13 fixes for 2013

EntrEprEnEurs lay out thEir wishlist. Can the government deliver? page 24

iSSUeS

tender ProCeSS

gSt

Urban aUtonomy

moderniSe regUlation

mediCal toUriSm

eaSe of doing bUSineSS

PrioritiSe mSmes

faSter imPlementation

Solar Power

enCoUrage fdi

Creating an eCoSyStem

edUCation

Urban renewal

Why it pays to have a diverse workforce Page 50

CASE STUDY aShok Soota

on crowdsourcing his company logo

page 47

SpECiAl REpoRT The smarTesT moves The hoTTesT Trends

and (AT lEAST)

16 reaSonS to be

oPtimiStiC page 38

a 9.9 media Publication | inc.com Facebook.com/Inc @incJanuary 2013 | `150 | volume 03 | Issue 12

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2413 Fixes for 2013In this special new year story, we get leading founder-CEOs to put out their wish list for a brighter future of the Indian economy. Is the government listening? as told to shreyasi singh

38 How and Where to Make Money in 2013 (and Beyond) Game-changing trends, hot markets, daring predictions, and 15 reasons to be cheerful about the year ahead. by adam bluestein

14InnovationToxic smoke from cooking stoves is one of the biggest health hazards in rural India. Could the Greenway Smart Stove be the way out? by sonal khetarpal

34 How I Did It His family wasn’t thrilled that Harsh Neotia didn’t enjoy work-ing for the family’s cement busi-ness. Instead, erecting houses and buildings caught his fancy. Happily, that interest has grown into a `1,200-crore business. as told to dhiman chattopadhyay

Cover design by Anil VKThis ediTion of inc. magazine is published under license from mansueto Ventures LLc, new York, new York. editorial items appearing on pages 4, 12-13, 20-22, 38-45 were all originally published in the United states edition of inc. magazine and are the copyright property of mansueto Ventures, LLc, which reserves all rights. copyright © 2009 and 2010 mansueto Ventures, LLc. The following are trademarks of mansueto Ventures, LLc: inc., inc. 500.

contents January 2013

2 | Inc. | JanUaRY 2013 PhoTogRaPh bY sUbhoJiT PaUL

05 Editor’s Letter

06 Behind the scenes Bikes, posters and lots of gato-rade. Companies that kept the Montra Desert 500 Ultra Cycling Rally a step ahead

09 Launch Deloitte’s manufacturing index bodes well for India A one-stop shop for your grocery needs A book that exposes “bullshit” The Inc. Data Bank: Why entrepreneurs fail at retirement A Skimmer’s Guide: The Org, by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan

13 Get Real By Jason FriedWant to be a better communicator? Start treating people more like computers.

06

stRateGy47 case stuDy Why Ashok Soota’s idea to crowdsource his new company’s logo paid off

50 ManaGInG Don’t get trapped in having an office full of people “just like you”. Diversity pays dividends at the workplace.

54 eLevatoR pItcH Can BANGS Fried Chicken bite its way to a `30 crore investment?

56 tHe Way I WoRk Corporate banker-turned-entreprenuer Samit Ghosh has made sure Ujjivan Financial Services, his microfinance company is not plagued by opaque communication.

60 I Wish I knew then... Neoteric Infomatique’s founder Paras H. Shah has learnt to keep his emotions in check when making professional decisions at work.

47

16 all things people By Hari TN CEOs must ensure they get feedback—it helps them stay real.

19 the Goods Workplace Ergonomics: office staples to help you keep the right posture Creating a personal webpage: easier than you think Presentation Magic: Make an impact with these tools A new eye saviour for your screen-tired gaze

Tech Trends: Networking tools for business trips

Guidebook, no. 12Do you waste half of your company’s time in meetings? Here’s a low-down on how to hold productive meetings, following Page 22.

contentsJanuary 2013

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JanUaRY 2013 | Inc. | 3

get to work want more insights from America’s fastest-growing job creators? Head to Inc.com for expanded features and additional Hire Power honourees by state, city, industry, and company size. Visit www.inc.com/hire-power.

Inc.com/HowIDIDIt

Ben LererCo-founder and CEO of Thrillist, on the prospect of selling his company

“I realised I was living backwards. I was always focused on this day in the future, when I really should have been focused more on enjoying the process of building the business.”

Inc.com/HowIDIDItDAn PorterCEO of game developer OMGPOP, on the decision to pivot

“We had been in back-to-back meetings debating this change. At some point, a developer said to me, ‘Why don’t we just build it and see?’”

Inc.com/PERSonAL-PRoDUctIVItY

want to Be Happier? Stop Doing these three thingsSometimes the route to happiness—both personal and professional—depends more on subtraction than on addition. Inc.com columnist Jeff Haden maintains that life is rosier once you cut out the following:

1. BlamingTaking responsibility when things go wrong instead of blaming others isn’t masochistic; it’s empowering. Doing so allows you to focus on being better or smarter next time. And when you get better or smarter, you also get happier.

2. BraggingGenuine relationships make you happier, but such relationships are formed only when you stop trying to impress other people and start being yourself.

3. whiningComplaining about your problems makes you feel worse, not better. If something is wrong, don’t waste time whining. Put that effort into making the situation better.

top Videos on Inc.com

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has helped me deconstruct (for the moment, at least) the greatest of those riddles—optimism. In my line of work, I routinely encounter varieties of opti-mism among entrepreneurs—from cautious to congenital (to borrow a phrase from my publisher, Anuradha Das Mathur) to irrational. Though this month’s cover story—an entrepreneur’s wish list of issues the Indian economy must fix urgently—emerged in response to anxieties about growth, ambitions being revised downwards, and a feeling that zeal can only take you thus far (even among the can-do entrepreneurial cadre), the responses we received undoubt-edly leaned on the entrepreneurial bias for optimism.

After all, having the courage to offer ideas for not just saving but renewing India’s cities, as Printo’s Manish Sharma and Saraplast’s Rajeev Kher have done can’t but be seen as leaps of faith. As author Teli Sharot says in her recent book The Science of Optimism (the review of which I read on Brain Pickings), “To make progress, we need to be able to imagine alternative realities, and not just any old reality but a better one; and we need to believe we can achieve it.” Who-does that better than entrepreneurs?

In keeping with the optimism theme, we have picked a special feature from our US edition. It spotlights the trends and ideas to profit from in 2013. We hope you will find it useful reading. As always, we look forward to hearing from you. And, wish you a great year ahead. May it bring you many new opportuni-ties, more sustainable profits and renewed determination!

An article I read a few days ago in Brain Pickings, possibly the finest source of curated content online,

editor’s letter

the optimism Fix

shreyasi [email protected]

MANAGING DIRECTOR: Dr Pramath raj SinhaPRINTER & PublIshER: anuraDha DaS mathur

EditorialMANAGING EDITOR: ShreyaSi SinghAssIsTANT EDITOR: Sonal KhetarPalfEATuRE wRITER: ira SwaSti

dEsignsR. CREATIvE DIRECTOR: jayan K narayanansR. ART DIRECTOR: anil VKAssOCIATE ART DIRECTORs: atul DeShmuKh & anil tsR. vIsuAlIsERs: manaV SachDeV & ShoKeen SaifivIsuAlIsER: nV BaijusR. DEsIGNERs: raj KiShore VermaShigil narayanan & SuneeSh KDEsIGNERs: charu DwiVeDi, PeterSon Pj miDhun mohan, hariDaS Balan & PraDeeP g nair

MarCoMAssOCIATE ART DIRECTOR: PraSanth ramaKriShnanDEsIGNER: rahul BaBu

stUdioChIEf PhOTOGRAPhER: SuBhojit PaulsR. PhOTOGRAPhER: jiten ganDhi

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salEs & MarkEtingsENIOR vICE PREsIDENT:KriShna Kumar (+91 98102 06034)busINEss DEvElOPMENT MANAGER: arjun Sawhney (+91 95822 20507)AssIsTANT REGIONAl MANAGER (sOuTh & wEsT):rajeSh KanDari (+91 98111 40424)

ProdUCtion & logistiCssR GENERAl MANAGER (OPERATIONs):ShiVShanKar m hiremathMANAGER OPERATIONs: raKeSh uPaDhyay AssT MANAGER (lOGIsTICs): Vijay menon ExECuTIvE lOGIsTICs: nileSh ShiraVaDeKarPRODuCTION ExECuTIvE: VilaS mhatre

logistiCsmP Singh, mohD. anSari

oFFiCE addrEssnine Dot nine meDiaworx PVt ltDa-262, Defence colony, new Delhi–110 024

for any querieS, PleaSe contact uS at [email protected]

PuBliSheD, PrinteD anD owneD Bynine Dot nine meDiaworx PriVate limiteD.PuBliSheD anD PrinteD on their Behalf By anuraDha DaS mathur. PuBliSheD at a-262, Defence colony, new Delhi–110 024PrinteD at tara art PrinterS PVt ltD.a-46-47, Sector-5, noiDa (u.P.) 201301EDITOR: anuraDha DaS mathur

JANUARY 2013 | iNC. | 5

Event concept and managementVelo Sportive was incorporated in June 2012 with a mission to promote cycling and cyclists. It is founded by a team of thirteen cycling enthusiasts, each of whom have flourishing day careers. The Desert 500 rally was the company’s first event and the company claims that the November rally was the largest cycling rally ever in India with 160+ cyclists regis-tered for it. Sponsored by TI cycles of India and Rajasthan Tourism, the company plans to hold many such events, at national and state level, by next year.

BEHIND THE SCENES Companies at the Heart of Everyday Life

6 | INC. | JANUARY 2013

ClothingWearing the right attire while cycling can help attain peak per-formance. The white jerseys with Desert 500 logos worn by par-ticipants were manufactured by Culture Clothing. Started by Vivek Seth in 1994, the ̀ 28-crore company offers a diverse range of fabrics from plain weave to spandex as well as special uniforms and customised apparel for the defence, medical and hospitality industries. The 700-people company also counts top brands such as Diesel, Armani, and DKNY among its clients.

Branding Branding can kill, or make an event. All the colourful col-laterals, signboards and posters for the Desert 500 were created and designed by Vibgyor, a Delhi-based market-ing company. Founded in 2002 by Ankur Kalra, the `25- crore company has a pan-India presence with offices in all major cities. The team of 75 employees has helped big names like Maruti, GSK, Maybelline, Pepsi, Samsung and many others create their brand story.

28.11.2012 10 A.M. Montra Desert 500 Ultra Cycling Rally

PHoToGRAPH BY TaRa B SaNoN REPoRTED BY SoNal KHETaRPal

launch News. Ideas. People.

The landscape for competitive manufacturing is in the midst of a massive power shift. Nations such as China, India and Brazil will surge and the manufacturing stalwarts—US, Germany and Japan—will be challenged to maintain their competitive edge, according to 2013 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness Index. The report was published jointly by Deloitte’s Global Manufacturing Industry group and the U.S. Council on Com-petitiveness on how CEOs view the competitiveness of the man-ufacturing industry in different countries around the world.

A global survey of more than 550 CEOs and senior leaders at

Eastwards BoundDeloitte report sets positive tone; says India and china next global manufacturing stalwarts

manufacturing companies around the world was conducted. Top executives across the globe ranked 38 nations on 10 parameters—talent-driven innovation; economic, trade, financial and tax system; cost and availability of labour and materials; supplier network; legal and regulatory system; physical infrastructure; energy cost and poli-cies; local market attractiveness; healthcare system; and government investments in manufacturing and innovation. The report found that access to talented workers is the top indicator of a country’s competitiveness—followed by a country’s trade, financial and tax system, and then the cost of labour and materials.

january 2013 | Inc. | 9

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The report ranks China as the most competitive manufacturing nation in the world both today, and five years from now. Brazil will jump from its current eighth slot to third and India will move up from fourth to second place in five years.

Survey participants cited India’s strong talent pool in the areas of science, technology and research, and lowest labour rates in the world as significant com-petitive advantages that would positively impact the country’s ability to conduct cost-efficient

GDP compared to 7-8 per cent in developed countries.

However, “India’s government is also enacting policy changes designed to improve the country’s competitiveness in areas execu-tives noted as disadvantages”, the report said. India’s National Man-ufacturing Policy (NMP), aims to add 100 million jobs and increase the share of manufacturing in India’s GDP from 15 per cent to 25 per cent by the year 2022.

This is precisely the reason why India is ranked over United States, five years hence. “National

2013 Global Manufacturing Competitiveness IndexCurrent competitiventess Competitiveness in five years

Rank Country nameIndex score

10=High 1=LowRank Country name

Index score10=High 1=Low

1 China 10 1 China 10

2 Germany 7.98 2 India 8.49

3 United States of America 7.84 3 Brazil 7.89

4 India 7.65 4 Germany 7.82

5 Republic of Korea 7.59 5 United States

of America 7.69

6 Taiwan 7.57 6 Republic of Korea 7.63

7 Canada 7.24 7 Taiwan 7.18

8 Brazil 7.13 8 Canada 6.99

9 Singapore 6.64 9 Singapore 6.64

10 Japan 6.60 10 Vietnam 6.50

In today’s fast-paced urban life, shopping for the very basic household items from various vendors, be it grocery from the

kiranawala, vegetables from the sabziwala or toiletries from the supermarket, consumes unnecessary time and effort. Sumat Cho-pra started EkStop in July 2012, an online grocery store, that prom-ises to put an end to all this. EkStop with its large inventory of essential items, personal care, health care and stationary products offers free home delivery, and does so within one to four hours of an order being placed. Also, shoppers have a variety of ways to place an order. They can dial in to EkStop’s helpline number, visit the website or just write out an e-mail. This choice is extended to several payment options too—cash on delivery, net banking, debit card or credit cards. An EkStop account also doubles up as a bud-get keeper, and advisor. The website provides customers with addi-tional features at no extra cost—order history for record, expense management tool to analyse the money spent, save on future orders and a better access to various promotions. Currently only operational in Mumbai, EkStop has plans to expand to Delhi and Bangalore by mid 2012. —Sonal Khetarpal

Say no to Grocery Woes

research and development, when compared to other countries. In spite of India’s better positioning in five years from now,

the report mentions that India loses out on grounds of legal and regulatory framework, power supply and supplier networks. India needs to reform its archaic labour laws that make dismissal of permanent labour a daunting task. To avoid this problem, manufacturers, particularly automobile companies, have been increasingly hiring contract labour, for half the rate of perma-nent staff. But, wage disparity and absence of benefits, like medi-cal benefits and pensions are causing discontent among contract labour. Also, logistics cost in India is high at 13-14 per cent of

Manufacturing Policy is more of a framework. What global CEOs say is that at least you have a policy, though you haven’t enacted that yet. US does not even have a policy”, said Tim Han-ley, DTTL Global Leader, Manufacturing.

Though American region will continue to show significant manufacturing prowess—with the United States, Brazil, Canada and Mexico all in the top 15 most competitive nations five years from now—many advantages are tilting toward Asia, which will have 10 of the top 15 most competitive nations within the decade.” notes Craig Giffi, vice chairman, Deloitte United States and co-author of this report.

newbie on the block

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Anyone can become a fast learner, says Tim Ferriss. The author of The 4-Hour Workweek and The 4-Hour Body, Ferriss spent the past year and a half researching ways to reduce the time it takes to master a new skill. The results are in his new book, The 4-Hour Chef.

Though The 4-Hour Chef is essentially a cookbook, Ferriss says it’s really about learning. “I chose the skill I found to be the most intimidating,” he says, “which was cooking.” In the 672-page book, Ferriss chronicles his learning process as he digs into the basics of food—as well as offbeat topics such as molecular gastronomy, outdoor survival and competitive eating. Ferriss interviewed hundreds of people, including Jeffrey Zurofsky, the co-founder of ’wichcraft restaurants in New York City, and Ed Cooke, a world memory champion. Among recipes for gazpacho and roast chicken, Ferriss lays out the guide to learning, which includes dividing things into manageable chunks and creating real consequences for not meeting goals. “I strongly believe if people read this and absorb it,” he says, “they’ll be able to cut the time to acquire any new skill by at least 50 per cent.” —Issie Lapowsky

close-up: Tim Ferriss

For his next act: dinner

Food for Thought Tim Ferriss serves up an unusual cookbook—with a side of learning.

