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A 9.9 Media Publication | inc.com Facebook.com/Inc @incmagazineApril/May 2012 | `150 | Volume 03 | Issue 03

OutstandingWorkplaceValues

special cOVerage:

3rd annual Inc. India 500 awards Page 18

Cover Story

Diversity | Feedback | personal Touch | rewards & recognition

Learn from four award-winning ComPanieS inLCuding:

MakeMyTrip Brickred

Page 28

musT-Have web ToolsTo engage cusTomers on your websiTe

Hitesh Dhingra (front) and amanpreet bajaj,

co-founders of LetsBuy.com, are confident they can work as well with flipkart which recently acquired LetsBuy.

The Way We WOrk

cracking the partnership

codeTwo buddies on how they

achieved hyper-growth

Page 56

NEW RESEARCH: What EntrepreneursReally Want

Page 44

HOW TOBE AN

EFFICIENTLEADER

Page 56

The magazine for growing Companies

Ou

Ts

Tan

Din

g W

Or

kp

la

ce

Valu

es

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Sankalp Forum is an Intellecap initiative. Learn more at www.intellecap.net

Visit www.sankalpforum.comor email sankalpforum@intellecap.net

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print_v1.indd 1 3/19/12 9:43:07 AM

contentscontentsApril/May 2012

40 How I Did It s. Ramakrishna Karuturi Serendipity led Ramakrishna Karuturi to a rose plantation in Israel in the mid-90s. Fascinated, he set up his own cultivation business. Today, Karuturi Global produces 650 million rose stems a year. as told to meenakshi kumar

44 the Motivation Matrix A new study sheds light on what company founders value most, and how an understanding of your priorities can help you in business. by leigh buchanan

28Good Values, Healthy companiesYou need more than a fat pay cheque to keep employees happy. Four companies tell us how to create great workplaces with values that make both business and people sense. by ira swasti 30 MakeMyTrip33 Cactus Communications34 BrickRed 38 Claris Lifesciences

56the Way We WorkHitesh Dhingra relies on instinct. Amanpreet Bajaj on details and precision. This “data-gut” combination has helped their company LetsBuy.com click its way to business glory. as told to shreyasi singh

april/May 2012 | Inc. | 1

on the coverHitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj, co-founders of LetsBuy.com. Photographed by Subhojit Paul in Gurgaon. Cover design by Anil VK.

This ediTion of inc. Magazine is published under license from Mansueto Ventures llc, new york, new york. editorial items appearing on pages 21, 52-60 were all originally published in the United states edition of inc. mwagazine 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.

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A new World Tomoyo yasuda

works at cactus communications, which has people

from seven nations in its Mumbai office.

contents April/May 2012

05 editor’s Letter

06 InnovationA low-cost detector for eye ailments

09 Launch Viewpoints: Why you should hire technical managers A big night: Inc. India 500 award ceremony Social enterprises: on their way to glory? The Inc. Data Bank Skimmer’s Guide to The Power of Habit, by Charles Duhigg

13 Get RealBy Jason FriedCreating a company culture when your employees are scattered across the map

14 the Dressing Room By Krishna Kumar A difference of opinion among your teammates is good for the organisation. Let them speak up

06

stRAteGy47 HIRInG How one firm gets new hires on board, and up to speed—fast

49 fInAnce American start-ups find funding from a surprisinging source—ad agencies

50 LeADeRsHIpeveryone knows leaders need to be tough and decisive. But elegant? Really?

52 DesIGnA website is reborn

54 eLeVAtoR pItcH Building Blocks sets up science labs for schools and colleges. Will investors show up with 8 crore?

60 I Wish I Knew then... over-confidence never pays in business, believes Alufit founder Pankaj Keswani. A recent rocky expansion plan has taught him the importance of detailed research.

16

47

16 Mind Roots By Shayamal Vallabhjee Creativity in business is all about seeing connections in the unconnected.

18 special coverage The legacy, the celebration and the people behind the third annual Inc. India 500 awards Guidebook, no. 3How to establish a code of ethics for your company. Find the guidebook following Page 24.

25 the Goods Tools for engaging customers on your company website Must-Haves: A way to tap social networks for travel tips Gadgets for mobile workers Cloud-based services to store and sync data Tech Trends, by Soham Raninga: Is the ultrabook right for you?

26

2 | Inc. | april/May 2012

MAIL

Inspiring StoriesYour magazine is appealing because it highlights entrepreneurs’ achievements. Every issue is a collector’s issue, and your articles must be inspiring our youth to become entrepreneurs. I loved the write-up on Printo’s Manish Sharma. In my 35 years in HR, I’ve seen very few instances of people like Manish. In fact, I shared the story with my children too.— ChAndrAprAbhA VenkAtAgIrI, via e-mail

Looks good I liked both your anniversary special issue and the book on the Inc. India 500 awardees. They are both very informative and the presentation is very imaginative and attractive.

shubha singh, company secretary, Dhanuka Agritech

really a worthy story? While going through the second anniver-sary issue which covers the 2nd gen biz

kids, a mixture of thoughts came up. I can understand the theme of two which leads to their inclusion. It was a great idea, and I’m sure the young people featured in the story will eventually prove to be worthy heirs to their legacy. But as a first-genera-tion entrepreneur, I think that these guys had it easy. I wonder if they would have done as well without the parental aas-hirwaad. I know they’ve worked hard, went to the top schools internationally, and have learnt their ropes, but my nagging

doubts don’t go away. As I moved on and read about the Lemon Tree founder Patu Keswani, there was immediately a 180-degree transformation in my percep-tion. Now, that’s a self-made entrepreneur whose story is a great inspiration.

tarun bangari, founder and ceo, janta khoj

To submit a letter, or alert us to an error, write to us at inc.india@9dot9.in. Letters may be edited for space and style. Submission constitutes permission to use.

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

EditorialMANAGING EDITOR: ShreyaSi SinghAssIsTANT fEATuREs EDITOR: rohini banerjee fEATuRE wRITER: ira SwaSti

Copy dEskMANAGING EDITOR: Sangita thakur Varma

dEsignsR CREATIvE DIRECTOR: jayan k narayananART DIRECTOR: anil VkAssOCIATE ART DIRECTORs: PC anooP & atul DeShmukh vIsuAlIsERs: PraSanth tr anil t & Shokeen Saifi sR DEsIGNERs: SriSti maurya & nV baiju DEsIGNERs: SuneeSh k, Shigil n, Charu DwiVeDiraj Verma, PrinCe antony, binu mP, PeterSon & PrameeSh PuruShothaman C ChIEf PhOTOGRAPhER: Subhojit PaulPhOTOGRAPhER: jiten ganDhi

Community tEamPRODuCT MANAGER: maheSh raViAssIsTANT PRODuCT MANAGER: rajat guPta AssOCIATE: DeePika Sharma

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 helP@9Dot9.in

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

4 | InC. | apriL/may 2012

Leafy, clean and self-sufficient, the Steel City (as it is known) was an oasis of an urban centre. There, the Tatas managed to create a town-ship where employees could be insulated from the inefficiencies that plagued Indian cities. Jamshedpur had uninterrupted power, good schools, hospitals, entertainment facilities and ample parks. And, it was built on a core value—of really engaging with the community.

