somebody’s birthday or how you decide to get somewhere. It’s about being mindful of process. It’s not that you have to go to the creative well and become more creative. But as you become more mindful of the process you just get better and better at it.
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How do you make intuition coachable? Tom: It’s not so much coachable as practice. I think the great danger for people as they progress through their careers is they rely on intuition informed by old data. It’s important to constantly refresh—to hold up the worldview you have in your head against the actual world out there in 2013. Also, your intuition is really the sum of your experiences. So the way that we say to improve your intuition is to have a lot more experiences and a variety of experiences.
People are excited by big data because it suggests you can arrive at the right answer by throwing lots of numbers at the question. Is there a tension there with creativity? Tom: We embrace big data because it helps
the client be more confident. But big data is inherently about the past. It’s not going to get you all the way to the future. At one point you could have done big data and discovered all books ever written were done on a typewriter or with a quill pen. That would tell you people want typewriters. Well they don’t. People want ways to get ideas from their head onto the paper or the screen. So we’ve been working with this idea called hybrid insights. It’s informed by big data but still human. So you distill all the data but put it in human form. David: It’s messy to go out there and get involved with customers and users and find out what’s really going on. But that’s where we get all our big ideas. Talking to them and understanding them or reframing the problem because they are surprisingly interested in something we didn’t know they were interested in. Big data is the inspiration. But you still have to build empathy with the people. How does technology fit into this? In one sense it allows anybody to create at least virtual versions of anything, and those versions can look pretty great. But is it a substitute for the more visceral, immediate challenge of sketching
ideas or building prototypes by hand? David: This is basically about storytelling,
right? So I can tell you the story verbally and then I can show it to you on a computer simulation and that tells you more. And I can mock it up physically. And at each of those levels, different stuff comes up. You say, my gosh, look at how close this is to this. This won’t work for me for cleaning or maintenance. When you move from visualising something to experiencing it you discover things hiding down in the details that result in either problems or innovations. Tom: A few years ago we did a full-size mockup with Marriott: what a whole lobby would be, what a room in a longterm-stay place would be. You could test out the interactions. What is it really going to be like in this little kitchen with multiple guests trying to get the toaster? It’s really hard to predict that with just the model.
contract with your team from the beginning that ideas are going to come from them, too. I may be the founder, but that doesn’t mean I have to have all the ideas. It’s almost a prerequisite that you are going to bring ideas to me all the time. Every day people are going to have ideas.
I know you are not a fan of benchmarking. But if companies were going to adopt one single practice from IDEO to juice their innovation, what should it be? David: The empathy part. It’s about getting
out there in the field and viscerally feeling what’s going on. That’s where the big ideas come from. That’s where we reframe problems. People think creativity is about problem-solving. It’s a lot about need finding. About making sure that you have a problem that’s worth working on in the first place. So all of this human-centered stuff is what other companies miss the
“ Thomas Edison said that one of the greatest measures of your ability is how many experiments you can do within 24 hours.” If you were launching a company and
could structure the innovation function any way you wanted, what would you do? David: It’s a cultural thing more than a
structural thing. How do you convince everybody that their job is a creative job? How do you convince accounts payable to do their job in an extraordinary way? Whatever structure you put together, the trick is to get everyone to do their job with intent, to see that they can do their job in a creative way. And to value that. That involves not judging people and rewarding people for trying new things and for being tolerant of failure. Tom: One way is to establish a social
most and what they would benefit from.
In the book, you say an innovation culture is like karaoke. Explain. Tom: Think of that karaoke room as a
metaphor for your company. There are a lot of special things going on. I am going to get up there and sing a cappella in front of my friends. I’m willing to take this big risk because you’re going to get up and sing next! We’re all in this together. The other part is that people have turned down critical judgment, temporarily, to go into the karaoke room. The big fear holding people back from creative confidence is the fear of being judged. DECember 2013 | INC. | 5 7
Never have enough time to get everything done? Try these five time saving apps that help you track, manage and grow your time. BY Ira Swasti
Because
time is money FIVe Apps To Keep You On The Clock
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Developed by Delhibased start-up Signals, this Android app realises that every entrepreneur’s secret wish is to not let a single minute in a 24-hour day be spent idle. Shifu observes a user’s phone behaviour and through its complex algorithms, recommends tasks that could be completed when there is time to spare. One can either set reminders for various tasks or let the app suggest them on its own. For instance, just when colleague X calls, the app could remind you to talk to her about a new investor you met. Or, when you’re near a certain locality, it could remind you to meet a potential client at a nearby cafe. Cost: Free Photograph by name tk
photos.com
Shifu
because time is money
Doodle
Always Be On Time Developed by the Noida-based company AppStudioz, this iPhone app always makes sure you’re on time. Instead of letting the user guess how much time it would take to reach that TiE event at 2:30pm in between the busy schedule, it estimates the time one may need to get ready. Once you’ve marked an event on your phone calendar or the app calendar, the activities that need to be done before you can leave and the time each of these activities would take, the app calculates the total time you’ll take to get ready. It displays a message that reads, “For the conference at 3:30pm, you should get started at 2pm”. It also has a chime feature to remind users to move onto the next activity when the estimated time of the former has passed. Cost: $0.99
Developed by the Zurich-based company by the same name, Doodle saves users from the unending email threads of scheduling a meeting or appointment with colleagues, partners or friends where five different people respond with five different time zones. This app allows the user to select some preferred time slots for the meeting and mail a Doodle poll to others who need to attend the meeting.
