Category: General

Published December 27, 2023

1

Drucker’s Wisdom

I am often asked, “How can I excel as a manager?” Responding to this has always been challenging for me, and here’s why: In my early days at IndiaWorld and Netcore, I led a small team and, candidly, I had much to learn. Furthermore, over the past 15 years at Netcore, I’ve been without direct reports, with professional CEOs spearheading the organisation. To address this query, I delved into the insights and experiences of others, aiming to craft a guide that could benefit aspiring managers. In this first of two essays, I’ll explore the transformation from managers to true leaders of people. The subsequent piece will delve into personal growth, emphasising how one can achieve peak performance in a professional setting.

One of the best places to begin is by understanding Peter Drucker’s theory of management. Business News Daily writes: “At the core of Drucker’s management theory lie the concepts of decentralization, knowledge work (in fact, he coined the term “knowledge worker”), management by objectives (MBO), and the SMART goal method.”

• Decentralization means that managers should empower employees by delegating tasks.
• MBO involves superiors and their subordinates working together to set common goals, identify employees’ areas of expertise and define measurable expected results.
• The SMART method means that those goals need to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-specific and recorded.

Toolshero adds about MBO:

• Objectives are determined with the employees or team members;
• Objectives are formulated at both quantitative and qualitative levels;
• Objectives must be challenging and motivating;
• Daily feedback on the state of affairs and key results at the level of coaching and development instead of static management reports;
• Rewards (recognition, appreciation and/or performance-related pay) for achieving the intended objectives is a requirement;
• The basic principle is growth and development not punishments.

Lattice writes on SMART:

• Specific: Does the goal have specific means and ends?
• Measurable: Can the goal be measured? How?
• Actionable/Achievable: What are the specific actions that will lead to this goal? What do you need to do to accomplish it?
• Relevant/Realistic: Is this goal relevant to your job duties, team, and company? Is it based on factors that are under your control?
• Time-bound: What is the time period? Does it depend on a deadline or target date, or is it on a regular schedule?

ChatGPT provides an overview of Drucker’s ideas on managing people:

Here are some of Drucker’s views on managing others:

• Management by Objectives (MBO): Drucker introduced the concept of MBO, which emphasizes setting clear, mutually agreed-upon objectives for employees and then monitoring their performance against these objectives. This approach promotes clarity, motivation, and alignment with organizational goals.
• The Human Factor: Drucker believed that workers are not mere assets; they are human beings. He emphasized the importance of treating employees with respect and dignity. He argued that productivity improves when managers treat workers as resources rather than costs.
• Strengths Over Weaknesses: Drucker advised managers to focus on leveraging the strengths of their employees rather than obsessing over their weaknesses. He believed that effective managers build on the strengths of their team members and strive to make their weaknesses irrelevant.
• Knowledge Workers: Drucker identified the rise of the “knowledge worker” and emphasized that managing such workers, who know more about their jobs than their managers do, requires a different approach. He believed that knowledge workers need autonomy and should be judged by their output and contributions rather than the hours they work.
• Continuous Learning and Development: Drucker stressed the importance of continuous learning and self-development for both managers and their teams. He believed that in the knowledge economy, continuous learning is crucial for organizational success.
• Listening Actively: Drucker highlighted the importance of active listening for managers. He believed that effective communication begins with listening and understanding the perspectives of others.
• Decentralization and Simplification: Drucker was an advocate for decentralizing decision-making to empower more employees and simplify processes. He believed that this approach leads to more innovation and faster decision-making.
• Results-Oriented Approach: Drucker emphasized that managers should focus on outcomes and results rather than just tasks and activities. He believed that what gets measured gets managed, and thus, managers should prioritize tracking and evaluating outcomes.
• The Right People in the Right Jobs: Drucker believed in placing people where they can make the greatest contribution. He argued that it’s the manager’s responsibility to ensure team members are positioned to leverage their strengths.
• Innovation and Change: Drucker viewed innovation and change as essential components of effective management. He believed that managers should be proactive in driving innovation and adapting to change.

With this background on managing others, we will focus on four aspects of managing others:

• As a leader: set a clear vision and strategy aligned with the organisation’s goals, and inspire trust and credibility
• As a manager of people: how to bring out the best in every individual, including hiring and coaching
• As head of a team: how to make the individuals work together in cohesion, and handle conflict resolution
• As a peer: how to collaborate with other functional leaders

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As A Leader

Adam Bryant writes in his book, “The Leap to Leader”, about the transition to a leadership mindset: “It is a realization that you are fully accountable, that you must grapple with the hardest decisions, and that you need to let go of doing the work that earned you promotion after promotion earlier in your career. It means writing the playbook for your job, rather than running the playbook that your bosses hand you. It means imagining what could and should be, rather than delivering on expected outcomes. It is about understanding that leadership is not a popularity contest, and that earning people’s respect matters more than having them like you. It means setting a compass for a new direction and letting others create the road map for executing the plan. It means unlocking the potential in people that they may not even see for themselves. It is about giving credit to others and taking blame when things go wrong. It means always doing what is best for the organization, even if that requires letting go of valued colleagues. It is about having the courage to take a stand, even if it costs you your job. It means thinking first about what you can do for people, rather than what they can do for you. It is about building other leaders, not just followers.”

Every manager has to be a leader. The transition from being an individual contributor (IC) to leading others is not an easy one. As an IC, one is given instructions on what’s to be done. As a manager, one has to set the objectives for others. It is less about doing work oneself, and more about getting work done through others.

This shift in roles brings about a profound change in perspective and responsibilities. While individual contributors often focus on the technical aspects of their tasks, managers must zoom out to see the bigger picture. They need to understand not just the ‘how’ but also the ‘why’ behind every task and project. This broader perspective is essential for setting the right direction for the team and ensuring alignment with the organisation’s overarching goals.

Moreover, leadership is about influence, not authority. It’s about inspiring and motivating team members to achieve their best, rather than merely directing them. This requires a deep understanding of human psychology and dynamics. Every individual on a team comes with their own set of strengths, weaknesses, motivations, and aspirations. A successful leader recognises these nuances and tailors their approach to resonate with each team member. This personalised approach not only boosts morale but also enhances productivity and commitment.

Adam Bryant explains this difference well: “Managers typically fall into one of two camps. First, there are those who think primarily about what their teams can do for them and how they can help advance their own career. They are the bosses who hoard talent and see people through a lens of whether they are useful to their own personal ambitions and needs… Second, there are managers who are more selfless. Their default interest is how they can help their team, and they see themselves as a coach whose job is to develop the talents and skills of people who work for them. They see career trajectories and possibilities for their direct reports that those employees may not even see for themselves. Rather than hoarding talent, selfless managers encourage people on their teams to explore new opportunities.” So, good managers are selfless, and not self-centred.

Another critical aspect of leadership is communication. While an IC might often work in silos, a manager must ensure open, transparent, and consistent communication. This involves articulating the vision, setting clear expectations, providing feedback, and, most importantly, listening. Active listening helps leaders understand the concerns, ideas, and feedback from their team, fostering a two-way communication channel that encourages innovation and continuous improvement.

Furthermore, trust is the bedrock of effective leadership. As a manager, it’s crucial to build and maintain trust with your team. This involves being reliable, consistent, and honest in all interactions. It also means trusting your team in return, delegating tasks, and giving them the autonomy to make decisions. This mutual trust creates an environment where team members feel valued, leading to higher engagement and loyalty.

Adam suggests a few questions as prompts for leaders to open up with their teams:

• What about your upbringing shapes how you lead today?
• What are some honest, unfiltered things about you?
• What drives you nuts? What are your quirks?
• How can people earn an extra gold star from you?
• What might people misunderstand about you?
• What’s the best way to communicate with you?
• What strength of yours can also be a weakness or problematic in certain contexts?

Decision-making is another area where the role of a manager diverges significantly from that of an IC. While individual contributors often focus on executing decisions, managers are responsible for making those decisions. This requires a delicate balance of analysis, intuition, and consultation. Every decision has consequences, and it’s the leader’s responsibility to weigh the pros and cons, consider the long-term implications, and make choices that benefit the team and the organization.

In conclusion, while the transition from an individual contributor to a leader can be challenging, it’s also immensely rewarding. It offers an opportunity to make a more significant impact, shape the direction of the team, and contribute to the organisation’s success in a meaningful way. Embracing the nuances of leadership and continuously striving for growth are the keys to thriving in this role.

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As a People Manager – 1

In both business and sports, teams are pivotal. Yet, before these teams can synergise to become greater than the mere sum of their components, they consist of distinct individuals. A captain or coach must deeply understand each team member and mentor them towards realising their utmost potential. Only with this foundation can victory be achieved.

Here are a few suggestions on how managers can build better relationships with the individuals in their team.

Understanding Individuality within a Team: Every team member brings a unique set of skills, experiences, and perspectives to the table. As a people manager, it’s essential to recognise and appreciate these differences. By doing so, you can tailor your management approach to resonate with each individual, ensuring that they feel valued and understood.

The Power of Personalised Feedback: Generic feedback often falls on deaf ears. However, when feedback is personalised and constructive, it can be a powerful tool for growth. By understanding each team member’s strengths and areas for improvement, a manager can provide insights that drive personal and professional development.

Empowerment and Autonomy: While guidance is essential, it’s equally important to give team members the autonomy to make decisions and take ownership of their roles. Empowering individuals boosts their confidence and encourages them to take initiative, leading to increased innovation and productivity.

Balancing Authority and Approachability: Navigating the delicate balance between authority and approachability is one of the quintessential challenges faced by managers. On one hand, establishing authority is crucial to ensure that directives are followed, decisions are respected, and the team maintains a sense of structure and discipline. It underscores the manager’s role as a decision-maker and a guiding force. On the other hand, approachability is equally vital. An approachable manager fosters an environment where team members feel valued, heard, and comfortable sharing their ideas, concerns, and feedback. It creates a two-way communication channel, promoting transparency and trust. Striking the right balance means that while team members respect the manager’s decisions, they also feel empowered to voice their opinions without fear of retribution.

Continuous Learning and Growth: The business landscape is ever-evolving, and so are the skills and knowledge required to thrive within it. Encouraging continuous learning and providing opportunities for professional development ensures that team members stay updated and relevant in their roles. Managers should work with each of their reports to charting out a learning plan for the next 1-2 quarters.

Building Strong Relationships: Beyond the professional realm, taking the time to build genuine relationships with each of the team members can have profound effects. Understanding their motivations, challenges, and aspirations on a personal level allows for a deeper connection, fostering loyalty and commitment.

Claire Hughes Johnson, in her book “Scaling People”, has a checklist for managing individuals:

• Hold regular 1:1s on a weekly or biweekly cadence, and they are rarely rescheduled.
• Create agendas for your 1:1s that include contributions from both sides, notes, and agreed-upon actions.
• Have quarterly goals that you track together.
• Hold bidirectional feedback sessions with your reports every three to six months.
• Hold more formal performance conversations every 3, 6, or 12 months (the more rapidly your company is changing, the more often these should occur) that emphasize both the results the person achieved (or didn’t) and how the person did or did not achieve those results.

Writing up a document on what it is like to work you and your management style is a good idea. As Claire puts in, “It really sets the tone for my working relationships. It was a good reminder that sharing what gets you up in the morning on a personal level can be as important as the mechanics of working together.”

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As a People Manager – 2

Hiring

One of the most important responsibilities a manager has is recruiting talent. Claire Hughes Johnson offers suggestions on the interview process:

• Have a clear job description.
• Determine who will conduct the interviews.
• Seek to have candidates only meet a maximum of eight people in the process. Studies at Google have demonstrated diminishing returns for additional interviews. If the role is more entry-level and very well understood, this could be reduced to four or five people.
• Make sure your interviewers are trained on effective interviewing.
• Share your assessment rubric with all interviewers and assign one or two elements of the rubric to each interviewer to avoid overlap.
• For more custom or infrequently filled roles, have a kickoff meeting in which everyone gets aligned on the role, the rubric, and their part in the process.
• Potentially, have a first round of three interviews to narrow the field before you ask the entire interview panel to participate. Then, have the remaining three interviewers meet the finalists—ideally, at least three candidates—in a final round.
• Conduct a hiring committee or candidate review process to finalize your selection.
• Have the recruiter and hiring manager check the candidate’s references.
• Make the offer. Hopefully, the candidate will accept—then you can set a start date and send them onboarding information!

Here are a few questions she suggests:

• Tell me about a time you worked on something that you knew you wouldn’t enjoy but which was necessary for the success of your team or company.
• When have you felt most connected to your coworkers? Tell me about a time when that connection was tested and how you adapted.
• What project are you most proud of? What was your contribution?
• Tell me about a project you’ve led that failed. What role did you play in the project’s failure? What did you learn? What would you do differently if given the chance to do it over?
• Work can be challenging, and we know it’s not the only thing on your mind. How do you approach balancing competing demands for your attention?
• What’s the best example of something in your current job that you don’t like?
• Tell me about the best leader you’ve worked for.

Onboarding

One of the most pivotal responsibilities of a manager is ensuring that new joinees transition smoothly into the organisation. Just as a warm welcome can set the tone for a lasting relationship, the initial experiences of a new employee can significantly influence their perception of the company and their role within it. Drawing parallels from other sectors, consider how companies meticulously design onboarding processes for customers, ensuring they feel valued right from the outset. Similarly, universities invest considerable effort in organising orientation programs for incoming students, aiming to acclimate them to a new phase of academic life.

In the corporate realm, an onboarding plan serves a similar purpose. It’s not just about administrative tasks and initial training; it’s about immersing the new joinee in the company’s ethos. This involves introducing them to the company’s products, services, and most importantly, its culture. By understanding the company’s values, mission, and vision, new employees can align their efforts with broader organizational goals.

Furthermore, integrating new joinees into the team is crucial. Building relationships with colleagues, understanding team dynamics, and establishing communication channels are all essential components of this process. A well-structured onboarding plan also familiarises them with the working environment, tools, and processes, ensuring they can operate efficiently from the get-go.

In essence, effective onboarding is akin to laying a strong foundation for a building. When done right, it ensures that new employees not only adapt quickly but also feel a sense of belonging and purpose, paving the way for long-term engagement and productivity.

5

As a Team Leader – 1

The single biggest responsibility for a manager is to fashion the people being led into an effective team, which can deliver on the expected outcomes. This task, while monumental, is the linchpin of organisational success. Many years ago, I had read Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.” Presented as a compelling leadership fable, the book provides insights into the pitfalls that hinder team success and offers remedies to overcome them.

Here is a summary from ChatGPT:

1. Absence of Trust:
   • Description: Team members are reluctant to be vulnerable with one another, leading to a lack of openness and honesty.
   • Recommendation: Build trust by encouraging vulnerability among team members. This can be achieved through team-building exercises, open discussions, and creating an environment where mistakes and weaknesses can be openly shared without fear of retribution.
2. Fear of Conflict:
   • Description: Teams avoid engaging in passionate and constructive debates, leading to artificial harmony.
   • Recommendation: Foster an environment where differing opinions are encouraged and valued. Managers should set the tone by engaging in constructive conflict themselves and mediating team discussions to ensure they remain productive and respectful.
3. Lack of Commitment:
   • Description: Without clear direction or buy-in from all team members, there’s ambiguity and a lack of clear decision-making.
   • Recommendation: Ensure clarity and buy-in by making decisions collectively and clearly communicating those decisions. Even if there’s not complete agreement, understanding the rationale behind decisions can help team members commit to them.
4. Avoidance of Accountability:
   • Description: Team members avoid holding one another accountable for their actions and performance, leading to lowered standards.
   • Recommendation: Foster a culture of peer accountability. This can be achieved by setting clear expectations, regularly reviewing performance against those expectations, and creating an environment where team members feel responsible for one another’s success.
5. Inattention to Results:
   • Description: The team doesn’t focus on collective results, leading to individualistic behavior and a lack of alignment with organizational goals.
   • Recommendation: Establish a shared vision and clear objectives for the team. Regularly review progress towards these goals and celebrate collective successes. Ensure that individual performance metrics align with team and organizational objectives.

The graphic from OMT Global summarises the key ideas:

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As a Team Leader – 2

Claire Hughes Johnson has three (among many) ideas I liked for what she calls “intentional team development”: structure, skills, and delegating.

On structure: “Sometimes you need to form a team with a lasting mission and goals. Other times you’ll want to create a task-oriented project or working group that can dissolve after the task is completed or the goal achieved. The primary difference is that a team works on a collection of persistent jobs to be done, whereas a task-oriented project or working group addresses a temporary, circumscribed action or mission to accomplish…Before implementing any type of organizing construct, take a step back and ask yourself:

• What are the objectives of this group?
• What skills need to be included?
• How long will the group need to last?

… The worst thing you can do is let a temporary structure persist for too long. This causes two problems. First, you will not have invested at the right level for that structure to be successful. Second, the structure’s persistence will be confusing to permanent teams, which should hold the primary scope and accountability for work that must be persistently done.”

On the skill-will matrix: “For a high-functioning team to exceed the sum of its parts, you first need to assess whether the team as a whole is capable of achieving that state. If not, concentrate on each member individually and identify any changes you might need to make. For these assessments, I like to apply the skill-will matrix created by longtime executive coach Max Landsberg to evaluate a person’s ability to accomplish a specific task:

On delegating: “Delegating takes two forms. First is general work assignment: The team member has a job to do and needs to understand the core functions of that job. Do they understand their day-to-day responsibilities, goals, and how they will be measured and assessed? This is something you should automatically cover in 1:1s. Second is a one-off assignment that might not neatly fit into the day-to-day work but that you or someone on your team needs to accomplish….Managers who under-delegate are often also folks who might be called micromanagers. They are over-involved in everything the team does, and they demand to be included in almost all of the team’s work or to review the work before it’s seen by anyone outside the division…Managers who over-delegate are very good at making employees feel empowered and trusted, but they get too far removed from the work and don’t recognize when an employee is in over their head. They may also give employees work that they’re not ready for, and they don’t demand high quality from their reports.”

[Claire has a set of publicly available workbooks.]

**

One element that is becoming increasingly important in modern workplaces is the role of the manager as a coach. A manager-coach focuses on nurturing and developing their team members, guiding them towards realising their full potential. This involves providing constructive feedback, setting clear growth paths, and fostering an environment of continuous learning. By adopting a coaching mindset, managers empower their team members to take ownership of their roles, encouraging proactive problem-solving and innovation. This not only boosts individual performance but also strengthens the team’s overall capability, fostering a culture of collaboration, growth, and excellence.

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As a Team Leader – 3

For leaders, attending meetings often ranks among the most time-intensive responsibilities. It’s alarmingly easy to conduct ineffective meetings: lacking a clear agenda, failing to draw conclusions, inviting an excessive number of participants, allowing them to drag on, and the list goes on. So, how can a team leader ensure meetings are productive and purposeful?

Here are 10 suggestions on doing meetings right.