Employees reciprocated with a loyalty and “stickiness” most companies today will find impossible to match despite handing out big bucks and bigger frills. The Jamshedpur model also dem-onstrated that generous employee perks and financial prudence were not natural adversaries. In fact, they married well together.

Our cover story this time has more contemporary examples of a similar effort. All four companies in our package on outstanding workplaces have effectively blended people benefits with corporate objectives—mostly with the help of a unique value both relevant to their needs, and personally championed by the entrepreneur in charge.

Take Cactus Communications, for example. Though it is Mumbai-based, the academic editing com-pany has more than 30,000 clients across the globe. A truly global

workforce might have been a necessity for Cac-tus, but the company went beyond that. It seeded its culture with a vibrant diversity—the head office has employees from seven coun-tries, and you only have to look at the photo-graphs on Page 32 to see what I mean. This focus has helped Cactus bring together a med-

ley of different ideas, perspectives and ways of working. There’s also MakeMyTrip, where CEO Deep Kalra believes

“you can’t over-recognise effort or achievement”. MakeMyTrip has robust rewards programmes that recognise not only employees who net in the highest sales, or bring in the most business, but also those who uphold company values or go beyond the call of duty to help peers out. We believe these stories make for good reading in today’s age of talent crunch and wars, and crippling attrition rates. I hope you find them useful as you craft your own people policies.

Much like the employees at these companies, I’ve benefitted from an exciting organisational value at 9.9 Media—this maga-zine’s publisher. Our business might be about specialty publica-tions, but an important part of the management aim has been to create new media leaders—almost all our publications are helmed by first-time editors. For me, bringing out Inc. India has definitely been a wonderful opportunity.

As always, I look forward to hearing from you. Do tell us what you thought of this story.

A significant part of my childhood was spent in Jamshedpur, a town in Jharkhand and the headquarters of Tata Steel.

Beyond Pay Hikes and Promotions...

Shreyasi Singhshreyasi.singh@9dot9.in

Things i LearnT in This issue

Be perennially paranoid. It’s a good state of mind for achievers to be in, says Ramakrishna Karuturi.

Begin to worry when your team members agree with you all the time. It’s unhelpful for both you and your company.

editor’S letter

apRIl/May 2012 | iNC. | 5

innovation Companies on the Cutting Edge

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leading by Example

“ hire people who like to get their hands dirty rather than those who just want to manage.”Swapnil Shinde, co-founder and Coo of Dhingana, a social music streaming site that makes downloading and listening to Indian music legal, and free, recently tweeted: “there’s a reason why people should be managed by people who have done the work before—a clear way to evaluate talent and performance.” In his Pune-based firm founded in 2007, he ensures he hires technical managers who can do a good job of managing people, instead of hiring just people managers. this tip is clearly tuning in great results at Dhingana. More than 3.5 million people across Asia, North America and europe access the music platform each month.

april/May 2012 | Inc. | 9photograph by jiten gandhi

launch

Winning Moments sanjeev Bikhchandani (left) and Pramath Raj

sinha releasing the special book

celebrating the Rising Stars of India Inc. an evening of celebration and camaraderie February 29, 2012, saw the culmination of the third annual Inc. India 500 Awards at Assocham House, New Delhi. It was a special night for us as more than 100 founder-owners and senior leaders of India’s fastest-growing mid-sized companies—as listed in our annual rankings—came together to celebrate the spirit of entrepreneurship. the event took off with a keynote address by sanjeev Bikhchandani, founder and executive vice-chairman, Infoedge India, who talked about the qualities high-potential entrepreneurs must internalise as they scale. As Mr Bikhchandani’s engrossing address came to an end, it was time to release a special coffee-table book on the Inc. India 500. Pramath Raj sinha, managing director, 9.9 Media, and Mr Bikhchandani did the honours. It was then time to recognise our awardees’ entrepreneurial contributions to India. Amidst the rapturous applause, our rankholders went onto the stage to receive their certificates from our guest of honour. the myriad colours embellishing the stage were reminiscent of the variety and distinctiveness of our winning companies that cut across geographies and sectors. As the evening wore on, it was time to show our guests a good time. the next few minutes witnessed waves of laughter rippling through our esteemed gathering as Nitin Gupta, stand-up comedian and founder of entertainment engineers, a Mumbai-based firm that organises stand-up comedy acts, took centre stage. From what success means to how people interact on Facebook, everything was fair game for Gupta. the laughter that the event ended on was a great pointer to the future—and the perfect way for us to celebrate our winners. we wish them bigger successes ahead. ***To see more event action, turn to page 18.

leadership

Get the scalability Dna

Good advice sanjeev Bikhchandani celebrated the winners’ achievements with a few tips of his own

one of India’s most successful internet entrepreneurs, sanjeev Bikhchandani, the founder and executive vice chairman of Infoedge India, the country’s premier online classifieds company, was the keynote speaker at the Inc. India 500 awards. An Inc. India 500 winner himself in our first ranking in 2009, Bikhchandani’s journey per-fectly embodies what gritty entrepreneurship is like. It’s a tale he recounted with great ease at the award ceremony. His early experi-ences—of starting out in his parents’ servant quarters, or having little access to capital—found perfect resonance in our gathering of entrepreneurs. But more than looking back, Bikhchandani chose to look ahead by introduc-ing the winners to what he termed the “DNA of scalability”. According to him, founder-owners need to embrace and live the changes their organisations bring forth. Bikhchandani put forth five key pointers—give your company the first-mover’s advantage by solving an unsolved problem, base your idea on detailed, continu-ous customer insight, become a personal magnet for talent, make sure you continue to engage with the customer, and put in place

impressive corporate governance stan-

dards. —Inc. India

10 | Inc. | april/May 2012

launch

april/May 2012 | Inc. | 11

roughly two-thirds of enterprises treat the social motive as equally if not more important than the profit motive. approximately one-third prioritise maximising social impact over profit maximisation. this finding suggests that most social entrepreneurs are using business as a tool to achieve a social goal rather than viewing the social impact as a positive outcome that will naturally flow from a certain type of business as usual. there is a trend towards emphasis on profit over impact in younger socents. this could be a result of the growing amount of funding available in the space, leading more profit-driven entrepreneurs into the space as well as a cultural shift occurring in which society is becoming more accepting of a combined profit and social impact motive.