Yast
The other users can then simply tick mark and express their availability for a specific time and could only choose from the given time slots and the days mentioned. It allows everyone in the loop to see what time suits everyone or most people in the group. Voila! The meeting’s scheduled.
Developed by the Norwegian start-up by the same name, Yast helps one keep track of their time. The app generates time sheets that allow one to see how much time was spent on meetings, lunch, travel etc. each day, each week or even each month. Simple to use, one just needs to set up different projects that need to be tracked by clicking on the apps’ Track Button. The app automatically generates reports around the user’s time management. What’s even better is that the app allows users to share different projects with their co-workers that helps calculate the total time the whole team spent on a single activity or a group of projects. It also allows including comments or notes for different sessions to describe what was done during that time.
Cost: Free
Cost: Free
Nightstand
Developed by the San Francisco-based app studio Spoonjuice (the arm of the Bangalorebased Sourcebits), this app is basically the quintessential customisable alarm clock for the iPad, iPhone, Android smartphone or even a Windows 8 phone. But it doesn’t stop at that. Apart from its gorgeous graphics designed by Apple Design Award winner Piotr Gajos, the app displays local
weather and time zones when you’re on business travel. In its dual time zone support mode, the app displays two clocks on the screen at once or allows the user to swipe through these time zones. It also comes with widgets for Twitter, Facebook and an RSS feed so that you can get your morning news in bed along with social media updates on your business. Cost: $0.99
DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 5 9
TELL IT Scott Harrison has raised more than $100 million for charity: water since 2007. His secret? Stories that are all but impossible to resist.
How to Make People Believe PITCHING A VC. RALLYING THE TROOPS. NAILING A TED TALK.
For entrepreneurs, persuasion is Job One. In the following pages, you’ll find tips on winning over an audience from a wide range of experts, including Steve Jurvetson, George Stephanopoulos, and business owners who have gone from flop sweat to fabulous By Burt Helm
Photographs Courtesy Subject
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How to Make People Believe
Not a dry eye in the house How Scott Harrison connects, affects and brings people around to his cause
B
e forewarned: In any Scott Harrison speech, there will be a moment when you will cry. The moments vary for different people, of course, but one bout of weeping seems to be the minimum. Most can’t make it all the way through the Rachel Beckwith story: The little girl gives up her birthday presents to raise $300 for clean water in Ethiopia, but falls short. A month later, she loses her life in an auto wreck. Her family rallies her community and people everywhere—and they raise $1.2 million. Then, Harrison plays the video of Rachel’s mother being welcomed by singing, happy Ethiopian villagers, the ones Rachel saved, and then the crew starts the drilling and the clear water splashes over everyone, and then, oh, boy; here we go; I’m crying watching this speech in this stupid auditorium. Scott Harrison runs charity: water, a nonprofit organisation that provides money to local charities that drill wells and install water-filtration systems in the developing world. Harrison’s business is telling stories that pull at people’s heartstrings and then their purse strings. He is very good at it: Since he founded charity: water in 2007, he has raised more than $100 million for the cause. Among entrepreneurs, Harrison is a role model for how to make people believe in you. “He’s completely rethought several pieces of the marketing puzzle,” says Brian Halligan, CEO of HubSpot, a marketing software company that invited Harrison to
“ People just want to know where their money is going.”