Decoding Bullshit Why stock markets are not wealth generators, and regulations don’t lead to better business practices

Q: What are the biggest “bullshit” lines that entrepreneurs should be aware of? A: Bullshit 1: Regulation secures better business practicesThat is laughably naïve. Regulation has two purposes: one, get the business on the radar wrapped in some morally righteous hoopla so that governments can evaluate the extortion potential of every business. Second, set up rules impossible to follow so that businesses can be forced to pay every time they are breached. Every businessman big or small, learns this very quickly. To survive in India, the trick is to have a very good sense of the “political cost” of doing a business. If you don’t know how to man-age your regulatory environment and risk, you will be bankrupt pretty quickly.Bullshit 2: Stock markets are wealth generators

That is big-ticket “bullshit”. Stock markets are an elaborate devise contrived by a clutch of industrialists, brokers and financial market intermediaries in order to defraud victims euphemistically called “small investors” into voluntarily transferring their wealth to those who run the market. The entire history of the stock market is a long history of institu-tionalised fraud and the fraud continues today. Bullshit 3: Companies are here to deliver value to customersCompanies are here to make money for their owners, that includes all enterprises whether its hospitals or banks or edu-cational institutions. Hospitals are certainly not here to

restore your health, high-end brands are not here to provide you with a superior product, and bankers are not here to help budding entrepreneurs fulfill their dreams. If you can see this, you will change both your behaviour pattern and your expectation matrix. Indeed, you could conceivably also reposition your product to take advantage of the natural propensity of many consumers to swallow this “bullshit”.

Q: Why should an entrepreneur read your Bullshit Quotient?a: To make any money at all, you have to understand where the opportunities are, and for that you have to understand how things work. Bullshit Quotient attempts to explain how India works to Indians. Most Indians know most of this in bits and pieces. Bullshit Quotient sets out to connect the dots and give you a complete picture. I would think that someone who has connected the dots will change the way he runs his business.

In his new book, Bullshit Quotient: Decoding India’s corporate, social and legal fineprint, corpo-rate lawyer Ranjeev Dubey strips off some of the hypocrisy around Indian laws and procedures, and attempts to show things for what they really are. He hopes his exposé of how things actually work in India will help entrepreneurs and anybody else who needs to navigate this maze. In the process, he also advises business owners to drop some of the “bullshit” they, in turn, propagate as well. —Sonal Khetarpal Ranjeev c. Dubey

author, Bullshit Quotient

january 2013 | Inc. | 11

The book: The Org: The Under-lying Logic of the Office, by Ray Fisman and Tim Sullivan.

The big idea: Organisations work the way they do for a reason. Accepted signifiers of office dysfunction, such as endless meetings and rigid policies, are often the result of necessary tradeoffs between such factors as innovation and coordination. Understanding those tradeoffs can help lead-ers make decisions as their companies scale.

The backstory: Fisman is a professor of social enterprise at Columbia Business School. His last book, Economic Gangsters, was about the corruption that prevents economic aid from reaching the world’s poor.

If you read nothing else: Chap-ter Five wipes some of the lus-ter from creative types while polishing the reputations of the much-maligned suits who oversee them. Among other cases, it cites a study of video-game companies that attribute far more revenue to the work of project managers than design-ers. Chapter Six reassures leaders that their meeting-packed schedules are good for the company, because that’s where CEOs gather information and cut through the spin that managers embed in one-on-one conversations and reports.

Rigour rating: 8 (1=Who Moved My Cheese?; 10=Good to Great). The Org effortlessly blends the history of management theory with current best practices. Though the authors cite mostly secondary sources, they dis-play a comprehensive grasp of academic literature and the popular business press. —Leigh Buchanan

—Compiled by Maeghan Ouimet

a skimmer’s

guide to the latest business

books

12 | Inc. | january 2013

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inc. data bank What retirement?Entrepreneurs are great at starting things. Planning for the end? Not so much. With most of their savings invested in their companies, many small-business owners are worried about having enough to retire. Some are being forced to postpone retirement because of the economy. But many others say they aren’t interested in retiring soon—or ever.

having enough money to retire is a big concern for entrepreneurs.

Since the recession, many entrepreneurs have dramatically pushed back their retirement plans.

PortIon of the PoPulatIon that Plans to retIre at 65 or older

“Counting on your company exposes your retirement to a lot of business risks when you may be least willing or least able to take them.”nEvIn aDamS CO-DIRECTOR OF EBRI CENTER FOR RESEARCH ON RETIREMENT INCOME

67% of sMall-busIness owners worry they won’t be able to put enough money away for retirement.

By contrast, 38% of aMerICans say they aren’t confident they will have enough income to last through their retirement years.

nearly one-thIrd of small-business owners say they will retire after age 70.

56% of sMall-busIness owners say most of their retirement nest eggs are tied to their companies.

Other popular ways business owners plan to pay for retirement:

76% will use savings and investments in stocks, bonds and mutual funds

41% will use real estate investments

76% will use Social Security

MOST AMERICANSSMAll-BUSINESS OwNERS

50%

2005 2010

SOURCE: gAllUP

70%

61%

69%

41%

56%

Entrepreneurs say their companies often account for a big chunk of their retirement funds.

SOURCES: gAllUP; PEw RESEARCH CENTER SOURCE: THE gUARDIAN lIFE SMAll BUSINESS RESEARCH INSTITUTE

SOURCE: THE WaLL STrEET JOUrnaL/VISTAgE INTERNATIONAl

however, for many entrepreneurs, the idea of quitting isn’t desirable, no matter how much they have saved.

51% would continue working full or part time in their business

If money were no object:

28% would retire completely

18% would start another businessSOURCE: gAllUP

SOURCE: THE gUARDIAN lIFE SMAll BUSINESS RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Get Real BY Jason FRiedJason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software company. He is a man, not a machine.

Last month, I mentioned that I’ve been taking a class in Ruby on Rails, a programming framework that powers tens of thousands of websites worldwide. Why go back to school? A couple of reasons. First, I want to be a better co-worker. I’m a designer, but I rely on programmers to bring my ideas to life. By learning to code myself, I think I can make things easier for all of us. Similarly, I want to be able to build things on my own, with-out having to bother a programmer.

I have no doubt that I’ll be able to accomplish both, once I get better at Ruby. But the course has already changed me in ways I never would have expected: Learning to program a computer is teaching me how to be a better communicator. I didn’t see that coming.

We think of computers as smart and powerful machines. But your goldfish is smarter. Unlike a goldfish, a computer can’t really do anything without you telling it exactly what you want it to do. A computer doesn’t have a mind of its own—it needs someone else’s to function.

Programming requires you to break things down to their abso-lute essence before building them back up again. For example, if you wanted a computer to make a sandwich for you, first you’d have to explain what a sandwich is (and maybe what it isn’t), what ingredients go into a sandwich (and maybe which ones don’t), how to assemble it, and every other little sandwich-related thing. When programming a computer, you can’t assume a whole lot. It knows next to nothing.

Learning to program is a humbling experience. It forces you to see how well you actually understand things in the real world. Do I really know sandwiches well enough to explain them to someone (or, in the case of a computer, something) who has never heard of them? Yeah, probably. But what about more com-plicated things?

Zeros and ones Here’s one way to be a better communicator: start treating people more like computers

Once you start thinking this way, you realize how much you assume. It’s easy to convince yourself you know something until you have to explain it to someone else. Then the truth comes out.

Learning how to program has taught me that I need to explain things more clearly—and not only to machines. I used to assume a lot and rush through things. But now, when I describe something new to someone, I find myself slowing down, breaking the idea down in my mind and explaining it piece by piece. I’d rather be asked to speed up than risk going too fast and skipping over the fundamentals that really matter.

For example, just yesterday, I was telling someone where I lived in Chicago. I said “Wicker Park,” and I figured he knew where that was. He was polite, so he didn’t stop me, but I could tell by his face that Wicker Park didn’t mean anything to him. So I stepped back, slowed down, and explained where Wicker Park was in relation to somewhere else he knew in Chicago. Now it made sense. The example may seem trivial, but if I wasn’t learning to program, I doubt I would have had the self-awareness to slow down.

I can see this helping me all over the place. Let’s say I’m trying to explain Basecamp, our project-management soft-ware, to a new customer. It’s so easy to assume this person knows what project management is. But maybe she doesn’t. Or maybe she has a different understanding of what project management means. Who knows? But I do know that if I assume nothing—ironically, if I approach her not as a human being but as a computer—I’ll have a better shot at making a clear and deep connection. And in business, nothing matters more than that.

Follow Jason Fried on Twitter: @jasonfried.

January 2013 | INC. | 13illustration by laurent cilluffo

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All Things PeoPleBY hARi TnHari TN is the global head of human resources at Amba Research, a Bangalore-based investment research outsourcing firm.

It’s often said that a CEO is the loneliest person in any organisation. Natural forces at the workplace often tend to isolate her from reality. Of course, the reasons are not very hard to fathom—few people dare to tell her the unadulter-ated version of the truth, and even fewer are their natural self in her presence. Almost every-one is posing, and almost everyone would like to sense which side she is leaning towards in any situation before volunteering to share their thoughts. There are very few people she can speak to openly in her organisation, and seek advice or feedback from. Therefore, it’s only natural for a CEO to be unaware of her own fail-ings. Worryingly, these forces are extremely strong and a good CEO needs to fight to prevent her eventual isolation. Doing this involves taking some tough calls—valuing the bearers of bad news, avoiding those who say what they think you wish to hear, listening to unpleasant things about yourself, taking off all your masks to make yourself vulnerable, and really implement some fundamental per-sonal changes. And all of these rest on get-ting regular, candid and insightful feedback from employees.

How to get started: But, even if a CEO wants to go ahead and get feedback, how should one go about it? What do you need to do to receive honest feedback, and build a work culture that encourages this repeat-edly? Well, it’s a matter of both style as well as specific actions. Firstly, a CEO must communicate both through her body lan-guage and verbal responses that she welcomes both positive and negative feed-back. Otherwise, most employees and team members end up saying what you want to hear. For obvious reasons, they become bearers of “good news”. Instead, you need to encourage people to bring “bad news” too. If not, over a period of time, CEOs become

surrounded by a clique, which eventually leads to their completely isolation from reality. Just the right body language when receiving feedback isn’t sufficient though. On getting feedback, it’s important to act on it, and go back to the person who pro-vided it to see whether he or she sees a tan-gible difference. It’s also useful to share the feedback received with the rest of your team because nothing demonstrates seri-ousness of purpose, and the willingness and courage to receive and act on it more. Actually, this is the most important part of the feedback loop. It demonstrates you are willing to be vulnerable. Ironically, the act of becoming vulnerable actually strength-ens your acceptance as a leader.

The feedback loop Ceos are often isolated from reality at the workplace. smart leaders then must do a lot of listening to keep in touch

16 | INC. | JANUARY 2013 illUstRAtioN bY MANAV sACHDEV

Why this isn’t easy to do: It’s useful to understand the underlying reasons why feedback isn’t usually sought. Often, it’s because when the roles of feedback reverse, many CEOs think—how can we seek feed-back from a reportee? Does, or can this undermine my authority and ability to take hard decisions? Sometimes, of course, we just don’t want feedback because of the fear of receiving negative feedback. This becomes even trickier when the feedback is on an aspect that is fundamental to one’s personal nature. There is also a notion that because a CEO’s job is to hold people accountable and take tough decisions, junior colleagues and other team members will always view them negatively. The view is that a biased feedback is hardly useful.

But, all these fears are completely mis-placed. Strong bosses recognise this quickly; weaker ones might take longer. For one, good leaders can manage dichotomy—they can provide difficult feedback to their col-leagues in the morning but follow it up the same evening with a friendly chat over a cup of coffee. Average leaders cannot man-age this switch—they find it difficult to iso-late issues and deal with two totally different issues with equally different approaches. Yet, the ability to switch styles based on the issue at hand is one of the clearest indicators of leadership, maturity and sophistication.

More importantly, feedback is critical because people prefer leaders who try to make fundamental changes over someone who avoids feedback at the cost of staying blind to their flaws. Leaders who are open and make a serious attempt at trying to change are respected. The paradox is why do they then not recognise this and seek feedback? The simple answer is that average leaders feel very threatened by the imagined pain of making the change, and a possibility of failing to make the change. It is the fear of failure and/or adverse feedback, common in weak leaders, that comes in the way of taking feedback. From several years of implementing feedback processes, I’ve found this is a big misconception. Your team members aren’t really out to “screw you”. In my experience, feedback on average is often balanced and mirrors reality.

Of course, there might be a disgruntled individual, or two, who responds with per-sonal bias. But, usually, this is rare. And, good leaders don’t suffer from the anxiety of this happening. For other CEOS who do, an executive coach from outside her company would be helpful in overcoming those fears. It would help if a CEO is assigned a coach by the Board, for example. The HR head could also play the role of a coach, but a professional coach or a Board member would be far more effective.

Once over the hesitation to do so, who should you seek feedback from? Typically, key stakeholders—Board members, direct reports, key customers and industry bodies (if the role involves extensive external inter-actions)—are a good place to begin with. Do make sure that feedback is both formal and informal. Formal feedback is best gath-ered by a professional and independent third party. Yes, this costs money but it is very effective. If HR (or any other internal function) is tasked with gathering the feed-back, then the feedback is likely to be sugar-coated. That is because very few employees believe that this kind of feedback will be kept confidential, and hence don’t take the risk of being candid.

Why it is so important for business: A recent research conducted by IBM has shown that a CEO impacts the organisa-tion’s climate (culture) to the tune of 80 per cent. In turn, an organisation’s climate can swing business results to the extent of 30 per cent. This may be intuitive to some but not so obvious to others. If intuition does not work, at least this research proves that a CEO’s skills and style (whether it is about people, decision-making or understanding

strategic issues) play a very important role in driving business results. Improvement to the CEO’s skills and style therefore becomes a business need. Without feedback, she may be inadvertently doing something dysfunc-tional that isn’t good for business—either delegating too much, being too hands-on, neglecting the big picture or overemphasis-ing the long-term vision to the detriment of execution. CEOs need to be aware of the impact of their actions and opinions. I’ve been amazed to see how decisions are sometimes made in executive team meet-ings. The decisions might seem consensual but they have been built on limited debate, and often even senior team members air views that they guess the CEO is anyway leaning towards. Ideally, a CEO’s involve-ment in shaping decisions must be in care-ful balance—neither excessive nor remote. A good CEO needs to perfect the art of bal-ancing delegation versus a hands-on approach based on the situation.

Interestingly, one of the most researched cases in history on how a leader participates in decision making is probably the contrasting styles President John F Kennedy adopted in two of the most serious crises during his presidency, namely, the Bay of Pigs crisis and the Cuban Missile crisis. While the former ended in total disaster, the latter was a huge success. Kennedy had learnt from his failure. Some of the simple changes he made in the second crisis were to deliber-ately stay away from the initial discus-sions, asking for arguments for all the options and having people play the role of a devil’s advocate.

it is the fear of failure among weak leaders that comes in the way of taking feedback. But your team members aren’t really out to “screw you”. Feedback on average is balanced and mirrors reality.

ALL THINGS PEOPLE

JANUARY 2013 | INC. | 17

Contact Hari TN at [email protected].

Your Business Toolbox The Goods

MaTias iRizeR NoTebook sTaNd This ultra-slim, height-adjustable notebook stand helps prevent neck and wrist pain, so common among laptop users. With four height and angle variations, it can be used at home, in the office or even while travelling. The sleek, interlocking design fits virtually any laptop. Designed to hold the weight of a laptop, the iRizer makes a solid stand for an iPad as well. Stacked together, the iRizer’s two slim acrylic plates are only 14mm thick and can easily fit into a notebook bag. It comes in a box with a MiniRizer stand for small gad-gets, carrying sleeves and an instruction card. cost: `3470

VeRbaTiM WiReless deskTop eRGo opTical MouseThis Wireless Desktop Optical Mouse features a modern design with a convenient thumb support. Its smooth, rubberised grip gives more con-trol for easier navigation. Available with a nano receiver, the mouse can be used wirelessly with 2.4 GHz reliability and performance. The nano receiver is small enough to plug in and left connected which makes it easier to use while travelling. Available in black, red and blue. cost: `2784

MicRosofT NaTuRal eRGoNoMic keyboaRd 4000This ergonomic keyboard is designed to provide a natural angle to the hand and wrist. An integrated palm rest with a plush cushioned surface provides that extra support. The keyboard, with dimensions of 503 x 262 x 82.8 mm, has 107 keys with several hot keys for Windows and internet shortcuts. A zoom slider, located in its centre, can be used to zoom in and out of documents and webpages. The minimum system requirements to install this keyboard are a computer with a USB port, Windows or Mac OS, CD-ROM drive and 60 MB of hard disk space. It comes with a three year limited warranty, and is available in black and grey. cost: `3482 TRaNsVal oRTho

back buddy sTaNdaRd Back Buddy is an anatomically designed backrest that helps the body to maintain its proper angle—little above 90 degrees—thus reducing the stress on the spine and lower back. Made from a special energy-absorbing foam, it includes an in-built tempered wire spring frame and an anatomically designed cushion, which provides pos-tural correction by reproducing the curve of the lower back. Easily portable and adjustable with the help of heavy-duty elastic and buckle, it can be fitted on to any chair, sofa or car seat. Back Buddy has undergone extensive trial with the Indian Air Force, and is endorsed by them. cost: `2580

Workplace ergonomics posture right with these office staplesMore often than not, a good posture is the first thing to be ignored in the turbulence of deadlines and tasks at a busy workplace. Most people only notice something’s wrong when their victimised joints threaten to give in. But you can avoid the pain of creaky joints and the subsequent expensive treatments by making your posture a priority. Here’s a list of office essentials—all ergonomically designed—to keep your employees’ posture perfect. —Sonal Khetarpal

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The Goods Products + Services

your online bio, supercharged create a personal webpagechances are good that your bio on the company website includes little more than a head-shot, title and career history. A new breed of service lets you create personal webpages that encompass your entire online life. Then you can include the link in your e-mail signature. Here are three options to suit different needs. —Jennifer Alsever

I run a training and support company for fast-growing soft-ware companies. We have 105 employees across the United States, Australia, Malaysia, and Europe, so conducting employee reviews isn’t easy. Last January, we started using a web-based system called Small Improve-ments to help manage the task.