Do Good, Get Big?Report says India’s social enterprises are young, but raring to goIndia is an active crucible for market-based solutions to poverty. These social enterprises (socents) are demonstrating that profitable business models can be worked out to tackle problems of livelihood, agriculture and education. The social enterprise industry in India has experienced dramatic growth over the last five years, with the greatest spike occurring in energy and agriculture. Health, livelihood development and water/sanitation have also witnessed a surge, while education has just taken off. Social Enterprise Landscape Report, a study brought out by Intellecap, a consulting and investment firm focussed on social enterprises, recently highlighted interesting findings on the growth, profitability, geographic distribution and social impact of these companies. —S.S.

the socents landscape is a young but fast-growing industry. nearly half of today’s enterprises have been in operation for less than two years, and a huge 80 per cent for five years or less. the industry appears to have taken off in 2005-06 around the time that microfinance got global recognition as a market-based strategy. in the last five years, there has been a continued and dramatic growth, straight through the global recessions, and likely spurred in the last two years by investors turning away from microfinance towards other investment opportunities.

Forty per cent of social enterprises target only rural markets, and another 35 per cent target rural and urban markets. a high concentration of headquarter locations are in the southern and western regions but nearly 60 per cent of enterprises are operating in at least one low-income state (liS). this suggests that while socents are typically based in regions where they have better access to human resources, infrastructure and networks, this does not prevent them from working in underserved regions.

More than half of the surveyed social enterprises are break-even or profitable. one quarter of surveyed social enterprises report being profitable while another 28 per cent report they are breaking even. as with total revenue and revenue growth, profitability is closely linked to enterprise age in our survey results. over time, an increasing portion of enterprises reach break-even and profitability milestones. profitable socents emerge quickly. of the socents who have reached profitability, 60 per cent reported doing so within the first two years after funding.

Years in Operation Rural vs. Urban Market Years to Profitability

0-2 years 46%

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inc. data bank crunching the numbers

The book: The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg; Random House.

The big idea: Habits can be our making or our undoing. either way, they are powerful. Canny marketers use cues to activate consumer spending habits, and wise leaders create strong institutional habits.

The backstory: New York Times journalist Duhigg has won numerous awards for his reporting.

Your business on autopilot: Duhigg reminds us that business processes and routines are nothing more than habits practiced on an organisation-wide scale. If you can get your kids to brush their teeth every night, you can get your employees to provide great customer service.

If you read nothing else: Chapter Four recounts Paul o’Neill’s turnaround of alumi-num company Alcoa. Duhigg uses the example to illustrate how improving a single habit—practicing safety, in Alcoa’s case—ripples out to improve an entire organisation. If all companies followed starbucks’s lead and trained employees in self-discipline, as described in Chapter Five, customer service and productivity would soar.

Rigour rating: 9 (1=Who Moved My Cheese?; 10=Good to Great). Duhigg interviewed more than 300 scientists and executives and consulted many academic studies. sixty pages of conclud-ing notes offer a window into the sausage-making process, complete with responses to fact-checking queries. —Leigh Buchanan

GloBal EnTREpREnEuRShIp

Portion of citizens who say entrepreneurs are highly valued in their country:

Portion who exercised less in 2011:

33%

Portion who gained weight:

22%

WoRk-lIfE BalancE

share of small-business owners who say the poor business climate had a negative effect on their health in 2011:

44%

Average rating given in online reviews:

4.3 out of 5

RESoluTIonS

small-business owners’ top goals for 2012:

1. Grow the business2. Improve relationships with friends and family3. Eat healthier4. Work out more5. Work less

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IN-PeRsoN CoNveRsAtIoNs: 84%

e-MAIl: 58%

MoBIle PHoNe: 50%

soCIAl NetwoRkING sItes: 35%

INstANt MessAGING: 22%

oNlINe PRoDUCt RevIews: 17%

PeRsoNAl BloG: 14%

Portion of citizens who say they have had an idea for a new business:

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24%eARN eNoUGH to lIve CoMFoRtABly

6%PAss tHe BUsINess to A FAMIly MeMBeR 7%

HAve FRee tIMe to Do wHAt I wANt

4%sell tHe BUsINess FoR A BIG PRoFIt

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eMARketeR; woRD oF MoUtH MARketING AssoCIAtIoN

—Compiled by Andrew Shafer12 | Inc. | april/May 2012

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Caldwell, Idaho. Edmond, Oklahoma. Phoenix, Arizona. Rapid City, South Dakota.

What do these places have in common? Someone who works at 37signals lives in each of

them. Our home base is Chicago, but more than half of our 32 employees live somewhere else. When someone asks me where we’re based, I like to answer that 37signals is everywhere.

These are not peripheral workers. They are core people, the ones who design our products and keep our customers happy. Our lead system administrator (the guy who keeps the servers running and our applications online) lives in Florida. A designer is in Colorado. We have programmers on both sides of the coun-try. Key customer service people live in Texas and Tennessee.

In fact, David Heinemeier Hansson, my business partner, is from Copenhagen. We started working together remotely before we’d even met in person. For years, we worked seven time zones apart. Today, he splits his time between Chicago and the south of Spain.

I never planned on building a company like this; it just sort of turned out that way. But I’m not complaining. Our willingness to hire remote workers gives us some key advantages—and has led to surprising revelations about what it means to work together when you aren’t together in the traditional sense.

One upside to having a company spread across many loca-tions is that you typically get more work coverage during the day. Because of time-zone spreads, a business can be effectively open for 12 to 15 hours, instead of just eight or 10. This means you’re more available to your customers. Sure, you could stagger workers into separate shifts, but that often segregates people and isn’t worth the trouble.

Another, more important, advan-tage: By not getting hung up on geography, we can hire the best people we can find. This has become more important than ever. Unemployment may be stubbornly high, but talk to

anyone in the media and technology industries, and there’s a good chance she will complain about how hard it is to find tal-ented people. Why limit yourself? Great people are better than close people. Great and close, of course, are ideal—but ideal is tough to find these days.

Of course, not everyone can work remotely. Not everyone does his best while working from his home, a co-working space, or a café. As a result, we usually try to hire people who’ve had experience working away from the mother ship.

Another issue is culture. Can you create a cohesive, healthy company when staff members rarely see one another face to face? I think so. The key is not to let two cultures emerge. You can’t treat the locals and remote workers differently. Everyone has to play by

the same rules and communicate the same way—no matter how far away peo-ple’s desks are.