tell his organisation’s story before 5,000 people at a conference in August. “There wasn’t a dry eye in there.” Charity: water raised more than $60,000 at the event. How does Harrison do it? Here are his tips for winning over an audience. Get Personal In every charity: water talk, Harrison begins by recounting his early life: how he grew up in a loving family but then lost his way when he moved to New York City, found booze and drugs, and became a nightclub promoter. Sitting in charity: water’s New York City office, which is bustling at 8 o’clock on a summer evening, Harrison acknowledges that, as much as he regrets those years, promoting parties taught him a valuable skill. Because he paid attention to what got people having fun, he says, “I knew how to get people excited about a story.” Be Visual Another key to Harrison’s success is visual storytelling, something he learned about after he quit the nightlife business and spent a year volunteering on a hospital ship bound for Liberia, where he took pictures of patients before and after dramatic facial surgeries. When he returned to New York City, he put together a gallery exhibit and raised money for Mercy Ships, the charity that ran the boat. These days, when he’s onstage promoting charity: water, he uses pictures and videos to illustrate the story, making it feel immediate and real. Later, he provides major donors and fundraisers with photos and GPS coordinates of wells they helped fund. Make It Easy to Say Yes Harrison emphasises that small donations can have a big impact. In 2007, the first charity: water fundraiser was for his 31st birthday. (He raised $17,000.) The next year, for his 32nd birthday, CROWD he asked people to stay home and PLEASER donate $32. (He raised $59,000.) Scott Harrison went from Now, this simple call to action—give promoting up your birthday and ask people to parties to pushing clean donate your age in dollars—is one he water. proposes at the end of most speeches. “It’s a great jujitsu marketing trick,” Halligan says. “He doesn’t say, ‘We need to raise $100,000 for this campaign.’ Instead, he explains how a small amount will make a huge, specific change in a few people’s lives.” Know Your Audience Raising money for water projects was the easy part. For a while,
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How to Make People Believe
Harrison wasn’t raising enough money to cover operations. At one point, he was five weeks away from missing payroll. Then, Michael Birch, co-founder of the social network Bebo, donated $1 million to fund operations. That’s when Harrison realised that wealthier private donors liked the idea of funding the charity’s business side. “People are open to a lot of value propositions. They just want to know where their money is going,” he says. PopCap cofounder John Vechey, who has agreed to donate $3 million to charity: water’s operations, says it felt almost like a venture capital investment. “I felt like I spent money to hire smart people, who will do exciting new things and reach way more people,” Vechey says. That’s a story wealthy donors, especially entrepreneurs, love to get behind.
Enough About Me.... The art of conversation, according to George Stephanopoulos When you’re having a one-on-one discussion, it’s often as crucial to get the other person to open up as it is to get your own point across. To that end, we asked George Stephanopoulos, anchor of ABC’s Good Morning America and host of This Week, how he draws compelling answers out of tough interview subjects.
1Prepare extensively
Good preparation leads to better questions. It also demonstrates a genuine interest, Stephanopoulos says. “Knowing what you’re talking about breeds respect on both sides,” he says. Before a 2009 interview about health care with President Barack Obama, Stephanopoulos prepared extensively to show his guest he had deep knowledge of the subject.
2 Don’t be a know-it-all
After all that prep work, you might feel like an expert. But keep things simple by starting with direct, open-ended questions. Then, use your knowledge to get your subject to expand on pat answers. “I used to try to show off how much work I did,” Stephanopoulos says. “But sometimes it was all wind-up and no question.”
3 Ask “Why?”
Ask “What do you do?” at a cocktail party, and people go on autopilot. Ask “Why?” and
people give fresher, more thoughtful answers. The same is true for television interviews, Stephanopoulos says.
4Watch for facial cues
During a conversation, facial cues can indicate if someone wants to say more or less about a topic. For instance, Stephanopoulos says he can tell someone is having a new thought when his or her eyes light up. “You can see it more than you can hear it,” he says. Then, he guides the conversation in that direction.
yourself to be interested 5 Force
If you’re bored by the person sitting across from you, your audience will be, too. The key is to find the one thing that does pique your curiosity. Stephanopoulos interviews a lot of actors, but he doesn’t always like their movies. His solution? He finds one scene that he finds remarkable for some reason and focuses on it.
How I Conquered Public-Speaking Anxiety
Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat
I’d done a round-theworld yacht race, where 100-foot waves crashed over the foredeck. I led and managed polar expeditions. I never felt fear in those moments. But when I started at Chartbeat in 2009, I was terrified of public speaking. I imagined myself up onstage, getting nervous, my mind going blank, then my body starting to sweat and people being horrified by me. I was asked to speak at a conference in Las Vegas. I felt like I had to be the guardian of Chartbeat story, so I agreed to go. I decided not to lean on PowerPoint, which made me even more nervous. I prepared like crazy. I flew to Vegas and spent the entire time pacing around my hotel room memorising my 45-minute speech. I decided to wear jeans and a white shirt, to hide sweat. Onstage, I tried to capture the audience’s imagination by explaining how everything it needed to know about the realtime web, it could learn from a Japanese automotive engineer who died in 1984. I survived. I didn’t get a standing ovation, but the audience seemed interested. A few people even complimented me afterward. The main thing that helped me overcome my anxiety was to speak onstage as often as possible. Over time, it’s gotten a lot easier. Now, I speak at conferences about once a month. I’ll improvise for the first few minutes and, if I get a laugh, I can relax. If you think about it, the audience wants you to succeed. DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 6 3
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How to Make People Believe
Ready for your Close-up?