• Set a Clear Agenda: Before the meeting, distribute a clear and concise agenda outlining the topics to be discussed. This helps participants come prepared and keeps the meeting focused.
• Invite Relevant Participants: Only include individuals who are directly involved in the topics at hand. This ensures that discussions are pertinent and decisions can be made efficiently.
• Start and End on Time: Respect participants’ time by beginning promptly and adhering to the scheduled end time. This sets a professional tone and encourages punctuality.
• Designate a Facilitator: Appoint someone to guide the discussion, ensuring that the meeting stays on track and that all agenda items are covered.
• Encourage Participation: Create an environment where all attendees feel comfortable sharing their insights and feedback. This can lead to more comprehensive discussions and better decision-making.
• Stay on Topic: Avoid veering off into unrelated subjects. If new topics arise that aren’t on the agenda, note them down for future discussion.
• Set Time Limits: Allocate specific time slots for each agenda item to ensure that all topics receive adequate attention and the meeting doesn’t overrun.
• Conclude with Action Items: End the meeting by summarizing key decisions made and assigning action items. Clearly state who is responsible for each task and set deadlines.
• Document and Distribute Minutes: After the meeting, promptly send out minutes that detail the discussions held, decisions made, and action items assigned. This serves as a reference and ensures accountability.
• Regularly Evaluate Meeting Effectiveness: Periodically gather feedback on the effectiveness of meetings and make necessary adjustments. This continuous evaluation ensures that meetings remain productive and valuable over time.

Here are some additional ideas:

Amazon’s Six-Page Memo Format: “Instead of using PowerPoint, Amazon executives sit around a table and read six-page memos in silence. This strategy allows a company’s executives to discuss the idea and review the details after reading the memo. The best ideas should move forward for consideration. Bad ideas should be quickly eliminated… There are multiple ways to approach writing six-page memos. For example, your group could delegate sections of the memo to different team members to write. Or you could have only one or two people write the first draft of the memo and then expand on the details by reading the memo as a group. You can write a six-page memo about a specific idea or to cover a specific period of time. For example, you could write a six-page memo to outline the current state of a business, the historical data from the last period, the goals for this period and how an executive plans on achieving the goals.” A related idea is to write a “backward press release…An internal press release allows a team or an individual to write about all of the great things that their idea will generate.” [Brittain Ladd]

15-minute meetings: “[It] is the fastest-growing block of time that workers and bosses are scheduling, according to an analysis of Microsoft Teams data, which also shows people are booking fewer hourlong meetings. Fifteen-minute meetings now make up 60% of calendared gatherings, proving that executives and employees alike have grown more ruthless with their time…Keep the circle tight: Having too many people in the meeting wastes everyone else’s time. Stay on topic: Focus on one aspect of a budget rather than the entire spreadsheet, or debate specific attributes of two potential hires, rather than rehash the latest round of interviews. Read up: Send around reading materials ahead of the meeting, otherwise known as “pre-work,” so participants can come prepared, says [Brian] Elliott. Stack them: Schedule 15-minute meetings to maximize your time, says copywriter Ashley Laabs. Three 15-minute meetings, one after the other, often work better than having them sprinkled through the day…Rahim Charania, managing partner of a real-estate investment firm, tells his staff that meetings must fit a ‘What-Why-What’ rubric. Three questions must be answered before somebody schedules a meeting: What are the issues being discussed? Why do we need a meeting? What would be the best outcome? The 15-minute block is the standard time allotted, Charania says, and meetings rarely run over: “It forces everyone to do the majority of their thinking before the meeting.”” [Wall Street Journal]

Question Jam sessions: “Polls, quizzes, and Q&A sessions aren’t designed to foster the one-on-one connections among meeting participants that studies show are vital if people are to feel their time together is meaningful. Presentations…are by definition one-way.” The alternative: a question jam session.

…[Jamming] is something you do to create the energy and feeling of belonging that’s needed for everything else to work. To solve problems no one can solve alone, we must build on one another’s experiences and insights—and the best way to do that is to ensure that everyone’s unique perspectives are brought into play before the groupthink kicks in.” [Pia Lauritzen]

8

As a Peer

A key responsibility as a manager is to connect with other cross-functional peers to get things done. No team is an island, and the manager often serves as the vital link in the chain of command and execution. This role, while pivotal, requires a nuanced understanding of collaboration, negotiation, and mutual respect.

The Interconnectedness of Teams: In today’s complex organisational structures, teams rarely operate in isolation. Projects often span multiple departments, each bringing its expertise to the table. While individual teams might have their specific goals, they are all interconnected pieces of a larger organizational puzzle. As such, managers must recognise the importance of these inter-team relationships and actively foster them.

Building Bridges, Not Walls: A successful manager-as-peer doesn’t just communicate with other teams; they build bridges. This involves understanding the goals, challenges, and priorities of other departments. By establishing open channels of communication and regularly checking in with peers, managers can ensure that their teams are aligned with the broader organisational objectives.

Negotiation and Compromise: Collaboration often requires negotiation. Different teams might have competing priorities, limited resources, or differing views on how to approach a problem. As the link between teams, managers must hone their negotiation skills, striving for solutions that benefit the organization as a whole while respecting the needs and constraints of individual teams.

Mutual Respect and Trust: Trust is the foundation of any successful relationship, and peer relationships in an organization are no exception. Managers must cultivate mutual respect with their counterparts in other departments. This involves honouring commitments, being transparent about challenges, and acknowledging the contributions of other teams. When trust is established, collaboration becomes smoother, and potential conflicts can be more easily resolved.

Leveraging Diverse Strengths: Different teams bring different strengths to the table. A manager who understands and leverages these diverse strengths can drive projects to success. This might involve tapping into the marketing team’s expertise for a product launch or collaborating with the finance team to set budgets. Recognizing and utilizing the unique skills of each department ensures a holistic approach to problem-solving.

Celebrating Collective Successes: While individual team achievements (and celebrations) are essential, it’s equally important to celebrate collective successes. When multiple teams collaborate on a project and achieve their goals, it’s a testament to the power of cross-functional collaboration. Recognising and celebrating these joint achievements fosters a sense of unity and encourages teams to continue working together harmoniously.

While the role of a manager within their team is crucial, their role as a peer in the larger organisational context is equally significant. By fostering strong, collaborative relationships with peers from other departments, managers can drive their teams and the organization towards collective success.

9

Leap to Leader

The “leap to leader” begins with successfully managing a team. Ascending the corporate ladder isn’t solely about personal achievements; it’s intrinsically tied to showcasing the capability to elevate others. The most effective path to promotions and recognition lies in consistently demonstrating one’s ability to harness the collective strengths of a team, guiding them towards shared goals. Here are a few suggestions from Adam Bryant:

Build a Wide Base: “Focus on broadening your skills and experience…Of all the most familiar career metaphors—ladders and obstacle courses are probably the two most popular—my favorite is the pyramid. A wide base will create a more stable foundation and provide you with more job security because you will have more options. And at the risk of overworking the metaphor, pyramids are also still relatively wide even near the peak, meaning you will have more options to move into a very senior position at the top of the organization.”

Don’t Chase the Next Job: “It may seem like a paradox, but the best way to get promoted is to focus on the job you have and to do it really well…Do the job you’ve been given really well by quickly mastering what’s expected of you, and then start working on how you can transform the job—to reimagine what could be rather than just focusing on what is. That is what leaders do, and you need to build a track record of transformation in every role you have so that people will gain confidence that you will have similar success on bigger stages.”

Perfect Your Do-to-Say Ratio: “One of the easiest ways to set yourself apart is to build a reputation for reliability and follow-through—somebody who always does what they say they are going to do…If people see you as reliable, as a person who always delivers, that will set you apart as trustworthy and a team player who understands that everybody relies on each other to get work done. Reliability builds trust, which leads to promotions and greater responsibilities.”

Build a Network without Networking: “In the same way that you need to create a wide base as a foundation for your career, you need to prioritize building your network of business relationships… Whenever you are about to meet somebody for the first time, take a minute to do a quick scan of their LinkedIn and Facebook profiles, and their Twitter and Instagram feeds. There’s a good chance that you will find some point of connection that will help turbocharge the relationship.”

Mentors and Sponsors: “Start small. Maybe there’s a person you want to reach out to and add to your network. Ask them for their advice on a specific question. Then act on their advice and follow up with them… You can find mentors anywhere. And you should look for people with backgrounds that are different from yours because you’re more likely to learn from them… Sponsors are different from mentors. They are the people who are going to go to bat for you in meetings, who will say, “We should give them a shot.” They will vouch for you, and they are willing to spend some political capital because they have decided you are worth betting on, and they are confident enough in your ongoing success that they see little risk in vouching for you.”

Don’t Ignore Your Peers: “If you don’t spend time building those connections, they might hold you back and undermine you in ways that you may not always know about. If you do invest in those relationships and show people that you are genuinely trying to help them and care more about the team’s overall success than your particular part of the business, then they are more likely to nominate you to lead the team someday.”

Managing Your Boss: “Of all the relationships you have at work, the single most important one is with your boss… The first thing you need to do is master your own job—to do it well and quickly so that you can then free up energy to explore ways to transform the job and do more than is expected… By figuring out how to do your job faster, you will not only free up time to spend on building relationships across the organization, but also create more bandwidth so that you can go to your boss to take something off their plate and bring it back better. Doing that work will help you better understand what really matters to the most senior leaders.”

**

Navigating the intricacies of managing and leading others is both a challenging and rewarding journey. While it offers a dynamic and fulfilling experience, its true efficacy comes from introspection and self-management. Mastery over oneself lays the foundation for effective leadership. In my next essay, we will explore the art of self-management as the cornerstone of impactful leadership.

Published December 26, 2023

1

The Road Taken…Or Not

Every day, we are faced with an array of decisions. Some are routine and seem inconsequential, while others possess the power to shape the trajectories of our lives, especially in the business world. My own journey has been punctuated by these pivotal moments.

In the summer of 1994, I grappled with the future of my failing image processing venture. By the end of that year (after having decided to shut down the imaging startup), I was contemplating the nature of my next enterprise – an India-centric Internet startup or a different pursuit. Over the years, I found myself at the crossroads more than once: deciding on content domains in ’96, choosing a buyer for IndiaWorld in ’99, relinquishing control of Netcore to a professional CEO in 2007, contemplating a political startup for the 2014 elections, reevaluating Nayi Disha’s direction in 2019, and in 2022, making a momentous decision about acquiring Unbxd for a staggering $100 million – a milestone for Netcore.

Each decision took me down a certain path. In every case, there was an alternative. I had to decide on the future direction within a limited timeframe. While I could take multiple inputs from others, the final call was mine. Every decision was about the future – one I had no way of knowing or predicting. I would never have perfect information to decide. Decision-making often boiled down to a leap of faith into an unpredictable tomorrow.  If I was wrong, the decision could bring some pain and even entail financial losses.

When I have to make big decisions, I  do what perhaps many of us do – list out the pros and cons, talk to a few people we trust for inputs, imagine the possible futures based on the choices we make, play out the worst-case scenario should the decision go bad, and perhaps even procrastinate. And yet, there comes a time when the decision cannot be delayed anymore. A deadline approaches. With hesitating finality, an answer must be given, a path must be chosen. One is never fully sure of how things will play out so there is always a moment of self-doubt, and even a “if only I had chosen the other path” feeling. In big and important decisions, there is no going back. For an entrepreneur and leader, there is no higher-up to pass on the buck for a bad decision. A mistake will have costs, and it may quite some time till one realises that an error of judgement has been made. There is the other side – the joy and ecstasy of having made the right move, which becomes a game changer taking the business into a new orbit. Every entrepreneur knows this dance well – between self-doubt and conviction, between lamenting what might have been and the euphoria of a decision that propels a business to new heights.

So, amidst this whirlwind of emotions and consequences, is there a way to consistently make better decisions? Let’s learn from the wisdom of others.

2

Decisions and Outcomes

Annie Duke writes in “How to Decide”: “Because any decision determines only the set of possible outcomes (some good, some bad, some in between), this means good outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions, and bad outcomes can result from both good and bad decisions.” Here is a helpful graphic:

Annie explains the four cells:

• An Earned Reward comes when you make a good-quality decision that results in a good outcome, like when you proceed through a green light and get through the intersection safely.
• Dumb Luck comes when you make a poor-quality decision that turns out well. You can be waiting at a traffic light and fail to notice the light has turned green because you are deeply entranced by the world’s most important tweet. If, while you are sitting there failing to proceed through the intersection, you happen to avoid getting in an accident with a car whose driver ignores the red light in their direction and barrels through the intersection, that doesn’t make looking at Twitter while driving a good decision. That’s just Dumb Luck.
• Bad Luck comes when you make a good-quality decision that turns out poorly. You can proceed through a green light and get in an accident with someone turning into traffic. That’s a bad outcome, but it wasn’t because your decision to follow the traffic laws was poor.
• Just Deserts means making a poor-quality decision that results in a bad outcome, like running a red light and getting in an accident.

Some additional inputs:

• The only thing you have control over that can influence the way your life turns out is the quality of your decisions.
• Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.
• Resulting: A mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of a decision…A necessary part of becoming a better decision-maker is learning from experience. Experience contains the lessons for improving future decisions. Resulting causes you to learn the wrong lessons.
• Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.

In her book, Annie outlines six steps to better decision-making:

• Step 1—Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes.
• Step 2—Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome—to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values?
• Step 3—Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding.
• Step 4—Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the option under consideration.
• Step 5—Repeat Steps 1–4 for other options under consideration.
• Step 6—Compare the options to one another.

She adds: “Your greatest challenge as a decision-maker is seeing things that, by their nature, are going to be hazy. For past decisions, you’re reconstructing the decision while navigating your way through distortion-inducing biases. For new decisions, you’re looking into the future, which is inherently uncertain. This six-step process will help you improve the quality of both new decisions on your horizon and your assessment of past decisions. It’s hard to accurately assess a decision after the fact, in the shadow of an outcome that has already happened. But if you have a good decision process going forward, and keep a record of it, you’ll be a lot better off. You won’t have to wonder after the fact whether a decision was good or bad, under the haze of resulting and hindsight bias.”

Here is more from ChatGPT on the key ideas in the book:

1. Backcasting and Precommitment: When faced with a decision, imagine a future where a positive outcome has occurred, then work backward to figure out the steps that led to that outcome. Precommit to decisions and set clear criteria before entering a situation where emotions might sway your choices.
2. Decide in Bets: When making a decision, think of it as placing a bet on a particular outcome. Assess the risks, rewards, and probabilities associated with each option.
3. Seek Feedback: Constructive feedback can help improve your decision-making process. Create an environment where you and others can provide feedback without fear of retribution.
4. Use Decision Journals: Keep a journal of your decisions. Note the context, the decision made, the expected outcome, and the reasons for the decision. This helps you learn from your experiences and refine your process over time.
5. Decision Hygiene: Introduce practices that minimize biases and errors in decisions. This includes techniques such as considering the opposite of your initial instinct, breaking decisions into smaller components, and being wary of data that seems too good to be true.
6. Tackle Decisions Sequentially: Instead of trying to decide all at once, break decisions into smaller parts and tackle them one at a time. This can reduce complexity and make the process more manageable.
7. Use Tools and Frameworks: Tools like decision trees, pros-and-cons lists, and weighted factor models can help structure your thinking and lead to better decision outcomes.

3

Zoom In, Zoom Out

In their book, “Decisive”, Chip Heath and Dan Heath write:

“A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped,” said Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his research on the way that people’s decisions depart from the strict rationality assumed by economists. In his fascinating book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes the ease with which we draw conclusions: “The normal state of your mind is that you have intuitive feelings and opinions about almost everything that comes your way. You like or dislike people long before you know much about them; you trust or distrust strangers without knowing why; you feel that an enterprise is bound to succeed without analyzing it.”

Kahneman says that we are quick to jump to conclusions because we give too much weight to the information that’s right in front of us, while failing to consider the information that’s just offstage. He called this tendency “what you see is all there is.”…We’ll refer to this tendency as a “spotlight” effect.

… That, in essence, is the core difficulty of decision making: What’s in the spotlight will rarely be everything we need to make a good decision, but we won’t always remember to shift the light. Sometimes, in fact, we’ll forget there’s a spotlight at all, dwelling so long in the tiny circle of light that we forget there’s a broader landscape beyond it.

They identify the four villains of decision-making:

• You encounter a choice. But narrow framing makes you miss options.
• You analyze your options. But the confirmation bias leads you to gather self-serving information.
• You make a choice. But short-term emotion will often tempt you to make the wrong one.
• Then you live with it. But you’ll often be overconfident about how the future will unfold.

The solutions, remembered by the mnemonic WRAP for the four verbs:

• Widen Your Options. How can you expand your set of choices?
• Reality-Test Your Assumptions. How can you get outside your head and collect information that you can trust?
• Attain Distance Before Deciding. How can you overcome short-term emotion and conflicted feelings to make the best choice?
• Prepare to Be Wrong. How can we plan for an uncertain future so that we give our decisions the best chance to succeed?

One of the ideas they discuss is “Zoom Out, Zoom In” as part of the process to attain distance before deciding. It’s a way of gaining a broader perspective on a problem or decision. Here’s a summary:

Zoom Out

• This means taking a step back to see the bigger picture. When we’re deeply involved in a situation, it’s easy to lose perspective and get caught up in the minutiae. By “zooming out,” you can detach from the immediate details and see things in a broader context.
• One tactic is to consider how other people in similar situations have handled similar decisions or challenges. This broader vantage point can offer valuable insights.
• Another approach is to ask, “What would I advise a close friend to do if they were in this situation?” This reframing can help sidestep personal biases and offer clarity.

Zoom In

• After zooming out, it’s crucial to “zoom in” to get a close-up view of the situation. This means immersing yourself in the specifics to ensure you’re not missing any essential details.
• One way to do this is by grounding decisions in concrete, tangible facts and realities. It might involve firsthand observation or seeking out detailed feedback.
• By focusing closely, you can make sure you’re not overlooking critical elements that could impact your decision.

This combination of “big-picture view and close-up” offers a balanced perspective. While zooming out provides a broader context and reduces emotional biases, zooming in ensures that decisions are grounded in the real, tangible aspects of the situation at hand. It’s a method to counteract both the tunnel vision that can come with being too close to a problem and the potential oversight of missing crucial details.

4

Consequential and Irreversible

Shane Parrish writes in his book, “Clear Thinking”: “In order to get the results we desire, we must do two things. We must first create the space to reason in our thoughts, feelings, and actions; and second, we must deliberately use that space to think clearly. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage. Decisions made through clear thinking will put you in increasingly better positions, and success will only compound from there.”

In 2020, I had done a course offered by Shane Parrish on “Decision by Design.” In the introduction to the course, Shane wrote: “Great decision making happens more like running multiple experiments at once. You create multiple hypotheses and test them simultaneously. You refine the experiments that are working based on the failed ones.  While each decision is its own unique situation, there are common skills that put you on the path toward success. You can think of it more like a sandwich, the top and bottom are important, but the order of the ingredients in the middle changes every time.  That’s why instead of teaching you a linear process, in this program we’re focusing on teaching you how to master the skills that apply throughout the process. So you can come into any decision, at any point, and add incredible value. Or you can see any problem at any point and identify where something may have gone wrong.”

The course covered 12 skills:

One of my biggest takeaways from the course for me was the importance of identifying consequential and irreversible decisions. This is a graphic from Shane’s book:

He writes: “When a decision is highly consequential and irreversible, its effects ripple throughout your life, and there’s no way to stop them. Some people call these “lead dominoes.” When decisions are like lead dominoes, the cost of a mistake is high. Exactly the opposite is true of a decision that’s inconsequential and easily reversed. The cost of a mistake is low: if you don’t like the outcome, you can just reverse it. The biggest mistake in cases like these is wasting time and mental energy. If you can take something back, or it doesn’t really matter, continuing to gather information becomes a drain on resources.”