Our employees log on to the Small Improvements dashboard each month (or each week for new employees) to complete self-evaluations containing questions created by managers. Employees can view past reviews and objectives and submit their evaluations right on the dashboard. Managers can read evaluations and past objectives, submit perfor-mance reviews, and create a new set of goals. Another great feature? Throughout the year, employees can log on to Small Improvements to praise co-workers for a job well done. Our management team takes that feedback into consideration during the review process.

We pay $5 a month per employee for our subscription. It has made a big difference, especially for some of our quiet achievers, who are more humble in their self-evaluations. now, we’re also much better at appraising employees on the basis of their performance throughout the year. —As told to Matthew Wong

MUST-HAvES

how i use small improvements to review employees

Have you tried a new product or service that helps you run your business? Head to www.inc.com/thegoods and tell us about it.

rob castanedafounder and ceo customware palo alto, california

The look: COLLAGERebelMouseThis service lets you create a Pinterest-style front page for your social-media posts. Link RSS feeds and social-media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter (sorry, no LinkedIn). After a few minutes, a page pops up displaying your posts, which are updated in real time, along with your bio and photo from Twitter. cost: Free for a basic account, then starting at $3 a month for premium features

The look: PHOTO DRIvEnabouT.Me A simpler option, About.me lets you design a one-page site with a photo, bio and buttons that link to your accounts on Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and other social networks. You can upload a photo or choose from 21 stock images of scenic locales. You can also customise colours and fonts. Then, you can see how many people visit, where they come from, and what they click on. cost: Free

The look: InFOGRAPHICVizify vizify aggregates information from your social-media accounts, including posts, photos and your career history. Then, it creates a homepage filled with bub-bles that present the infor-mation in infographic form (click on a bubble for more information). You can change the colour scheme, add your own background photo, or choose from a gallery of images. You can also track site traffic. cost: Free

RebelMouse

vizify

about.Me

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TaRGus ulTRalife WiReless Mouse aNd pReseNTeR Use this two-in-one device as a wireless mouse for controlling a cursor. Then, twist the top portion to reveal presentation controls, including buttons for paging up and down and switching to a blank screen. The 5.4-ounce Ultralife, which works with PCs and Macs, has at 1,200-dots-per-inch laser sensor for pre-cise cursor control and works from up to 30 feet away in presenta-tion mode. cost: $89.99

JabRa soleMaTe speakeRIf your slide show includes sound, laptop speakers won’t do. Turn up the volume with this rugged porta-ble speaker, which con-nects wirelessly with any Bluetooth device, including laptops, tab-lets, and smartphones. The brick-size, 1.3-pound Solemate, which comes in black or white, has three front speakers and an inte-grated subwoofer for deep bass. The battery lasts eight hours fully charged. cost: $200

epsoN poWeRliTe 1761W WXGa 3lcd pRoJecToR Make cinemaworthy presentations with this portable, 3.7-pound LCD projector, which boasts 2,600 lumens of brightness and 720p resolution, comparable to that of a high-defini-tion television. The short-throw projector sits right next to a screen, making it ideal for a variety of rooms. You can present wire-lessly from a laptop, iPhone, iPad, or Android device over a Wi-Fi network using Epson’s iProjection app. cost: $700

slideshaRk app This app lets you view and present Power-Point slide shows using your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, without compromising anima-tions and graphics. You can store presentations in an online SlideShark account and connect your tablet or smart-phone to a projector to display presentations. You can also beam slide shows to mobile devices in the audience and track views. cost: Free for 100MB of stor-age, then starting at $49 a year for 600MB of storage

The World is your stage killer tools for making presentations on the goyour conference room may be outfitted for making top-notch presentations, but how about your briefcase? These days, neither customers nor investors have patience for subpar slide shows. Here are four tools that will help you make stellar presentations anywhere you go. —Adam Baer

The Goods Business Travel

tech trends john brandon Networking on the Road social tools for business trips

business trips can be great networking opportunities. But when I travel for work, I wind up spending most of my downtime alone. Recently, I tested two new services, Startup Stay and Here on Biz, created to help road warriors net-work more effectively—and maybe even snag a free place to crash.

Startup Stay is an online community that lets entrepreneurs connect with other company owners willing to host them on business trips. Launched in June, the site has 5,000 members in hun-dreds of cities worldwide, including New York and Barcelona. Before a recent trip to the Bay Area, I registered for the free service and did a search for San Fran-cisco. Up popped thumbnail photos of 175 local entrepreneurs, along with links to their LinkedIn profiles, references and lodging details. I sent requests to 25 members and, after a day, Anthony Kru-meich, co-creator of the event-planning app Bloodhound, offered me a spot on his futon.

I was a bit apprehensive as I drove from the San Francisco airport to my host’s gated apartment complex in the trendy SoMa district. My fears dissipated when I hit the buzzer and my smiling host met me at the door. Krumeich gave me a tour of the apartment, which doubles as the headquar-ters for his 11-person start-up, and we chatted for a couple of hours. When he showed me to my bed—a futon in the cor-ner of the communal space—I realised it wasn’t large enough for my 6-foot-2 frame and checked in to a hotel. The next morn-ing, however, I returned to meet Kru-meich’s staff and spend the day with him at a tech conference.

During the same trip, I also tried Here on Biz, a free app for iPhones and iPads that lets you chat with nearby LinkedIn members, including those in your network. The app, which launched this summer, has about 6,000 members. I fired it up on my iPad at the Minneapolis

airport, and a list of 30 professionals appeared. Because no one was in the immediate vicinity, the app widened the search radius to include the entire city. I sent connection requests to about 15 people. When I landed in San Francisco,

I was disappointed to see no one had accepted. The next day, I opened the app at the conference and sent requests to 30 people, but, once again, no one accepted. Back home, I finally chatted with one Here on Biz member—the founder of a marketing firm in Eagan, Minnesota.

Overall, I was disappointed with Here on Biz, but, like many social networks, it could prove useful as more people sign up. On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by my Startup Stay experience. If you’re like me, you might not love the accommodations, but you could make a valuable business contact.

“ My fears dissipated when i hit the buzzer and my smiling host met me at the door.”

With more people spending most of their time staring at computer monitors or digital screens, it is the eyes that are the worst victims. With cases of Computer vision Syndrome only slated to rise, GUnnAR Optiks, recently launched its range of computer eyewear in India.

With a trademarked secret recipe called i-AMP lens technology, GUnnAR Optiks claims to protect the eyes from excessive glare from digital screens, enhance the contrast for better viewing, therefore exorcising the visual demons of staring at the digital screen at short distance for too long. GUnnAR Optiks has a partnership programme with Carl Zeiss vision for custom-made prescription eyewear for people who have mildly impaired vision and have to wear lenses or spectacles.

Apart from a wide array of eyewear products GUnnAR Optiks offers, the ones that make sense for PC users and gamers is its Professional and Gaming range, respectively. Even though we didn’t test them for the purpose of a review, we have been using SteelSeries (SS) Scope amber-tinted gaming eyewear and Wi-Five Crystalline computer eyewear for over a month. Both glasses are quite light and sit close to the eye, reducing incoming glare and relaxing the eye, especially the SS Scope amber-tinting gaming eyewear.

These specialty eyewear sell at a premium—both the glasses mentioned above cost `5,500 each. While this price seems to be expensive, it’s relatively cheaper compared to US prices. —www.thinkdigit.com

EYE RELIEF

handle tired eyes the glassy way

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12

Great leaders share a common trait—a respect for time. At the workplace, there are several competing demands on a CEO’s time. Not surprisingly, often, a long line of meetings take up the lion’s share. But, smart managers carefully weigh the costs of holding meetings. A necessary evil as they might be, meetings also interrupt the flow of work. Meetings that aren’t called for the right reasons, or don’t have an objective laid out, stand the risk of turning into energy draining mind-numbing babble sessions that serve little purpose. According to Mike Myatt, chief strategy officer, N2growth, a leadership development & advisory firm, 80 per cent of meetings possibly never needed to take place.

David Allen, productivity consultant and author of Getting Things Done, says one of the greatest blocks to organisational productivity is the lack of decision by a senior person about the necessity of a meeting and with whom to move an important issue forward. “You’ve got to run a tight ship to produce real results,” advises K. Jayshankar, managing director, Empowered Learning Systems.

Read on to learn how to hold meetings that aren’t tagged as the biggest time wasters in your company. —Charu Bahri

Hold Productive Meetings

Everything you need to know to run your business in today’s economy

: : : : : : : : : : : A monthly guide to policies, procedures And prActices

Vol. 03 No. 12 | inc. guidebook

hold productive meetings : : : : : : : : : : : : :12

Establish clear objectives: Meetings are held to accomplish tasks such as find-ing solutions to problems, defining strategies, and so on. This can only happen if clear reasons and objectives are spelt out ahead of the meeting. For instance, meetings to share updates waste valuable office time. Circulate news through an e-mail instead. “Meet-ings held to build consensus because people get upset if they aren’t consulted prior to decision-making aren’t justifi-able either,” adds Jayshankar.

Create a culture where meetings are an exception, not the rule. After set-ting the deliverables for a meeting, pre-circulate the agenda and back-ground reading material, and empha-sise that invitees come prepared. “An agenda that is too long is a no-no,” cautions Gaurav Lahiri, managing director, Hay Group India. Propose that agenda items concerning only a few attendees be covered via e-mail or in a separate smaller meeting.

Schedule well: Choose an appropriate time for the meeting, when attendees are most productive and the least has-sled with other matters. Take your cue from the online meeting scheduling service When is Good. It has analysed over 1,00,000 responses to 34,000 events on its platform and found that “Tuesday, 3pm” is the most “available” meeting slot.

A good practice is to check the attendees’ availability before sending out the final invite. State the meeting start and end time clearly on invita-tions, keeping the duration as short as is possible, and stick to these timings even if some attendees show up late. In fact, fining late-comers can help change future behaviour.

Invite right: Ken Segall is the person behind the ‘i’ in iMac and a key mem-ber of Steve Jobs’ creative team for over a decade. In Meetings Are A Skill You Can Master, And Steve Jobs Taught Me How, he describes how Jobs would ask you to leave a meeting if you had noth-ing to contribute. At Apple, there’s no such thing as mercy invitations for meetings. Meeting groups are kept small and consist of the smartest brains whose opinions really matter and who can contribute to resolving the issue at hand. The premise is that smaller

groups are more focused and moti-vated. Also, smarter people work faster and better, and are less likely to detract from the issue at hand. Essentially, Jobs believed that increasing the number of attendees is akin to inviting complexity to take a seat at the table.

Only shareholder’s meetings, organ-isational (department, division, or company wide) gatherings and special events justify a huge number of partici-pants. Ideally, restrict attendance to just 10 people.

Meet wiselySteer well: Poorly facilitated meetings seldom yield desired results. A leader’s role in a meeting is absolutely vital—“not to dictate pre-conceived solutions to the gathering but to set the tone and steer the proceedings towards a defini-

tive decision,” advises Jayshankar.George David Kieffer, author of The

Strategy of Meetings, describes the skill to manage a meeting as perhaps the most critical asset in any career. Yet, most managers have never been trained to develop ideas, to motivate people and to move people and ideas to positive action. Since best outcomes come from non-intimidating, profes-sional settings, start with a few light moments to help people establish a rapport. Asking “Why are we here?” is a good way to get down to business. Then, steer the proceedings towards resolving the agenda items. “Make it a point to hear everyone’s opinions and address their concerns. A special effort can help draw out shy people. Prepare well for this,” says Meeta Wasan, founder director of Doon Consulting, a management consultancy. In order to keep the discussion tightly focused on the agenda, the leader will strictly keep to the time allotted for each topic. If need be, use phrases like “Let’s move on” or “My next topic is...” to change the subject and politely discourage discus-sions about irrelevant side issues. Build consensus: Strong leaders seek the right outcome regardless of their own gut feeling and in spite of dissenting opinions. “For this, a leader must understand the audience and find common ground between differing ideas that must converge,” says Jayshan-kar. Throwing in some banter and keeping the conversation light helps build consensus over sensitive issues.

Developing skills to make a perma-nent impression on people is useful. Author Helio Fred Garcia, executive director of the Logos Institute for Crisis Management and Executive Leader-

set it uP well

Create an office culture where meetings are an exception, not the rule.

inc. guidebook | Vol. 03 No. 12

ship, cites emotion as the key to moving hearts and minds in a meeting. Use anecdotes to establish an emotional connection with your audience. “It also really helps to address each member on a personal level at some point during the meeting,” adds Wasan. And, listen closely to others’ opinions to get them to listen to you.

Recap and document: A good practice is to make someone quickly recap the action steps at the end of a meeting. Or, ask each person to state the action items that they are responsible for. This exer-cise helps show up actionables that have been missed and breeds a sense of accountability. For the best outcomes, Jayshankar proposes writing down the minutes as “a clear call to action, not as

“he said, she said” documentation that goes nowhere.” He recommends that minutes list each subject discussed, the decision taken, the principal person made responsible for executing that action and the timeline for that to hap-pen. Minutes are best circulated within 24 hours of the meeting.

Assess and evaluateCompanies that have great meet-ings work on improving the way they are conducted. For instance, every new employee at Intel is put through a course on effective meetings. According to Michael Fors, corporate training man-ager at Intel University, Intel’s training programme also talks a lot about meet-ing discipline. Conference rooms in Intel offices bear a poster on the wall to

nudge attendees to meet right. It says: Do you know the purpose of this meet-ing? Do you have an agenda? Do you know your role? In this context, Lahiri proposes giving some importance to norms of conduct during meetings. “Create a document that informs employees what must always be done and what must never be done during meetings.” Critical post-meeting analy-ses of a few important gatherings can help as well. Determine what went right, what misfired, whether the right people were in attendance and if they came pre-pared and whether the deliverables were met. Use the insights so gathered to improve future meetings. Then, you can look forward to creative exchanges of ideas that contribute to the all-round growth of your employees.

Notes:

hold productive meetings : : : : : : : : : : : : :12

resourcesLearn more from Al Pittampalli’s Read This Before Our Next Meeting, www.amazon.com/read-this-Before-Meeting-ebook/dp/B0057Zer34/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Glean insights from Meetings Are A Skill You Can Master, And Steve Jobs Taught Me How by Ken Segall, http://www.fastcodesign.com/1669936/meetings-are-a-skill-you-can-master-and-steve-jobs-taught-me-how

Read about what you shouldn’t say in a meeting, http://www.happiness-proj-ect.com/happiness_project/2008/04/this-wednesda-2/

A few tips for scheduling meetings:

schedule breaks: When you plan marathon all-day meetings, schedule 10 minute breaks for people to stretch their legs and check their e-mail and phones. Otherwise, attendees get distracted by thoughts about messages piling up for a response.

Plan ahead: Avoid impromptu meetings unless it’s urgent. Then, wrap things up in 10 minutes or less. Essentially, subjects that are worth addressing are worth planning for.

establish conditions: Establish rules for cancelling conditional meet-ings, such as if only a certain number of people can attend or if key contrib-utors can’t be in attendance etc.