1
Plan What You Won’t Say In addition to preparing your main talking points, decide what is off limits ahead of time. “Don’t feel trapped into giving an answer to a question you didn’t anticipate,” Johnson says. If you get a question you’re not expecting, find a way to transition back to the topics you want to discuss. Use phrases such as “Let’s take a step back for a minute” or “First, let me offer some context ti it” to switch the focus without seeming evasive or rude to anyone.
2
Be Concise Most TV interviews last only two or three minutes, so brevity is key. Boil your messages into compact and memorable sound bites and rehearse them beforehand. It’s a bonus if they are witty, but, above all, they should be clear. “Answers should last the duration of an elevator ride,” Johnson says, “and be memorable enough that people can repeat your key messages once the doors open.”
3
Smile Chances are you’ll be nervous. “A lot of times, people get frozen because they’re staring into the camera, picturing the thousands of people watching them,” Johnson says. A simple smile can help relax your posture, lower your stress level, and help you engage with the interviewer.
STAND AND DELIVER: Sergeant Major Ray Chandler addresses U.S. Army troops in Kandhar province, Afghanistan
Rallying the troops How the U.S. Army’s highest-ranking enlisted man motivates his fellow soldiers
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n April 2004, in the early days of the Iraq war, an armored vehicle drove under a bridge and hit an improvised explosive device, killing one of the three U.S. Army soldiers on board. It was the first casualty in the war for 1/7 Cav, the 1st Squadron, 7th Cavalry of the U.S. Army. Sergeant Major Ray Chandler, the squadron’s highest-ranking enlisted soldier, faced the task of talking to the troops. He had worked closely with the man who died. And he worried that the tragedy happened because his unit had grown complacent. Today, Chandler is the Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldier. As a 32-year veteran of the Army who has served as a tank crewman and a command sergeant major, Chandler knows a thing or two about motivational speeches. “So much of what you’re asking a soldier to do is irrational,” he says. “That’s why it’s both so difficult and so important to talk to them.” Following the casualty in 2004, Chandler gathered his unit for a pep talk. He began by asking soldiers to share positive memories of their lost comrade and talk about how they felt about his death. Next, instead of assigning blame, he calmly explained that their future vigilance would be a form of paying homage. “We need to honour his sacrifice by doing what we know to be right,” he said. “We’ll help
each other so that we don’t repeat it.” Thankfully, the unit didn’t lose another soldier for the rest of its two-year deployment. In any motivational speech, Chandler says, it’s crucial to show team members that you care about them as individuals and trust them to fulfill their roles, and that everyone’s role matters to the higher cause. Chandler used that approach to motivate the 1/7 Cav when it was charged with securing more than 100 polling places during Iraq’s presidential election, a task that would stretch the unit thin and expose it to insurgent attacks. The day before the election, Chandler and his commanding officer assembled the troops. They didn’t downplay the situation. “You are going to be a target,” Chandler told the soldiers. He reminded them they were responsible for developing security plans for their sites, explaining that their objective was to ensure the election process was not disrupted. Their success or failure, he said, would have strategic consequences for the United States. The day of the election, which proceeded as planned, Chandler and other squadron leaders circulated among the polling places, encouraging the soldiers, supplying hot food, and offering support. “If you’re going to demand your people do something extraordinary,” Chandler says, “you’ve got to be there with them while they’re doing it. DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 6 5
COURTESy US ARMY
Tips on acing a television interview from Tom Johnson, president of corporate communications firm Abernathy MacGregor Group
How to Make People Believe
Steve Jurvetson on how to pitch a venture capitalist Hint: Be more like Elon Musk
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ver the past 18 years, venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson has heard thousands of pitches. Jurvetson is managing director of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the Menlo Park, California, venture capital firm that has backed such successful companies as Skype, Hotmail, and Tesla Motors. We asked Jurvetson what impresses him during pitch meetings, what doesn’t, and why some entrepreneurs are, in his words, “just kind of magic” in a presentation.