You will need a place where everyone, regardless of location, talks, shares work, and discusses ideas. It could be a cloud-

based chat room, a project-management tool, a teleconferencing system like WebEx, or a wiki. The key is to find a way to make your virtual workspace the place where everyone communicates, not just the people you can’t see. It can take some getting used to, but eventually, employing such tools becomes second nature. At our office, even people who sit next to one another communicate using our collaboration tool, Campfire.

There’s one question I hear from entrepreneurs all the time: “How do you know work is getting done if you can’t see people doing it?” My response? Observing work take place is not the same as seeing work get done. In fact, I have found that it’s easier to know if people are getting work done when they’re remote. That’s because their work has to speak for itself. When you don’t have just being there at the office to hide behind, it becomes all about the work. And it’s hard to argue with that.

Out of Sight, Top of Mind How to keep a business on track when your top performers are scattered across the map

Follow Jason Fried on Twitter: @jasonfried.

GeT Real BY JaSOn FRied

Jason Fried is co-founder of 37signals, a Chicago-based software company.

He is perfectly happy working remotely.

april/May 2012 | INC. | 13illUSTraTiON by Shigil N

THE DRESSING ROOM BY KRISHNA KUMARKrishna Kumar is the founder of Kinesis Sports, a Bengaluru-based tennis training institute. He is also a professional coach specialising in transformational leadership. He likes a difference of opinion.

Walter Lippmann, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American publicist and political commentator who coined the term “Cold War” once said, “When all think alike, no one is thinking.” Nearly four decades after his death, we continue to see the ill-effects of “structured” think-ing, most so in the world of busi-ness where creativity and innovation are critical to success.

Over the years, honchos of small, medium and large businesses have confided in me about feeling rudderless in their corporate jour-ney. “My business is not going any-where in particular,” is a refrain I’ve heard several times in interactions with CEOs and other decision makers across the country.

At a recent conference, for example, the CEO of a mid-sized company sidled up to me during a coffee break and asked if we could discuss a problem he was facing.

talented and experienced team at work, he said. So, he was finding it difficult to understand this palpable lack of creativity and innovation within his teams.

I curbed my instinct to begin dishing out advice, and instead asked my friend if he had heard the story of the “Naked Emperor”. As legend goes, there was once an emperor who was known to be deeply narcissistic,

He began by telling me that though his business was booming across tradi-tional product lines, he knew his company was unable to cash in on all the opportunities available.

He gave his diagnosis of where the problem began—in team meetings his managers were high on enthusiasm when it came to implementing ideas, espe-cially if they came from him. “But they rarely contribute ideas of their own and seldom contradict my words during team discussions,” he added. He had a

Captain disparate opinions. Surround yourself with advisors and team members who think differently from you, and from each other

14 | INC. | april/May 2012

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and cared only about showing off and indulging preferences for expensive clothes. Two con-men who visited the kingdom heard of the king’s penchant and decided to exploit this weakness. They went to the pal-ace and offered to stitch the king the finest outfit he would have ever set his eyes on. They told him they used a cloth so special that only a few people with a very high intel-lect and refined taste could see it.

Not confident about his own ability to judge this fabric right, the king decided to try out the new outfit before two of his trusted lieutenants. The con-men had planned the ultimate deceit. The costume was nothing at all—the con-men had con-vinced the king that an invisible outfit was the special one. So, the king was basically in the buff after he thought he’d tried the new outfit on. His trusted lieutenants were shocked to see their master naked but were scared to admit it. They not only praised the king’s costume but also invited other court-iers to take a glimpse of the amazing cloth that was invisible to those who did not deserve to see it. Soon, the entire kingdom turned out to witness a grand procession where the emperor would showcase his new dress.

The crowd praised the magnificent clothes of the emperor, each more afraid than the other to admit that they weren’t “good enough” to see the dress material. At this juncture, a small child, who did not understand shame or fear, shouted out naively, “The king isn’t wearing anything.” The crowd caught on and people started discussing the king’s nude procession, first in hushed tones that got louder as the truth dawned on more people. Undeterred, the emperor continued his procession with his head held high but without a shred of cloth-ing on his body.

After patiently hearing the story, my CEO friend asked whether I thought he was behaving like this emperor. Well, maybe not. It would be more appropriate to say that the company’s core philosophy was to implement one person’s desire while put-ting the lid on new ideas and innovation. They were functioning in an environment where the management team preferred to demonstrate collective ignorance. Individ-

Vulcan married to a life in logic and Dr McCoy, who was driven solely by compas-sion and scientific curiosity. Both these characters are frequently at odds and sug-gest different courses of action based on their subjective view of the situation. The captain hears both his advisors and often comes up with a third option, built entirely from his perspective.

The fact that the leader has advisors around him with a world view vastly differ-ent from each other and from himself pro-vides a clear insight into the captain’s confidence as a leader. A weak leader always surrounds himself with people who are loath to express their opinions. Any organ-isation that fosters such a behaviour ends up stif ling creativity and innovation. This eventually results in a situation where deci-

ual opinion never came out during discus-sions and nobody thought it fit to critique the leader’s opinions and ideas. In all fair-ness, I believe that my CEO friend had sensed this situation but was unable to pin-point where the fault was. It lay in his style of leadership!

Most first-generation entrepreneurs face similar situations in their journeys, especially those that have built their busi-ness up from scratch. During this period, they transfer the core values and ethics to the business and often unconsciously hand-pick a management team that mirrors these beliefs and values. The team, on its part, slides into a comfort zone, a major con-straint to creative thinking.

But my friend was not ready to give up without another fight. It wasn’t just his lead-

ership style, he claimed. He told me in no uncertain terms that his frustration stemmed from the knowledge that his busi-ness growth demands frequent doses of innovation. He thought he was in the classic “What Got You Here, Won’t Get You There” phase, to borrow from executive coach Marshall Goldsmith’s bestselling book of the same phrase. That was his problem, he asserted, and he needed to figure out the steps he should take to overcome this entre-preneurial ennui.

I wasn’t about to get sidetracked from my diagnosis though. I harked back to Star Trek, the super-hit television serial of the 1970s. James T. Kirk, the iconic commander of the Space Ship Enterprise, once told his close confidante and friend Dr Leonard McCoy—the advantage of being a captain is being able to ask for advice without neces-sarily having to use it.

I also reminded my CEO friend of Cap-tain Kirk’s closest confidants—Mr. Spock, a

sion-making and problem solving is cen-tralised and the company is seldom able to change course mid-stream.