He suggests three principles:

• The ASAP principle: If the cost to undo the decision is low, make it as soon as possible.
• The ALAP principle: If the cost to undo a decision is high, make it as late as possible.
• The Stop, FLOP, Know principle: Stop gathering more information and execute your decision when either you Stop gathering useful information, you First Lose an OPportunity (FLOP), or you come to Know something that makes it evident what option you should choose.

Here is another helpful graphic:

Elaborating on the last principle, Shane writes: “It’s finally time to act when you come to know something that makes it clear what you should do. Sometimes you gather a critical piece of information that makes your decision easy, perhaps a First Lost Opportunity. Other times, especially in more ambiguous situations like relationships, it’s just a gut feeling that doesn’t go away or change. Either way, there’s always a moment when you simply know at a core level exactly what to do.”

5

First-Principles Thinking

Ozan Varol, in his book “Think like a Rocket Scientist”, writes: “Process, by definition, is backward looking. It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures…When necessary, we must unlearn what we know and start over. This is why Andrew Wiles—the mathematician who solved the centuries-old Fermat’s last theorem—said, “It’s bad to have too good a memory if you want to be a mathematician. You need to forget the way you approached [the problem] the previous time.”…Knowledge is good. But knowledge should inform, not constrain. Knowledge should enlighten, not obscure. Only through the evolution of our existing knowledge will the future come into focus. The tyranny of our knowledge is only part of the problem. We’re constrained not only by what we’ve done in the past, but also by what others have done as well.”

What Ozan advocates is first-principles thinking. He writes:

The credit for first-principles thinking goes to Aristotle, who defined it as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” The French philosopher and scientist René Descartes described it as systematically doubting everything you can possibly doubt, until you’re left with unquestionable truths. Instead of regarding the status quo as an absolute, you take a machete to it. Instead of letting your original vision—or the visions of others—shape the path forward, you abandon all allegiances to them. You hack through existing assumptions as if you’re hacking through a jungle until you’re left with the fundamental components.

…For Musk, using first principles meant starting with the laws of physics and asking himself what’s required to put a rocket in space. He stripped a rocket down to its smallest subcomponents—its fundamental raw materials. “What is a rocket made of?” he asked himself. “Aerospace-grade aluminum alloys, plus some titanium, copper, and carbon fiber. And then I asked, what is the value of those materials on the commodity market? It turned out that the materials cost of a rocket was around 2 percent of the typical price—which is a crazy ratio.”… So Musk decided to cut his own metal and construct his next-generation rockets from scratch.

…[Invisible rules] are habits and behaviors that have unnecessarily rigidified into rules. They’re unlike written rules, which are visible. The written rules appear right there in the standard operating procedures and can be amended or deleted…[I]nvisible rules…are the silent killers that constrain our thinking without our being aware of it.

…[F]irst-principles thinking should be deployed where it matters the most. To mop the mist collected on your mental windshield in those areas and expose the invisible rules governing your life, spend a day questioning your assumptions. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, What if this weren’t true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this or replace it with something better?

…If you’re trying to transform an industry, it makes sense to look outside the industry for talent. That’s where you’ll find people who aren’t blinded by the invisible rules—the white tablecloths—that constrain their thinking. In its early days, SpaceX would often hire people from the automotive and cell-phone industries. These are fields where technologies change rapidly, requiring quick learning and adaptation—the hallmark of first-principles thinkers.

First-principles thinking is a problem-solving and decision-making approach that involves breaking down complex ideas and problems into their most fundamental underlying components or principles. Instead of relying on analogies, conventions, or past norms, first-principles thinking directs us to dive deep into the problem and understand its basic elements. Once identified, these fundamental principles can then be reassembled in a creative manner to devise innovative solutions. In essence, first-principles thinking prevents one from getting trapped in prevailing modes of thought and opens the door for genuine innovation by returning to the basics and building from there.

6

Second-level Thinking

Second-level thinking is a concept often attributed to Howard Marks. He calls it, “The Most Important Thing.” In the context of decision-making, it refers to the ability to think beyond the immediate and obvious implications of a decision and to consider the next-level consequences and possibilities that might not be readily apparent.

First-level thinking is superficial and simplistic. It might involve making decisions based on obvious facts or popular consensus. For instance, in an investment context, first-level thinking might be: “This company’s earnings are rising, so its stock is a good buy.” Second-level thinking delves deeper, asking questions like: “If everyone believes this company’s stock is a good buy because earnings are rising, perhaps it’s already overvalued. What are the underlying factors driving the earnings growth? Can they be sustained? What are the broader market dynamics at play? How might competitors respond?”

Second-level thinking is about understanding the complexities and nuances of a situation, challenging the initial assumptions, and looking for deeper insights that might give one an edge in decision-making. It’s about trying to see things that others don’t, predicting how situations might play out based on a multitude of factors, and making decisions that account for these deeper insights.

From Howard Marks’ book: “Remember, your goal in investing isn’t to earn average returns; you want to do better than average. Thus, your thinking has to be better than that of others—both more powerful and at a higher level. Since other investors may be smart, well-informed and highly computerized, you must find an edge they don’t have. You must think of something they haven’t thought of, see things they miss or bring insight they don’t possess. You have to react differently and behave differently. In short, being right may be a necessary condition for investment success, but it won’t be sufficient. You must be more right than others … which by definition means your thinking has to be different.”

In an investor note, he wrote: “Second-level thinkers double-think (and triple-think) every angle of every situation. A good example can be seen in the hypothetical newspaper contest John Maynard Keynes wrote about in 1936. Readers would be shown 100 photos and asked to choose the six prettiest girls, with prizes going to the readers who chose the girls readers voted for most often. Naive entrants would try to win by picking the prettiest girls. But note that the contest would reward the readers who chose not the prettiest girls, but the most popular. Thus the road to winning would lie not in figuring out which were the prettiest, but in predicting which girls the average entrant would consider prettiest. Clearly, to do so, the winner would have to be a second-level thinker. (The first-level thinker wouldn’t even recognize the difference.)”

By engaging in second-order thinking, we can make more informed decisions that are likely to have positive outcomes in the long run. This type of thinking can help us to avoid making decisions that may seem beneficial in the short term but could have negative consequences in the future. In addition to considering the long-term consequences of our decisions, second-order thinking also involves considering the potential unintended consequences. For example, a decision that seems to be beneficial for one group of people may have negative consequences for another group. By taking into account the potential unintended (and often unseen) effects of our decisions, we can make more better choices.

Second-order thinking is a valuable skill that can be applied to all areas of our lives. By developing our ability to think in this way, we can make better decisions that are more likely to lead to positive outcomes.

7

Rapid Response Teams

Pawel Moetyl, in his book, “Labyrinth”, looks at “the most prevalent weak spots in decision-making processes, not only in business but in life in general; during crisis and calmer times; in both individual and group decisions.” Pawel tries to “to answer the question of how to make decisions that are simultaneously rational, effective, and wise.” Among the common errors he identifies: relying on past successes, ignoring significant information, conducting superficial analysis, yielding to outside pressure, putting too much faith in luck, or misinterpreting important data.

Pawel writes:

There are three fundamental approaches to the decision-making process, each with its own particular advantages depending on circumstances.

The first approach is called routinized decision-making—essentially an intuitive approach in which we make a decision unconsciously, drawing on repeated experiences and ingrained habits and decision-making mechanisms without thinking too much about them. It sounds dangerous, but the routinized approach is the one that we naturally use for making recurring decisions in known conditions (i.e., when we know exactly what the effects of an action will be). In such conditions, routinized decision-making not only works, but thanks to the extra automaticity of this method of deciding, it also saves our brains the time and energy needed for more important, conscious choices.

In advocacy mode, when we encounter a problem that requires us to make a decision, we rely on our prior experience, knowledge, and sense of the situation to point us toward an appropriate solution. Once we find a starting point, we look for information to confirm that our idea is a good one, and if we find that information, we make our decision and then act on it. In this mode, decision-makers and teams operate quickly and effectively, looking for key pieces of information that are pertinent to the choice to be made. Advocacy therefore works in numerous situations where we are dealing with classically understood risk management—that is, when we know what the consequences of a decision will be and how likely it is that they will occur…The vast majority of business decisions are made in this mode, as it enables us to save one of our most precious resources: time.

In the context of a black swan event, …the third decision-making approach—inquiry—should be the only option. With inquiry mode, the decision-maker tries to analyze all the available data, to review the evidence from all angles, involving as many people and perspectives as possible. This leads to open, constructive discussion and an intellectual battle of ideas (detailed discussion of different options, actions, and possible scenarios), but without affective (personal) conflicts…Inquiry is certainly the most time-consuming approach, but it helps anyone using it to make the best possible decisions, based on a thorough analysis of the data and assessment of possible scenarios.

A rapid response team is one way to deal with black swans. Writes Pawel: “An organization that reacts faster than its competitors can not only not lose in a black swan situation, but may even gain. At the same time, truly unexpected situations typically create chaos in an organization, and too much time passes before the key people recover from the shock and set in action the appropriate mechanisms. For this reason, more and more organizations are setting up rapid response teams (sometimes even calling them the black swan response team), made up of people from a number of departments, with varying competencies and a range of experiences, whose task is to shorten the time is takes to react to a crisis. These teams meet often and rehearse reacting to different types of black swans. They analyze how to respond to events on a global, sectoral, organizational, team, and individual level, looking for weak points in the company that require immediate action. They also force others to discuss new solutions and promote the inquiry mode.”

Among some of the rules suggested:

• If you find yourself in a black swan situation, go into inquiry mode. Whatever your intuition or experience is telling you may be wrong.
• Set up your own Executive Committee. Surround yourself with people who don’t think like you. Value those who disagree with you, and who aren’t afraid to say it.
• When improving an organization, also pay attention to the best and most efficient processes. In a black swan situation, they can fail. Do you have a backup plan?
• Shoot down Concordes and hunt for monkey habits. Eliminating loss-making projects and bad practices frees up time for other things, increasing a company’s agility and flexibility.

Pawel adds: “Rapid response teams act so that any eventual black swan attacks with less force. They relentlessly test an organization and its components from the point of view of the unexpected. They optimize processes, structures, resources, and working practices. They free up time and energy. An effect of their work is a kind of decisional Kaizen, constantly seeking minimal gains that make a firm more agile and thus better prepared for a surprise scenario.”

8

Asking Right Questions

In any decision-making process, one of the biggest hurdles is the question and process. Paul Magnone, Christopher Frank and Oded Netzer provide some interesting insights in their book, “Decisions over Decimals.” They write:

What distinguishes a person who makes smart, confident data‐driven decisions? It is not exceptional analytic skills. Instead, successful decision‐makers balance data, experience, and intuition. They quickly sort through information, apply judgment, and are fierce interrogators of data to cultivate sharp insights. They know there is more to decision‐making than just the data. They resist being intoxicated by information. Instead, they apply first‐order principles to understand what the decision really is, why it must be taken, and to what end. They then seek the relevant data to help make that decision. In short, they make informed decisions with incomplete information.

This approach to fast decision‐making taps into a different set of skills, requiring a change in mindset by combining information and intuition. We call this approach Quantitative Intuition (QI). QI is the product of years of discovery about making effective and efficient decisions. For too long, the debate has been on the value, veracity, and variety of Big Data. This trend has shifted the problem from data exploration to data sifting. This book dives into this emerging method to reimagine making decisions with imperfect information. By sharing a set of rapid response tools to get to the core of any business challenge, QI enables the reader to quickly interrogate and integrate data to make quick, effective, and often bold decisions. QI emphasizes the need to break the allure that an abundance of data is a crystal ball to eliminate all uncertainty and lead to perfect decisions.

… Being able to combine qualitative thinking and intuition means possessing the ability to make confident decisions with incomplete information while counterbalancing our fear of failure. It means transforming different pieces of information into a decision by adopting a parallel view of all issues that matter, rather than just considering each piece of information separately and sequentially. Furthermore, it means enhancing our business acumen with the ability to spot patterns while also challenging how much value we are willing to attribute to those patterns and the data.

A starting point in the process is asking what the authors term as “divergent questions.” An explainer: “These are open‐ended questions that encourage many answers. These questions can best be understood as exploratory—as means for analyzing a situation, problem, or complexity in greater detail and then predicting different outcomes. Frequently the goal is to stimulate creative thought or to expand the conversation.” Some examples:

• Go/No Go: Why are we talking about this now?
• Clarification: What is the meaning?
• Assumptions: What are your assumptions?
• Foundational: How do we know this to be true?
• Action: What could be done? What should be done?
• Cause: What is the context? Why did this happen?
• Effect: What will be the impact or outcome?

In any problem solution or decision-making exercise, the key is to get to the crux. As the authors write: “[The] first step is to ask ourselves one straightforward but extremely powerful question: What do I wish I knew to make the best decision possible?” Their solution:

IWIK, as we’ll henceforth refer to the formula “I wish I knew,” has a particular goal: to identify the core fundamental issue that needs to be solved. IWIK accelerates your team’s thinking to establish awareness of what you know and what knowledge is necessary to make an informed decision. By focusing on what matters, IWIK speeds up the decision‐making process.

… Agile decision‐making is grounded in how you think, not how hard you work. Either through repetition or observation, we have all developed habits that undermine our ability to solve a problem. We jump into solution mode, accepting what is asked of us at face value, often confusing activity with impact. In our rush toward a solution, we neglect to frame the problem. We need to understand this crucial insight: The quality of your decision is directly proportional to the effort invested in framing the problem. The frame enables you to narrow what you need to solve.

IWIK is a tool—a thinking technique, if you will—that’s designed to help you frame the problem. It clarifies priorities, uncovers the essential information needed, quickly identifies knowledge gaps, defines assumptions, and reveals biases that might threaten to influence, slow, or shape a decision.

There are four parts to the IWIK process, as the authors outline:

• Ask: Getting the right people to think about the right questions. “The goal of the initial communication is to kick‐start the thinking process, to prime the brain pump, so to speak. You’re not overwhelming them with sticky notes, whiteboards, or breakout sessions; you’re just asking them to start considering and contemplating. As a result, by the time you meet in person or virtually for your session, each participant should be in the right mindset to think creatively.”
• Brainstorm: Optimizing the discovery of information. “You should plan to conduct successive rounds of sessions with various stakeholders. By its very nature, the goal of the exercise is to expose knowledge gaps, and it is essential, as a leader, to understand and appreciate that some people are more comfortable than others highlighting what they don’t know and acknowledging the limits of their competencies. Small group discussions have the advantage of unlocking conversations that may not happen in other group settings because of fear or inhibition.”
• Capture: Leading IWIK discussions. “Your role is that of a scribe. When you ask your colleagues or clients “What do you wish you knew?”, you’re extending an invitation to them to think expansively without concern for existing data, time, resources, headwinds, budgets, or guard rails… An interesting dynamic occurs after you pose the IWIK question: The mode slowly shifts from a quiet, awkward silence to one of high energy. Once the questions start flowing, your colleagues, liberated from the pressure to know and have answers, may actually feel unable to stop…The output of an IWIK session will be a series of statements or questions highlighting what people want to know.”
• Deliberate: Ordering, aggregating, and synthesizing IWIKs. “The goal of organizing the IWIKs is to identify patterns in the requests and look for duplicates and outliers. You’re on the path to understanding the root of the issue, and this, in turn, will inform the essential data you need, guide the specific analysis required, and focus your efforts on what matters most to your stakeholders, leading to faster, more confident decisions.

The aim is to create the IWIK Knowledge Matrix:

In conclusion, the authors write: “IWIK and the Knowledge Matrix are designed to prevent companies from the immense temptation to drown themselves in data. They won’t help you answer every single question that might possibly be related to solving a greater problem, but they will help you determine what the most important and salient questions are for framing the problem at hand.”

9

Rethinking

There are times when we will realise that a decision we have made has not gone as expected. We are having second thoughts. We need to rethink. In his book “Think Again”, Adam Grant asks us to “let go of knowledge and opinions that are no longer serving you well, and to anchor your sense of self in flexibility rather than consistency. If you can master the art of rethinking, I believe you’ll be better positioned for success at work and happiness in life. Thinking again can help you generate new solutions to old problems and revisit old solutions to new problems. It’s a path to learning more from the people around you and living with fewer regrets. A hallmark of wisdom is knowing when it’s time to abandon some of your most treasured tools—and some of the most cherished parts of your identity.”

He writes: “[Rethinking] starts with intellectual humility—knowing what we don’t know. We should all be able to make a long list of areas where we’re ignorant…Recognizing our shortcomings opens the door to doubt. As we question our current understanding, we become curious about what information we’re missing. That search leads us to new discoveries, which in turn maintain our humility by reinforcing how much we still have to learn. If knowledge is power, knowing what we don’t know is wisdom.”

I asked Bard to list out a few key ideas from Adam’s book:

• The first-instinct fallacy: We tend to believe that our first thought or idea is the best one. However, Grant argues that our first instincts are often wrong. We are more likely to be correct if we take the time to consider alternative perspectives and to gather more information.
• The desirability bias: We tend to see what we want to see. This can lead us to overlook evidence that contradicts our beliefs. In order to make better decisions, we need to be aware of our own biases and to actively seek out information that challenges our views.
• The confirmation bias: We tend to seek out information that confirms our existing beliefs. This can lead us to become entrenched in our own views and to be resistant to change. In order to be more open-minded, we need to be willing to consider evidence that contradicts our beliefs.
• The sunk cost fallacy: We tend to continue investing in a course of action even when it is no longer the best option. This is because we feel a sense of ownership over our past decisions. In order to make better decisions, we need to be willing to admit when we have made a mistake and to change course.
• The argumentation mindset: We tend to approach conversations with the goal of winning. This can lead us to become defensive and to close our minds to alternative perspectives. In order to have more productive conversations, we need to approach them with the goal of learning.

At the end of the book, Adam lists out takeaways for individual rethinking. A few among them:

• Think like a scientist. When you start forming an opinion, resist the temptation to preach, prosecute, or politick. Treat your emerging view as a hunch or a hypothesis and test it with data. Like the entrepreneurs who learned to approach their business strategies as experiments, you’ll maintain the agility to pivot.
• Beware of getting stranded at the summit of Mount Stupid. Don’t confuse confidence with competence. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a good reminder that the better you think you are, the greater the risk that you’re overestimating yourself—and the greater the odds that you’ll stop improving. To prevent overconfidence in your knowledge, reflect on how well you can explain a given subject.
• Harness the benefits of doubt. When you find yourself doubting your ability, reframe the situation as an opportunity for growth. You can have confidence in your capacity to learn while questioning your current solution to a problem. Knowing what you don’t know is often the first step toward developing expertise.
• Don’t shy away from constructive conflict. Disagreements don’t have to be disagreeable. Although relationship conflict is usually counterproductive, task conflict can help you think again. Try framing disagreement as a debate: people are more likely to approach it intellectually and less likely to take it personally.
• Practice the art of persuasive listening. When we’re trying to open other people’s minds, we can frequently accomplish more by listening than by talking. How can you show an interest in helping people crystallize their own views and uncover their own reasons for change? A good way to start is to increase your question-to-statement ratio.