1. Save the Speech Treat pitch meetings
like a conversation, not a speech, Jurvetson says. Of course, you should be prepared to outline your business idea and the massive opportunity it represents. But be prepared to go off script. During pitches, Jurvetson asks lots of questions, partly to see how well an entrepreneur adapts and responds to the
What I learned about wowing a crowd from doing magic tricks Aaron Levie, Co-founder of Box
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meetings with glib entrepreneurs who respond to straightforward questions by tossing off anecdotes instead of providing analytical responses. “Being slick is not the right answer,” he warns.
3. Get Along One huge red flag for Jurvet-
son during pitches? Co-founders who cut each other off and are clearly not getting along, which could indicate bigger troubles within the business. “That happens more often than you’d think,” he says.
TALK TO ME Steve Jurvetson prefers pitches that feel more like conversations.
4. Be Enthusiastic Above all,
your pitch should get investors excited. “It’s that infectious enthusiasm that gets us jumping out of our seats about whatever it is an entrepreneur is doing,” Jurvetson says.
5. Think Big The most impres-
unexpected. “The point is to show you’re good on your feet, that you can get an idea across, and demonstrate how you think in the context of the meeting,” he says.
2. Be Candid Be honest and precise when
you answer questions. “We have a disdain for the sales pitch,” Jurvetson says, recalling
I was a professional magician in middle school and high school, the same time I was doing a lot of computer stuff. I could make people disappear in boxes. I could have an audience member select a card and then find it inside an orange. In the sense that magic is an illusion, it’s not a great analogy to business. But doing magic tricks and making business presentations do have some things in common. The art of magic is about getting people engaged in some kind of
sive entrepreneurs are curious and deeply knowledgeable about a wide range of topics, Jurvetson says. “Elon Musk wins you over with his elegant mastery of engineering,” Jurvetson says. “But what blew my socks off was when our conversation veered way off topic. We started musing about whether it was possible we all lived in the matrix, and Musk still had deep knowledge. It made me believe he could connect the dots in a way that lesser minds couldn’t.”
story. Roughly speaking, when you see a magic trick, the magician spends 80 per cent to 90 per cent of the time just getting you engaged and building suspense. Only 10 per cent or 20 per cent of the time is spent on showing you the truly uncanny part of the trick. It’s about capturing your audience members’ imaginations, and then letting them run wild about what’s possible in the world. If you watch a product launch by Steve Jobs, Michael
Dell, or Jack Dorsey, you’ll see a lot of those same techniques. They spend 70 per cent of their time just building up the story line behind the product before giving you a glimpse of it. At Box, I get excited about taking a complicated idea like cloud storage, making it much simpler and more elegant, and then letting people run with it. As an entrepreneur, if you’re acknowledging only facts and information and the here and now, then you’re not doing your job.
How to Make People Believe
Secrets of a Great Ted Talk How do you give a knockout speech on one of the world’s most prestigious stages? You practice, then you practice some more.
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t was the scariest f---ing thing I’ve month beforehand, they schedule a Skype done in my life,” Derek Sivers says. rehearsal, during which the presenter gives Before him sat Microsoft founder Bill the talk and gets feedback on structure, pacGates, former Vice President Al Gore, ing, and clarity. After that, they encourage and about 400 other audience members. speakers to practice—with a stopwatch, in Sivers, a lifelong entrepreneur, was about front of nonexperts, in front of a mirror, to share leadership lessons—by way of over and over again, and get the talk down narrating a YouTube video featuring to their specified time limit. dancing hippies. He had three minutes. Then, a day or two before the conference, It was 2010, and Sivers was onstage at speakers do a dry run on the actual stage, TED, the biannual gathering known for with countdown timers running, to get a serving up exquisitely feel for standing there, crafted talks to the world’s looking out at the seats, big thinkers and leaders. Keeping it Real and projecting to the back TED presenters aren’t typi- The best presentations seem row. The hope is that the spontaneous, even if they are cally professional speakers training takes over when highly scripted. Here are tips but researchers, technolothe unexpected happens. for staying cool onstage from gists, and other people And the unexpected usuTED organizer Kelly Stoetzel. simply doing interesting ally does happen. Nilofer Tell the Story Your Way work. Months in advance, Merchant, author of 11 You may be tempted to copy the TED organizers hunt for Rules for Creating Value in structure of popular TED talks new speakers and solicit the #SocialEra, remembers from the past. But if you do proposals from past when an unexpected laugh that, your talk may very well end up feeling contrived. attendees. Last year, TED threw off her TED talk Instead, map out the structure also began hosting a talent about the benefits of walksearch that allows hopefuls that seems most natural. ing meetings. “I thought, to apply online and