Build in travel time: Build in a few minutes of travel time to reduce stress. For instance, when you sched-ule an hour long meeting, inform invitees that they have five minutes to reach the venue and settle down. This is especially useful if you work in a large organisation occupying an entire building.

tiPs to Hold Productive And MeMorABle MeetingsA few tips to get more value from your meetings:

location: Don’t hold meetings off-site unless it’s absolutely necessary. Off-site meetings are more expensive to organise and to attend. Instead, establish rules to ensure that office meetings can proceed uninterrupted unless something urgent comes up (define “emergency”).

Meet standing: In The No Asshole Rule, author and Stanford professor Bob Sutton says that standing meetings take 34 per cent less time to make an

assigned decision than meetings where attendees are seated. And, the quality of decisions made in both sorts of meetings is comparable. Appar ently, sitting back encourages commentating instead of content-making. So, gather people around a focal point (you, the leader) and get them discussing the matter while standing.

create break-out groups: A good way to handle large gatherings is to create smaller working groups. This keeps the situation less formal, and encour ages participants to share their great ideas. It also helps maximise the value of time. Open the meeting with a brief introduction before you create break- out groups to discuss different agenda items. Then, let the leader of each working group summarise her position and build consensus from the rest to conclude that point.

scHeduling tiPs

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Encourage FDI

Solar Power

Medical Tourism

Prioritise MSMEs

Faster Policy Implementation Creating an Ecosystem

Modernise Regulation

Taxation

Urban Autonomy

Tender Process

2013As told to sHREYAsI sINGHDesign by Anil VK

for

jAnuAry 2013 | INC. | 2 5

Education

Urban Renewal

Ease of Doing Business

FixesDespite the din of cynicism and a range of plummeting

economic indicators, there is something about new

beginnings (and a new year) that kickstarts the wheels of

optimism. And, when it comes to optimism,

entrepreneurs can put out quite a show. The ability to

spur ahead despite all odds (and, often precisely because

of it), and continue to hope for healthier balance sheets and growing profits is a key entrepreneurial trait. in this

special story—a fix-it for the year ahead—Inc. India gets

13 company founders to put forth their wish list for a

brighter future.

13 fixes for 2013

2 6 | INC. | jAnuAry 2013

13 fixes for 2013

The government of India has been offering a lot of freebies and incentives to encourage a higher literacy

rate. However, all the efforts made by the government revolve mostly around providing children a carrot to come to school. But, for children to really get educated, it’s not enough to make them reach the school’s doorstep. What happens inside school is most important. If stu-dents do not have the right infrastructure and quality instructors, then the objective of spending crores of the taxpayers’ money on giving a lunch meal, or even a laptop for free will be totally unproductive.

The government needs to instill an honest perfor-mance-based teaching programme. Today’s teachers aren’t ready to teach the children of tomorrow. Majority

of the teachers feel that there exists a huge gap between what they can teach and what a student wants or is capable of learning today. For a brighter education scenario in this country, we need knowledgeable, self-motivated and well-trained teachers in abundance. The existing teacher compensation and other benefits do not make teaching an exciting career for young candi-

dates to take it up as a profession. Hence most of the aspi-rants who could have been good teachers, stray to other career options for want of better livelihood. Unlike doc-tors, once a teacher takes up a position, there is no contin-uous evaluation or performance monitoring system, which can help teachers stay updated.

Most educational policies formulated today are not the brainchild of teachers—it generally reflects the under-standing of politicians and bureaucrats in the education space. It would be prudent to create an administrative position for teachers, something like the Indian Teach-ing Services (ITS) cadre; this cadre can rigorously work towards the improvement of the overall education system on a whole and remain accountable for the health of the education system of our country.

Aakash Chaudharyjoint director, Aakash Educational Services

EDUCATIon

Create an Indian Teaching Services

1

2ECoSySTEM

Promoting enterprise

While there is an unbelievable amount of raw talent and entrepreneurial energy

in india, much of this is unfortunately untapped to help the greater good. We rou-tinely hear complaints of not being able to hire the right people. new government poli-cies should invest heavily in applied educa-tion. This will encourage MnCs to set up businesses in india and train new workers with methods that have worked successfully abroad. Any unreasonable restrictions for a credible multinational to set up its operations in india should be eased, and the govern-ment should facilitate a process to make new entrants feel comfortable and welcomed in the market. just as so many successful entrepreneurs came out of companies like google, Proctor & gamble, general electric and others, the next generation of impact entrepreneurs in india will emerge out of similar companies. it’s these new skills, combined with the inborn entrepreneurial zeal among most indians, that will create

new businesses and transform existing ones, and will put india on the path to becoming a true superpower. The gov-ernment should pro-mote not only more training, but create an environment where it is easy to start an enterprise and take risks.

Vinodh Bhatco-founder & CEo, Saavn


PH

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13 fixes for 2013

Given that government tenders represent a very large part of our GDP, there are some fundamental shortcomings in the process that affect all bidders. For instance, if a

tender is cancelled and recalled later, all bidders are forced to buy the tender document all over again, for no fault of theirs. There are instances when the same project has been re-tendered four times! When you extrapolate this over the lakhs of tenders issued by various government bodies each year, and the tens of thousands it costs for most tenders, you are actually talking of a few hundred crores in tender document costs alone. The pol-icy change should be that if document has been purchased by a bidder once, and the ten-der is recalled/re-tendered at the tendering authority's discretion, subsequent re-tender documents for that project should be at no charge to the earlier bidders.

Also, several penalties are imposed on a vendor in case there is a delay in project completion. But, there is no liability from the government's side when payments are delayed endlessly. In fact, this delay becomes a key reason for corruption because officials concerned know that the vendor will suffer if payments are delayed, and thus can be induced into giving bribes to further the payment process. The policy should be changed so that once the completion certificate is issued for a project, or for the staggered milestones within it, payments made after 30 days from that com-pletion date will attract the same rate of interest as the vendor was liable to if the project was delayed.

TEnDER PRoCESS

Simplify re-tendering; make tardy payments liable

Anil Kumarmanaging director, Great Sports Infra

URBAn AUTonoMy

Deregulate our cities, and set them freeindia urgently needs to deregu-

late its cities. This will spur qual-ity growth and create competitiveness among our cities, which pillar significant portion of our gDP. by deregulation, i mean local autonomy to the direct elec-tion of the head of the city. Of course, it does not mean decou-pling with the national or state policy as a whole. giving autonomy to local governments will allow

Manish SharmaCEo, Printo

them to focus on efforts and resources on issues which they specifically may have come to power for. More importantly, such local autonomous bodies will have to live in an environment where the impact of the decisions they have taken is directly felt by their constituencies. Therefore, their performance can be evaluated more accurately. The world over, cities are meant to be efficient hubs of commerce that provide the maximum bang for the buck on skills and capital. yet, as a geo-graphical area, cities are small enough to have electorates that can be involved (Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan lost his job in days while it took years for union Telecom Minister A. raja to be cooked). state governments are the right solution for states but cities need directly-elected may-ors. The government's job is to create the right environment for markets to succeed and intervene in areas where there are failures."

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4


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13 fixes for 2013

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MsMes) con-tribute about 45 per cent of the manufacturing out-

put, and 40 per cent of the total exports of the indian economy. They have been the torchbearers of a fast-growing india. However, even as their small setups help them be agile, it also brings them difficult operating sce-narios. Many believe that the availability of finance is the biggest worry for MsMes. However, what hinders MsMes most is knocking on multiple government departments, especially in taxation. We urge the government for sim-plification and unification of taxes for MsMes. We firmly believe that a "single Window Clearance system" for MsMes is an idea whose time has come. it will not only reduce red tapism, efforts, time and cost, but also reduce

unintentional non-compliance by MsMes to a great extent. it will allow MsMe owners to submit regulatory documents to a single department. This paperwork mainly involves lengthy applica-tions for import-export permits, customs declarations, trading invoices and other such docu-mentation; for example, easing up statutory compliances in the national Manufacturing Policy of 2012.

TAxATIon

Implement GST…now!

Dinesh Agarwal founder & CEo,

IndiaMART

I overwhelmingly vote for the implementation of the

Goods and Services Tax (GST) in India in 2013. Post imple-mentation of the VAT and the Service Tax, the GST will lead to a far-reaching transformation, and one that will inspire confi-dence in the Indian state’s polit-ical maturity. The time is perfect for an immediate rollout of the GST—mainly, because the implementation of the VAT and the robust IT infrastructure our taxation system now enjoys has led to bet-

ter coordination between states and the centre. The only thing the GST implementa-tion needs now is political conviction. Without the GST, the existing taxation system is burdened with various anom-alies and incongruity vis-à-vis tax rates, state-specific defini-tions and a lack of uniformity

in procedures. This makes tax compliance both expensive and difficult for a tax-abid-ing company. Plus, the wide range of tax levies have created distortions, increased

complexity, and brought in an element of discretion that can be misused by authori-ties. For a company like ours—which is involved in manufacturing to retail, and is labour and resource intensive—the GST will be a huge step forward. There are sev-eral benefits that a GST rollout will lead to including making India a single market with a uniform tax rate by breaking down tax barriers. It will make our taxation sys-tem a true value-added tax regime that helps companies avoid double taxation. It will also significantly enhance tax compli-ance by reducing opacity, and reduce cor-ruption in tax administration, both on the demand and supply side. Undoubtedly, the GST is possibly the most significant taxa-tion reform of the decade, and needs to be urgently prioritised.

PRIoRITISE MSMES

give single-window clearance

The solar power sector in India has witnessed tremendous growth in the last few years owing

to favourable policy and regulatory mechanisms. The Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission

(JNNSM) launched in 2010 is a major initiative of the government to promote solar energy technologies. The JNNSM has a very opti-mistic approach and timeline of achieving grid tariff parity by 2022. The mission aims to achieve volume production, local manufactur-ing, rapid diffusion and deployment of solar technologies across the country. Although the government has efficiently promoted supply side measures by way of incentivising capacity additions in solar power, sufficient measures are yet to be taken to create a demand side “pull” to complement the supply side “push”. Full implementa-tion of market driven mechanisms (not subsidies) such as renew-able purchase obligations (RPOs) and renewable energy certificates (RECs) are extremely important to promote solar power generation and attract greater capital to the sector. The government of India has mandated State Electricity Regulatory Commissions to specify renewable purchase obligations (solar and non-solar) for each state in India. This is essentially the minimum percentage of solar power distribution utilities must source. But, although specific solar power purchase obligations have been set, proper enforcement of the RPO mechanism is required.

SolAR PowER

Work on pushing demand

Inderpreet wadhwaCEo, Azure Power

76

5

Gaurav Dublish, promoter director,

wildcraft India


13 fixes for 2013

Guardian is a pharmacy retail company with over 230 stores built on the platform of 100 per cent

reliability in a country where a very significant amount of medicines that are sold are fake. There are over 7,50,000 retailers and over 75,000 distributors in the country with a large number of shops not meet-ing even the basic requirements to sell medicines. In order for Guardian to expand, grow and offer reliable

medicines at competitive prices throughout the country, it is critical that it is able to raise funds for growth. There are insufficient funds available from domestic equity players and banks do not give funds to retail players even against the pledge of liquid stocks. In order for us to grow across the coun-try, the one policy that I would like to see implemented in 2013

is permission for multi-brand retail companies like ours to raise foreign direct investment. In addition to growth, I believe our ability to raise funds to establish great systems and processes will also lead to advan-tages that would accrue to the consumer. For example:

1. Bar Coding is normally not affixed to medicines in India. This is critical if consumer interest is to be protected. This will also ensure that expired medi-cines are not passed off to the consumer, and helps the industry track medicines.

2. The supply chain infrastructure for medicines in our country is weak. Investments in the supply chain will permit the company to develop this infra-structure so that the health systems are strengthened.

3. Refrigerated transportation is needed for criti-cal care medicines and vaccines. In the current sce-nario, shortcuts are often taken which jeopardise these medicines.

With improved practices, the regulation of medi-cines by the government would also improve signifi-cantly. This will lead to better and more focused enforcement for the industry as a whole.

FoREIGn DIRECT InVESTMEnT

Make raising investments easier

Ashutosh Gargfounder & CEo,

Guardian lifecare

8


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13 fixes for 2013

MoDERnISE REGUlATIon

Pass the new Insurance BillI wish the new Insurance Bill would be approved by

the Parliament and replace the Insurance Act of 1938. Insurance is a $20 billion a year industry in India but governed by law that was written before India got her independence! I have had the unique experience of sitting in industry meetings where the discussion was around what the law makers had in mind in 1938. The world has changed since then—India has been partitioned, the World War II has been fought, the internet has been invented and smartphones have been introduced. On a more seri-ous note, insurance today is sold through distribution channels such as bancassurance, telecalling and internet. Payments are made using payment gateways and credit cards. Unit link prod-ucts are the market norm. None of these existed in 1938. As a result, the law is grey and ambiguous. This ambiguity impacts the manner in which insurance brokers like us operate each day. The new Insurance Bill, if approved, has several interesting features. First, the FDI will increase from 26 to 49 per cent for insurance companies and brokers. Only three of the top 20 international brokers are currently present in India. Ownership restrictions are a primary cause for this. If the FDI increases, I expect several international brokers would enter the country. This will help develop the market. Also, companies such as ours will be excel-lent local partners for the new entrants.

The second big benefit is that many restrictions that are cur-rently in the Act will be removed and the IRDA will be given

powers to regulate on these restrictions. Compensation to intermediaries is one such example. Commissions are currently capped in the 1938 Act. This has severely impacted the retail penetration of general insurance. For example, agents earn just about `750 for every indi-vidual health insurance policy of `5,000 that they sell. So even if the agent sells one policy every other day she will earn `11,250 a month. The task is difficult and earnings are low. I hope the regulators will use the dis-cretion provided to them to increase compensation on select general insurance products.

The third likely benefit of the new bill is easier access to capital. The new law will allow public sector insurers to go in for IPOs, reinsurers to operate in India, prescribe lower capital for stand-alone health insurance companies and allow some amount of financial reinsurance. All these changes combined with the higher FDI will increase capital supply.

Insurance is a heavily regulated industry. Many are deterred by this but I view regulation as a critical way to ensure that only serious operators enter the business. It took us eight months to get our license. I found that period difficult because every aspect of our background and business plan was scrutinised. However, now that we have crossed that hurdle, I am delighted because there is a huge entry barrier for others who may want to enter the business. A steady improvement in the laws that govern insurance will systematically improve the industry’s performance. Approv-ing the insurance bill is a good and necessary first step.

URBAn REnEwAl

invest in our cities—they need it badlyThe McKinsey global institute says the

gDP of india will multiply five times by 2030. The growth will be fuelled by a rising urban population, which as of 2008 was 40 million and is slated to rise to 590 million by 2030. urbanisation thus needs to be looked upon from a different angle. indian cities are barely able to deliver even basic standards of living. if projected large scale urbanisation happens without an overhaul of urban ser-vices, the situation looks grim. lack of investment in development of urban infra will worsen the situation for the current as well as the future population. As projected in the

united nations Handbook of benchmarks, the demand and supply gap by 2030 for treated water will be 94 billion litres per day, sewage treatment will be 109 billion litres per day, and solid waste disposal will be 82 million tons per annum. Therefore, it is high time that the government should either bring in new policies or substantially mend the existing ones. in sanitation, for example, gov-ernment should adopt policies of tax relax-ation and others, somewhat like what happened in iT. This will help bring entrepre-neurs and conglomerates to the sanitation industry, a dire need for our cities.

Rajeev Kher CEo, Saraplast

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10

Kapil Mehtamanaging director,

Securenow

jAnuAry 2013 | INC. | 31

13 fixes for 2013

As an entrepreneur in India, one has to spend a lot of time on legal compliance. This starts from the

day one decides to start a new company. Registering a new business in India has become easier in the last few years, but it is still very tedious and time consuming compared to the developed markets. After registering the company, there are multiple government depart-ments one has to deal with. Just look at how many tax authorities one needs to deal with—sales tax, service tax, value added tax. Similarly, there are multiple reg-ulatory authorities to deal with, be it the Reserve Bank of India, Foreign Exchange Management Authority (FEMA), or the Enforcement Directorate (ED).

Recently, the government has begun an enquiry to see whether FDI is being violated in case of e-commerce companies that have raised venture capital. Some companies are being examined two or three years after they first raised money. Clearly, the interpretation and understanding of law is not clear, even on the government's

side. In such a scenario, as an Indian entrepreneur today, I have to spend a lot of time and energy in being compliant. Instead of focusing on innovation, if young companies like ours, spend so much time in compliance, how can we ever build world class com-panies? Of course, we want to be compliant but can the government not make it easier and simpler?