10

More Frameworks

In this essay, I discussed the following decision-making frameworks:

• Decisions and Outcomes, by Annie Duke
• Zoom in, Zoom out (part of WRAP), by Chip and Dan Heath
• Consequential and Irreversible, by Shane Parrish
• First Principles Thinking, by Ozan Varol
• Second-level Thinking, by Howard Marks
• Rapid Response Teams, by Pawel Moetyl
• I Wish I Knew, from “Decisions over Decimals”
• Rethinking, by Adam Grant

Here are some more:

The Eisenhower Matrix: Developed from a quote by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the matrix is a simple four-quadrant box that helps categorise tasks by urgency and importance. It helps differentiate between what’s urgent and what’s important, ensuring that time and resources are spent on tasks that align with larger goals.

A3 Thinking: Originated from Toyota’s lean management philosophy, A3 thinking focuses on problem-solving, proposing changes, and continuous improvement. The ‘A3’ references the international paper size used to document the process. By containing everything on a single page, it forces clarity, brevity, and disciplined thinking.

Six Thinking Hats: Proposed by Edward de Bono, the Six Thinking Hats method requires participants to adopt various ‘modes of thinking’ (symbolized by different coloured hats). Each hat represents a unique perspective, allowing groups to examine issues from multiple angles and reduce bias.

Cost-Benefit Analysis: A systematic process to weigh the total expected costs against the total expected benefits of one or more actions in order to choose the best or most profitable option. The fundamental principle behind the cost-benefit analysis is to ensure decisions are made based on objective data.

Pareto Analysis (80/20 rule): Focuses on identifying the 20% of causes that are responsible for 80% of the effects. Helps in prioritising tasks or identifying areas of maximum impact.

Intuitive Decision-Making: Rather than always relying on structured frameworks, intuitive decision-making emphasizes using one’s intuition or ‘gut feeling’. This mode of decision-making acknowledges that humans have an innate ability to recognize patterns and make decisions based on this subconscious understanding.

Decision Matrix: A tool used to evaluate and prioritise a list of options. The matrix helps in ranking options based on certain criteria, making it easier to choose the most suitable option.

Cynefin Framework: Developed by Dave Snowden, it is a tool that helps leaders categorise problems into five domains: Obvious, Complicated, Complex, Chaotic, and Confused. Each domain represents a different level of complexity and suggests an appropriate decision-making approach, from clear cause-and-effect in the Obvious domain to the unpredictable nature of the Chaotic domain.

OODA Loop: Formulated by U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, it stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The cycle begins with observation of the environment, followed by orientation based on gathered data and previous experiences. A decision is then made about the course of action, which is subsequently executed. The loop emphasizes continuous feedback and adaptability, allowing entities to respond quickly to evolving circumstances and outpace competitors.

Pre-mortem: It is a proactive strategy used to anticipate potential problems before they occur. Unlike a post-mortem, which analyses a project’s failures after completion, a pre-mortem imagines a future scenario where a project has failed and works backward to identify potential pitfalls and weaknesses. Conducted at the onset of a project, team members are encouraged to think negatively and envision worst-case outcomes. By foreseeing challenges, teams can devise preventative measures, enhancing the project’s chances of success.

Red Teaming: It is a decision-making support process wherein a group actively challenges an organisation’s plans, policies, systems, and assumptions, mimicking potential adversaries to expose vulnerabilities. Originating from military exercises, Red Teaming’s primary goal in business and security contexts is to improve decision-making by providing a candid, critical perspective. It helps organisations anticipate potential threats and weaknesses by simulating an external attacker’s mindset, ultimately refining and fortifying decisions and defences.

Incorporating these frameworks in decision-making processes can enhance the clarity, accuracy, and effectiveness of the decisions made. Each tool or method offers a unique perspective and is best suited to specific types of decisions or situations.

11

Mental Models – 1

In the final section of this series, I want to discuss about mental models and their importance in decision-making.

My first memory of the phrase “mental models” was in a book club meeting a couple decades ago. It was in the context of a book by Robert Hagstrom, “Investing: The Last Liberal Art.” The book is about how building a multidisciplinary mindset can help you become a better investor. The author writes about the inspiration for the book from Charlie Munger, from a talk Charlie gave to students:

Rather than discussing the stock market, he intended to talk about “stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom.” For the next hour and a half, he challenged the students to broaden their vision of the market, of finance, and of economics in general and to see them not as separate disciplines but as part of a larger body of knowledge, one that also incorporates physics, biology, social studies, psychology, philosophy, literature, and mathematics.

In this broader view, he suggested, each discipline entwines with, and in the process strengthens, every other. From each discipline the thoughtful person draws significant mental models, the key ideas that combine to produce cohesive understanding. Those who cultivate this broad view are well on their way to achieving worldly wisdom, that solid mental foundation without which success in the market—or anywhere else—is merely a short-lived fluke.

To drive his point home, Charlie used a memorable metaphor to describe this interlocking structure of ideas: a latticework of models. “You’ve got to have models in your head,” he explained, “and you’ve got to array your experiences—both vicarious and direct—on this latticework of models.” So immediate is this visual image that “latticework” has become something of a shorthand term in the investment world, a quick and easily recognized reference to Charlie’s approach.

He goes on:

John H. Holland, a professor in two fields at the University of Michigan—psychology, and engineering and computer science—is a frequent visitor to the Santa Fe Institute, where he has lectured extensively on innovative thinking. According to Holland, innovative thinking requires us to master two important steps. First, we must understand the basic disciplines from which we are going to draw knowledge; second, we need to be aware of the use and benefit of metaphors.

…The ability to link mental models together and then benefit from the connections assumes that you have a basic understanding of each model in the latticework. There is no benefit to stringing mental models together if you have no idea how each model works and what phenomena it describes. Remember, though, it is not necessary to become an expert in each model but merely to understand the fundamentals.

… Holland argues [that] metaphors are much more than merely a colorful form of speech, even more than representations of thoughts. They can also help us translate ideas into models. And that, he says, represents the basis of innovative thinking. In the same way that a metaphor helps communicate one concept by comparing it to another concept that is widely understood, using a simple model to describe one idea can help us grasp the complexities of a similar idea. In both cases we are using one concept (the source) to better understand another (the target). Used this way, metaphors not only express existing ideas, they stimulate new ones.

A diverse set of mental models across various disciplines improves decision-making and problem-solving. By integrating knowledge from diverse fields, one can form a “latticework” of interconnected ideas to approach challenges holistically. This multidisciplinary approach ensures a broader and deeper understanding of complex situations, preventing over-reliance on a single perspective.

12

Mental Models – 2

In the vast spectrum of human cognition, decision-making stands as one of the most intricate processes. Every day, we are faced with an array of choices, ranging from mundane selections like what to eat for breakfast to more profound dilemmas, such as career shifts or ethical quandaries. Underpinning these decisions is an arsenal of cognitive tools known as mental models.

Defined as the representations people build to make sense of the world, mental models consist of our underlying assumptions, concepts, principles, and ideas about how things work. Just as a scientist uses models to explain and predict phenomena, our minds employ mental models to interpret and navigate the world around us. From Wikipedia: “The term was coined by Kenneth Craik in 1943 who suggested that the mind constructs “small-scale models” of reality that it uses to anticipate events. Mental models can help shape behaviour and set an approach to solving problems (similar to a personal algorithm) and doing tasks.”

James Clear adds: “A mental model is an explanation of how something works. The phrase “mental model” is an overarching term for any sort of concept, framework, or worldview that you carry around in your mind. Mental models help you understand life. For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps you understand how the economy works. Game theory is a mental model that helps you understand how relationships and trust work. Entropy is a mental model that helps you understand how disorder and decay work. Mental models also guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions, and solve problems. Learning a new mental model gives you a new way to see the world.”

Shane Parrish has written three books on mental models. “The quality of your thinking depends on the models that are in your head…When you learn to see the world as it is, and not as you want it to be, everything changes. The solution to any problem becomes more apparent when you can view it through more than one lens. You’ll be able to spot opportunities you couldn’t see before, avoid costly mistakes that may be holding you back, and begin to make meaningful progress in your life. That’s the power of mental models.”

He adds: “In order to see a problem for what it is, we must first break it down into its substantive parts so the interconnections can reveal themselves. This bottom-up perspective allows us to expose what we believe to be the causal relationships and how they will govern the situation both now and in the future. Being able to accurately describe the full scope of a situation is the first step to understanding it. Using the lenses of our mental models helps us illuminate these interconnections. The more lenses used on a given problem, the more of reality reveals itself. The more of reality we see, the more we understand. The more we understand, the more we know what to do… Most problems are multidimensional, and thus having more lenses often offers significant help with the problems we are facing… The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem. And because we don’t have the right models to understand the situation, we overuse the models we do have and use them even when they don’t belong.”

Consider a business leader deciding whether to launch a new product. If she were to rely solely on financial models, her decision might be purely based on projected profitability. However, by integrating mental models from psychology, she could anticipate consumer behaviour. Incorporating models from sociology might allow her to predict societal trends or shifts that could influence the product’s reception. By weaving these models together, her decision becomes multifaceted, incorporating a range of factors that might have been overlooked in a unidimensional approach.

Moreover, mental models play a pivotal role in countering cognitive biases, the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, which can cloud decision-making. For instance, the ‘confirmation bias’ pushes individuals to seek out information that aligns with their existing beliefs. A robust latticework of mental models can act as a safeguard against such biases, offering multiple perspectives and challenging pre-existing notions. When faced with a decision, consulting various mental models can serve as a mental checklist, ensuring that biases don’t unduly influence the outcome.

Mental models are thus invaluable assets in the realm of decision-making. They offer structured frameworks for understanding complexities, drawing connections, and predicting outcomes. By cultivating a diverse and interconnected latticework of these models, one can navigate decisions with increased clarity, depth, and foresight.

13

Checklist

If there is one book I had to recommend, it would be “Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger” by Peter Bevelin. It dives deep into the mental models used by brilliant minds. Drawing from multiple disciplines, it explores the psychology of misjudgements and biases, emphasising the importance of understanding human behaviour and its influences on decision-making. The book is a treasure trove of insights on how to think rationally, avoid common cognitive pitfalls, and make better decisions. Regarded as a masterpiece in the decision-making genre, “Seeking Wisdom” equips readers with tools to navigate complex challenges, making it an indispensable read for anyone looking to enhance their judgment.

There is a very good collection of checklists towards the end of the book. Here is a sample of questions for determining what the issue is:

• What’s the question? What is this really about?
• What’s the essence or nub of the issue? What is then the key question?
• Relevant? Solvable? Important? Knowable? Utility- applicability?
• Do I understand what the subject is all about? In order to have an opinion on a subject I need some relevant data and basic knowledge about the subject, otherwise just say: “I don’t know”.
• Is my judgment here better than others?
• What must I predict here and is it predictable?
• Is a decision needed? What happens if I don’t deal with this? Is this something I can do anything about? Should “I” do this?
• Over what period of time am I considering this issue? Where am I at present? From whose point of view?
• Simplify by deciding big “no-brainer questions” first and begin from where I am.

**

I asked Claude to prepare a 10-point checklist for managers and leaders based on this series.

1. Identify the decision’s level of consequence and reversibility. Some choices are inconsequential or easily reversed while others have lasting impacts. Assess where this decision lies on the spectrum.
2. Widen options through divergent thinking. Avoid narrow framing. Brainstorm as many alternative paths forward as possible.
3. Test assumptions against reality. Ask probing questions to check assumptions. Seek objective data and feedback.
4. Attain distance before deciding. “Zoom out” for perspective. “Zoom in” for granular analysis.
5. Weigh costs, benefits, and likelihoods. Use expected value calculations. List pros/cons and assess probabilities.
6. Leverage mental models. Consult different lenses like psychology, systems thinking and game theory.
7. Prepare to be wrong. Simulate worst-case scenarios. Have contingency plans to course correct.
8. Debate respectfully. Seek constructive criticism. Arguments can refine decisions.
9. Decide sequentially. Break down complex choices into smaller steps. Pause and validate.
10. Continuously re-evaluate. Be ready to think again if new data emerges. Stay flexible.

**

In the intricate tapestry of life, decisions serve as the threads that shape our path, influencing not just our immediate actions but also the broader contours of our journey. The art of decision-making, while seemingly innate, is a skill that benefits greatly from conscious cultivation, practice, and refinement. As we traverse the labyrinth of choices, it’s empowering to remember that we can hone this skill, drawing from diverse mental models and frameworks. Equipped with this knowledge and understanding, we can navigate the myriad choices with greater clarity, making decisions that resonate with our values and aspirations. In this continuing journey, every choice we make is a step towards mastering the art of decision-making, an endeavour that holds the promise of a more intentional and enriched life.

Published December 25, 2023

1

Samachar and Choices

During my IndiaWorld days in 1997, I had to decide on how we could create the news content that our audience (primarily non-resident Indians) wanted. One path taken by other portals was to hire journalists. I decided that I wasn’t going to go down that path – a newsroom would be an expensive recurring cost, and I did not have that kind of money. So, I chose to use technology to solve the problem: software would crawl the home pages of news sites every 30 minutes, extract the headlines by reverse engineering the HTML, and then put the top five headlines from multiple news sources on a single page. This site I called “Samachar”.

As it turned out, Samachar.com became the most popular Indian news portal. Many visitors made it their home page, visiting multiple times daily. It became the gateway to popularising the other sites in the IndiaWorld portfolio. It created a differentiator that no other Indian portal could match. Advertisers (mainly telecom companies selling calling cards and banks) flocked to Samachar.com. The ‘Samachar Strategy’ was a big reason behind IndiaWorld’s success. Rather than becoming a money sink, it became a money spinner.

The word ‘strategy’ is perhaps the most used and abused word in business conversations. Everything becomes a ‘strategy’, importing to an idea or action gravitas and making everyone in the room pay attention. Over time, the meaning has been diluted and expanded. So, what really is strategy? At its core, strategy is about making choices. It’s about deciding where to play and how to win. In the case of Samachar, I made the decision to use automation as an alternative to journalists.

From a previous post in my Proficorn series: “Ramesh Mangaleswaran explained strategy very well. He described it as a set of choices that a business needs to make, and then decide on the resources (human, capital). Strategy needs a combination of big bets and not so big bets (options). The big bets need to be counterbalanced with a safety net if things go wrong. Strategy also needs to be thought at two levels – like looking through a telescopic (long-term, directional) and microscope (near-term, specific actions).”

In that post, I also had a couple more quotes on strategy, both from Michael Porter.

Business World: “[Michael] Porter also warned about the overuse of the word strategy. He simplified the definition in business as a set of choices that are long term and articulate the competitive advantage that companies will seek to create, in order to win. The strategy also should not be confused for goal and aspirations. It is more than just particular actions – it is holistic. At the same time, it is not a mission statement or values. It is not vague, it is specific.”

Farnam Street: “Really, strategy is about making specific choices to win in the marketplace. According to Mike Porter, author of “Competitive Strategy”, perhaps the most widely respected book on strategy ever written, a firm creates a sustainable competitive advantage over its rivals by “deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver unique value.” Strategy therefore requires making explicit choices— to do some things and not others— and building a business around those choices. In short, strategy is choice. More specifically, strategy is an integrated set of choices that uniquely positions the firm in its industry so as to create sustainable advantage and superior value relative to the competition.”

In this series, I will discuss strategy in more depth, and connect it to my profipoly idea – how can strategy help businesses build a “profits monopoly”?

2

Wikipedia and Michael Porter

Let’s begin our strategy journey by reviewing some of the writings.

Wikipedia offers history and an overview:

Strategy (from Greek στρατηγία stratēgia, “art of troop leader; office of general, command, generalship”) is a general plan to achieve one or more long-term or overall goals under conditions of uncertainty. In the sense of the “art of the general”, which included several subsets of skills including military tactics, siegecraft, logistics etc., the term came into use in the 6th century C.E. in Eastern Roman terminology, and was translated into Western vernacular languages only in the 18th century. From then until the 20th century, the word “strategy” came to denote “a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills” in a military conflict, in which both adversaries interact.

Strategy is important because the resources available to achieve goals are usually limited. Strategy generally involves setting goals and priorities, determining actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing resources to execute the actions. A strategy describes how the ends (goals) will be achieved by the means (resources). Strategy can be intended or can emerge as a pattern of activity as the organization adapts to its environment or competes. It involves activities such as strategic planning and strategic thinking.

Henry Mintzberg from McGill University defined strategy as a pattern in a stream of decisions to contrast with a view of strategy as planning, while Henrik von Scheel defines the essence of strategy as the activities to deliver a unique mix of value – choosing to perform activities differently or to perform different activities than rivals. Max McKeown argues that “strategy is about shaping the future” and is the human attempt to get to “desirable ends with available means”. Vladimir Kvint defines strategy as “a system of finding, formulating, and developing a doctrine that will ensure long-term success if followed faithfully.”

Michael Porter wrote about strategy in a 1996 article in Harvard Business Review:

Operational effectiveness and strategy are both essential to superior performance, which, after all, is the primary goal of any enterprise. But they work in very different ways.

A company can outperform rivals only if it can establish a difference that it can preserve. It must deliver greater value to customers or create comparable value at a lower cost, or do both. The arithmetic of superior profitability then follows: delivering greater value allows a company to charge higher average unit prices; greater efficiency results in lower average unit costs.

…Strategy is the creation of a unique and valuable position, involving a different set of activities. If there were only one ideal position, there would be no need for strategy. Companies would face a simple imperative—win the race to discover and preempt it. The essence of strategic positioning is to choose activities that are different from rivals’. If the same set of activities were best to produce all varieties, meet all needs, and access all customers, companies could easily shift among them and operational effectiveness would determine performance.

…Strategy is making trade-offs in competing. The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. Without trade-offs, there would be no need for choice and thus no need for strategy.

…Strategy is creating fit among a company’s activities. The success of a strategy depends on doing many things well—not just a few—and integrating among them. If there is no fit among activities, there is no distinctive strategy and little sustainability. Management reverts to the simpler task of overseeing independent functions, and operational effectiveness determines an organization’s relative performance.

3

Richard Rumelt

The best definition of strategy comes from Richard Rumelt in his book, “Good Strategy Bad Strategy”. He writes:

Good strategy is coherent action backed up by an argument, an effective mixture of thought and action with a basic underlying structure I call the kernel. A good strategy may consist of more than the kernel, but if the kernel is absent or misshapen, then there is a serious problem. Once you apprehend this kernel, it is much easier to create, describe, and evaluate a strategy. The kernel is not based on any one concept of advantage. It does not require one to sort through legalistic gibberish about the differences between visions, missions, goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics. It does not split strategies into corporate, business, and product levels. It is very straightforward.

The kernel of a strategy contains three elements:

• A diagnosis that defines or explains the nature of the challenge. A good diagnosis simplifies the often overwhelming complexity of reality by identifying certain aspects of the situation as critical.

• A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. This is an overall approach chosen to cope with or overcome the obstacles identified in the diagnosis.

• A set of coherent actions that are designed to carry out the guiding policy. These are steps that are coordinated with one another to work together in accomplishing the guiding policy.

Rumelt adds: “In business, the challenge is usually dealing with change and competition. The first step toward effective strategy is diagnosing the specific structure of the challenge rather than simply naming performance goals. The second step is choosing an overall guiding policy for dealing with the situation that builds on or creates some type of leverage or advantage. The third step is the design of a configuration of actions and resource allocations that implement the chosen guiding policy.”