submit Oh, no; I just lost a line,” Work The Crowd videos. “We want people she recalls. “I literally Before your speech, chat with conference attendees during talking about the ideas threw out a point I was coffee breaks, lunch, or cockthey most love,” says congoing to make.” tail parties. The small talk will ference programmer Kelly Sivers managed to nargive you a better sense of your Stoetzel. rate the hippie video, audience. Even better, you’ll About two months which showed how one see a few friendly faces in the crowd when you take the stage. before the conference, crazy person can start a speakers must submit an movement, just as he had It’s Not About You outline or script. Then, practiced it, word for word. When you write and deliver Stoetzel and her team help It got laughs, a standing your speech, don’t think, This is them hone their ideas and ovation, and more than a message I must communicate, Stoetzel says. Rather, she incorporate anecdotes. A three million views online. suggests thinking, People will “No other conference I’ve love knowing about this! “It’s ever spoken at required me TIME TO SHINE almost like you’re providing a TED talkers (from top) Jane to do so much, so far in service on the stage, and McGonigal, Michael Porter, advance,” Sivers says. “But makes it feel more like a Brené Brown, Derek Sivers and conversation.” Shereen El Feki it really helps.“ DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 67
How to Make People Believe
Give the audience more of what it wants: Less Why more companies are embracing PechaKucha, a peppy—and brief—presentation style imported from Japan
A
t software giant Autodesk, employees know what CEO Carl Bass likes to see in a presentation. Twenty slides. Six minutes and 40 seconds’ worth of material. Such are the requirements of PechaKucha, a presentation format that applies discipline and design to the baggy and the bombastic. With its emphasis on speed and graphics, PechaKucha plays angel to Power-Point’s devil. The rules are beyond simple. Speakers display 20 slides and spend 20 seconds on each. If you have more than 20 points to make: too bad. Cut some. If an idea or graphic is too complex to explain in 20 seconds: too bad. Simplify it. “For a while, I required my staff to present this way,” says Bass, who complains that most speakers think more about how much they have to say than about how much the audience wants to hear. “It makes people crisp,” he says. “It forces them to organise their thinking.” Like many elegant, minimalist inventions (haiku, sushi), PechaKucha originated in Japan. In 2003, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, principals at a namesake architecture firm in Tokyo, sought ways to create excitement around their new arts space, SuperDeluxe. “We thought we’d get some architects round and have a show and tell,” recalls Dytham. “But architects talk too much, and we wanted to showcase lots of people in one evening.” The pair fiddled with timing, calculating that, at six minutes 40 seconds, they could squeeze in 20 presenters. “People said, ‘It’s impossible for me to talk about my building in 20 slides,’ ” says
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Dytham. “We said, ‘Of course it’s not.’ ” PechaKucha Nights are now staged in more than 600 cities around the world, with subject matter ranging from the significance of red hair (Brighton, England) to an aid mission to Haiti (Istanbul). Business has paid attention as well. On YouTube, you can catch Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb, giving his company’s history the 20-by-20 treatment. Josh Golden, founder of Chicago-based digital marketing company Table XI, first encountered PechaKucha when he became its vendor. Dytham hired Table XI to develop a website for PechaKucha, the not-for-profit he and Klein founded that works with people and organisations holding PechaKucha events. Golden soon became an evangelist. “Every new employee who joins the firm does a PechaKucha presentation about themselves,” Golden says. “We have a series of events called Table Talks where our staff and community members get together and do PechaKuchas around a theme. Our last one was about the education of software developers. We’ve just embraced the structure wholeheartedly.” Dytham says presenters appreciate the format’s tough-love approach. “It forces you to edit,” he says. PechaKucha has a democratising effect, he adds: “Whether you’re the boss or the intern, you’ve got the same 20 slides and 20 seconds.” Autodesk’s Bass suggests another advantage. “I won’t tell you that PechaKucha prevents people from giving bad presentations,” he says. “The good news is they can give them for only six minutes and 40 seconds.” —Leigh Buchanan Illustration by Anil T
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How to Make People Believe
Both Simple The secrets of effective storytelling from the modern master at the Moth By Leigh Buchanan