I wish the government would simplify and com-bine the most commonly used company related regu-lations into a single law which is easy to understand and practice. After that, they can implement this law as a single window compliance system for companies; a sort of a checklist. Such a system could be hosted on the internet and bring about transparency for the gov-ernment as well. I believe this law would encourage more entrepreneurs to start a business and make it significantly easier for young companies to do what they do best—get customers and make money.

EASE oF DoInG BUSInESS

Entrepreneurs should only need to mind their biz

Bipin Preet Singhfounder, MobiKwik

FASTER PolICy IMPlEMEnTATIon

bring the Preferential Market Access (PMA) Policy into play in 2012, the govern-

ment had recognised the importance of the esDM (electronic sys-tem Design and Man-ufacturing) sector and has come out with a holistic vision of how to make india a global hub in the esDM space. The govern-ment has released a set of synergistic poli-cies in the form of the national Telecom Policy 2012 (with signifi-cant focus on indian telecom products and manufacturing), the national electronics Policy 2012 and the 12th five-year-plan docu-ment, with a goal to establish india amongst the global leaders in esDM “products” by using the strengths of our highly talented manpower, r&D skills and a large and fast growing local market demand.

One specific policy, included in the nTP-2012 and neP-2012, which can have the largest impact in 2013 is the timely and effective implementation of the Preferential Market Access (PMA) policy. This is an innovative policy which leverages the large domes-tic demand of esDM products (e.g., telecom) and provides a preferential market opportunity for any company (indian or for-eign) which creates products in india that meet the required mini-

mum domestic value-addition criteria. since this policy does not require any additional funding from the gov-ernment, it can be quickly implemented and will create a mar-ket-pull for domestic products. it will pro-mote entrepreneur-ship while not making any compromises

either on technical specifications, quality or price.

Today in many electronics and telecom products, r&D, iPr and software constitute a large proportion of the product cost—these are areas where india has a global competitive advantage. An effective implementation of these policies should focus on the prod-uct development, innovation, iPr and software within india, while the rest of the manufacturing eco-system comes up.

by focusing on our strengths, india can build a new esDM industry in the country, one that can rival the success of the iT services industry. As per govern-ment estimates, esDM can be a $400 billion industry over the next 10 years, can create 30 lakh new jobs and can contribute up to 10 per cent of the gDP, in addition to strengthening our national secu-rity and reducing our dependence on imports.

Sanjay nayakCEo & MD,

Tejas networks

11

12


13 fixes for 2013

I urge the government to incentivise medi-cal tourism in India. The government

should provide tax exemptions for hospitals that generate foreign currency and cater to foreign patients. Further, earmarked medi-cal zones in line with Special Economic Zones or Software Technology Parks should be created to cater to the growing demand of medical services and contract medicine manufacturing. These zones will create additional sources of foreign exchange and capital for Indian hospitals and the pharmaceutical industry, and

MEDICAl ToURISM

Make earmarked medical zones, like SEZs and STPs

Gurpreet Sandhumanaging director,

Reva Pharma

ensure Indian medical services and manufacturing are at par with world standards. Further, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) which is likely to push India’s economic growth by streamlining the credit avail-ability for input taxes paid across board for manufacturing and services, should be intro-duced soon. I would also advocate some kind of weighted deduction of 150 per cent of the expenditure incurred on corporate

social responsibility (CSR) activ-ities specifically covering critical areas like education, health, ani-mal husbandry, water manage-ment, waste management, women empowerment, poverty eradication or rural develop-ment. In wake of the new service tax regime, where all services except the ones that fall in nega-

tive list are taxable, the government should reduce the service tax rate from 12.36 per cent to the earlier 10.3 per cent.

13

jAnuAry 2013 | INC. | 3 3illusTrATiOn by rAj VerMA


He did not like the idea of running a cement business much, even less the idea of living in a small town in Gujarat—even if it meant the tag of being the boss at the famous Ambuja Group. As luck would have it, a family friend gave him the oppor-tunity to try his hand at building homes. It’s been 26 years since then and Harsh Neotia hasn’t stopped building. From luxury bungalows, five-star hotels, malls and super specialty hospitals, Neotia has created several architectural landmarks in Bengal. Now, the chairman of the ̀ 1,200 crore newly re-christened Ambuja Neotia Group plans to expand his horizons, albeit cautiously.

I did my schooling from the Le Martiniere for Boys, Calcutta and then did my B.Com from St Xavier’s College. In college, since I had classes only in the mornings, I would spend the rest of the day apprenticing with my dad at the Ambuja Group’s office in Park Street. I wasn’t really responsible for any-thing. Then, I’d just sit in meetings, try to understand the business and pick up insights. Our company was setting up a plant in Gujarat then. It started production in 1985, and became our flagship cement plant. In the early 1980s when I was going to the office, a lot of the buzz was around this.

In fact, in 1983, I was asked to go to Gujarat to take charge of this plant, and oversee its construction. My father believed it was a good way to blood me in. But, when I visited

the plant and the area and saw the nature of discussions that were happening there, I was overawed. I didn’t know what I was sup-posed to do there. It was too complicated for my liking. So, I came back and told my father what I felt. Looking back, I think I didn’t enjoy building a cement plant in a far-flung village in the middle of nowhere. I was too much of a city boy! Then, of course, I told my father that the project was too big and com-plicated for me to begin my career with.

I came into real estate by accident. As fate would have it, soon after I returned to Kolk-ata, a friend of my father who was moving to Mumbai came over to our house to ask what he could do with a 6 cottah piece of land he had in the upmarket Chowringhee Lane in central Kolkata. It struck me that may be I

As told to dhImAN ChAttopAdhyAy / Photographs Courtesy Company

HOW I DID IT

The AccidentalBuilder

Harsh Neotia AmbujaNeotiaGroup

A Cautious Opportunist Though

wary to expand much beyond Bengal, Harsh Neotia has

never been hesitant to undertake new real estate

ventures.


HOW I DID IT

could build a multi-storied residential apart-ment block there. That excited me. I wanted to take on this project. Fortunately, my father and uncle agreed.

I knew nothing about building nor did my family. My father hadn’t even built his own house. But I was 22 years old, and a lot more adventurous. I also took this up since it gave me a chance to stay on in Kolkata. It took us 18-20 months to do the project and we made more money than we had expected. My father’s friend was happy. And, I got a pat on the back from my father and uncles. In the bargain, I also made some money, a few lakhs in profit. Things picked up momentum. We got more properties to develop into residential projects. By 1989, we had done 7-8 projects, some of which were office complexes.

By 1989, I began to feel cramped. I loved real estate and construction but I wanted to do bigger projects. I decided to move down the banks of the river Ganga in search of a good piece of land, to build a hotel, and a larger housing complex. We made 50 visits to different sites before set-ting our eyes on a 60-acre plot in Raichak, a Kolkata suburb. Raichak is just 90 min-utes from the city centre but is well located for a hotel because it’s near the confluence of the Ganges and the Bay of Bengal. Here, the river looks like the sea, and you get to see dolphins if you’re lucky. This became my first big real estate deal. The local bro-ker told us we would get hold of the land in a year’s time. It was a complicated exer-cise—over 400 people together owned those 60 acres! Eventually, it took us four years to purchase the land.

my father was livid. He felt I was wasting money on a large piece of land two hours away from the city, and in an area where only fishermen and farmers lived. I asked him to trust me on this one. He agreed even though he never really warmed up to the idea. It was more like he resigned himself to it. Of course, he was very disappointed that I hadn’t got into the cement business. But, over the past few years, I’d tasted independence by working on my own. The last thing I wanted to do was to report to my father directly.

In 1993-94, we began work on the site. We eventually opened FFort (a five start hotel modelled on a fortress on the river delta) in 1997. Today, we have over 100 residences, guest houses, and another five-star prop-erty, Ganga Kutir. For a few years, we fran-chised the FFort out to Radisson to operate. Three years back, we began managing it ourselves. This project has turned out to be great for us—both the hotels have been profitable over the past two years, and the residential units have been bought by lead-ing corporate houses.

Around the same time, we also got involved in what became a landmark, first-of-its kind project anywhere in India—a public-private joint housing project in West Bengal. The government came out with an ad asking for participation from the private sector for housing projects. We were one of the 15 com-panies that applied and were one of the two companies selected. Luck continued to favour us on this project. We got Balakrishna Doshi, a celebrated architect, to work for us.

Even as my real estate venture was going well, the Ambuja Group was growing rapidly. My maternal uncle, Narottam Saxena and my uncle, Suresh Neotia, who was chairman along with my father, wanted me to get more involved in our primary business. Till then, I would just go to the annual meeting at the cement plant, and even there would spend most of my time in and around the temple complex in the plant. In fact, the meetings I attended, I was forced to do so. Clearly, I didn’t pick up much.

In 1997, Ambuja Group bid for Modi Cement through the Board for Industrial and Financial Reconstruction (BIFR). We were a front ranking bidder. In fact, we finally won the bid in 1998. After this was done, I was

dealer network had been all but demolished. In any case, I did not know the C of cement. How could I possibly work on such a compli-cated BIFR case?

But, I finally decided to plunge in—mainly, because of two reasons. One, at least, I was assured that even post-acquisition, Modi Cement, would be headquarted in Kolkata. I didn’t have to leave my city. Also, honestly, I realised I didn’t have the funds to do anything big in my real estate venture since I didn’t have access to resources. Also, my family had spent generations building the business. I had a responsibility of carrying forward the legacy. Despite convincing myself, the next two years were horrible. I regretted joining the cement business almost every day. Not only did Modi Cement have loads of problems, I found the cement business itself very boring and lacking in creativity.

By 2005, the family decided to move out of cement. The first trigger came in 1999 when

“We’ve consciously not expanded much beyond Bengal. We’d

rather fill the space where we already have goodwill.”

summoned by Narot-tam mama who clearly told me that I had fooled around enough and now it was time to get down to the core business. So, I went to a few meetings during the bidding process. I was shocked when I went through the BIFR documents. There were astronomical lia-bilities we were getting into. Modi Cement had not paid royalty and sales tax dues, and had 400-odd litiga-tions pending. Its

JANUARY 2013 | INC. | 3 7

HOW I DID IT

we bought out a part of DLF, and then ACC. With these big moves, we bit off more than we could chew. At one point, we had to go for an open offer because we couldn’t keep the 14.5 % holding we had in ACC. We didn’t have the resources for it. To raise resources, we would have had to dilute our holding to a precarious level which was unsustainable in the long run. In hindsight, we needn’t have been so ambitious—we weren’t big enough to go on such an acquisition spree.

By now, the senior generation was older. They had serious health issues to contend with. Selling our cement unit became inevita-ble. We sold it to HOLCIM in 2006 who have retained the various cement brand names. After this, I was left to go back to doing what I loved to do—real estate. Fortunately, although I hadn’t focused on the real estate business for almost ten years, we had com-pleted four projects in that time. Also, our projects Swabhumi, City Centre and Udayan all turned out to be landmark sites. So, we had

built up goodwill, but did not have the required scale. In 2006, we had only about 60-65 people in the real estate business and one office. We had a turnover of ̀ 90 crore and a net profit of ̀ 6 crore. Contrast that to now—we have grown to a ̀ 1,000 crore-plus company with ̀ 125 crore profit in 2011-12.

today, we not only build townships of both luxury and affordable homes, we have super specialty hospitals (The Bhagirathi Neotia children’s hospital, for instance), five star hotels, malls, office complexes. We have also expanded beyond Bengal into Raipur and Patna. We’ve consciously not expanded much beyond Bengal. We don’t have that kind of financial power yet. Also, we’d rather fill the space where we already have goodwill before moving elsewhere. Today, we can proudly say West Bengal is Ambuja country. We have five star properties in the Sunderbans, Kolkata, Raichak, Santiniketan and Darjeeling. We’ve also built the best hospitals, malls and higher educational institutes.

looking back, most of what I have done has been opportunity driven. For instance, in 1999, we built for a tender for an office-cum-shop structure in Kolkata. Actually, we didn’t really have an idea what we’d bid for—it was supposed to be a mall. That bid actually led to the City Centre, India’s second mall. It was also twice as large as the first, the Crossroads mall in Mumbai. In 1999, there were no malls in India. For a year or two, we were at a loss about what to do with the land after having paid for it. Initially, we had appointed Charles Correa to make a design for a traditional shops and office set up. In the meantime, the Crossroads Mall opened in Mumbai. I hap-pened to meet Ravi Raheja, the owner of Shoppers Stop, at a party. He advised me to make a mall and even booked a store at City Centre. When I went back to Charles Cor-rea with the idea, he almost threw me out. In India, he said, no one goes to malls, they go to bazaars. He almost walked out of the project before we arrived at a compromise of a bazaar with a mall added to it. Luckily, that compromise turned out to be the proj-ect’s USP. We accidentally walked into a good idea.

Actually, I have realised that in life some things work and some things just don’t. There is not always a direct co-relation between efforts and results. It’s a lesson I learnt early in life—some things give you greater results with much less effort. So, today the slow down has hit us like most oth-ers. We are not starting anything new. It’s better not to fight the economic mood. Of course, we are going ahead with the projects we have in pipeline. Putting those on hold could prove to be more expensive. I would be concerned if the economy continues this way. I’m hoping that much like in 2008, things will look up in another 7-8 months.

Ambuja Realty isn’t my only dream though although the goodwill we have generated gives me great satisfaction. Of course, you can keep growing and growing. Even if things are good, it’s not good enough. I want to look ahead. After I retire, may be 10 years from now, I’d like to run a school. No one is likely to give me a dean or a principal’s role so I’ll have to start my own school.

Reaping profits Building on goodwill, Harsh Neotia has turned his real estate enterprise into a `1,000 crore plus company with `125 crore profit in 2011-12.

It’s been a while since we’ve been able to approach a new year with a whole lot of optimism. But 2013 feels different. Unemployment is edging downward, and the economy is mending (however slowly). But it’s more than that. Running a business has seldom seemed so... well, interesting. And, dare we say, cool. Why? Read this story and find out.

Special RepoRt

How & wHere to

make money In 2013 (and beyond)

Game-chanGinG trends, h ot m a r k e t s, daring predictions

plus 16 reasons to be (cautıously) cHeerful about tHe year aHead by Adam bluestein

3 8 | InC. | january 2013

smartphones are displacing credit cards the way plastic once toppled cash. Google got the ball rolling, with Google Wallet. Now other big names are getting in on the game—AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile, for example, are collaborating on a mobile wallet called Isis.

But the biggest game changers so far have been—no surprise—entrepreneurs. Square, a start-up launched in 2009 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, offers simplified credit card processing via a credit card reader for mobile devices. Merchants can

use Square to swipe cards on a smartphone or tablet instead of a traditional credit card terminal; customers can use it to pay via smartphone, à la Google Wallet. And Square’s straightforward fee structure—$275 per month with 0 per cent processing on the first $250,000, or 2.75 per cent per swipe—has proved to be a welcome alternative to traditional models that charge merchants as much as 5 per cent of the purchase price, plus additional fees.

Dwolla, an online and mobile digital-cash network based in Des Moines, takes

Game ChanGer

1.plastic Will Be passéWithout credit cards, getting paid will get a lot quicker, easier, and cheaper.

You travel all over the world to study how people are using technology. What specific things do you look for?I try to figure out what it will feel like to be a human using technology 10 years from now. One thing I always look for is the silly, crazy, niche apps—like Angry Birds, say, or an app that lets you track your baby’s sleep schedule. These get into the richness and complexities of humans.

In what ways are our interactions with technology changing?Touch and voice technology are getting better. And gesture recognition will be used more broadly. We’re looking at how to bridge multiple inputs—motion, sound, and gesture—combined with information about people’s locations to put it all in context. Foursquare is just the tip of the iceberg.

as a futurist at Intel, you have all the resources of a giant company to draw on. how can someone with fewer resources predict the future?Get yourself a 13-year-old mentor. The perspective of someone who has grown up with computing power in his pocket, always being con-nected, is fascinating. And at 13, people are just starting to form their own vision of the world and have the language to communicate it.