On the other hand, enterprises that allow diverse opinions to be aired support greater innovation and prove to be better at solving problems. They avoid group-think and team meetings and discussion forums become genuine platforms for sharing ideas. This is where a Mr Spock or Dr. McCoy can be of help—they fuel creativity and innovation by airing their views and forcing the leadership to think.

As noted American educationist and philosopher George F. Kneller said: “Cre-ativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted.”

Krishna Kumar can be reached at kk@intradconsult.com

A weak leader always surrounds himself with people who are loath to express their opinions.

april/May 2012 | INC. | 15

Mind Roots BY shaYaMal VallaBhjeeShayamal Vallabhjee is an EQ consultant who has worked with the world’s best athletes and businessmen. He’s also authored several books. He uses the Emotional Quotient to unlock creativity and productivity in business.

Meet Isadore Sharp—the hotelier who opened the first Four Season motor hotel (or, motel) in 1961, with 125 rooms in downtown Toronto, Canada.

Would-be hoteliers at that time had two choices. They could build a small hotel with fewer than 200 rooms and offer guests modest amenities, sometimes nothing more than a television set or an ice machine in the hall. The other alternative was the “few frills” option—a large hotel of 700-plus rooms that catered to business travellers and had extensive amenities, much like the second Four Seasons hotel Sharp opened just outside Toronto. Each option had its own unique advantages—the small hotel offered comfort and intimacy but lacked

the amenities that attracted the business traveller. The larger hotels could afford fancy frills but were cold and impersonal.

By early 1970s, Isadore Sharp had opened three Four Seasons motels but on the brink of opening his fourth, he found himself at a crossroad. He loved cozy motels but they could not generate the rev-enue required to maintain the amenities his target market of business executives expected. His guests loved the amenities at his second hotel, but its sheer scale could never really provide that homely feel that was unique to the motel. With three prop-erties running, Sharp already had two con-trasting and existing models. Both had advantages and disadvantages but neither

the art of creative thinking. don’t choose between two opposing ideas. Fusing them separates the best from the rest in business

was a model concrete enough for successful and sustainable expansion.

Rather than choosing one of the existing models, Isadore Sharp used his “opposable” mind to hold both models in his head, roll them together and create a new model that incorporated the benefits of each—he com-bined the best of the small hotel with the best of the large hotel, into a medium size hotel that could offer the amenities with a sense of intimacy and personalised service. Eco-nomics didn’t allow for this model to be suc-cessful because costs were spread over fewer rooms. Sharp though refused to be bound by conventional economics. He reasoned that if Four Seasons offered distinctly better service than its competitors, it could charge

16 | INC. | april/May 2012 illustration by shigil n

Mind Roots

a substantially higher premium. That’s how the exclusive Four Seasons chain was born. And, it revolutionised the hotel industry.

Isadore Sharp is an example of brilliant Integrative Thinking—the ability to hold in one’s mind two opposing ideas and merge those ideas into a third idea that encom-passes the benefits of each individual idea. Integrative Thinking and Emotional Intel-ligence (EI) are two of the most important skills in business. They single-handedly separate the best from the rest, because they allow an individual to be creative and inno-vative within the realm of his business. And creativity is the key to staying ahead.

The art of thinking creatively has forever been shrouded in mystery but like Thomas Edison, many others geniuses like Charles Darwin, Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein have all proven to be exceptionally extraordinary thinkers. They were the geniuses whose unorthodox approach to thinking gave birth to ideas that shaped the world we see it today.

Creative thinking isn’t problem solving. It’s the ability to generate new ideas or alter-natives from nothing or by integrating two existing models or theories. The process can be pinned down to simply tackling things from a different perspective, which is actu-ally harder than it seems because our brains have been hardwired to think in a certain way. So much so that if I remove a word from a sentence, you probably will not notice at first because your brain will automatically fill ‘in the gap’ with data that already exists.

If there is one particular thing that stands out about geniuses, it is their ability to make juxtapositions between similar subjects—a facility to connect the uncon-nected enables them to see things to which others are blind. If we look at some of the greatest minds, what they did best was to force relationships:

· Leonardo da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and the ripples a pebble makes when hitting water, to con-nect that sound travels in waves.

· Nikola Tesla forced a connection between a setting sun and a motor that resulted in the modern day AC motor.

· Albert Einstein did not invent the concepts of mass, energy or speed of light

or overreaction. Or, when we are happy, there is a positive pattern of events. Trying to re-programme the end result isn’t possi-ble. But, if we can understand our triggers, we would have unlocked the ability to tran-sition to the ideal state of mind—the birth-place of creativity.

but forced them together to come up with the equation E=mc2.

I was once said that, “imagination is our greatest renewable resource and one that cannot be outsourced”. There can be no truer statement. Our imagination allows us to remove every conceivable boundary and

ask the most powerful question: What if? Creativity is nothing but an application of imagination. It is the process by which we push our limits, remove boundaries, over-come adversity and rediscover our sense of awe. In business terms, it’s how we come up with perfect strategies, brilliant innova-tions, world-class marketing ideas and unbeatable formulae for success. But, first, one needs to unlock the power of possibil-ity by removing the imaginary limitations we have created.

Up until now, I have given you examples of geniuses who managed to “innovate” two opposing ideas into one. Needless to say, this is easier said than done mainly because our emotions might cloud our judgment and prevent us from actually determining the salient points critical to the development of the idea and choosing the best ideas to pur-sue. This is where EI comes in. Essentially, EI is the capacity to recognise our own feel-ings and those of others, manage those feel-ings, and learn to motivate ourselves.

To me, EI is the foundation of all learn-ing. Everything we do stems from a thought, which invokes a feeling, that in turn, trig-gers off a sequence of events. The end result of each specific emotion, although unique in each individual, is set and ingrained into our personality very early. Emotional trig-gers always set off a sequence of events—the end result of which is the same. For exam-ple, when we are angry, it’s likely that our subsequent actions are driven by aggression

Our world is overflowing with ideas. Grasping them is a faculty of our con-scious mind but the ability to synergise them into something new and creative is a faculty of the subconscious mind. EI is the key to transporting the mind to a place where our conscious thoughts and delib-erations can merge.

Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, had a brilliant method of transi-tioning between consciousness and sub-consciousness. He would sit in what he referred to as his “thinking chair” with a metal ball in his hand. On the floor directly beneath his hand, he would place a metal pan. Edison would then allow his body and mind to completely relax. At some point between consciousness and subconscious-ness, his hand muscles would relax invol-untarily, allowing the metal ball to fall onto the metal pan. He would then wake up and note down whatever he was thinking about. This process allowed him to activate and create thoughts that were unhindered by his conscious mind.