Rumelt’s second book is “The Crux.” He writes: “[T]he term crux … denote[s] the outcome of a three-part strategic skill. The first part is judgment about which issues are truly important and which are secondary. The second part is judgment about the difficulties of dealing with these issues. And the third part is the ability to focus, to avoid spreading resources too thinly, not trying to do everything at once. The combination of these three parts lead to a focus on the crux—the most important part of a set of challenges that is addressable, having a good chance of being solved by coherent action.”

He adds: “The art of strategy is not finding your one true goal and passionately pursuing it with all your heart and soul in everything you do—that is a type of mental illness called monomania. The art of strategy is not setting higher and higher performance goals for people and using charisma, carrots, and sticks to push them toward attaining those goals—that presumes that someone somewhere knows how to find a way through the thicket of problems the organization actually faces.”

I have discussed more on Rumelt’s writings in Parts 4-8 of my essay, Hotline: The Crux of the Brand-Customer Relationship.

4

Quotes

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

“A vision without a strategy remains an illusion.” Lee Bolman

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.” -Japanese proverb

“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” – Sun Tzu

“Objectives can be compared to a compass bearing by which a ship navigates. A compass bearing is firm, but in actual navigation, a ship may veer off its course for many miles. Without a compass bearing, a ship would neither find its port nor be able to estimate the time required to get there.”  – Peter Drucker

“What business strategy is all about-what distinguishes it from all other kinds of business planning-is, in a word, competitive advantage. Without competitors there would be no need for strategy, for the sole purpose of strategic planning is to enable the company to gain, as efficiently as possible, a sustainable edge over its competitors.” – Kenichi Ohmae

“There is only one winning strategy. It is to define the target market carefully and direct a superior offering to that target market.”— Philip Kotler

“Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.” – Jim Collins

“To be strategic is to concentrate on what is important, on those few objectives that can give us a comparative advantage, on what is important to us rather than others, and to plan and execute the resulting plan with determination and steadfastness.” – Richard Koch

“Designing a winning strategy is the art of asking questions, experimenting and then constantly renewing the thinking process by questioning the answers.  No matter how good today’s strategy is, you must always keep reinventing it.” – Constantinos Markides

“The reason why it is so difficult for existing firms to capitalize on disruptive innovations is that their processes and their business model that make them good at the existing business actually make them bad at competing for the disruption.” — Clayton Christensen

“Without a strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” — Morris Chang

“If a strategy is to be achieved, it must be publicly tracked, measured, and monitored. If you are trying to lose weight, you must get on the scales regularly.” -David Maister

“What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you – what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind – you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn’t a strategy.” – Jeff Bezos

“Famous pivot stories are often failures but you don’t need to fail before you pivot. All a pivot is is a change is strategy without a change in vision. Whenever entrepreneurs see a new way to achieve their vision – a way to be more successful – they have to remain nimble enough to take it.” – a  Eric Ries

“Companies that grow for the sake of growth or that expand into areas outside their core business strategy often stumble. On the other hand, companies that build scale for the benefit of their customers and shareholders more often succeed over time.” – Jamie Dimon

“Unless structure follows strategy, inefficiency results.” – Alfed Chandler

“In marketing I’ve seen only one strategy that can’t miss – and that is to market to your best customers first, your best prospects second and the rest of the world last.” – John Romero

5

7 Powers – 1

A good book on business strategy is “7 Powers” by Hamilton Helmer. He writes: “The arc of any celebrated business is underpinned by decisive strategy choices that are few and typically made amidst the profound uncertainty of rapid change. Get these crux choices wrong and you face a future of persistent pain, or even outright failure.”

He provides three definitions:

• Strategy: the study of the fundamental determinants of potential business value
• Power: the set of conditions creating the potential for persistent differential returns
• Mantra (or company strategy): a route to continuing Power in significant markets

He adds: Potential Value = [Market Scale] * [Power]

I asked ChatGPT to summarise the seven powers discussed in the book.

1. Scale Economies: This refers to the advantage large-scale operations have. When a company grows, it can spread its fixed costs over a larger number of units, leading to a lower cost per unit. Companies that achieve scale economies can under-price competitors and achieve higher profit margins.
2. Network Economies: This is about the value that increases with the number of users or participants. Think of platforms like Facebook or Twitter; the more users they have, the more valuable (and entrenched) they become. A company that taps into network economies can fend off competition because the value proposition strengthens as more users join.
3. Counter-Positioning: This involves a newcomer adopting a new, unique business model which incumbents cannot replicate without damaging their existing business. It’s a way for newer entrants to challenge established companies by making the old ways of doing business obsolete.
4. Switching Costs: This is when it’s hard or costly for customers to switch from one product to another. Software platforms or services that require significant time or resources to change (e.g., enterprise software, subscription services) benefit from this power.
5. Branding: A strong brand serves as a powerful competitive advantage. When customers trust and prefer one brand over others, that company can command premium pricing and ensure customer loyalty.
6. Cornered Resource: This is about having exclusive access to a valuable asset or resource that others can’t easily duplicate. It could be a talented team, a unique technology, or even a prime location.
7. Process Power: Over time, some companies develop unique ways of doing things that are hard for others to replicate. These efficient and effective processes can become a source of competitive advantage.

Here are 2 graphics from the book.

In the book, Helmer answers the question, “How to get there?”

• Scale Economies. With this first Power type, you must simultaneously pursue a business model that promises Scale Economies (industry economics), while at the same time offering up a product differentially attractive enough to pull in customers and gain relative share (competitive position).
• Network Economies. Here the needs are similar to Scale Economies, except that installed base, rather than sales share, is the goal.
• Cornered Resource. You must secure the rights to a valuable resource on attractive terms. This often comes from having developed that resource in the first place and then gaining ownership of it, the most common avenue being a patent award for research developments.
• Over an extensive period of time, you make consistent creative choices which foster in the customer’s mind an affinity that goes beyond the product’s objective attributes.
• Counter-Positioning. You pioneer a new, superior business model that promises collateral damage for incumbents if mimicked.
• Switching Costs. With Switching Costs, you must first attain a customer base, meaning the same new-product requirements demanded of Scale and Network Economies factor in here as well.
• Process Power. You evolve a new complex process which renders itself inimitable within a reasonable period and yet offers significant advantages over a longer period of time.

He adds: “The first cause of every Power type is invention, be it the invention of a product, process, business model or brand, The adage ‘Me too’ won’t do” guides the creation of Power… You must create something new that produces substantial economic gain in the value chain.”

This is captured below:

6

7 Powers – 2

Helmer in an interview with Colossus: “If you start a business, you put something in, your time and investments and all this stuff, and you do it maybe for love, but you also get something back, and that something back has to hopefully be more than what you put in in the first place. You might question whether it was really worthwhile. And so the notion of Power is that when you figure out something about a business, you figure out something that’s better than what is currently offered. And so that might be a better business model, or it might be an interesting grant, or it might be a new product or something like that. But then the spectre of competitive arbitrage comes in. If you do something better, the question then is: okay, but for that to be durable – because what you want is durable success in business – for that to be durable, there has to be something that prevents others from taking all of that away from you. And so the something better is a benefit and that something that keeps others from getting it is a barrier. And so you need both those conditions… It’s very important to realize that often when you start a business, you just don’t know whether you’re going to have Power or not. You just don’t know. And yet, it may be a very reasonable bet to proceed knowing that an opportunity may arise… The technology frontier is constantly moving forward. And that is the most important driver of opportunity influx… The starting place for strategy and the starting place for Power is creativity…It involves invention, not discovery.”

Reed Hastings writes in the book’s introduction: “Hamilton is so much more than an able synthesizer and communicator, as 7 Powers demonstrates. Any strategy framework, to be broadly useful to a business person, must address all the key strategy issues facing an organization. Hamilton has long been aware of the deficiencies in existing frameworks. His solution? To forge ahead with entirely novel conceptual advances, and then to bind these together into a unified whole…7 Powers tightly integrates the numerous insights he has developed in his several decades of consulting, active equity investing and teaching. It is a uniquely clear and comprehensive distillation of strategy. It will change how you think about business and pull into focus your critical strategy challenges, not to mention their solutions.”

Abi Tyas Tunggal writes: “What are the secrets to making a company enduringly valuable? If we are to believe Hamilton Helmer, the answer is strategy and execution. Every celebrated business is underpinned by decisive strategy choices and operational excellence, in the midst of uncertainty, which leads to some form of competitive advantage… The crux of 7 Powers is that a business can try to improve its strengths, mitigate its weaknesses, eliminate competitor risk, better serve its customers, maximize shareholder value, or take advantage of its pricing power.”

Chris Stoneman writes: “The business strategy (small s) is a route to continuing power in significant markets. Being there (statics) is one thing, but getting there (dynamics) is quite another. Not only should businesses know which of the 7 Powers will be their static strategy, but also how and when to build and execute on them. Timing is key. Me too won’t do. Invent new things and create compelling value. Only then will businesses have the opportunity to gain continued power in a significant market.”

Dan Shuart writes: “I find Helmer’s framework a useful tool when asking the question “why”. Why does a company consistently earn superior returns on capital? Why might a company enjoy superior growth rates for many years? How long might these superior returns last? Identifying potential sources of Power among businesses and stocks you are studying is a useful exercise and helps build comfort with different competitive positions (or lack thereof). No one always gets it right, but just attempting to understand if a business has an enduring competitive moat is half the battle. If an investor’s aim is to buy good businesses it’s tough to think of a better checklist than Helmer’s 7 Powers as a starting point. Studying businesses that meet some of the above criteria amounts to fishing in a stocked pond. This isn’t the way to invest successfully but it certainly is a way.”

Sachin Rekhi writes: “Hamilton narrowly defines a successful strategy as creating a route to persistent differential returns for your business. Accomplishing this requires each strategy to have two critical components: a benefit and a barrier. The benefit materially augments your business’s cash flows by enabling you to increase prices, reduce costs, and/or reduce investment needs. The most important part of a strategy, though, is establishing a barrier, which prevents existing and potential competitors from arbitraging away the benefit. This is necessary to ensure your benefit persists, otherwise competitors could quickly catch up and remove your advantage. This is often described as developing an economic moat for your business. Hamilton then goes on to define 7 strategies, which he refers to as the 7 powers, that accomplish both of these goals. Hamilton asserts that these 7 strategies encompass every possible strategy for creating a successful moat and suggests every business must leverage one or more of these strategies to build a significant and enduring business.”

Helmer’s mantra – a route to continuing Power in significant markets – is the essence of what I call a “Profipoly” (profits monopoly, or a path to exponential forever profitable growth).

7

Playing To Win

Another very good book on strategy is “Playing To Win” by AG Lafley and Roger Martin. They define strategy as “a coordinated and integrated set of five choices: a winning aspiration, where to play, how to win, core capabilities, and management systems.” In their framework, strategy is about answering five interrelated questions:

1. What is your winning aspiration? The purpose of your enterprise, its motivating aspiration.
2. Where will you play? A playing field where you can achieve that aspiration.
3. How will you win? The way you will win on the chosen playing field.
4. What capabilities must be in place? The set and configuration of capabilities required to win in the chosen way.
5. What management systems are required? The systems and measures that enable the capabilities and support the choices.

Here are short descriptions from the book on each of these five questions:

The first question—what is our winning aspiration?—sets the frame for all the other choices. A company must seek to win in a particular place and in a particular way. If it doesn’t seek to win, it is wasting the time of its people and the investments of its capital providers. But to be most helpful, the abstract concept of winning should be translated into defined aspirations. Aspirations are statements about the ideal future. At a later stage in the process, a company ties to those aspirations some specific benchmarks that measure progress toward them.

Where to play represents the set of choices that narrow the competitive field. The questions to be asked focus on where the company will compete—in which markets, with which customers and consumers, in which channels, in which product categories, and at which vertical stage or stages of the industry in question. This set of questions is vital; no company can be all things to all people and still win, so it is important to understand which where-to-play choices will best enable the company to win.

Where to play selects the playing field; how to win defines the choices for winning on that field. It is the recipe for success in the chosen segments, categories, channels, geographies, and so on. The how-to-win choice is intimately tied to the where-to-play choice. Remember, it is not how to win generally, but how to win within the chosen where-to-play domains.

Two questions flow from and support the heart of strategy: (1) what capabilities must be in place to win, and (2) what management systems are required to support the strategic choices? The first of these questions, the capabilities choice, relates to the range and quality of activities that will enable a company to win where it chooses to play. Capabilities are the map of activities and competencies that critically underpin specific where-to-play and how-to-win choices.

The final strategic choice in the cascade focuses on management systems. These are the systems that foster, support, and measure the strategy. To be truly effective, they must be purposefully designed to support the choices and capabilities. The types of systems and measures will vary from choice to choice, capability to capability, and company to company.

The book emphasizes that effective strategy is about making clear-cut choices on where to play and how to win in those chosen markets. Success requires both a deliberate approach to designing a winning game plan and the executional discipline to implement that plan consistently.

8

Strategy That Works

The book by ,”Strategy that Works”, Paul Leinwand and Cesare Mainardi connects strategy to execution. Two tables capture the essence of the authors’ ideas.

Here is a short summary of each of the five ideas, as summarised by ChatGPT:

1. Commit to an Identity: Successful companies understand their unique value proposition and stay true to their ‘way to play’. They avoid the trap of chasing multiple directions and instead focus on what they do best.
2. Translate the Strategic into the Everyday: Instead of having high-level strategies that remain on paper, successful companies embed their strategic objectives into daily operations, ensuring that there’s alignment from the boardroom to the frontline.
3. Put Culture to Work: Recognising culture as a significant asset, these companies leverage their cultural strengths to drive their strategy and ensure that behaviours, mindsets, and company values are in sync with strategic goals.
4. Cut Costs to Grow Stronger: Rather than indiscriminate cost-cutting, top companies approach cost management strategically. They invest in areas that align with their identity and core strengths, and cut costs in areas that don’t fit this mould.
5. Shape the Future: Successful companies are proactive. They don’t merely react to changes in the market; they shape these changes by influencing trends, making forward-looking investments, and sometimes even creating entirely new markets.

One of the key elements of this framework is the ability to shape the future. As companies grow and age, there is a tendency to become complacent. That is when agile supercompetitors can nibble away at market share. The authors write: “The ultimate payoff for becoming and staying coherent is a position of market leadership. Companies that close the strategy-to-execution gap can become the centers of their own ecosystems, changing the structure of the industries around them to advance their own position. When companies accomplish this, they become what we call supercompetitors.” They provide a framework for incumbent leaders to guard against this.

9

Blue Ocean Strategy – 1

It is rare that a conversation on strategy will not include the phrase “blue ocean.” (I myself talk about the need to find a “blue ocean in a red ocean.”) The book “Blue Ocean Strategy” by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne became an instant classic when it was published. Here is the contrast between red and blue oceans as defined by the Blue Ocean website:

Red Oceans are all the industries in existence today – the known market space. In red oceans, industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Here, companies try to outperform their rivals to grab a greater share of existing demand. As the market space gets crowded, profits and growth are reduced. Products become commodities, leading to cutthroat or ‘bloody’ competition. Hence the term red oceans.

Blue Oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today – the unknown market space, untainted by competition. In blue oceans, demand is created rather than fought over. There is ample opportunity for growth that is both profitable and rapid. In blue oceans, competition is irrelevant because the rules of the game are waiting to be set. A blue ocean is an analogy to describe the wider, deeper potential to be found in unexplored market space. A blue ocean is vast, deep, and powerful in terms of profitable growth.

In short, blue oceans are uncontested spaces.

The chart below from the website puts the differences in perspective:

A cornerstone of blue ocean strategy is value innovation.

The authors list eight principles of blue ocean strategy:

A helpful tool is the “strategy canvas”. It is best understood through an example. The authors provide this canvas for Southwest Airlines.

For thinking through the blue ocean strategy, the authors suggest using the “four actions framework.”

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Blue Ocean Strategy – 2

Here are a few examples of companies that have successfully applied blue ocean strategies:

Cirque du Soleil: It created a new market space by combining circus and theater to appeal to adult audiences, moving away from traditional circuses targeted at children.

Netflix: Netflix transitioned from its initial model of mail-in DVDs to an online streaming platform, effectively creating a new market space. Instead of competing with traditional cable or satellite TV, it tapped into the demand for on-demand, diverse content with a subscription model.

Tesla: While many automakers focused on incremental improvements in fuel efficiency or hybrid technologies, Tesla made a bold move into electric vehicles with superior range and performance. They targeted not just environmentally-conscious consumers, but also luxury car enthusiasts and tech-savvy buyers, thereby carving a unique niche.

Airbnb: Airbnb created an online marketplace for homestays, offering an alternative to hotels. It connected travellers looking for cheaper or more local stays.

Warby Parker: The eyewear industry was long dominated by a few big players. Warby Parker disrupted the scene by offering designer eyewear at affordable prices through a direct-to-consumer online model. They also employed a “Home Try-On” program, allowing customers to choose five frames to be shipped to their home for free, to try them out and send back the ones they didn’t want. [Lenskart did something similar in India.]

Peloton: Peloton created a new market for home fitness by offering interactive classes led by live instructors. Peloton’s bikes and treadmills are also connected to a community of users, which helps to motivate people to work out.

Shopify: Shopify created a new market for e-commerce platforms by making it easy for people to start their own online stores without any technical knowledge. Shopify offers a variety of features and tools that make it easy to set up and manage an online store, including payment processing, shipping, and inventory management.

Aravind Eye Hospital: It created a new market for affordable eye care in India by developing a high-volume, low-cost model. Aravind Eye Hospital has performed over 7 million cataract surgeries, making it the largest provider of eye care in the world.

Zerodha: In the stock brokerage industry in India, Zerodha introduced a disruptive pricing model with significantly lower brokerage fees (often zero for delivery trades). This attracted a vast number of retail investors to the stock market, especially younger, tech-savvy traders.

Paper Boat: It created a new market for branded ethnic drinks like aam panna, jaljeera, etc. that provided a refreshing natural alternative to colas and sodas.

I asked ChatGPT and Claude for examples from B2B SaaS. Here are some success stories.

Slack: While the market had numerous communication tools, Slack revolutionised workplace communication by offering an intuitive, real-time messaging platform, integrating various third-party applications. Instead of just being another communication tool, Slack positioned itself as a collaboration hub for work.

Zoom: Before the pandemic, there were already established players like Skype and WebEx in the video conferencing domain. Zoom identified and rectified common pain points such as difficult set-ups and dropped calls. With its easy-to-use interface, seamless integration, and high-quality video, it soon became the preferred choice for businesses worldwide. It avoided competing with enterprise software like Microsoft’s SharePoint (in the early days).

Canva: Canva created a new market for graphic design by making it easy for people to create professional-looking designs without any design skills. Canva offers a variety of templates, fonts, and images that users can drag and drop to create their own designs.

DocuSign: It digitised the document signing process to make it accessible anytime, anywhere while improving security. Created an alternative to in-person signing.

HubSpot: Instead of focusing solely on one aspect of customer relationship management, HubSpot introduced an all-in-one inbound marketing, sales, and service platform. By combining multiple tools into one integrated platform and promoting inbound marketing, they created a niche in a market dominated by giants like Salesforce.