Should we be worried about the future?I try to get people to think and understand that you can’t let the future happen to you. You have to take action. We all own the future and have the power to shape it by creating a vision of the world we want.

advice from tHe future, part 1

“get yourselfa 13-year-old

mentor.”BrIan DavID JohnSon is Intel’s in-house futurist.

january 2013 | InC. | 3 9IllustratIon by ben wIseman

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things further, by cutting out credit cards altogether. The brainchild of Inc. 30 under 30 honouree Ben Milne, Dwolla allows users to transfer funds directly between bank accounts, from a computer or smart-phone, for a flat fee of 25 cents per pay-ment, with no charge for transactions of less than $10. The company’s Masspay fea-

ture, meanwhile, lets users send funds to as many as 2,000 people simultaneously, and has staggering implications for any business with a payroll. In April 2012, Dwolla was serving 15,000 merchants and processing more than $1 million in trans-actions daily.

Going into 2013, e-commerce increas-ingly means m-commerce, and optimising mobile payments will be key for any busi-ness that sells online. purchases made on mobile devices in the uS are expected to total $11.6 billion in 2012, nearly double those made in 2011, and are forecast to reach $31 billion in 2015, according to eMarketer. roughly 34 per cent of people surveyed by IDc Financial Insights in 2012 reported making mobile purchases, up from

just 19 per cent in 2011. That’s impressive, especially when you consider how many potential buyers have looked—and balked—because the process for making purchases on a smartphone was just too unwieldy. (ever tried tapping your credit card number into a form on a 2- by 3-inch screen?)

chicago-based start-up Braintree saw opportunity in eliminating abandoned shopping carts. It offers a simple plat-form to enable one-tap purchases from mobile websites and provides customers with online and mobile payments processing—including in foreign currencies—for 2.9 per cent of

the purchase price plus 30 cents per trans-action, with no monthly fees or minimums

As customers use their smartphones for shopping, the devices will become a pri-mary conduit for directing targeted cou-pons, rewards, and other special offers. Belly makes digital-based loyalty programs; think of them as electronic versions of the classic “buy 10 get one free” punch card. Merchants track purchases through an ipad; consumers use a smartphone app. Already, companies are getting creative with rewards: A sandwich shop will name sand-wiches after repeat buyers; a grocery store lets loyal shoppers cut the line. Bottom line: The boring business of payment processing is getting pretty sexy. And that’s good news for your business, too.

Do we really need to worry about things that will happen 10 or 20 years from now?Ideally, as an organisation, you want to develop strategies and plans that are robust across the entire spectrum of possible futures. Forecasts are all going to be wrong—but you want them to be wrong in useful ways. Futurism is almost like a vaccination. You inject a little bit of a denatured pathogen to prepare your body in case you encounter it for real.

how do you imagine these possible futures?One way is to look at technolo-gies that are just coming out and think about how they can be abused. Product designers have their idea about how things should be used, but as William Gibson said, “The street finds its own uses for things.” Take tablets. How are they going to be hacked into other things? Take anything new and think about how the designer would not want someone to use it.

You’ve done some work in the gaming and entertainment industries. What developments are you tracking there?The advances in artificial intelligence in gaming— with nonplayer characters behaving more and more like humans—are just incredible. Any real breakthrough in AI is going to come from gaming. In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios. I expect we’ll see more TV and movies, like Star trek, that show a world that actually looks like a good place to live.

speCIal report How to Make Money in 2013


“Zombies are so played

out.”*JamaIS CaSCIo

is a distinguished fellow at theInstitute for the Future.

e-commerce increasingly means m-commerce, and optimizing

for mobile payments is key.

Real Estate Rebounds

*what’s after zombies? See page 45.

Reasons to Be

Cheerful


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After years of the doldrums, the residential real estate market—perhaps the mother of all economic indicators—finally is showing signs of life, even in hard-hit areas such as Arizona and Florida. These are the metro areas showing the biggest gains in home values from September 2011 to September 2012 (the most recent data available) and their average home prices.

Source: Zillow

phoenix +20.4%, $149,400Fort myers, Fl +10.1%, $139,800san Jose, Ca +9.7%, $599,800Denver +8.8%, $221,000

miami-Fort lauderdale+7.9%, $149,700san Francisco +7.3%, $497,600naples, Fl +7.2%, $215,500las Vegas +7.0%, $121,500tulsa +6.9%, $106,500Bakersfield, Ca +6.8%, $123,800

Six Numbers That Should Make Your Day

$103Projected price perbarrel of crude oil in 2013, down 7.4 per cent from 2012Source: U.S. Energy InformationAdministration

16%Projected growth inthe us aerospace industry in 2013Source: Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation

5%Projected growthfor us auto and auto-parts makers in 2013Source: Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation

$270 billionProjected business-travel spending in 2013, up 4.9 per cent from 2012Source: Global Business Traveler Association

5%Projected increase in retail sales in 2013Source: Kiplinger

-34.6the bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index in mid-october, a six-month high

nearly halF oF all Americans own a smartphone. Globally, mobile users are expected to outnumber desktop users by 2014. And the amount of time we spend on mobile devices is growing fast—currently an average of 82 minutes a day, more than twice the amount of time spent two years ago.

“consumers are accus-tomed to—even addicted to—always-on, anywhere, anytime connectivity, and the next 12 months will see them push their mobile lust to obsessive, occasionally nearly insane degrees,” says David Mattin, lead strategist at Trendwatch-ing.com. These multitasking users are looking to fill micro-amounts of time (sometimes just seconds) throughout the day and rely on a constant stream of customised data to help them decide where to go, what to do, and what to buy. Businesses that are attuned to mobile consumer behaviour can take advantage of these “mobile moments.”

Making sure your online presence is optimised for mobile is a no-brainer. A study

commissioned by Google found that three-quarters of visitors to a mobile-friendly site will return, but 79 per cent of those who find a site difficult to use on their mobile devices will give up and go elsewhere. Do you also need an app? probably. Minutes spent per month on apps more than doubled from March 2011 to March 2012, according to comScore.

The smartphone, though, is just one of the new screens that businesses will need to grapple with. In 2013, we will see a continuing proliferation of screen sizes and device types—phones, tablets, desk-tops, web-connected TVs, and touchscreens in retail and other environments—to accommo-date different uses, hand sizes, and personal preferences.

What does it all mean for you? “We’re sure to see more mobile commerce arise in new and interesting formats,” says

Jeremy laTrasse, ceo of Mes-sage Bus, an app that enables messaging across e-mail, mobile, and social networks. Apps will have to be tailored to appeal to on-the-go smart-phone users, and they will also have to work with the more leisurely tablet experience.

Boloco, a chain with 22 burrito restaurants on the east coast, has embraced an all-screens strategy. It offers online ordering through its website and a mobile app (with a 10 per cent discount), “mayor” privileges for custom-ers with frequent Foursquare check-ins, touchscreen kiosks to speed wait times, and TV monitors in Boloco outlets showing videos about where the food comes from. Since

Boloco introduced its app, online and mobile sales have grown fourfold, at an average check of $9.05, compared with $7.51 for all sales.

Getting ready for total appification is, admittedly, a tall order. Not only must you build apps and other tools, but you

also have to formulate a cross-platform marketing strategy and ensure compati-bility across different devices. But a host of start-ups is thriving by providing the back-end services. Jay Jamison, a partner at Bluerun Ventures in Menlo park, california, calls them the “arms dealers of mobile-app infrastructure.” They include parse and Stack-Mob, which give developers quick, easy ways to build apps, and Twilio and urban Airship, which help automate things such as SMS messaging and location-based notifications.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be everywhere or do every-thing. But you do need to be in the game.

Reasons to Be

Cheerful

january 2013 | InC. | 41IllustratIon by ben wIseman

73%of men and

63 per cent of women don’t

go an hour without checking

their phones.

Source: Lookout

Game ChanGer

2.there Will Be an app for every Waking minute

Do you have a mobile strategy? even if you do, you probably need a new one.

online education“education is at a major crossroads in terms of the exorbitant cost and the lack of direct correlation to improved life outcomes,” says amish jani of Firstmark Capital in new york City. In other words, expect to see lots of innovation in this space. andy Hines, a futurist who teaches at the university of Houston, sees opportunities in online programs for professional certifications and in “catch up” degree programs for people who started college but didn’t graduate. “the percentage of people who graduate has been flat for a long time,” Hines says. “If we could reach that huge body of people in limboland, we could see a nice boost.”

you need to know this

Disruptive designProducts such as the nest thermostat and the Plumen CFl light bulb are just two recent examples of a trend we can expect to see a lot more of in 2013: start-ups shaking up stale product categories through the power of design. “Disruptive products are king, and innovative designs will challenge the status quo in ways that previously wouldn’t have been possible,” says scot Herbst, of Herbst Produkt, an award-winning product-design firm. “being small and nimble and new can free a creative mission from all of the antiquated standards that established players suffer from.”

5 neW nICheS

that are heatInG

up faSt

power sleep Americans are desperate for a good night’s sleep. In an otherwise lethargic economy, mattress makers Mattress Firm and Select comfort grew 39 per cent and 25 per cent, respectively, last year, according to the publication Furniture Today. And demand for products and services that promise more and better zzz’s shows no signs of abating—including “performance” bedding, sleep-focused retailers, and high-end sleep-consultant services. “The trend aligns perfectly with a basic law of economics—supply and demand,” says New york city brand strategist John parham. “There’s very little sleep these days, and therefore it’s in huge demand.”

real stuff, made in the uSathe rising cost of manufacturing abroad and new technologies like 3-D printing are combining to spark a resurgence of small manufacturing in america. not only are consumers hungry for the unique and customised, but physical-product start-ups can also now work anywhere—see seven Cycles, which produces high-end bicycles in watertown, massachusetts; artifact bag Company, whose leather and canvas goods are handmade in omaha; and shapeways, a 3-D printing “factory” in new york City.

personal health, always on In 2013, consumers will increasingly turn to digital tools to monitor and improve their health through exercise, sleep, and diet. sales of wearable fitness-tracking devices like Fitbit are forecast to hit 90 million units in 2017, and the market for sports and fitness apps will exceed $400 million in 2016, according to abI research. and increasingly flexible and sophisticated sensors—embedded in clothing or shoes or attached to the skin like bandages—will help speed adoption and enable always-on monitoring. “this will explode in 2013,” predicts unity stoakes, co-founder of startup Health.


you need to know this, too


in out

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happy Blue Year Twice a year, the pantone color Institute forecasts the colours

that will dominate fashion collections—and inevitably influence other industries as well. The top spring colour in 2012, Tangerine Tango, is so... um, 2012. The pick for spring 2013: Monaco Blue. “It has stability and depth,” says leatrice eiseman, the institute’s executive director. “people are being more thoughtful; they’re looking for dependable classics.” Don’t expect to see big-ticket items in bold colors, eiseman says, until the economy really picks up steam again.

these Days, nearly everyone knows how to click past or block banner ads and pop-ups. Mean-time, consumers are spending more time online, especially on social-media sites. Those two trends are adding up to a new way of marketing—one based on connecting to people via online content.

What is content? It could be nearly anything: blog posts, white papers, webinars, pod-casts, slide shows, videos. The key is that it engages custom-ers—and spurs them to share it with others. See, for example, the action-sports videos pro-duced by helmet-cam maker Gopro or the beauty and lifestyle-focused blog on Birchbox. con-tent can be equally as compelling in a B2B context: The website of hubSpot, a maker of marketing software, features case studies, videos, and podcasts about key trends in marketing.

creating content for your own website, though, is only part of the content play. With millions of users each, social media’s Big 8—Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, pinterest, Instagram, linkedIn, Google+, and youTube—present untold opportuni-ties to acquire and engage audiences. But you can’t do it via banners, coupons, and other traditional approaches. Instead, marketers are engaging in so-called native advertising, a term you’ll be hearing a lot this year.

Native advertising is simply advertising that follows the format, style, and voice of whatever platform it appears in. The goal is for someone browsing a site to see the advertising as something integral to, rather than an intrusion on, his or her overall experience of the site. It seems to work: on Facebook, for example, the average click-through rate for “sponsored story” ads in the second quarter of 2012 was 53 per cent greater than that of display ads, according to

TBG Digital. And online publish-ers such as The Atlantic and Gawker Media are offering more opportunities for sponsored posts and videos tailored to the interests of their readers.

Making the shift to content will not be easy. unlike old methods of marketing, in which brands could keep campaigns going for months at a time, social media requires constant refreshing. “you can’t leave a message in the market for nine minutes, let alone nine months,” says James Gross, president of percolate, an advertising soft-ware company in New york city. A flurry of companies is focusing on the business opportunity here, providing online tools and services that help streamline both content creation (like con-tently and percolate) and the placement of native advertising (Sharethrough).

Fortunately, a marketing campaign on Instagram, for example, can be man-aged by a single person with a smartphone. or you can outsource it to customers—something that Jay peak, a ski resort in northern Vermont, does to foster brand loyalty. The resort asks skiers to tag Instagram shots that they believe exemplify what they love about the mountain with a “raised Jay” hash tag. “It ends up being a conversation starter,” says marketing director Steve Wright, “an opportunity to open lines of communication and put a face to the business.”

Something else that’s new about content marketing: The content in question does not have

to be slick to be effective. And therein lies another advantage for small companies, says Gross. “A lot of times, larger companies can get so focused on quality that they won’t do something bold. A smaller business can be quicker to let go of quality and focus on what actually works from a content perspective.”

Average time spent

watching online video jumped

38%from 2011 to 2012.

Game ChanGer

3.ads Will Be articles,and Vice Versa

Forget banners and pop-ups. Instead, connect with consumers via blogs, videos, white papers, and more.

Source: Nielsen

In toDay’s netWorkeD, hyperinformed economy, customers are no longer mere buyers. They’re helping design and innovate products and services, preordering and funding products that haven’t been created, and even investing directly in early-stage busi-nesses. If you continue to treat your customers as mere sources of revenue, you’re missing the boat—and, quite likely, pushing them into the arms of a competi-tor who understands the truly important role they can play.

For a look at the opportuni-ties, and perils, of this new cus-tomer-centric model, consider the pebble Watch. The company launched via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, raising $10.2 million and netting orders for some 85,000 watches. When the anticipated September delivery date came and went without explanation, pebble took a serious beating. But the company rallied, posting regular updates,

including videos and photos from its production facility. And pebble’s founder, eric Migicovsky, learnt an important lesson. “It’s awesome to see the amount

of support we have after posting an update about production,” he says. Kickstarter learnt its lesson, too: In September, it announced new rules that, among other things, require project creators to better disclose risks and challenges associated with their projects.

But crowdfunding is just one way to get customers involved. Quirky, a New york city company that manufactures household goods and tech accessories

suggested and voted on by its 300,000-strong community of citizen inventors, uses another model. rather than preselling, Quirky produces selected products at its own risk and rewards “influencers”—those who have helped to refine the product—with royalties on the items’ sales, which

a lot of your work focuses on the way humans will be challenged by an increasingly hostile natural environment. What are the implications for businesses?Economies are embedded inside ecosystems. Companies dependent on tourism, for example, are affected by low rainfall—there’s less snow for skiers, and forest fires are more intense. Businesses that decide to be reality based and identify where they’re vulnera-ble to climate impact, that start thinking about how to buffer against it, are going to be able to take advantage of shortages. When the water runs out, not everyone is in the same pickle.

are there places today that give us an indication of what the future might look like?The key to the future actually might be in the past. Everything we’re doing now relies on mas-sively integrated global supply chains that depend on cheap oil and other things. Does a future with higher-priced gas look more like the past? Hunt for places around the world where price matters more to see how price might affect behaviour.

Do books have a future?The marketplace tells us that good, visceral storytelling has a place. But there are lots of questions about the format that stories take. Maybe sto-rytelling belongs in audio—a short story is the length of a commute. That can be a sacred spot where you have the ear of the reader without having to compete with other media like games or TV.


“the key to the future actually

might be inthe past.”paolo BaCIGalupIis a Hugo and nebula

award–winning science-fiction author.

Game ChanGer

4.Customers Will Get in your Faceused to be you had to please your customers, your investors, and the press. What happens when your customers are your investors and your press?

Source: Nielsen


92%of people trust recommenda-

tions from friends and

family above any form of advertising.

rememBer eVerythInG you’ve learnt about the power of Face-book, Twitter, and other social-media sites to promote your business? It remains true, with one caveat: In 2013, expect to see a backlash to the sheer massiveness of these sites—as well as the emergence of smaller-scale, niche networks. “In 2013, we’ll see more users start to expect, if not demand, some tangible benefits in exchange for all the time they spend online and the personal information they’re sharing,” says Trendwatching.com’s David Mattin. Adds howard Tull-man, ceo of Tribeca Flashpoint Media Arts Academy, partner at chicago high Tech Investors, and columnist for Inc.com: “consumers are starting to understand the value of their

information and asking to be compensated, whether with badges, rewards, pre-ferred pricing, or discounts and perks.” Tullman’s prediction for 2013: “We’ll increasingly see new kinds of virtual currencies and services—like Ticketmaster’s Facebook app that lets you see where your friends are sitting at an event.”