Creativity is the future of business. Being able to understand the demands of your environment and to successfully com-pensate for them in your industry will ulti-mately steer your business to the pinnacle of your industry. You can be a market leader through the process of integrative thinking and emotional intelligence, because the next big thing in business is going to be a combination of two existing ideas.

Creativity is an application of imagination by which we push our limits and overcome adversity.

april/May 2012 | INC. | 17

“This award is special because I used

to read about it in college, and when I

started the company. Now, I have it.”

Vijay Shekhar Sharmachairman and managing director

One97 Communications

“The strength of the Indian economy

during the global recession has been the SME sector, and Inc.

India has taken the right direction towards recognising these

companies.”amarjit Singh

chairman and managing director AG Aerovision

18 | INC. | april/May 2012

“Inc. India 500 is a definitive ranking of the best-performing

corporates in the country today.”

B. Venkatramana, executive director,

VMC Systems

“It is a big motivating factor to work even

harder in the coming times because you want your name to be listed

every year.”VikaS garg

director, Vikas Global One

“It’s an amazing feeling to be a part of ‘The List’. It’s a huge confidence building

measure for our customers and

employees.” Pankaj ratra

director, Path Infotech

“It is indeed a proud moment for the entire

BS team to be honoured with the Inc.

India 500 Award.” rajeSh agarwal

managing director, BS TransComm

april/May 2012 | INC. | 19

Journey of Inc. India 500 Inc. India 500 is a toast to the emerging order of the new India Inc. It celebrates the stellar contribution of the underserved and under-recognised mid-sized community in India. The annual Inc. India 500 ranking is a testimony to heroic journeys and winning performances by the hidden gems and rising superstars of our business landscape.

Inc. IndIa 500 Is aN offshoot of the aNNual Inc. 500 awards whICh were establIshed IN 1982 to IdeNtIfy fast-growINg

amerICaN ComPaNIes

Past hoNourees of the Inc. 500 INClude fouNders of ComPaNIes lIke mICrosoft, oraCle, sas aNd domINo’s PIzza

oNly three years old, the Inc. IndIa 500 Club Is already a wINdow to INdIa’s ICoNIC leaders aNd future suPerstars

story through Pictures

The galaxy of winners gathered at

assocham House for the award

ceremony

Sanjeev Bikhchandani, vice chairman,

infoEdge and pramath raj Sinha,

MD, 9.9 Media, honouring the

winners

amarjit Singh, managing director,

a G aerovision with his wife and daughter

The Methodology 3,500 companies across 35 sectors made their way to a master list—one each for public listed companies, public unlisted companies and privately-held businesses. We excluded BFSIs, PSUs and companies whose group turnover exceeds 1,500 crore. These companies were then assessed by Inc. India’s research team on the following: digital presence: Each company was subjectively assessed on a scale of 1 to 5 on company website

and availability of company information online. leadership: The leadership was assessed on information available online. In this digital world, absence of

information on top management is regarded as “not keeping up with the Joneses”, and hence penalised. year of incorporation and line of business

After this subjective assessment, we assessed net sales data of the last four financial years, and calculated the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of net sales. The final Inc. India 500 consists of 200 listed companies, 200 unlisted public companies and 100 privately-held businesses.

30 yearold legaCy

ICoNICwINNers

salutINgINdIaN ICoNs

2 0 | INC. | april/May 2012

story through Pictures

anuradha Das Mathur, publisher, Inc. India, talking to the guests

Stand-up comedian Nitin Gupta gives the winners much to laugh about

Shreyasi Singh, managing editor,

Inc. India, addressing the gathering

resourcesFor more about the third

annual Inc. India 500 Awards, visit the below link:

http://www.growthinstitute.in:81/incindia500/

For photographs: http://tiny.cc/ovp3aw

3,500 companies across 35 sectors made their way to a master list—one each for public listed companies, public unlisted companies and privately-held businesses. We excluded BFSIs, PSUs and companies whose group turnover exceeds 1,500 crore. These companies were then assessed by Inc. India’s research team on the following: digital presence: Each company was subjectively assessed on a scale of 1 to 5 on company website

and availability of company information online. leadership: The leadership was assessed on information available online. In this digital world, absence of

information on top management is regarded as “not keeping up with the Joneses”, and hence penalised. year of incorporation and line of business

After this subjective assessment, we assessed net sales data of the last four financial years, and calculated the compound annual growth rates (CAGR) of net sales. The final Inc. India 500 consists of 200 listed companies, 200 unlisted public companies and 100 privately-held businesses.

Remove photogRaph along dotted line

Our annual exercise begins in April 2012. The rankings are out every year in our special

September-October double issue. Don’t miss the chance to register your company!

Please get in touch with rajat gupta at rajat.gupta@9dot9.in or at 0120-4010914

2012

REGISTRATION OPEN!

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Your Business Toolbox The Goods

launchrock BesT For: BuildinG Buzz

Looking to generate some prelaunch excitement? This service helps you create a Coming soon page for your website. After creating an account on Launchrock.com, select a background design or upload your own, then add information about your business. A box will appear on the homepage encouraging people to sign up to receive e-mails with company news and earn incentives for spreading the word via e-mail or on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and other websites. Go to your Launchrock dashboard to track a variety of information, including daily sign-ups and page views. cost: Free

inTercom BesT For: a personal Touch

When people register on your website, Intercom adds their information to an online data-base, along with information culled from social networks and other websites. You can sign on to your Intercom dash-board to view user profiles and see when they signed up and the last time they visited. Then, you can com-pose messages for specific people and the notes will pop up automatically the next time they come to the site. on your dashboard, you can see a list of open replies and respond to them. Intercom rates the strength of your relationships based on how often you inter-act with visitors. cost: Free during beta testing

punchTaB BesT For: rewardinG loyalTy

PunchTab’s loyalty programme lets you reward people for com-ing to your website every day, making comments, and shar-ing your content on social net-works. After you set up the programme using a wizard, vis-itors can click on a rewards ribbon on your homepage and log in to earn points, which they can redeem for gift cards in a PunchTab catalogue on your site. You can use PunchTab’s standard rewards guidelines—for instance, the service recom-mends doling out 100 points for each visit—or create your own. Log on to PunchTab.com to check out user profiles and lea-derboards. cost: Free for a standard programme with up to 10,000 users

olark BesT For: chaTTinG

This service makes it easy to add a web chat function to your site. After pasting in a line of code, go to your olark account to choose a design and size for the chat box, stipulate where it should appear, and link it to an instant-messaging program. You can also customise a welcome message and offline notification. When customers click on the box, a message opens in your IM program, where the chat takes place. You can view transcripts on olark.com and export them to customer relationship management programmesincluding sales-force. cost: starting at $17 a month for one user

reeling Them inTools to engage customers onlinea lot of business owners are focussed on interacting with customers on social networks. But how about your plain old company website? These new tools offer innovative ways to engage people who visit your site—and to keep them coming back. —Abram Brown

april/May 2012 | inc. | 2 5illUSTraTiONS by Shigil N

The Goods Products + services

MusT-HAves

my favourite tool for making travel plans

My company does branding and marketing for different causes, including autism and AIDs awareness, and I travel often to meet with investors, partners, and celebrities. When I’m planning trips, I don’t like relying on online reviews written by strangers. A few months ago, I started using Trippy, a free service that helps me get travel recommendations from trusted social-media contacts.