11

More Strategy Frameworks

“Five Forces” by Michael Porter: It offers a holistic approach to understanding competition within an industry and formulating strategies accordingly. The five forces encompass: (1) The threat of new entrants, which assesses how easy or difficult it is for competitors to join the industry; (2) The bargaining power of buyers, gauging the ability of customers to influence prices; (3) The bargaining power of suppliers, determining the influence suppliers can have on price and quality; (4) The threat of substitute products or services, considering the potential for other products or services to capture a company’s customer base; and (5) Rivalry among existing competitors, which analyses the intensity of current competitive relationships within the industry.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen: It focuses on why large companies can fail despite good management due to disruptive technologies. Introduces the concept of disruptive innovation. A related idea from Christensen is to think of “Jobs to Be Done”, which focuses on understanding customer needs based on the jobs they’re trying to accomplish.

“Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore: A marketing theory that describes the lifecycle of high-tech products, emphasising the challenges faced during the early stages of introduction.

“Three Horizons Model” by McKinsey: This helps allocate resources across Horizon 1 (current business), Horizon 2 (emerging business) and Horizon 3 (future business) for strategic growth. [I have written about this.]

SWOT Analysis: A framework used to evaluate an organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

“Growth-Share Matrix” by BCG: It helps companies analyse their product lines or business units in terms of their market growth rate and relative market share. The matrix classifies products into four categories: Stars (high growth, high market share), which are leaders in flourishing markets and typically require investment to maintain their dominant position; Cash Cows (low growth, high market share), established and successful products that generate consistent cash flow; Question Marks (high growth, low market share), potential future stars with uncertain prospects and often necessitating significant investments to boost market share; and Dogs (low growth, low market share), which neither generate nor consume large amounts of cash and may be divested.

“Ansoff Matrix” by Igor Ansoff: It is a strategic planning tool that provides a framework to help executives and other senior managers devise strategies for future growth. The matrix categorises growth strategies along two dimensions: products (existing vs. new) and markets (existing vs. new). This results in four primary growth strategies: (1) Market Penetration, which focuses on increasing sales of existing products in existing markets; (2) Product Development, where new products are introduced into existing markets; (3) Market Development, which involves introducing existing products into new markets; and (4) Diversification, a strategy that seeks growth through introducing new products into new markets.

“Balanced Scorecard” by Robert Kaplan and David Norton: It is a strategic performance management tool that allows organisations to translate their vision and strategy into actionable objectives and performance metrics. It evaluates performance from four interconnected perspectives: (1) Financial, which measures fiscal performance and profitability; (2) Customer, emphasizing customer satisfaction and retention; (3) Internal Processes, evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of operations; and (4) Learning and Growth, which gauges the organisation’s ability to innovate, improve, and develop its human capital.

**

In exploring the essence of strategy across various seminal books and frameworks, some consistent themes emerge – strategy is centred on making clear choices to establish competitive advantage, it requires both strategic thinking and disciplined execution, it entails understanding customers and the market landscape, and it involves creating a differentiated value proposition difficult for rivals to replicate. While there are many lenses to analyse strategy, at its core it is about defining where to play, how to win, and what capabilities and systems are needed to outperform competitors. Crafting and implementing a coherent strategy remains vital for companies to carve out a sustainable niche, though the quest for an enduring “profipoly” in today’s dynamic markets necessitates constant creativity, invention and strategic renewal.

Published December 24, 2023

1

Why

A couple years ago, I was on a panel at a marketing conference. When called upon to introduce Netcore, I explained what we do. “Netcore helps B2C/D2C companies build better digital experiences. Our martech stack helps with communications, marketing automation, and search and product discovery.” A little later in the day, I listened to a competitor introduce his company. “We touch your lives in many ways. Those messages you get from ABC Bank? We power them. Those relevant recommendations on XYZ eCommerce site? We help with those.” He went on to give a few examples of the outcomes that end customers saw because of their product. He humanised their products in a way that it resonated and connected with everyone in the room. I thought to myself, “Why did I not tell our story like this?”

I had written in “Worldbuilding, Storytelling and Entrepreneurship”: “Entrepreneurs live in and build tomorrow’s world. For this, they must persuade those around them – co-founders, first employees, investors, and first customers. They have to bring to life a tomorrow which seems like fiction to many and yet is just around the corner. Entrepreneurs need to set and sell stories in this new world, just like how some writers have been doing. Worldbuilding and storytelling are the tools entrepreneurs use to make their breakthrough ideas and products succeed.”

I added, “A good entrepreneurial story is not just about what the product does, but why it matters. It paints a picture of a better future and positions the product or service as a means to that end. It humanises the company, making it easier for people to connect with its mission… the most effective stories are often the ones that tap into universal human experiences and emotions. They present the company’s mission as a shared journey, where every stakeholder is a crucial participant. This narrative strategy is powerful because it makes people feel a part of something bigger than themselves…Entrepreneurs thus need to become storytellers – imagining and even living in the future. They are building for a world a few years ahead because that is what it takes to go from an idea to customers. That world must be alive in their mind all through this time. Entrepreneurs compete for different visions of the future. Battles are first won by the stories because that is what the early adopters buy into.”

Storytelling has been at the heart of human culture since time immemorial. It’s an intrinsic part of our history and evolution, bridging the gap between generations, cultures, and geographies. The power of a story lies in its ability to leave a lasting imprint; it is through our tales that the essence of our lives and businesses come alive. They resonate with emotions, inspire action, and create memories. And yet, we don’t do enough of it. In this series, I will delve deeper into storytelling and why it matters – not just for entrepreneurs, but every one of us.

2

Wisdom – 1

Here is a collection of wisdom on storytelling.

Wikipedia: “Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term “storytelling” can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.”

National Storytelling Network: “Storytelling is the interactive art of using words and actions to reveal the elements and images of a story while encouraging the listener’s imagination.”

Hubspot: “Understanding new ideas can be confusing; stories can offer a way around that. Think about times when stories have helped you better understand a concept. Maybe a teacher used a real-life example to explain a math problem, or a speaker used a case study to convey complex data. Stories help solidify abstract concepts and simplify complex messages. Taking a lofty, non-tangible concept and making it relatable using concrete ideas is one of the biggest strengths of business storytelling… Stories are a universal language; they can bring people together and create a sense of community. Despite any barriers and differences, stories connect us through feelings and how we respond to them. We all understand the story of the hero, the underdog, or heartbreak. We all process emotions and can share feelings of elation, hope, despair, and anger. Sharing a story gives even the most diverse people a sense of commonality and community.”

Robert McKee (In Harvard Business Review in 2003): “A story expresses how and why life changes. It begins with a situation in which life is relatively in balance: You come to work day after day, week after week, and everything’s fine. You expect it will go on that way. But then there’s an event–in screenwriting, we call it the “inciting incident” – that throws life out of balance. You get a new job, or the boss dies of a heart attack, or a big customer threatens to leave. The story goes on to describe how, in an effort to restore balance, the protagonist’s subjective expectations crash into an uncooperative objective reality. A good storyteller describes what it’s like to deal with these opposing forces, calling on the protagonist to dig deeper, work with scarce resources, make difficult decisions, take action despite risks, and ultimately discover the truth. All great storytellers since the dawn of time – from the ancient Greeks through Shakespeare and up to the present day–have dealt with this fundamental conflict between subjective expectation and cruel reality.”

He adds: “A storyteller creates all characters from the self by asking the question, “If I were this character in these circumstances, what would I do?” The more you understand your own humanity, the more you can appreciate the humanity of others in all their good-versus-evil struggles. I would argue that the great leaders Jim Collins describes are people with enormous self-knowledge. They have self-insight and self-respect balanced by skepticism. Great storytellers – and, I suspect, great leaders – are skeptics who understand their own masks as well as the masks of life, and this understanding makes them humble. They see the humanity in others and deal with them in a compassionate yet realistic way. That duality makes for a wonderful leader.”

3

Wisdom – 2

Paul Zak: “My research has also shown that stories are useful inside organizations. We know that people are substantially more motivated by their organization’s transcendent purpose (how it improves lives) than by its transactional purpose (how it sells goods and services).  Transcendent purpose is effectively communicated through stories – for example, by describing the pitiable situations of actual, named customers and how their problems were solved by your efforts. Make your people empathize with the pain the customer experienced and they will also feel the pleasure of its resolution – all the more if some heroics went into reducing suffering or struggle, or producing joy.”

Vanessa Boris: “Good stories do more than create a sense of connection. They build familiarity and trust, and allow the listener to enter the story where they are, making them more open to learning. Good stories can contain multiple meanings so they’re surprisingly economical in conveying complex ideas in graspable ways. And stories are more engaging than a dry recitation of data points or a discussion of abstract ideas. Take the example of a company meeting. At Company A, the leader presents the financial results for the quarter. At Company B, the leader tells a rich story about what went into the “win” that put the quarter over the top. Company A employees come away from the meeting knowing that they made their numbers. Company B employees learned about an effective strategy in which sales, marketing, and product development came together to secure a major deal. Employees now have new knowledge, new thinking, to draw on. They’ve been influenced. They’ve learned.”

Shalini Lal: “Stories are particularly powerful in times of great change. They help us make sense of what is happening around us and what we should focus on. They help us reinterpret our place in the world and understand what action we need to take. As we enter a time of great change across our worlds, people will search for stories that help them make sense of these shifts. There is so much that is changing, and following all such shifts is beyond the capacity of most. Even if they managed to track change, they would need to give meaning to all that they were seeing and how these trends were connected. This is where powerful stories that focus attention will be compelling.”

Marie Hattar: “One of the biggest challenges facing the modern marketing team is how to break through rather than be drowned out by the content tsunami. Instead of pinning your hopes on the next magical adtech tool or some other marketing tactic in your arsenal, you should reorient everything around storytelling. This is because I’ve found that people don’t remember data or speeds and feeds; it’s stories that transcend time, people and cultures.”

Yoast: “To tell a good story, you usually have to include four elements: a character, a problem, an action, and a solution.”

Masterclass has 7 tips on how to tell a good story:

1. Choose a clear central message.
2. Embrace conflict.
3. Have a clear structure.
4. Mine your personal experiences.
5. Engage your audience.
6. Observe good storytellers.
7. Narrow the scope of your story.

On structure, it explains: “There are many different ways to structure a story, but the three ingredients a story must have are a beginning, middle, and end. On a more granular level, a successful story will start with an inciting incident, lead into rising action, build to a climax and ultimately settle into a satisfying resolution.”

Marshall Ganz talks about the story of self, us, and now as part of a public narrative for building movements, as distinct from marketing: “[It goes] back to the questions of Rabbi Hillel, the first-century sage, which I’d learned about as a child: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?” It adds: “Public narrative is a process and not a script. It’s not something to tell over and over. It incorporates the stories of others as well as your own. It’s learned and practiced by telling, listening, reflecting, and telling again. Public narrative’s aim is building grassroots power by activating people through storytelling and connecting those stories to clear policy and campaign goals.”

4

Wisdom – 3

Peter Guber in “Tell To Win”: “The building blocks of all compelling stories, whether they’re told in person, in the pages of a book, or via actors on a screen or monitor, are challenge, struggle, and resolution. First … get your listeners’ attention with an unexpected challenge or question.  Next … give your listeners an emotional experience by narrating the struggle to overcome that challenge or to find the answer to the opening question.  Finally … galvanize your listeners’ response with an eye-opening resolution that calls them to action…The best stories lead from the heart, not the mind…Stories that “work” transport audiences emotionally. They move us to laugh, cry, gasp, sigh, or yell in sympathetic rage, and every listener intuitively demands this emotional propulsion.”

Jonah Sachs in “Winning the Story Wars”: “Stories are a particular type of human communication designed to persuade an audience of a storyteller’s worldview. The storyteller does this by placing characters, real or fictional, onto a stage and showing what happens to these characters over a period of time. Each character pursues some type of goal in accordance with his or her values, facing difficulty along the way and either succeeds or fails according to the storyteller’s view of how the world works.” He writes about the five qualities that make stories success:

• TANGIBLE: Stories present information that makes concepts visible and human scale. They make people feel that they can “touch” and “see” an idea.
• RELATABLE: Stories matter to us because their characters carry values that we want to see either rewarded or punished.
• IMMERSIVE: Stories allow people to feel that they have experienced things that they have only seen or heard.
• MEMORABLE: Stories use rich scenes and metaphors that help us to remember their messages without conscious effort.
• EMOTIONAL: Stories elevate emotional engagement to the level of, and often beyond, intellectual understanding.

Carmine Gallo writes in “The Storyteller’s Secret” about the five types of storytellers: those who ignite our inner fire, those who educate, those who simplify, those who motivate, and those who launch movements. He adds: “History’s most inspiring leaders were storytellers…Many of the storytellers featured in this book changed the course of history. Some are business heroes. Some inspired movements. Above all, they are all dream makers. They reach for the stars and inspire the rest of us to create our own moonshots. This book is about the visionaries and risk-takers who have mastered the art of telling stories and who inspire us to live better lives. Some make us laugh. Some make us think. Some make us change. Through artfully telling stories that inform and challenge, they build companies, drive the world forward, and make us feel like we, too, can achieve the impossible.”

Some of the secrets discussed in the book:

• Identify your brand’s core purpose.
• Dream in moonshots.
• Introduce a “hero”—person or product—who triumphs over adversity.
• Make stories at least 65 percent of your presentation.
• Deliver serious topics with a side of humor.
• Use pictures to illustrate your story.

John Walsh, in his book, “The Art of Storytelling”, lists 14 steps for telling stories:

• Step 1: Select a story
• Step 2: Push through the story
• Step 3: Envision the scene with present-day feelings and concerns
• Step 4: Tell the story from the view of someone at the scene
• Step 5: Establish the story’s central truth
• Step 6: Find a memory hook
• Step 7: Tell a story within a story
• Step 8: Plan your first words
• Step 9: Know how the story ends
• Step 10: Research the facts
• Step 11: Eliminate needless detail
• Step 12: Add description to the story
• Step 13: Include audience participation
• Step 14: Arrange practice audiences

5

Wisdom – 4

Kindra Hall writes in “Stories that Stick”: “The most obvious gap in business is the void between the customer and the company…But while the sales gap is important, there are other gaps everywhere in business. There are gaps between entrepreneurs and potential investors, between recruiters and prospective employees, between managers and employees, between leaders and executives. To make a business work, you need to bridge the gaps…You must master three main elements to have any hope of building a bridge strong enough to get your intended audience—potential customers, key team members, investors, etc.—across the great divide: attention, influence, and transformation. First and foremost, the best bridges must capture attention and captivate the audience, so they know the bridge is there in the first place. The second element, influence, is the means by which you’re able to compel the audience to take the action you desire. And third, if you don’t want to have to keep bridging the same gaps over and over again, the best bridges transform the audience, creating a lasting impact and leaving the audience changed, so they never even consider returning to the other side of the bridge, thereby closing the gap forever.”

Jerry Weismann writes in “Presenting to Win”: “The good presenter grabs their minds at the beginning of the presentation; navigates them through all the various parts, themes, and ideas, never letting go; and then deposits them at the call to action…The effective presenter makes it easy for the audience to grasp ideas without having to work. The effective presentation story leads the audience to an irrefutable conclusion. The journey gives the audience a psychological comfort level that makes it easy for them to say “yes” to whatever the presenter is proposing. Presenting, therefore, is essentially selling…In the end, the most subtle impact of a clear and compelling presentation is perhaps the most powerful effect of all: The person who is able to tell an effective business story is perceived as being in command, and deserves the confidence of others. When you are in command of your story, you are in command of the room. Your audience will follow where you lead, and so will money, influence, power, and success…Persuasion is the art of moving your audience from Point A, a place of ignorance, indifference, or even hostility, toward your goal . . . navigating them through an unbroken series of Aha!s . . . to Point B, a place where they will act as your investors, customers, partners, or advocates, ready to march to your drum.” He adds: “Constantly ask the key question: What’s in it for you?” He calls it WIIFY, with the “you” referring to the audience.

In “Everyday Business Storytelling”, Janine Kurnoff and Lee Lazarus write: “To the majority of us, it’s not obvious how to authentically incorporate storytelling into our daily work lives. Instead, we resort to what we do know. We leverage existing content for a “quick fix.” We grab our latest slide deck that we (or our co-worker) built as a starting point, and from there we cobble together slides. We load up on bulleted text. We pile in every chart we can find. We even add in some “pretty” slides that we found on the corporate portal from the marketing team. We have a very technical term for this type of incoherent, hodgepodge communication. We call it a Frankendeck.” They add: “Every story has four structural elements—or signposts. They are setting, characters, conflict, and resolution. These signposts create a pattern of ideas that feel familiar, feel human, feel satisfying, but most importantly, just feel. And if ideas make us feel, we remember them…The first three signposts of storytelling—setting, characters, and conflict—can be introduced in any order. In fact, many stories start with conflict before we have zeroed in on any characters or established setting… The resolution must always come last.”

Indranil Chakraborty writes in “Stories That Work”: “For Sale: Baby shoes. Never worn. When you read these six words, what feelings do they evoke? Don’t these six words immediately make us empathize with an unknown, grief-stricken woman? We can almost visualize the situation and our hearts go out to her. Ernest Hemingway wrote this story, calling it a six-word novel. It shows the almost visceral effect stories can have on us.”

6

Wisdom – 5

Janis Forman writes in “Storytelling in Business”: “If you are planning to use storytelling in your work, the place to begin is by putting together your signature story. Much like your signature, your “signature story” is unique to you and is probably the most personal of stories you’d share in business settings. It may reveal something about your character—what you value—and take the form of an autobiographical excerpt; that is, a personal story (and versions of that story) about a significant experience, relationship, accomplishment, or failure that has given you insights about who you are as a person and a professional.” Janis lists some questions to ask:

• What specific experiences have you had with a mentor, a family member, a teacher, friend, boss, colleague, or significant other who has had a substantial impact on who you are as a person and a professional?
• What major challenge have you faced in your personal or professional life? What choices did you make, and what insights did you gain from this experience?
• What stories told to you, read in a book, or seen in a film move you,—and what does this say about you as a person and a professional?

Matthew Luhn writes in “The Best Story Wins”: “There is a scientific reason why stories stick in our minds. Way back in our evolution, when humans developed the ability to speak, we communicated about life or death situations, like being chased by a tiger, successfully hunting a bison, or avoiding poisonous plants. We know that storytelling was important to our early ancestors because we have “storyboards” of those life lessons that date back thousands of years painted on cave walls. The ancient people that learned the lessons of those stories lived, and the ones that didn’t died…Along with being memorable, stories are impactful. Stories take us on a roller-coaster ride, a journey through high moments (happiness, anticipation, surprise) and low moments (sadness, fear, anger) that actually affect our bodies on a chemical level. Science has revealed that the chemicals in our tears produced by laughter are different than the chemicals in our tears produced by sadness. When we see or hear people—or even animated toys, robots, or rats—laughing, smiling, or sharing stories of suspense, dopamine and endorphins are released in our bodies; when we see or hear anything sad or somber, oxytocin is released. When we place these sad and happy moments next to each other in a story, we build an amusement park ride for people’s hearts and minds. Ups and downs, tension and release, you’ve created a story that keeps an audience sitting on the edge of their seats.”