he Moth advises storytellers to begin in the action. So here goes: On a humid July evening, I sit behind a green velvet curtain in a cluttered New York City loft, recounting for several colleagues and my boss how, in college, I did Bible study with a boy so he would make out with me. Can I say that? Should I say that? What’s Inc.’s circulation these days, anyway? Maybe I should genericise it. Strike the Bible study and making out. Substitute an embarrassing experience from my college years. The Moth folks wouldn’t like that, though. Vulnerability and specificity are among their touchstones for great storytelling. And this small band from Inc. has come to the Moth’s SoHo office to learn about great storytelling: how to identify, craft, and find meaning in stories and begin to think about applying them to our business. I knew that I’d probably have to produce a yarn or two, and so on the way over, I had mentally rifled through my meager store of life experiences. I was going for something mordant, wry, or—all else failing—whimsical. That I somehow ended up telling this pathetic tale is testament to the Moth’s ability to shake loose poison fruit from concealing psychic foliage. The Moth, for the uninitiated, is a nonprofit organisation that stages live storytelling events and immortalises the choicest tales in podcasts, in public radio broadcasts, and, most recently, in a book. Many luminaries have taken turns at the mike, but the Moth harvests most of its talent from the ordinary folks who show up 7 0 | INC. |
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at its open-mike storytelling contests or submit recorded pitches through a website or phone line. Imagine your voice mailbox overflowing each morning with the dramatic, intimate recollections of absolute strangers. How great a job is that? Since roughly the dawn of time, leaders have recognised the power of stories to clarify, mollify, unite, inspire, and stir to arms. In the past 20 years, as storytelling has been adopted as a “management thing,” we’ve been deluged with books, workshops, conferences, and TED talks on the subject. So it’s not surprising that an organisation like the Moth would offer a programme to train businesses in storytelling. Kate Tellers, the fortuitously named senior producer for Moth Corporate Workshops, has worked with organisations as diverse as venerable L.L. Bean and bright-eyed social venture startups. “The businesses that seek out the Moth fall into two camps,” says Tellers. “One camp are fans of the Moth who wonder if they can bring that sort of
connectivity and energy into a room. The other is people who recognise storytelling is the most effective communication tool and want technical tools so they don’t have to stand there naked and alone.” What most people don’t seek out from the Moth but may find there is a kind of narrative cohesion undergirding the seeming randomness of their lives. Picking through memories, and then picking apart those memories to rebuild them into something with meaning and momentum, you start to recognise patterns and themes. Storytelling helps you explain yourself to others. But it also helps you understand yourself, which for leaders is the most critical skill of all. I hadn’t thought of that Bible study story in years. It bubbled out of another story from seventh grade that I’d repressed even further. And that story emerged from an exercise called first/best/worst/last, which is part of the personal-storytelling instruction that is part of a typical Moth Corporate Workshop.
How to Make People Believe
photos.com
and
True First/best/worst/last is an idea-generation exercise. People partner up and challenge one another to describe, for example, the first time they travelled to another city by themselves or the best party they ever attended. Having excavated some promisingly loamy memories, participants stand up and start sharing with the group, then absorb feedback from instructors and colleagues. “When we start working on a story, we call it unpacking,” says Tellers. “You need to tease out all the material, and you ask the right questions to get to its heart.” Whether coaching business clients or performers in its stage shows, the Moth relies on some homegrown rules called the Seven Principles of Moth Storytelling. The principles include things such as “Set up the stakes” and “Develop the arc,” but I won’t list them all here. Tellers asked me not to, because they are under copyright. That’s OK. Lists suggest bullets, and bullets suggest PowerPoint; and PowerPoint, in the ethos of the Moth, might as well be wandering the halls with a Kick Me sign taped to its back. Storytellers like metaphor, so let’s try that instead. At its simplest, a story is a journey whose beginning and end you can see. But instead of choosing the most efficient or scenic route, you choose a route that will bring you and your audience to the destination changed. Simple or profound, the change must have meaning. And the storyteller must pin down that meaning and
communicate it to the audience. Above all, stories should be personal. For most entrepreneurs, that comes naturally, but for some it is a challenge. I’ve interviewed founders who have trained themselves always to say “we,” even when they clearly mean “I,” because they fear sounding egotistical. Often, business leaders will devolve to customer success stories or stories about a Hail Mary pass lobbed collectively by the whole team. The content of such stories is fine, says the Moth. But the perspective, the voice, the emotion, the moment of change or recognition—those things must belong to the storyteller. Third person will not cut it. In a Moth Corporate Workshop, personal-storytelling instruction is followed by a session customised for the client’s goals. “Sometimes the goal is, ‘We want to explain who we are as an organisation, so let’s start to gather some effective stories that will explain the culture and goals,” says Tellers. “And sometimes it’s, ‘We have a big pitch coming up’ or, ‘We are going through a rebranding, and we need to generate stories for that.’” David Gerson, marketing director at Interface Europe, was thinking bigger than a sales pitch when he brought Moth instructors down to a company event in Atlanta last year. Interface is a 40-year-old modular carpet manufacturer with more than $1 billion in revenue. It was founded by Ray Anderson, a renowned DECEMBER 2013 | INC. | 7 1