Here’s how it works: Before a trip, I log on to Trippy’s web-site or iPhone app and enter my destination and travel dates. The service pulls up a list of Facebook friends who are likely to know about my destination based on their pro-files. Next, it prompts me to ask them for advice by sending a message to them on Face-book or writing on their Walls. My friends can click on a link in the message to enter sugges-tions on my Trippy account. Then, I can add the ones I like to my itinerary, which I can pull up on my iPhone as I travel. I can also share my itinerary with employees visiting the same city using Trippy’s Copy Trip feature.

so far, I’ve used Trippy, which also works with Linked-In and Twitter, to plan about 20 trips. Thanks to the service, I no longer waste time reading tonnes of anonymous reviews. Instead, I get meaningful input from a handful of people I trust. —As told to J.J. McCorvey

jake kloberdanzfounder and ceo onehopeirvine, california

away we Go new gadgets for mobile workersmore people are working outside the office, whether they are on the road or at home in their pajamas. Here are five new products designed to make mobile workers more productive. —John Brandon

a. lanTronix xprinTserverThis handy 9.6-ounce device uses an ethernet connec-tion to find nearby printers, then lets you print docu-ments from your iPhone or iPad. During our test, it found an HP printer in just 10 seconds, and we easily printed several e-mails, including some with com-plex graphics, from an iPad 2 and iPhone 4s. cost: $150

B. BiknBiKN’s thumb-size tags help you keep track of valuables using your iPhone. Attach them to any object and snap your phone into the BiKN case, which communicates with the tags via a radio sig-nal. using the myBiKN app, you can view a map on your iPhone of tagged items within a distance of several hundred feet, page them so they beep, or set an alarm to go off if a tag leaves a preset

perimeter. The tags worked perfectly during testing, sounding an alarm even when our iPhone was off. cost: starting at $100 for one tag and an iPhone case

c. hp compaq l2311c noTeBook dockinG moniTorThis HP device is a laptop docking station and monitor in one. Plug in your note-book with a usB cable to connect to the 23-inch mon-itor, which pivots from side to side, tilts, and switches to portrait mode. The monitor has a built-in HD webcam for videoconferencing, jacks for headphones and micro-phones, and two ports for peripherals. cost: $319

d. powerBaG insTanT messenGerThis messenger bag has a built-in rechargeable bat-

tery pack that can charge most smartphones up to four times and tablets once (sorry, no laptops). The 2.7-pound bag is made from tear-resistant nylon and has a padded pouch for a tablet or laptop. It fully charged our tablet in six hours and a smartphone in one hour. cost: $180

e. planTronics Blackwire 435Ideal for videoconferences, this corded usB headset has two separate over-the-ear headphones, one of which has a noise-cancel-ing microphone boom. You can use both earpieces for stereo sound or one for mono sound. During our test, skype calls sounded crisp. Another plus: The headset comes with a protective travel case. cost: $100

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Products + services The Goods

FILe CABINeT

new ways to sync and store Once geared toward consumers, cloud-based services for storing and syncing files are now targeting business users. here’s the skinny on two of them. —J.B.

dropbox for Teams like the original Dropbox, this service lets you place documents in a folder on your desktop and access them on the Dropbox site, mobile devices, and other computers linked to your account. it also offers business-friendly features, including centralised billing for multiple accounts and the ability to add and delete users. another plus: you can store unlimited versions of files. Cost: $795 a year for five users and 1,000 gb of storage

insync a good option for google Docs loyalists, insync downloads google Docs files to a folder on your desktop so you can work on them in Microsoft Office and other programs. you can upload files to google by dropping them in the folder. When you make changes to the files, the service updates the google Docs version. you can also access files on other computers linked to your account and on the insync site. The service does not have a mobile app. Cost: insync’s service is free; google Docs is free up to 1 gb of storage, then starts at $5 a year for 20 gb of storage

tech trends soham raninga

does ultra cool=ultra useful? ultrabooks are definitely in. But, are they right for you?

I wouldn’t blame you for lusting over an ultrabook. It’s curvy and slim as hell—a “size zero” right on your desktop! For those of you who didn’t know what an ultrabook is, go back and read the previous line again. That’s an ultrabook in a nutshell. Of course, it comes with a few technical advantages. But nobody buys the ultrabook for its tech-nical prowess. In this case, external beauty is the name of the game. But, is the ultrabook the perfect weapon of choice for road war-riors who want their business class note-books to come both with great portability and performance effi-ciency? Let’s stack up the pros and cons.

Where Ultrabooks Score…There’s no beating the ultrabooks on portability and style. With a 13.3-inch screen size, these notebooks weigh 1.2-1.7 kg—almost half the load of a standard 14 or 15-inch notebook. On thickness too, the ultrabooks, at their slim 2 cms, are half the size of regular notebooks. These dimensions allow you to travel really light. As opposed to the battery-guzzling slim, touchscreen smartphones, ultrabooks are a power-effi-cient lot with a battery life in the range of five to eight hours on full charge. Most aver-age notebooks only tot up three to four hours at best.

But perhaps the most significant advan-tage in technical terms is the storage tech-nology used in ultrabooks. With flash memory-based solid state drives (SSDs); these machines offer zippy boot-up and data access times, robust storage (lesser chances of drives failing due to their non mechanical nature compared to regular hard disk drives) and superior power efficiency, thanks to lower operating temperatures. If those are your top traits for a good note-book, an ultrabook is definitely a good fit.

Where they don’t…If you crave for raw performance in process-ing and graphics, the ultrabook doesn’t score too well. The core processing and graphics chips in these machines are tuned more towards energy efficiency, to ensure longer battery life and to control the heat generation. The ultra slim form does not allow enough room to fit the mainstream notebook platforms inside the ultrabooks. They aren’t rich in features either. Also, the slim design prevents them from having multiple ports and connectivity options that

are normally found in notebooks. Typically, you’ll get two or at best three USB ports instead of the four on most notebooks. Other “standard” connectivity options like HDMI, Ethernet port, card reader aren’t a necessity in

case of ultrabooks. It’s a good idea to check which ones are available in the ultrabook model you’ve chosen.