At the same time, the sheer massiveness of Facebook is creating opportunities for smaller-scale, niche networks. people aren’t likely to flee Facebook outright, Tullman says, but they will increasingly augment their online social experience by using other networks whose size, privacy, and more customised parameters are better suited to specific tasks and goals.

Some good examples are path, a free personal-social-network service that limits users to a 150-person circle; App.net, a subscription service that lets users create their own social networks; and NextDoor, a private social network that helps users connect with others in the same geographic area. MindMixer is a sort of virtual town hall that enables communities to define and discuss ideas. yammer, meanwhile, helps businesses create internal networks.

The emergence of more and varied social networks will present a challenge to businesses accustomed to Facebook and Twitter. For one thing, many people use such networks specifically to avoid the increasingly commercial aspects of Facebook; in that case, you would be smart to start by limiting your presence to participation and listening, rather than selling. eventually, however, smaller networks could become effective ways to reach specific geographic areas or professional groups, or build communities around a brand. The goal here, says Tullman, is less to attract new customers than to build deeper, longer-lasting, and more lucrative relationships with the ones you have. When you have that, word of mouth will naturally bring in the new business.

gives them an incentive to promote the items themselves. The model has essentially eliminated the need for traditional marketing, says Ben Kaufman, Quirky’s founder and ceo. “The nature of marketing is convincing people they need something—you don’t need to persuade someone they need something if they’ve already told you they need it.” Kaufman expects to see more companies follow his lead. “It’s the smart way of doing things—learning more about what customers want up front, before making a big investment.”

even when customers aren’t liter-ally invested in a company as product consultants, there is a growing need for companies to be more transparent. Forward-thinking brands in all indus-tries will increasingly be expected to disclose information—about products, labour practices, sustainability—that customers care about. “Brands will need to move from just having nothing to hide, to showing and proving every-thing they do,” predicts David Mattin, senior analyst at Trendwatching.com. “even consumers who aren’t interested will expect brands to prove their ethical credentials to those who are.”

Tricia Wang, a digital ethnographer who has worked for Nokia and Micro-soft, points to another emerging trust issue that marketers may need to think about. “For a long time, brands thought that they only had to focus on developing trust with their consumers,” says Wang. “But as companies start embracing sharing models that can rely on people’s networks to popularise their product or even create the service itself—think Airbnb—designing for trust will be a top priority. Successful companies will be the ones that figure out how to foster trust—not just between the company and the consumer, but between con-sumer and consumer.”

Game ChanGer

5.social media Will Get Bigger.


parting thought

robots are the new zombies.Finally, something really scary. Vampires will suck your blood, and zombies will eat your brains. but robots? They want your job. In the months ahead, robots will be everywhere. they will continue to fight our

Source: eMarketer

and smaller.

wars, make our stuff, and grow ever closer to driving our cars. and they will be swarming the multiplex, starting with steven spielberg’s Robopocalypse, the director’s first foray into science fiction since 2002’s Minority Report.

january 2013 | InC. | 4 5

Facebook just hit one billion users. Brace yourself for the backlash.

There were

1.43 billionsocial network users in 2012, a 19.2% increase

over 2011.

by ira SwaSti

caSe Study

Ashok Soota didn’t want to rely on clichéd ideas for his company’s logo. Could crowdsourcing do the trick?

Strategy Tactics. Trends. Best Practices.

JANUARy 2013 | iNc. | 47

strategy

it veteran Ashok Soota left his former job of 12 years at MindTree to start another IT firm, Happiest Minds in April 2011. He spent the next five months, from April to August 2011, setting up the brand of the company single-handedly. Soota had the name of his venture in place but designing a company logo that defined the company’s identity, without a team in place, was another matter altogether. So, Soota decied to crowdsource a logo design. He claims Happiest Minds is the first Indian corporate to have done that. But, has handing over the identity of his company to a bunch of strangers paid off?

1 the backStory

the company now may have eight offices around the world but for the first four months, Soota worked single-handedly to create a brand for his new venture. For Soota, the name of the company wasn’t a problem because he was clear about nam-ing his company on a theme close to his heart—happiness. “it is evident that in an increasingly 24/7 world, happiness has taken a back seat,” Soota says. “accord-ingly, we decided to create a company with a simple mission of creating both the happi-est people and the happiest customers. but, designing a logo that could speak volumes of the firm’s brand, without a design or even a marketing team in place, wasn’t going to be easy. even if the team was in place, Soota says designing the logo in-house was never an option because that wasn’t his company’s core competence. the only other alternative was to hire a profes-sional design organisation but that meant writing cheques worth tens of lakhs of rupees, a huge cost for a start-up.

2 the problem

3 the Next StepS

After co-founding and running the $400 million Indian IT firm MindTree, it came as a surprise to most industry experts when Ashok Soota declared a sudden exit from the company to start another ven-ture of his own. Soota says the rationale behind creating another IT venture was the underutilised and unexplored domain of new disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility, social media and big data, in the country. “These technologies have seen a lot of change in the last decade, and yet not a single new IT company has focused on developing solutions using them,” Soota says. So in April 2011, the 71-year-old IT pioneer grasped the opportunity to lay the foundation of Hap-piest Minds, an IT services provider based in bangalore whose core area of functioning is to combine these technolo-gies to create solutions for manufactur-ing, retail, travel and media businesses.Over 14 months, the company has expanded to eight offices in the US, UK, India and Singapore.

Soota decided to consult renowned mar-keting expert Jessie Paul, founder of marketing firm Paul Writer to come up with a solution. During one of their brain-storming sessions, the duo came up with the idea of tapping the crowd for ideas for a company logo.“The main driver of using crowdsourcing was not to save money but to tap into the creative abilities of a large group of people,” Soota says. He roped in two crowdsourcing platforms—Jade Magnet and Techgig—to launch a logo designing contest. Contributors were given a simple brief—to show what Hap-piest Minds means visually with the help of an image, a scribble, a photograph or anything that can be transformed into a visual brand identity. A cash prize of $2,000 was decided for the best design.

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4branding is a complex exercise for the best of compa-nies. To hand over a key aspect of the task—the visual identity of the brand—to a group of non-professional designers who might not even know the company’s core business—might seem like a risky proposition but Soota says, it worked beautifully for them. The crowdsourcing contest began in May 2011. In two months, Happiest Minds received nearly 1,500 logo design submissions. The top 150 ideas were picked out and put to popular vote on Jade Magnet and Techgig. From that emerged a short-list of 25 finalists to be presented to a jury com-prising of design and marketing experts including R Sridhar, Geetha Narayanan Rukmini Krishnaswamy and Jessie Paul along with Soota. The winning design was one in which a half figure of a person had its arms open and raised with three idea sticks hovering over its head. It was sent by Jemin Shingala, a software professional based in New Jersey. The multi-coloured scheme of the design was replaced by a green and yellow combination by bangalore’s famous Srishti School of Art Design and Technology (its director Geetha Narayanan was on the jury) to make the design easier to reproduce, and add to the happiness quotient.

the aFtermath “We were not crowdsourcing to save money. Our goal was to democratise the process, get more participation and fresh ideas,” Soota says. “However, the crowd-sourcing contest turned out to be both an innovative and cost effective approach.” Using two crowdsourcing platforms instead of one was a wise decision as the company got access to two different sets of people pitching in with designs. While Jade Magnet attracted more independent international designers, Techgig brought in designs by technology professionals. The crowdsourcing, in fact, played a role beyond the creation of a logo. It helped introduce Happiest Minds to its target market. “It became a cost-effective way to create a buzz around our company. It pro-vided us with an opportunity to share the story behind the name of the company and be known among our target audience even before we had a logo,” Soota says.

5the takeaway

the expertS weigh iN

caN’t replace proFeSSioNalSAn intelligent way to tap hundreds of minds for a logo design but this cannot overturn the work of a dedicated pro-fessional who can deliver a better prod-uct along with a value addition of credibility and assurance on no re-usage of the design. Plus, logistics can be complicated when you are paying numerous people to work on different projects. A company with a low budget can afford to get its logo crowdsourced, but a company with a good budget must always hire a professional to design its logo, who can interpret its vision and mission in the most appropriate way.Deepak Kaistha | CEO | PowerBrands, New Delhi

a variety oF ideaS at your Feet When you use social media to work on an idea, it can both mean superlative collaboration, or in some cases, total confusion. But I don’t think there could have been a better option in the case of the visual identity of Happiest Minds, where the strength of variety through crowdsourcing and the whetting by a very competent and aware jury brought out the best possible outcome. I don’t think there is any risk involved in crowdsourcing because after the public voting, the final decision rests with the core team of Mr. Soota’s trusted advi-sors and of course, himself.N. Chandramouli | fOuNDEr AND CEO | Comniscient Group, Mumbai

rouNd the globe creativityI’m a fervent believer of the idea of crowd-sourcing and Mr. Soota’s endeavour is a fine example of how this can be done successfully. The funda-mental thought here is the ‘‘democrati-sation of an idea”. If you’re looking for great ideas, use the power of the web to seek them from anywhere in the world. The only downside is that of sifting through a barrage of thoughts that come your way. But I see that as a worthwhile exercise. T-shirt website Inkfruit.com and the community lend-ing website Kiva.org are other fantastic examples of how this can work so well. Chris George | fOuNDEr AND CEO | EBS Worldwide, Mumbai

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Managingthe diversity dividendWant to drive innovation at the workplace? Build a more inclusive team.

an eclectic mix of people typical of any business organisation—some in their 20s, some in their 50s, some women, some men, some IIT pedigree and some fresh-ers from a local university—sit together in an office conference room of a 250-people global communications company based in Mumbai, where a woman is asking them several questions: “Have you ever been witness to a scene where a heavily-built person in your team was made the butt of jokes when you were planning a company picnic? Or made fun of a shy man with a low effeminate voice who raised his voice to put across a point dur-ing a meeting? Or sneered at a male col-league who wanted to work from home to

take care of his child at while her wife was away on tour?”

These are typical questions that Nir-mala Menon, founder and CEO of Inter-weave Consulting, a Bangalore-based diversity management firm, asks during her half-day workshops at companies such as Google, HCL, Yahoo and Britan-nia to help create more inclusive work-places. More and more, companies the world over have begun to realise the value of an inclusive workplace where team members appreciate each other’s differ-ences to create a more collaborative work-ing environment for one another. Also, it’s only in an environment when people aren’t worried about being judged, or

looked down upon, that they feel the free-dom to come up with innovative ideas and out-of-the-box solutions.

Though gender diversity is a global talking point (see box) with the world’s largest corporates making determined efforts to make their workplaces, Boards and parliaments more representative, Menon points out that diversity issues at the workplace go much beyond gender issues. “Diversity is not just one thing. It’s a combination of all the differences that exist between people that make them unique,” Menon says.

In an extremely diverse country such as India, differences at the workplace could arise because of the language one

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speaks, the region where one comes from, the institute one graduated from—whether it was an IIM or a local B-school—the person’s sexuality or even the community he or she belongs to. “Typically, inclusion does not come natu-rally to us as anybody who is different from us is seen to be unworthy of our trust,” Menon explains. “So at the work-place, people tend to form small groups with colleagues who’re like them, sharing information selectively with others or shying away from collaborating.”

Exclusion isn’t always limited to those we perceive to be not “as good as us”. Sub-consciously, people tend to have strong prejudices against people from an “elite” educational background or preconceived notions about certain communities being smarter. This also leads to some employ-ees not feeling a part of the team, which in turn takes a toll on employee produc-tivity and engagement levels within the organisation.

Hence, managers need to be careful of their own behaviour to ensure that the workplace is perceived to be inclusive. Menon uses a simple test to help them realise that. She says if a manager’s team members can figure out who the manag-er’s favourite people are in the team—sim-ply by observing the kind of conversations they have with each other—she is not doing a good job of being an inclusive manager. A good leader is one who is seen as someone who interacts and socialises with all her colleagues on an equal footing irrespective of their educational or com-munity backgrounds.

Moreover, in today’s globalised world, more and more businesses are realising that it’s not just important but essential to have a diverse workforce demographic that is representative of their target mar-ket to better understand the needs of their customers. By bringing together individu-als from different backgrounds and expe-riences, businesses can more effectively market to consumers from different com-munities, educational backgrounds, or even sexual orientation. When an “insider” can tell you how a part of your target group thinks, or what they want, a

firm wants to hire 10 MBAs, it should go for a mix of different types. They should bring in three to four highly experienced candidates and five or six fresh B-school graduates. Companies should also throw toss up this mix by bringing on board some academic toppers, and others who might have average scores but great com-munication skills,” Rajan says. This way, you straightaway get diversity in terms of age, outlook, experience, educational background and skill set, she adds.

While it is common for companies to hire people from within the industry, say an FMCG firm only hiring people from other FMCG companies (with the same set of people trying to solve the same set of problems over and over again), a new trend sees businesses moving out of their own industries to hire people from associ-ated industries, say an FMCG firm hiring people from an IT company or a pro-cesses company. This practice of recruit-ing people that have varied experiences in different industries helps create a more holistic picture of the business and its impact on other industries as different aspects and perspectives come to the fore. Plus, when businesses expand their hiring net, the chances of recruiting the best and brightest minds is higher and in the increasingly competitive market, talent has become crucial to earn profits than ever before.

Here’s look at three Indian business ventures that have successfully leveraged the diversity dividend by exploring differ-ent kinds of diversities at their workplaces:

phyical ability-based diversityAccording to the World Bank, there are about 40 to 80 million differently-abled people in India—about 3-6 per cent of the country’s population—but due to low lit-eracy levels and misconceptions about their productivity, only a few thousand have succeeded in finding suitable employment opportunities. Vindhya e-Infomedia, a Bangalore-based data management and processing firm, has set an extreme example in creating an inclu-sive workplace by exploring the potential of this minority. More than 80 per cent of

A glance at some of the winners of the 2012 Diversity Leader Award, given by the American bi-monthly magazine Diversity Journal, to recognise initia-tives organised by American busi-nesses to encourage and embrace inclusion at the workplace:

Raytheon, a defense technology major, organises regional diversity summits where almost 3,400 employ-ees from across the company partici-pate to build diverse teams and organisations, proactively resolve diversity-related conflict and demon-strate the ability to adapt personal style to accommodate differences.

Workforce solutions provider Man-powerGroup uses social media to reach and hire untapped sources of talent such as women, people with disabilities and those with cultural barriers to work. Manpower’s senior management regularly communicates news about the company’s diversity initiatives through Twitter.

Leading healthcare company United-Health Group organises training mod-ules for its employees on valuing diversity and inclusion. Some of the topics include: Corporate Culture and Diversity and Developing Cultural Pro-ficiency.

Another healthcare provider Well-Point prominently features the compa-ny’s Diversity & Inclusion site on the company’s intranet. The site highlights monthly diversity posters and provides guides to diversity observances on a calender, every month.

championing diversity

business can channel that into creating the best-fit products and services; or even, identify new areas of opportunity.

But, how should one go about doing this? Latha Rajan, co-founder of the lead-ing HR consultancy Ma Foi Strategic Consultants advises companies to induce diversity in the workforce right at the time of planning campus recruitments. She recommends them to focus on getting individuals with different skill sets. “If a

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the company’s 300-people is differently-abled (mainly orthopaedically challenged or hearing impaired) and to ensure the entire workforce is sensitive to its needs, everyone in the organisation needs to learn the company’s official language—the sign language. Vinhdhya’sfounder, Pavithra YS dismisses any “do-gooder” tags for this practice. Hiring people with disabilities was not a part of the compa-ny’s CSR initiatives, she says, but simply a responsible way of hiring people from a community that is deprived of work even though their productivity levels are as good as any. “The number of distractions a so-called normal person has and the number of breaks he or she wants are way too many,” says Pavithra. “In my experi-ence, the level of commitment I have seen in differently-abled person is equal to, if not higher, to a so-called normal person and their attrition levels are much lower.”