How to Make People Believe
environmentalist and much-loved leader. Anderson was the business incarnate, and when he died in 2011, “there was a lot of concern that the story of Interface doesn’t die with him,” says Gerson. “Ray was an amazing storyteller. But now we had to get at the stories that are within each one of us. We wanted to give people the framework and the confidence to formulate their own stories about Interface and our future. “The Moth gave us a common vernacular of how powerful a story could be when told the right way,” says Gerson. “Ever since then, we’ve been talking about telling the story, telling the story, telling the story.” The hardest thing about storytelling, as taught by the Moth, is that stories must be both simple and true. Real-life events are baggy and ambiguous; time and distance go only so far toward smoothing the bulges. “In one or two words, what is your story about?” asks Tellers toward the end of our workshop. As I grudgingly start rejecting all those things my story isn’t about, a shape—clean, at once fresh and familiar— emerges. It feels satisfying. I remember the words of the late monologuist Spalding Gray: “I have to live a life in order to tell a life. I would prefer to tell it, because telling, you’re always in control. You’re like God.” t Inc., we constantly ask entrepreneurs to relate their companies’ birth legends. Some start with themselves in utero and haul out a memoir’s worth of autobiographical detail. Others cut straight to an aching market need, and ta da! There they stand, ready to fill it. Some get the length, the tone, and the level of detail just right. In this regard, I have high expectations for George Dawes Green, the novelist and poet who is the Moth’s founder. I am not disappointed. “Well, you know, the Moth was inspired by nights that I used to spend at my friend Wanda Bullard’s house on St. Simons Island, Georgia, where I grew up,” says Green, speaking over the phone from his home in Savannah, Georgia. His voice is faintly elegiac: Southern in cadence if not in accent. “We’d just sit around the porch 7 2 | INC. |
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and drink a lot and tell stories all night. The porch had screens that were kind of ripped up and moths were, you know, always whirling around the light. We started to refer to ourselves as the Moth— this sort of pickup group who would gather around to drink and tell stories.” Green goes on to talk about moving to New York and attending poetry slams where arty, self-conscious language obscured meaning and emotion. “I noticed when the poets introduced the poems, they would often tell a little story,” he says. “And it was so natural. And the audience would laugh.” Believing New Yorkers would embrace the purity of true stories plainly told, Green started staging storytelling evenings. The
same themes addressed by Tellers. But he wants to talk about just one thing. “At the center of every great story is some kind of human flaw,” says Green. “It is actually human failure. A great storyteller recognises in some way that he is a clown. And we immediately respond to that, because we are all clowns.” Green believes that some of the most compelling business stories of our time are also story-stories. He attributes much of Apple’s success to our knowledge of the rise and fall and rise of Steve Jobs. By contrast, “one of the great corporate failures in the last 10 years is Microsoft’s inability to find its story,” he says. “Bill Gates is a truly great man, and so we ought
“ The Moth gave us a common vernacular of how powerful a story could be when told the right way. ” early shows were “actually awful,” he says. “People had forgotten how to tell stories. They felt they had to tell a story with a moral or some important purpose. Or they would use a lot of fancy language. And the stories were too long. It really didn’t work at all. “We just kept working and working,” says Green. “And we started to find brilliant natural storytellers. And that’s it. That’s the birth legend.” The principles state that storytelling is about making choices, so I ask Green why he tells the Moth story in that particular way. “I am emphasising the naturalness of storytelling, because that is the beauty of it,” Green explains. “I like to bring in the drinking, because that seems to be part of this communal experience. What I really love about the story, too, is that I get to mention my friend Wanda, who was the best friend of my life. She just died a few years ago. I always loved her.” For a whisper, I am sad, too. I expect Green to raise many of the
to be responding emotionally to Microsoft’s products. But there is a coldness there.” I ask Green which entrepreneur he would most like to see on the Moth’s main stage, and he doesn’t hesitate. “The great story of our time, I think, is Elon Musk,” he says. “He has such a fabulous potential for success because he came so close to failure. He’ll carry anything to the edge because he doesn’t see his life as worthwhile unless he does that.” But do we want to hear Elon Musk because he tells a great story or because he has lived a great story? The Moth folks won’t get drawn into that distinction. They live by the dictum that every human being has a great story inside. Those business people whose job it is to captivate, to move, and to persuade hope they are correct. And so do those of us who sit in audiences and in conference rooms, waiting to be captivated, moved, and persuaded. Send in the clowns.