Bernadette Jiwa writes in “Story-Driven”: “Every business is driven by one of two philosophies. A company is either competition-driven or story-driven. The competition-driven company is reactive to the marketplace and prioritises beating its competitors and racking up profits. It identifies with the capitalist ideal and is intent on keeping score. The people who lead competition-driven organisations seek to dominate the market and maximise shareholder value. They care about increasing market share, boosting the single bottom line and raising their status as ‘the leader’ in their category. Their goal is to win. In contrast, the story-driven company is responsive to customers and prioritises having a clear sense of purpose and identity. It makes little reference to the competition and is intent on creating an impact. The people who work there derive a deep sense of meaning from their work because they know their company exists to do more than simply make a profit. The leaders of story-driven companies (big and small) have clear visions for the future they want to see, and they inspire their teams to join them on the journey to creating that future. They often succeed by doing things that can’t be measured or are not immediately scalable. Story-driven companies have a positive impact on their customers and society. They thrive by making the connection between their purpose and prosperity. Their goal is to make a difference.”

7

Hero’s Journey

One of the most common templates for storytelling is the hero’s journey, or the monomyth. It involves a hero who goes on an adventure, faces challenges, is victorious, and comes home changed or transformed. Think Frodo Baggins in “Lord of the Rings” or Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars”. Here is an illustration from Wikipedia of the Hero’s Journey.

I asked ChatGPT to summarise the hero’s myth in the context of storytelling (with light editing).

The art of storytelling is ancient, predating written language and serving as the bedrock for human civilization’s cultural and moral structures. Among its varied formats, the ‘Hero’s Journey,’ as conceptualised by Joseph Campbell in his seminal work “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” stands out as a particularly resonant and universal template. This narrative pattern has been employed in epics, films, novels, and even in modern business storytelling. The consistent appeal of the Hero’s Journey lies in its reflection of human experiences, challenges, growth, and transformation.

At its core, the Hero’s Journey comprises three fundamental stages: Departure, Initiation, and Return.

Departure: This is where our protagonist, often an ordinary individual in a familiar world, encounters a ‘Call to Adventure.’ The hero may be reluctant at first, often exhibiting resistance or refusal. However, with the guidance of a mentor, the hero musters the courage to cross the threshold into an unknown, often fantastical world.

Initiation: As the hero ventures into the unfamiliar territory, they face trials and tribulations, confronting enemies and uncovering allies. This stage is crucial for character development, as the hero learns, adapts, and grows stronger, both internally and externally. The climax of this phase is the ordeal, where the hero must confront their biggest fear or challenge, resulting in a transformation or rebirth.

Return: With the ordeal overcome and the reward in hand, the hero commences the return journey to the ordinary world. However, this path is seldom smooth. The hero must reconcile the lessons and powers acquired during the initiation with their original environment, often facing resistance or final tests. Ultimately, the hero emerges triumphant, bringing boon or knowledge back to their community, resulting in the betterment of both the self and the society.

So, why does this template remain so universally appealing in storytelling? Firstly, the Hero’s Journey mirrors the human life cycle and our personal quests for meaning, purpose, and identity. Each of us, in different ways, embarks on journeys, faces challenges, grows, and aims to return transformed. The narrative template taps into this shared human experience, making the story both personal and universal.

Secondly, the Hero’s Journey showcases transformation. It highlights that challenges, no matter how insurmountable they seem, can lead to growth. This underlying message of hope and the possibility of metamorphosis resonates deeply with audiences, providing both escapism and inspiration.

Moreover, the cyclical nature of the Hero’s Journey, where the end often hints at a new beginning, reflects the cyclical nature of life itself. It emphasises the idea that learning and growth are continuous processes, and challenges will always lead to newer horizons.

In modern storytelling, variations of the Hero’s Journey have been employed in blockbuster films, bestselling novels, and even brand narratives. Think of classics like “Star Wars” or “Harry Potter” or brand stories where companies position their products as solutions to challenges, making the customer the hero of their own journey.

In conclusion, the Hero’s Journey, with its stages of departure, initiation, and return, offers a timeless narrative structure that resonates deeply with human psychology and experience. It serves as a mirror to our challenges, aspirations, and transformations, emphasizing the potential for growth inherent in every challenge. As storytellers continue to adapt this template to contemporary contexts, the Hero’s Journey will undoubtedly remain a cornerstone of compelling narratives, connecting us to our shared human essence.

8

My Stories

Over the past couple years, I have tried to bring more storytelling in my writing and presentations. My book, “Startup to Proficorn”, has many stories from my entrepreneurship journey. While I do not always follow the templates of good storytelling, I do try and bring in the problem-solution aspect. Within Netcore, when I need to talk about some of the changes we need to do, I try to begin with a customer story. Here are my stories that I have found resonate with the audience.

• IndiaWorld origin: the story of how I returned from the US, failed with my early entrepreneurial efforts, and then got the idea of creating India’s first Internet portal focused initially on the information needs of Indians outside India.
• Launching Samachar, Khoj, Khel, Bawarchi: the story of how I lost IndiaWorld.com (the primary domain) and then came up with sites with Hindi names that differentiated us and became memorable.
• IndiaWorld exit: this is by far the most exciting story I tell of how I sold IndiaWorld for 166 times revenue. There is some drama (failed efforts to raise venture capital), a bidding war, and excitement (how the valuation went from $40 million to $115 million in less than a couple weeks). There is also an epilogue – the dotcom crash and how the exit timing mattered.
• Replacing myself as CEO of Netcore: this is the one founders I speak to have the most questions on – how I made the decision to bring in a CEO to run the business in 2007. How did I decide? Who did I choose? What was it like after I made the decision?
• Netcore’s SaaS transition: this is the story about the time in 2019 when Kalpit (Netcore’s current CEO) and I attended SaaStr and realised we needed to change Netcore’s product, sales, and marketing model if we had to target markets like the US.

At a personal level, there are a few stories that connect well.

• The story of how I returned from the US: this was because of what my father had told me when I left – finish Masters in 9 months, work for 2 years, and then come back.
• The failures in the first 3 years after I returned: how I tried multiple ideas as an entrepreneur and each one of them failed
• My 30 failures over 30+ years as an entrepreneur: while I do spend time talking about my successes, I also discuss how the journey of experimentation has many flops and the pain of each idea that did not grow.
• The birth of Abhishek: how my wife and I went through 5 years of IVF treatment to have a baby.
• My political entrepreneurship with Niti Digital and Nayi Disha: why I embarked on that path, and the outcomes in 2014 (success) and 2019 (failure)

When I tell my personal stories, I tell it like it happened and with authenticity and humility. In the past few months since the publication of my book, I have done multiple interviews and presentations, and it is always the stories that people remember rather than the generic advice that I mention from my learnings. I am still learning the art of storytelling – and so should you.

9

Your Stories

We tell stories all the time – to our friends, to colleagues at work, to strangers we meet on flights or at events. From anecdotes shared over coffee to corporate presentations, the art of weaving a captivating tale is invaluable. By honing this skill, we can create deeper connections, leave lasting impressions, and truly make our messages resonate. Here are a few suggestions.

• Unearth life’s turning points: Reflect on the pivotal moments in your life. What are the crucible experiences that shaped you? Identifying these and understanding their impact can form the foundation of a compelling story. Articulate them in ways that evoke emotions and provoke thought.
• Maintain a story bank: Just as a writer keeps a journal, maintain a repository of stories tailored for various situations. Being vigilant about everyday observations can yield a treasure trove of gems. Because of my blog, I need a steady inflow of content and so I am extra alert for interesting observations and experiences. Some of them have found their way in my Life System writings.
• Transform experiences into narratives: Cherish life’s significant moments. Don’t forget them. They can come in useful when they can be connected to learnings. I was telling a colleague about a recent experience at a hotel where I was staying. Among the staff at the restaurant was this person who was so cheerful and greeted every guest individually. Just seeing her smile in a roomful of strangers gave a nice start to the day. When I was leaving on the third morning, she said she hoped I would be back the next morning. When I told her I would be leaving that night, she made a sign of tears – which converted into a smile when I said I would be back for a day the following week. I use this story on how each of us can become memorable – even in short meetings with people we don’t know and leave a mark.
• Reimagine presentations: I am very text-oriented when I make my slides. I use bullet points which I talk through. I have been thinking of how to change this and make it more story-oriented with imagery and a few words. Visuals, paired with concise text, can be powerful. Incorporate imagery, metaphors, or even short anecdotes to make your points memorable.
• Be an avid learner: Engage with diverse storytelling mediums – books, movies, or YouTube videos. Analyse what captivates you. Is it the pacing, the character development, or perhaps the plot twists? Gleaning insights from these sources can significantly elevate your storytelling prowess.
• Understand your audience: Tailor your story to your listeners. Consider their background, interests, and values. A story that resonates with one group might not resonate with another.
• Embrace vulnerability: Authentic stories often come from a place of vulnerability. Sharing personal challenges or lessons learned humanises you and builds trust with your audience.
• Conclude with a message: Every good story has a moral or message. Ensure your listeners walk away with a clear understanding of the core idea or lesson you intended to convey.
• Practice makes perfect: Seize every opportunity to share your stories. Through repetition, refine your narrative. Stories become better as we tell them. Pay attention to your audience’s reactions; tweak phrases or sequences based on what resonates best.

Storytelling is an intricate blend of art and science, imagination and structure, emotion and logic. By continually refining this craft, we can touch hearts, inspire action, and leave an indelible mark on our listeners.

 10

Storytelling in Business

Netcore operates in a crowded and competitive market. The question I have been thinking of is: how can we tell a better story to set ourselves apart from the competition? Can we go beyond comparing features and showing dashboards of data? Can we talk about a future which Netcore is uniquely positioned to bring to life? Can our storytelling give us a competitive advantage – creating a blue ocean in a red ocean? How can we stand out in a sea of sameness? Here are a few themes I have been working on.

• I start with a new and memorable phrase to describe the problem. In Netcore’s case, the word I have been using is “profipoly” (profits monopoly). I tell a story about how companies like Google, Apple and Microsoft have created a profits monopoly which delivers exponential forever profitable growth for them – and keeps competitors at bay. Every business needs to aspire to become a profipoly. And I plan to show them how to do it.
• I discuss how marketing has made a wrong turn by not focusing on profitable A focus on branding, acquisition, and retention has meant that growth comes at the cost of profits. I show the state of brand P&Ls (profit and loss statement), and how marketing is one of the biggest contributors to profitless (profitless or less profits) outcomes.
• I then bring in the agents of change – the breakthrough ideas and innovations. This is the exciting part of the story – where the troubled past can give way to a happy future.
• I finally show the outcomes – happier customers with memorable experiences, and better P&Ls. All this can lead to sustainable profitable growth.
• I end with a roadmap and a hero – the 90-day plan (call-to-action) which needs a “Chief Profipoly Officer” to implement it. This also shows CMOs a possible future to the corner office, something they can rarely aspire to in their current roles.

As I have been telling this story, I also feel an inner excitement – of talking about something new, of linking it to a brighter future, of showing the big picture of how becoming a profipoly is marketing’s fourth wave and final frontier. I used to do this a lot in the early days of IndiaWorld – evangelising the infinite potential of the Internet, and how the business could benefit by becoming an early adopter. For the past years, my writings have focused on a new world of marketing, and I now need to tell the story of how digital businesses can finally bring in the one thing that’s missing – profits.

**

Stories are what we grow up with. When we as babies cannot read, we listen to stories told to us by our parents. They help us understand and interpret the world. Like the lost art of asking beautiful questions, somewhere down the line as we grow up, we forget about how important stories are to every form of communication and interaction. It is time for each of us to learn and practice storytelling – in our personal and business lives. As Steve Jobs said when he was CEO of Pixar: “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”

 

Published October 26, 2023

1

Intro

During a recent US trip, I picked up “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman. The book is about two technologies – Artificial Intelligence and Synthetic Biology. Mustafa dubs them as the technology of intelligence and the technology of life, respectively. He (or rather AI) writes in the prologue:

In the annals of human history, there are moments that stand out as turning points, where the fate of humanity hangs in the balance. The discovery of fire, the invention of the wheel, the harnessing of electricity—all of these were moments that transformed human civilization, altering the course of history forever.

And now we stand at the brink of another such moment as we face the rise of a coming wave of technology that includes both advanced AI and biotechnology. Never before have we witnessed technologies with such transformative potential, promising to reshape our world in ways that are both awe-inspiring and daunting.

On the one hand, the potential benefits of these technologies are vast and profound. With AI, we could unlock the secrets of the universe, cure diseases that have long eluded us, and create new forms of art and culture that stretch the bounds of imagination. With biotechnology, we could engineer life to tackle diseases and transform agriculture, creating a world that is healthier and more sustainable.

But on the other hand, the potential dangers of these technologies are equally vast and profound. With AI, we could create systems that are beyond our control and find ourselves at the mercy of algorithms that we don’t understand. With biotechnology, we could manipulate the very building blocks of life, potentially creating unintended consequences for both individuals and entire ecosystems.

The book is about the promise and perils of the two technologies, and the need for containment. Writes Mustafa: “The coming wave is defined by two core technologies: artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology. Together they will usher in a new dawn for humanity, creating wealth and surplus unlike anything ever seen. And yet their rapid proliferation also threatens to empower a diverse array of bad actors to unleash disruption, instability, and even catastrophe on an unimaginable scale. This wave creates an immense challenge that will define the twenty-first century: our future both depends on these technologies and is imperiled by them.”

Around the same time, I came across another book, “Programmable Planet”, by Ted Anton. From its description:

A new science is reengineering the fabric of life. Synthetic biology offers bold new ways of manufacturing medicines, clothing, foods, fragrances, and fuels, often using microbe fermentation, much like brewing beer. The technology can help confront climate change, break down industrial pollutants, and fight novel viruses. Today, researchers are manipulating life forms and automating evolution to create vegetarian “meat,” renewable construction materials, and cancer treatments. In the process, they are changing our concept of what life science can achieve. Is this a new industrial and information revolution—or dangerous tinkering that could unleash unintended consequences?

Programmable Planet is a grand tour through the world of synthetic biology, telling the stories of the colorful visionaries whose ideas are shaping discoveries. Ted Anton explores the field from its beginning in fighting malaria in Africa to the COVID vaccines and beyond. Covering medical and agricultural triumphs and blunders, he examines successes in energy production, plant gene editing, and chemical manufacturing, as well as the most controversial attempts at human gene enhancement. This book reports from the front lines of research, showing policy makers’ struggle to stay abreast of the technologies they aim to regulate. Even-handed, lively, and informative, Programmable Planet gives a glimpse of the promise and problems of a new biology-based industry.

What intrigued me was ‘synthetic biology.’ I had heard the phrase for the first time a few months ago. (While my world is centred around marketing tech, I do like to explore new technologies.) The reason I have woken up late to the synthetic biology revolution is that I never liked biology. I stopped studying it at the earliest opportunity – right after tenth grade. I preferred to go to St. Xaviers College in Mumbai in the 11^th rather than Jai Hind because biology was not compulsory in Xaviers. I opted for Geology. Having seen the phrase on more than a few occasions, my curiosity took over. I decided I needed to understand it more, and the best way to learn for me is to read and write. Hence this blog series.

2

What It Is

My first stop was to query ChatGPT and ask what synthetic biology is and its core technologies. Here’s what I got.

Synthetic Biology is an interdisciplinary field that combines principles from biology, engineering, computer science, and other areas with the aim to design and construct new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing natural biological systems for useful purposes. It seeks to create new biological functions that do not exist naturally and offers a more systematic approach to engineering biology.

Here’s a breakdown of its significance:

1. Understanding Fundamental Biology: By attempting to recreate biological systems, scientists gain deeper insights into the principles that govern life. This helps us understand the complexity and nuances of living organisms.
2. Medical Applications: Synthetic biology has the potential to revolutionize medicine. For example:

1. • Personalized Treatment: Tailored therapies based on an individual’s genetic makeup.
   • Drug Synthesis: Microorganisms can be engineered to produce drugs, reducing the need for chemical synthesis.
   • Targeted Therapies: Design of microorganisms that target cancer cells or other disease-causing agents without affecting healthy tissues.

3. Sustainable Production: Organisms can be engineered to produce fuels, chemicals, and materials in more sustainable ways than conventional methods. For instance, bacteria might be modified to produce biofuels from waste products.
4. Environmental Remediation: Synthetic organisms can be designed to break down pollutants or absorb heavy metals, helping to detoxify environments that have been subjected to industrial pollution.
5. Food and Agriculture: By modifying crops or creating new organisms, we can produce food that is more nutritious, requires fewer resources, or is more resistant to pests and diseases.
6. Bio-computing: DNA and other biological systems have been explored as potential mediums for computation and data storage, presenting a whole new paradigm for computing.
7. Safety and Biosecurity: On the flip side, synthetic biology has implications for biosecurity. While it provides tools to address global challenges, there’s also a risk of misuse, either accidentally or with malicious intent. Thus, the field underscores the need for stringent safety and ethical guidelines.

Core Technologies

Synthetic biology is propelled by a range of core technologies that enable scientists to design, construct, and test biological systems in more standardized and engineering-like ways. Here are some of the foundational technologies:

1. DNA Sequencing: This allows us to read the genetic code of organisms. Rapid advances in sequencing technologies have made it faster and cheaper to read DNA, providing vast amounts of genetic data to researchers.
2. DNA Synthesis: Once the desired DNA sequence is known, it can be custom-made using chemical methods. Advances in DNA synthesis technology enable scientists to create long strands of DNA with custom sequences, which can be inserted into organisms to introduce new functions.
3. Gene Editing: Technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 allow scientists to make precise changes to an organism’s DNA. This has revolutionized synthetic biology by allowing for more accurate and efficient modifications.
4. Bioinformatics and Computational Biology: These involve using computer algorithms and software tools to design and model biological systems. Computational tools can predict how changes in DNA will affect an organism’s function, enabling more precise engineering.
5. Standardized Biological Parts (BioBricks): Just as electrical engineers use standard parts (like resistors and capacitors) to build circuits, synthetic biologists aim to create libraries of standardized biological parts (like promoters, genes, and terminators) that can be mixed and matched to build new biological systems.
6. Automated DNA Assembly: Automation platforms, like robotic systems, allow for the rapid assembly of multiple DNA parts in a precise order, accelerating the construction of synthetic biological systems.
7. Microfluidics: This involves manipulating small amounts of liquids on a chip. Microfluidics can be used for high-throughput testing of biological samples, greatly speeding up experiments.
8. Protein Engineering: This focuses on designing new proteins or modifying existing ones to have desired functions. Techniques like directed evolution, where proteins are evolved in the lab under artificial selection pressures, can create proteins with novel or improved functions.
9. Synthetic Genomes: Scientists are working on creating entire synthetic genomes. The first synthetic bacterium with a completely synthetic genome was reported in 2010. Such approaches might lead to organisms that are entirely human-designed.
10. Metabolic Engineering: This involves redesigning the metabolic pathways of an organism, often to produce a desired chemical or compound. For instance, yeast cells have been engineered to produce biofuels or antimalarial drugs.
11. Chassis Organisms: These are simple, well-characterized organisms that synthetic biologists use as platforms for adding new functions. Examples include certain strains of E. coli bacteria, which are often used because their genetics are well understood.

These technologies, combined with principles from engineering, are what allow synthetic biologists to approach biology in a modular and systematic way, designing organisms to carry out desired tasks. As with any technology, responsible development and deployment are essential, given the potential societal and environmental impacts.