To minimise a glamourisation of a workplace like this, and make her people feel like they are working in any regular office, Vindhya is planning to do away with wheelchairs in the office and switch to regular swivel chairs, albeit with bigger seats and better handles.

cross-functional diversity“Diversity of thought brings in diversity in ideas which helps in better innovation and that is a key competitive advantage for any company,” says Srimathi Shivashankar, associate vice president, diversity and sustainability at HCL Tech-nologies whose role is to ensure that diverse groups at HCL are comfortable enough to express themselves and bounce off ideas to drive innovation. To facilitate cross functional innovation, the global IT firm has an internal contest called MAD JAM or Make a Difference Jamboree where HCL employees from any depart-ment pitch in innovative ideas on any area of business—be it streamlining processes, client servicing or cloud solutions. For instance, this year, about 270 idea white-papers were received from HCLites out of which the company’s infrastructure divi-sion came up with the winning idea of an intuitive cloud lifecycle management

Until now, no book has offered companies a clear, pragmatic guide for creating more gender-balanced approaches to business. Here’s a brief summary of the four-step approach that the author, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, suggests in her book How Women Mean business:

audit: business leaders eager to effect change often rush too far ahead too quickly. It is very important to ensure first that there is a good understanding of where a company is coming from on this issue, what has been accomplished, and what lessons are to be learned to date, both internally and externally. So, the first part of the book covers the Audit Phase, incorporating three chapters on understanding the issue internally and externally.

awareness: The second phase concerns Awareness, ensuring that senior man-agers understand why gender balance matters. This section is about leaders deciding what the business case for gender balance really is in relation to the company’s broader strategic goals.

align: Once the leadership is convinced and convincing on the issue, companies are ready to adapt the systemic underpinnings of their organisations by identify-ing and rooting out subconscious obstacles leading to a more gender-balanced meritocracy. The Alignment Phase is about changing the company’s DNA by embedding new processes and systems in training, talent and marketing.Sustain: Finally, companies need to use clear and effective measures, reward structures, and communications approaches to maintain the change process. This is covered in the last section called Sustain.

how women mean business

framework called MyCloud that enables the organisation to achieve improved ser-vice levels and reduced IT costs. This was a solution that an infrastructure division of a company may not typically come up with.

cross-cultural diversityEn Route Media is another technology firm that has learnt to leverage the advantages of diversity at the workplace, albeit of a different kind. The Mumbai-based producers of Flo, an in-taxi digital entertainment and advertising network, hire Singaporean and Vietnamese interns from the National University of Singapore

for five months to work with them. “The fact that they have been brought up in a different surrounding and in a different education system is immediately noticeable in team discussions. They are usually not “yes-sayers” and challenge the status quo from day one. This helps bring different perspectives tothe table,” says Paul Schwarz, co-founder of En Route. Although, there are certain practical downsides of hiring cross-culturally, cautions Schwarz, as some of these interns have strong accents when they speak in English which makes it difficult to employ them in roles that demand client interaction. —Ira Swasti

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Bon Appétit Will Asvin Simon’s recipe of indigenising western style fast food tempt investors?

strategy

FouNder : Asvin simon

LoCAtIoN: Chennai

LAuNChed: 2009

GeoGrAphICAL preseNCe: Across 13 states in India, and one outlet in Doha, Qatar

prICING: From `29-`359

empLoyees: 350

projeCted turN-over For 2012-13: `18 crore

FuNdING souGht: `30 crore

FuNdING souGht For: opening up 500 out-lets in India and build overseas presence

Get the produCt rIGht Any QSR model is product driven as there is no experience attached, unlike dining. For bangs, it will be extremely criti-cal to derive a product which is widely accepted. As a QSR chain, most of the food needs to be standardised. So, striking that balance—between standardisa-tion and local delights—is very important. Menu offerings are another challenge along with the consistency of delivery, as the diversity in food habits is very evident in the Indian mar-ket. having said so, standard offerings would make sense, as nowadays the urban Indian trav-els and is aware of the standard taste, making it difficult for operators to take the plunge.PROSENJIT ROY CHOUDHURY, CEO Barbeque Nation, Mumbai

stICk to the sAme CItIes the strategy of setting up in tier-2 and tier-3 cities lets the company avoid major competi-tion from multi-national fast food chains, but that could change in the future. however, I’m concerned about the high food cost (40 per cent) which shouldn’t be more than about 33-35 per cent and that means they need to pay more attention to menu composition. the cur-rent turnover of `18 crore across 35 outlets is a daily sale greater than `15,000, not quite as per projections. It may be more profitable to open more outlets in same cities than to expand to others because it lowers material costs and improves efficiency.MADHU MENON, chef and food consultant, Bangalore

CoNtroLLING Costs Is keythe idea of serving Indian-fla-voured fast food is good but to keep the business profitable and scalable they need to keep all cost factors in mind. bangs will need to carefully manage infrastructure costs (supply chain and real estate) if it wants to be a multi-city player. As it grows, it will need to minimise their cash burn by increasing their daily revenue per outlet (Indian and international bench-marks for break-even points is $2,000/outlet/day upwards). Also, indigenisation and keeping the price point low can make people walk into the outlet for the first time but a great experi-ence will convert them into repeat customers. SORABH GUPTA, partner Bedrock Ventures, Delhi

the pitch: “Driven by increasing disposable incomes and exposure to western cuisine, the fast food market in India stands at `8,000 crore today, and is growing at a CAGR of 35-40 per cent annually. In fact, there exists a tremendous scope for expansion in the underserved tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Understanding this market potential, we offer western fast food items such as burgers, pastas and wraps, and Indianise them to suit the palate of cus-tomers in smaller cities who wish to enjoy global products but want the taste to be familiar. So customers can savour our chilly and coriander fla-voured chicken, or wraps in makhni gravy. We revise our menus every six months, and launch special delicacies to coincide with regional festivals. We have ambitious plans of opening 500 outlets across the country in the next five years.”—As told to Neha Gupta

Elevator PitchBangs serves Indian-flavoured fast food products. Will investors have an appetite for `30 crore?

the experts Weigh In


Being Inspired The impact Ujjivan makes on the lives of the working poor keeps Samit Ghosh going. In the three decades he worked for CitiGroup and Bank Muscat, Samit Ghosh picked

up every nuance of the banking business. That experience along with his family background (of being born in a middle-class family where he saw his parents’ fortune change with the 1985 revolution in the financial services industry) made Ghosh want to move to his next professional challenge, of making financial services available to the working poor by providing them loans. He founded Ujjivan Financial Services, a microfinance venture, in 2005, and in the past seven years, it has disbursed more than $580 million among a million customers. Interestingly, Ujjivan has also won the Great Place to Work award three times. Ghosh’s secrets to making that happen are simple— don’t work after office hours and ask employees to go home on time.

As told to IrA swAstI | PHoToGraPHS By SrIvaTSa


strategy

I have three dogs, a German Shepherd, an Irish Setter and an adopted street dog that wake me up every morning around 6-6.30am. I can’t stay in bed after that because I have to let them out for a walk. After getting ready, I recharge for the day by lounging in the huge ter-race area in my house in Whitefield, Bangalore that has a beautiful view of large green trees, for about half an hour to 45 minutes. This is the time I relax, have my breakfast and think about the day with owls and squirrels as my companions. My family is not an early riser like I am so I usually have my fixed breakfast of oat cereal with dry fruits and a glass of lemonade with honey in it, with my dogs who’re back home after their walk by then.

I have three children but I get to spend maximum time with my eldest daughter. She works for our company’s foundation, Parinaam and we leave for office together around 8.15am. In the car, I try reading the newspaper if I’m not busy admiring the greenery out-side. I reach office around 9am and the first thing I do is try to get my personal obligations

the wAy I work | samit Ghosh, Ujjivan Financial services

“We hire people based on referrals from our customers, and not just employees.”


strAteGy

Sometimes, senior members in my team prod me not to share dangerous instances of attacks fearing that other staff members may get scared on hearing them. But I believe open and transparent communication in an organisation goes a long way in gaining the trust of employees. When we tell our employees about these attacks, especially in crime prone areas such as Western UP and Bihar, we talk to them about ways they can protect themselves and how we will help them. This helps assuage some of the sense of insecurity that could have crept in otherwise. Over the years, we’ve realised that the best protection of our staff is only possible with the help of our customers. Normally, the bad elements that attack the field staff are from the same locality. So we make sure we verbally emphasise that we are working for their good and our staff needs to be pro-

tected from any kind of attacks.

ut, building trust around financial issues among the working poor liv-ing in urban or semi-urban slum areas takes time. What helps a lot in this case is constant communication and being open with them from the very beginning till the end. That way, they open up faster and relate to you better, too. So not just my field staff, but on my part as well, I ensure I visit each of the regions (north, south, east and west) where Ujjivan operates in, atleast once in three months. I wish I could do this more often but visiting each of the 299 branches across India is not possible.

Visiting customers, interacting with them and listening to their issues is the favourite part of my job. It also helps us to get direct feedback on our loan issuing procedure and our business in general. On my last field visit to Tamil Nadu, for instance, I asked customers what

such as paying bills out of the way before I get on with official work.Once that is taken care of, I start my day by checking e-mails on my laptop. I get about 150-200 e-mails a day in my inbox, 30 per cent of which are usually junk. Earlier, I used to get mails on my phone too but then they started chasing me 24 hours of the day, seven days of the week and I decided to get rid of that. Now I prefer to check mails on my own time instead of having them chase me.

I usually keep my mornings open for one-on-one meetings with my staff, where they update me about the latest happenings in their branches or talk about various issues they’re facing in their regions. These are more like casual conversations or chats than meetings with my teams because I like to make sure that communication in the office is as open and healthy as possible. Having worked in a corporate environment for 30 years, I have been trying to do away with the backbiting and politics that comes with opaque communications sys-tems in place.

Here, when a person does some-thing well, we emphasise on sharing his or her secret of success with all the teams so that others can learn from it. There have been many incidents where our people have gone beyond their line of duty to help our custom-ers. These stories are very inspira-tional for others in our teams. For instance, once our branch staff took complete care of a customer who was suffering from tuberculosis, admit-ted her children to an orphanage and even handled her last rites because her family couldn’t afford to. Another time, some thugs tried to snatch the cash bag that had all the cash col-lected from one of our operating areas. Our field agent was dragged for 15 metres and got hurt, but didn’t let go of the bag. Now, that’s incredible.

“I ensure that communication in the office is as open and

healthy as possible.”


strAteGy

to form a group and come back and see us. Then they go through a training programme, basically an orientation into microfinance where they learn about the terms and conditions, what we offer and what kind of disciplines they need to follow to repay the loan in time. After this, they are taken through a test, and if they clear that, they are inducted into the programme. It’s sort of a literacy programme about microfinance where the loan takers know what they are getting into before they get into it.

I am very strict about my work timings. Most days, I leave office by 5.30-6pm in the evening and so does most of the office. I’m very strict about the timings my staff keeps. If an employee is staying overtime, beyond say 7pm, a report arrives on my desk the next morning informing me about the same. I normally talk to the supervisors in that case to know the cause because working over-time is taken as a negative, not a positive. I admit there are some departments like finance where however much I try, people just want to come late and leave late because they prefer working in the evenings. I don’t have an issue with that but I don’t want to encour-age it personally.

As I reach home, I relax, have tea and then hit the gym or go swimming on a good day, along with my daughter. My family and I are huge fans of the MasterChef, so after I come, we religiously watch that show together at night. When you run a business, it’s a 24/7 job, it’s always there in the back of your mind, so after some quality family time, I am back to checking my e-mails and then hit the bed by 11-11.30pm to be ready for the next day. Even on Sun-days, after enjoying some cooking with my wife Elaine, in the evening, I list down all that needs to be accomplished at work the next week. It’s not difficult to be motivated when you work in a business like Ujjivan where you can see the direct impact of your work. It keeps you going.

But I have always believed that if you work efficiently, you should be able to complete your work within office time and go back, except some peak periods at the end of the month when loan collections take place. So, we have a rule in the office where if someone wants to come and work on a weekend or on a holiday, he or she needs my special approval. That deters people from doing it.

I used to think that the work of a field agent at Ujjivan is a dif-ficult job in a difficult environment. But when the team from the Great Place to Work Institute came and did the survey of our employees’ engagement and motivation levels, they found that their biggest motivating factor was actually the work they do and the impact they can see on the lives of the working poor. Basic hygiene factors such as paying salaries on time, providing good increments on time and other HR management factors play a sig-nificant role, of course. But, it’s the above sentiment that differen-tiates this job from others.

Of course, bringing the right people in is the primary key to creating that culture. We have a unique hiring technique to ensure we only hire people who are comfortable working in tough envi-ronments such as urban slums. So, instead of just hiring people based on referrals from existing employees, we ask our customers to refer potential candidates to us. There are several cases where the mother in the family has taken a loan from us to run a small business, and her son works with us as a field agent, collecting those loans and educating others about our services and how to make use of it. Customers also have to go through a whole screen-ing process before we do business with them. When we open a new branch in a locality, each branch manager or field representative go street by street wherever the poor are, and explain to them what we do, how they can avail our services, and how to form loan groups. When these potential applicants come to us, we ask them

they believed was an acceptable waiting period for a loan to get sanctioned. They all said seven days. We communicated that to our staff, and worked to change our processes to make sure we had the ability to dis-burse loans in that seven-day time frame.

In fact, to infuse more enthusiasm into this initia-tive, we started a contest within our organisation to reduce the turnaround time where branches that man-aged to give out loans within seven days won cash prizes. This is not the first time we organised a compe-tition among our employees to keep them motivated. Before this, we did an internal competition where employees were encouraged to get back old customers. In microfinance, like any other business, what happens is that some customers who had taken loans earlier drop out of the programme or sit idle, so the contest was to understand why they left, resolve their issues and get them back as new customers. Employees who got the maximum number of old customers won cash prizes worth thousands of rupees.

A lot of time, in order to meet targets and deadlines at work, people tend to work on weekends and holidays.

opening Up Ghosh’s favourite part of running Ujjivan is when he gets to visit and interact with his customers, and get their feedback on the company’s loan issuing processes. He does that at least once every three months.


Growing up in a Gujarati business family, entrepreneurship was in Paras Shah’s veins. After completing his engineering from Case Western University, USA, when Shah returned to India in 1991, he was keen on bringing international technology standards to a nation which had abysmal PC and internet penetration back then. Thus was born the Mumbai-based Neoteric Infomatique, an IT services dealership. Over the past 21 years, Neoteric has grown into a ̀ 1,800-crore national IT distribu-tor with 55 plus branches and more than 700 employees across 500 cities. Here, Shah talks about why a prudent businessman is one who keeps his emotions at bay in the office.

I wIsh I knew then...

Paras shah, founder and CeO, neoteric Infomatique

I hail from a Gujarati business family where both my parents always motivated me to have a never-say-die attitude and an indomitable spirit when doing business. My father instilled in me the penchant for undertaking calculated risks and embrac-ing new challenges. It was this upbringing which inspired me to start Neoteric in 1991. I’ve been lucky to have both my par-ents as guides and mentors to me in busi-ness—my mother taught me the value of delegating both responsibilities and power.

While running Neoteric, though, I realised that just empowering your employ-ees to make decisions isn’t good enough. As a boss, one has to make sure that action and thought isn’t just driven by you, but to have a culture where employees are proactive, and motivated to grow the company. To be able to do this effectively, one needs to be careful to keep emotions aside. In the first 10 years of Neoteric, I didn’t do well on that count. My emotions reflected in my profes-sional decisions, especially when the deci-sions were about people who had put in long tenures in the company. I found it dif-ficult to segregate between personal and professional relationships. I liked being a “nice guy”, and would feel great when col-leagues said that about me.

But, I realised soon enough that this nice guy image was proving to be a hin-drance when the time came to make cer-tain big decisions for the growth of the company. Some senior team members—those who enjoyed both decision-making powers and their colleagues’ support—were simply not taking decisions that would give us a lead in the industry. Plus, my emotional attachment to them was clouding my ability to evaluate such people

properly—solely, on the basis of their competence. Once I realised that, it was important to change. I ensured that my emo-tions took a backseat, even when it meant letting long-serv-ing employees go because they had become roadblocks in the company’s growth.

This wasn’t easy for me. In fact, letting such people go was one of the toughest decisions I had to take in my 21 year-long business journey. But, change is really the only constant. It’s the golden rule—adapt, or perish. Now, we try to bring on board the best people from the indus-try to mentor Neotericians, and make sure their decision mak-ing powers are aligned with

action. For instance, Dr R. Srinivasan, an XLRI alumnus and an expert on diverse industries such as oil and gas, IT, steel, con-struction and consumer goods etc. has been an HR consultant with us for the last 10 years. We constantly try to make Neo-teric the breeding ground for the best talent in the industry. —As told to Ira Swasti

Reining In emotions Paras Shah has learnt not to let his emotions dictate his professional decisions.

6 0 | InC. | JANUARY 2013

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