3

Commentary – 1

Wikipedia: “Synthetic biology (SynBio) is a multidisciplinary field of science that focuses on living systems and organisms, and it applies engineering principles to develop new biological parts, devices, and systems or to redesign existing systems found in nature. It is a branch of science that encompasses a broad range of methodologies from various disciplines, such as biotechnology, biomaterials, material science/engineering, genetic engineering, molecular biology, molecular engineering, systems biology, membrane science, biophysics, chemical and biological engineering, electrical and computer engineering, control engineering and evolutionary biology. It includes designing and constructing biological modules, biological systems, and biological machines, or re-designing existing biological systems for useful purposes. Additionally, it is the branch of science that focuses on the new abilities of engineering into existing organisms to redesign them for useful purposes.”

Genome.gov: “Synthetic biology is a field of science that involves redesigning organisms for useful purposes by engineering them to have new abilities. Synthetic biology researchers and companies around the world are harnessing the power of nature to solve problems in medicine, manufacturing and agriculture… In some ways, synthetic biology is similar to another approach called “genome editing” because both involve changing an organism’s genetic code; however, some people draw a distinction between these two approaches based on how that change is made. In synthetic biology, scientists typically stitch together long stretches of DNA and insert them into an organism’s genome. These synthesized pieces of DNA could be genes that are found in other organisms or they could be entirely novel. In genome editing, scientists typically use tools to make smaller changes to the organism’s own DNA. Genome editing tools can also be used to delete or add small stretches of DNA in the genome.”

Bio.org: “Synthetic biology is a new interdisciplinary area that involves the application of engineering principles to biology. It aims at the (re-)design and fabrication of biological components and systems that do not already exist in the natural world. Synthetic biology combines chemical synthesis of DNA with growing knowledge of genomics to enable researchers to quickly manufacture catalogued DNA sequences and assemble them into new genomes. Improvements in the speed and cost of DNA synthesis are enabling scientists to design and synthesize modified bacterial chromosomes that can be used in the production of advanced biofuels, bio-products, renewable chemicals, bio-based specialty chemicals (pharmaceutical intermediates, fine chemicals, food ingredients), and in the health care sector as well. Synthetic biologists are working to develop: standardized biological parts — identify and catalog standardized genomic parts that can be used (and synthesized quickly) to build novel biological systems; applied protein design — re-design existing biological parts and expand the set of natural protein functions for new processes; natural product synthesis — engineer microbes to produce all of the necessary enzymes and biological functions to perform complex multistep production of natural products; and synthetic genomics — design and construct a ‘simple’ genome for a natural bacterium.”

4

Commentary – 2

Mustafa Suleyman: “Living systems self-assemble and self-heal; they’re energy-harnessing architectures that can replicate, survive, and flourish in a vast range of environments, all at a breathtaking level of sophistication, atomic precision, and information processing. Just as everything from the steam engine to the microprocessor was driven by an intense dialogue between physics and engineering, so the coming decades will be defined by a convergence of biology and engineering. Like AI, synthetic biology is on a sharp trajectory of falling costs and rising capabilities. At the center of this wave sits the realization that DNA is information, a biologically evolved encoding and storage system. Over recent decades we have come to understand enough about this information transmission system that we can now intervene to alter its encoding and direct its course. As a result, food, medicine, materials, manufacturing processes, and consumer goods will all be transformed and reimagined. So will humans themselves… Welcome to the age of biomachines and biocomputers, where strands of DNA perform calculations and artificial cells are put to work. Where machines come alive. Welcome to the age of synthetic life.”

Ted Anton: “There is nothing new about modifying life to make products that humans need…What is new is the speed, scale, and power of researchers’ ability to remake life. Today, hundreds of labs are fine-tuning gene pathways and DNA, and gene editing is taking place in homes, garages, and backwoods stables for cattle and horses. In agriculture, many of the tomatoes, apples, and oranges we eat are engineered to resist disease or to enhance their flavor or shelf life. Most cheese and many cold water detergents are made using enzymes produced by modified organisms. The same holds for many vegetarian meats. Some of the more whimsical quests seem drawn from the pages of science fiction—glowing trees to light highways, designer plants to cool Earth, and cells to detect and attack disease… Metabolic engineering, standardized parts, gene editing, directed evolution, and new forms of genetic material—and their applications in medicine, the environment, clothing, food, housing, biofuels, defense, remediation, and biomining—promise a better future… Engineered biology will be part of a matrix of processes to create a more sustainable world. It offers a possibility of realigning the human relationship with Earth. Call it a production platform and a portal to a new society that manufactured in partnership with nature, not in opposition to or domination of it. The creation of new life forms could enhance the world for the improvement of human beings.”

Matthew Bennet [via Masha Savelieff]: “There are so many exciting applications. In the short-term these include medical applications, such as CRISPR-based gene editing, bacterial therapeutics and biomaterials (i.e., cells embedded in materials to provide novel functions). In the long-term, I hate to even speculate…As our ability to engineer biology increases, the number of possibilities explodes. I believe that the killer application for synthetic biology has not been envisioned yet. Just as the first computer scientists probably never could have predicted smartphones, streaming devices and AI, I don’t think we can predict what our work will eventually become. But it will be amazing, of that I have no doubt.”

WSJ: “The rise of the cloud and distributed computing have boosted that effort, allowing for the processing of larger data sets. Scientists can perform genetic and DNA sequencing at a more rapid pace and scale, according to Jennifer Lum, co-founder of Biospring Partners. With a better understanding of the DNA composition and functions of cells of specific types, scientists can manipulate and redesign those cells to drive a particular outcome, from biofuels to disease-resistant plants. “It is collapsing time and expanding the aperture by which we are able to run experiments on a broader set of designs that scientists want to test on,” she said, describing the impact of those factors, while cautioning that plenty of challenges must still be solved.  A recent wave of discoveries has been made possible because of the availability of more computing power. Scientists can now better model and study the interactions of proteins, which are encoded by DNA sequences, Lum said.”

**

In an article celebrating 20 years of the Human Genome Project, The Economist wrote: “Genomics has…come to form a framework for biology in the way that the periodic table forms one for chemistry. It touches everything. And with that, the ambitions for their subject of those biological prophets of the 1980s are being fulfilled in a manner they could scarcely have dreamed of.”

I love science fiction. Through the years, as I watched movies like Star Wars and Jurassic Park, and recent series like “The Expanse” and “Foundation”, I always thought of these as stories set very far in the future. Now, with the speed of innovation we are seeing in areas like AI and synthetic biology, I am not so sure. Perhaps, a few of the stories we have watched could come true in our lifetime. We are living through not just one revolution, but many simultaneous revolutions across disciplines, each building on the other.

In Difficult Times

There were times when I felt lonely and alone. It happens to all of us. That exam which did not go right, a relationship which suddenly changed, a mistake that should not have been. The answer to many of these unpleasant situations is to lock oneself in a room and brood. I wish I had not done that. I wish I had studied more. I wish I had not said that. Life doesn’t always go to plan.

In moments like these, you can always count on your parents. Their love is unconditional. It does not expect anything back. It is just there – invisible like oxygen in the air. Every breath has it. However old we grow, parents are always there for their children. And yes, we will always be children for them. So, in these moments, when you feel the world has turned against you, when nothing seems to be going right, always remember that you have your parents. It is not always possible for them to know what you are feeling given that you will be in a hostel. And even when you meet or talk for a few hours occasionally, you can always put on an act to make sure everything’s normal. But remember that when the times are difficult, they will always be there for you.

A parent’s life is not easy. For 18 years, you have been the centre of their lives. You were never a “meeting” scheduled on a calendar. They were always there when you wanted. You hurt yourself? They were there to take you to the doctor. You liked that train or plane to play with? They went that extra mile to get it for you. You wanted to read the book? Next day it was at your study table. You were too young to realise what they were giving up to make space for you. And now, as you leave home, think about what’s going on in their lives. There is a void nothing can fill. Even as you sleep in a faraway land, they are awake wondering about you. The words may not be spoken, you may not even be thinking about them, but you are always there in their heart, mind and soul.

So, remember that. If anything goes wrong, talk to them. They have always solved every problem you faced. They always will. You are never alone in this world. Even if everyone else is on the other side, they are on your side. Just their sight, their words will be enough to cheer you up and turn the tide. But remember, you have to tell them. Tell them when you are not feeling good, when you did something you should not have, when you broke a rule, when you crossed a threshold you should not have. They will show you the way ahead.

**

So, that’s it. The rest is for you – my 18-year-old self – to figure out. Nothing to add beyond the reco to explore and experiment, cultivate good habits and friends, and never forget that even in the hardest of times your parents are always there for you. Go out in the world, live life well, and be the best version of you. The next one month and four years will be unlike any that you have experienced. They are to be celebrated. Life is waiting with her embrace. You have to take the first steps.

Habits and Friends

It is very important to also set the ground rules of what you will not do. Peer pressure is a big deal. It can push in many different ways – and not all are for the good. This is where nurturing matters. Parents have imparted to us the framework for deciding between what is right and wrong. They know us better than we know ourselves. At no time should we do anything that we or they will regret. In that one moment of weakness among a group of friends, in that one sentence challenging us, we are very liable to go astray. That is the moment of truth. No one is looking, but there is an inner voice talking and eyes above watching.

Freedom comes with responsibilities. These have to be self-defined. There are no parents to set the boundaries. What time one wakes up, what time on esleeps, what one eats or drinks, what friends one makes, what habits one embraces – these are the decisions that only you can make. The guiding light must be the boundaries one sets.

Going from the constraints of home life to the extreme freedoms of dorm life can be exciting at first. No permissions, no answering questions, no asking! It is a life which I could only imagine when I went to IIT. But then I also realised soon enough that I have to cultivate habits carefully and make friends even more judiciously. Just because there were no minimum attendance requirements did not mean that I could miss class when I wanted. Just because there was no one to make sure I am awake did not mean I could sleep as long as I wanted. Just because there was no one to check the statements I was making did not mean I could lie to those closest to me. I had to make sure I stayed true to myself. I could not in a few months undo all the good my parents had taught me – just because I had the freedom to.

Above everything is the selection of friends. Not only will you select friends but your friends will also select you. Choose carefully. And do not let old friendships die just because some new ones are being formed. Even today, two of my best friends are those from school. While we may not meet as often, the friendship has stayed for 40+ years. It has survived slaps, short-lived anger, time, distances, and periods of silence. Friendships do not see caste, class, gender, or nationality. With friends, it doesn’t matter when one meets; the conversation can be continued as if you had met just yesterday.

Just as parents did not judge you, take you for what you are, and see and bring out the best in you, so do good friends. Cultivate good friendships and go the extra mile for them. Friendship is not a balance sheet where giving and taking needs to be matched. It is about unconditional giving. It is about being there when needed – and sometimes even when not needed. Friends are the one true constant in a world that changes, where short-term demands take over, where time pressures and deadlines are abundant.

Because when you look back to your younger days, you will not remember what was written on the blackboard. But you will always remember the vulnerable moments shared late at night, and the comforting hand that you felt on your shoulder.

Explore and Experiment

As my friend and I were parting ways after dinner, he asked me, “If there was just one thing you could tell 18-year-olds what would it be?” My quick answer was, “Explore and experiment.”

Life for the first time away from home offers many attractions and distractions. It is even more so if one enrolls in a university outside India. There are thus two big shifts: from home to hostel, from India to international. It is a change that cannot be planned for or even anticipated. New friends have to be made, new food and other habits have to be formed, new daily schedules have to be created. It is a world ready for an 18-year-old, irrespective of whether that 18-year-old is ready or not. With the benefit of hindsight, here is what I would tell my teenage self.

There’s much to learn and know. The academics in the classroom are just one aspect of life. They are the only constant. Beyond that, it is about the choices you make. While today’s 18-year-old can WhatsApp or Facetime parents daily, I would recommend both sides to give space to each other. Life is not about clinging on to the past and telling Mom what you ate for lunch and dinner. It is about creating some space to look ahead to the future. Just as I recommend contiguous time for writing and thinking through the constant inflow of messages on our always-on digital devices, 18-year-olds must also immerse themselves in their new world. The past has been about creating the foundation, the present and future is about constructing the building.

I discovered myself on the beautiful campus of IIT. I was an introvert who blossomed in the company of strangers who later became very good friends. I participated in cultural activities, went on treks, had long late-night chat sessions, and took long walks at midnight. I broke the rules I had grown up with – in a good way. More learning happened outside the classroom – and it was because I chose that path. I explored and experimented. I did not let my past life define my future. I tried many things for the first time. I kept within my boundaries, but without the rigidities. I shared stories with people who just a few weeks ago were complete strangers. I ate with people from backgrounds very different from mine. I spent hours in hostel rooms not my own talking about just about anything. I learnt the art of conversation watching and listening to others. I built relationships one person at a time.

When I look back, I should have perhaps done more of this. The weekends I chose to come home – could I have spent more time in the hostel? The hours I spent studying concepts which the mind failed to grasp – could I have learnt to play the guitar? Could I have acted in the hostel theatrical productions? Could I have learnt to play tennis or basketball? Could I have explored and experimented much more than I did? Because the four carefree years of undergrad will never come again. There is not a worry in the world, there is no fear of failure, there is no one to judge you, there is no need to be politically correct. There will be a time when all of that will matter, but not in those four years. So, if there’s one piece of advice to my teenage self I would give, it would be to do things you’ve never done before. Even things you thought you were not capable of. Explore, experiment – and expand.

Home in the World

At dinner with a friend, we started talking about our kids. Our 18-year-olds were headed to the US for undergrad. I mentioned to my friend about memories of my going to IIT-Bombay and hostel life, and the learnings during those four years. My friend, who had done his undergrad in the US, also had very good memories about campus life. As we ended our dinner, he said, “Rajesh, since you love writing so much, why not write a blog series on what advice would you give to 18-year-olds on the cusp of their undergrad life?” I liked the idea. As I thought more about it on the drive back home, I decided to frame it as advice that I would give my 18-year-old self, since most young people are not too excited about receiving life advice from an older parent or adult!

I entered IIT-Bombay at 17. I had never lived away from home. While there was some excitement about hostel life, there were also some anxieties about being away from parents. I had chosen IIT rather than go abroad for undergrad thanks to the sensible advice I had received from a friend who had gone abroad for his undergrad a year ago because IIT education was among the best in the world. So it was that in July 1984, on a drizzling Sunday afternoon, my parents dropped me to my hostel and soon, I was all alone. But not for long. Seniors were waiting to initiate the ragging ritual. Thus began hostel life. I had little or no time to myself between classes and getting introduced to seniors as a “freshie”. Word had spread that I could talk well and was quite sporting. (And could follow instructions on a Maggie packet!)

The first month passed by rapidly. New friends, new surroundings, new explorations. The sheltered life was a thing of the past. Here I was among peers, where the decision-making buck stopped with me. I would call home once a week for a quick update. Even though I went back most Friday nights or Saturday mornings, I was keen to return to my new world quickly. (Going home was about good mom-made food, sleeping, and getting my clothes washed.) The month became a semester, and then a year. My first year at IIT transformed me in many ways, and made me bolder, better, more independent. As it did for many of my friends. Each of us chose our own path through IIT – some concentrated more on academics, others blended studies with extracurricular activities. What we had was some starting advice from our parents to guide us, but eventually we were on our own. We had to fight our own battles, make our own decisions small and big, plan our own way forward. And in the process, we discovered ourselves.

The one advice I have given many parents through the years is to send their children away from home to a hostel for their undergrad. Let them grow up on their own, let them figure out their lives, let them become their best versions. One of the best ways to accelerate this process is to put them in surroundings different from home. As Abhishek and many others his age go out into the world in a process of learning and self-discovery, I asked myself, “What advice would I give him? Even better, what advice would I give my teenage self?”

I have written the Foreword in Anjali Malpani’s book, “Tries, Sighs, and Lullabies: The Untold Stories of Infertility.” About the book: “Tries, Sighs, and Lullabies: The Untold Stories of Infertility chronicles these and many other intimate and gripping real-life stories of loss, hope, endurance, and sacrifice. This remarkable compendium deftly describes the boundless desire and limitless struggle to build a family and the inexplicable joy that stems from becoming a parent, whether through reproductive technology, adoption, surrogacy, or natural means. Dr Anjali Malpani, a pioneer in the field of fertility treatment in India, successfully manages to capture the emotional, physical, and social dimensions of these complex stories and showcases the diverse facets of family, parenthood, and life at large. Through her empathetic and resonant writing, she provides an honest look at the traumas and triumphs involved in the journey of infertility. All in all, this thought-provoking and absolutely unputdownable collection of memories is sure to make you feel the soaring highs and the devastating lows of the characters which will stay with you forever.”

Here is an excerpt from my Foreword:

Abhishek is one of Anjali’s sixteen thousand babies. Born after five years of IVF treatment, he is truly Anjali’s baby. Bhavana and I had almost given up after four years – the emotional upheavals being as much as the medical challenges. But Anjali never gave up. She pushed us for one more try. I was at a friend’s place in Atlanta when Bhavana called to give the good news. For me, the words which came out were “Thank You, Anjali.”

Our journey with Anjali and Dr. Anirudha Mapani had begun in 2000. Bhavana and I had been married six-and-a-half years when we first visited their clinic. I had known Anirudha earlier through interactions I had with them in 1993-94 when I was trying to do an image processing software and needed to analyse ultrasound scans. That time, I went as an entrepreneur. This time, we went as patients.

Going to Infertility specialists is not something one can discuss easily with family and friends (however close they may be). It is a difficult decision to make and it means that both husband and wife have to accept reality and make a joint decision to seek advice and help. While the Web can be a helpful resource in understanding problems and possible solutions, there really is no alternative to spending time talking with doctors. Especially, ones who are as warm, friendly and knowledgeable as the Malpanis.

…On April 19, 2005, Abhishek came into the world as a six-and-a-half pound baby after a Caesarian. I could not believe it till I saw him and held him in my own hands. Five years after our first meeting with the Malpanis and eleven-and-a-half years into our marriage, Bhavana and I were parents.

For me, the lasting memories of that day are when both Anirudha and Anjali came (separately) to Breach Candy Hospital and held Abhishek in their hands. He was, after all, their creation. He was a triumph of their determination as much as he was our dream come true.

**

Anjali has been a friend for Bhavana and me through these years. She exemplifies the joyful spirit of life itself with her infectious joie de vivre. For her, every day is a blessing, every moment to be lived – for a mission. Bringing more babies in the world. Always patient, always ready to answer every question, always persevering, she goes the extra mile. For her, there is no “patient” – only mothers-in-waiting.

The book tells the stories of Latika, Nicole, Jyoti, Lily, Pooja, Durga, Yasmin, Shivani, Lakshmidevi, Kanta, Sushma, Sudha, Rakesh and Arjun, and countless others. Through these pages, you will live their ups and downs, ask their questions, and get Anjali’s answers. As someone who was once sitting across the table from Anjali, I could not help but relive our trials and tribulations as I read through these stories. There is something magical about the birth of a baby. Most are fortunate to experience it in the natural flow of life. Some need help. And for them, God has sent doctors like Anirudha and Anjali.

As I finished reading the book, all I could do was echo the same words from a moment long gone by but never forgotten, “Thank You, Anjali.”