Most importantly, with the current mar-ket pricing, especially in India, ultrabooks don’t give you the best value for money. Priced `50,000 and upwards, these machines are expensive in terms of a pure features + performance to price ratio. The same money can get you a notebook that is at least twice as fast, and offers all the latest features and connectivity options.

But, fret not. Ultrabooks are the future of mobile computing, and will evolve rapidly—eventually catching up on the performance and features front while improving further in power efficiency. What we have now is the first generation of ultrabooks. The new models—probably out in the second half of 2012—promise to score well on all aspects. So, if you’re not in the immediate hurry to go “size zero” on your notebook, I’d suggest you hold on. It’s unlikely to be a long wait.

it’s sexy, curvy and slim as hell—a “size zero” right on your desktop.

april/May 2012 | inc. | 2 7

Values,

Companies... workplaces you will never want to leave:)

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Companies...

employees over long stints is quite another story. Harder still, is to find organisations where employees feel pride in being a part of them. We found four companies who live up to this virtue at The Great place to Work institute, an independent agency that ranks the best companies to work for. Each of these workplaces has won an award for being a great employer, and we decided to dig deeper to zero in on the core values that make these workplaces special. Entrepreneurs running these great workplaces don’t just have flourishing balance sheets and expanding client rosters, they also feel their employees’ pulse. So, if you’re wondering why you’re having such a hard time retaining yours, even as the global market recedes, these gems may give you some pointers. a great workplace isn’t just a dream. it exists.

What makes a business successful? innovative ideas. Sound finances. Great strategy. But are any of these achievable without the right people? and yet, do companies value their employees enough? While it’s not difficult to find companies that lay a strong emphasis (and puts in place a rigorous screening mechanism) to find the right people, spotting companies that manage to retain their star

By Ira SwaStI

april/May 2012 | inC. | 2 9

MakEMyTrip

Core Value: Rewards and Recognition

Don’t worry, be reward-happy

Why rewards and recognition? MakeMyTrip.com is one of india’s leading online travel companies with 20 branches across the country, and international offices in New york and San Francisco. a poster boy for india’s new-age entrepreneurship, MakeMyTrip had a blockbuster ipO debut on the Nasdaq in august 2010. But, travelling these highs wasn’t a breeze. Deep kalra, the company’s founder and CEO, believes a great, driven team has scripted this success. Operating in a highly competitive online market for a decade, the travel giant has come to be known for its people-centric workplace—moulded by an enthusiastic rewards and recognition pro-gramme to beat competition, says kalra. His team confesses they err on the side of over recognising employees—not just for actual achievement but even for genuine efforts to keep the work environment positive.

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Good Values healthy Companies

“our honeymoon in Europe went really well. Everything worked like a clock as per the itin-erary you’d provided us. It was all well planned right from the VISA and EURAIL tickets to the hotel bookings and sightseeing. A splendid effort from your end and your constant help over the phone was truly remarkable...” This was an e-mail Ankush Jamadagni sent MakeMyTrip after returning from his holiday in Europe in November 2011. But the Jamadagnis weren’t the only ones to have a great time. Their e-mail won Chandni Monga Singhal, a travel coordinator

at MakeMyTrip, a trophy and a certificate. Part of what is called the CustoMore Award, this recognition is given out to sales and cus-tomer service executives who receive the best fan (read: customer) mail each month.

It’s just one of the many reward tactics MakeMyTrip has put in place to motivate employees to beat their targets—whether it is the number of transactions sealed or the amount of profit made.

“If you want employees to repeat good behaviour, you have to let them know their behaviour was good,” says Purva Misra,

senior vice president, human resources. “So we create a big deal about the winners

so that others would want to be a part of that elite group.” Take the Hal-

laBol award, for example. It’s a coveted recognition, given out monthly to sales executives with the highest sales for the

month or for non-sales staff who have made a significant con-

tribution to the organisation in their function. Apart from a big round of applause when the award is announced at the employee’s desk—the winner takes home cash rewards, a flag and some stars to brand their work stations. The HallaBol scheme is well-planned—about 10 per cent of employees in the company’s different operational regions like North, South, East, West and Gujarat get rewarded. More than the company-wide communi-cation, the physical branding of being awarded has played a big part in making this an award employees aspire for. In fact, this focus is apparent the moment you enter MakeMyTrip’s spacious, open-plan office in Gurgaon. Employee workstations are bedecked with colourful flags, stars and certificates won as part of the wide range of R&R schemes in place here. “The cash rewards we give may not be that sig-nificant but it is the feeling of being recog-nised in front of peers and leaders that really motivates people,” she adds.

There’s an entire galaxy of rewards to choose from including the Star Performer, Star Extraordinaire and Star Leader which are all given out during the bi-annual town hall meetings—attended by everybody from the CEO to the support staff. But can win-ning so many awards lead to complacency and overconfidence among workers? MakeMyTrip dismisses those concerns, saying the winning culture has had the desired impact—increased productivity. Many winners have been nominated more than once proving they want to stay on the top, points out Misra. “It’s an unbelievable feeling to receive it in front of the entire organisation. It really moti-vates you to be there again,” says V. Archana, a

Flying high Monthly star performers brand their workstations with winning paraphernalia.

MakeMyTrip has won many awards itself. it likes passing on the joy.

company dashboard

Founded in: 2000Turnover:

`3490 croreNo. of

employees: 1150

april/May 2012 | inC. | 31pHOTOGrapHS By SuBHOjiT paul

Good Values healthy Companies

senior international holiday consultant at Make-MyTrip’s Chennai office, who has won the star performer award twice.

There are other recognitions with equally quirky names like the Raving Fans scheme. Here, employees keep a scorecard for the cus-tomer feedback they receive—three points for every positive one and two minus points for every negative feedback. Once they toll up 100 to 300 points, they can redeem them to buy iPods, DVD players, wrist watches or cell phones. Similarly, points from the Peer-to-Peer scheme, instituted to promote teamwork can also be added up to buy these goodies. There are more exciting prizes up for the takes too—like the grand prize of a fully-paid for trip to Europe for two given to the Query Champion award (an employee who manages customer queries the best).

Although CEO Deep Kalra’s involvement with these R&R initiatives has reduced over the years, several of these traditions were launched when MakeMyTrip was just a 200-people start-up in 2005. Even today, Kalra sends out appre-ciation e-mails in troves—for business achievements like beating a sales target, and lit-tle things like sharing a good article with fellow “trippers”, as employees here call themselves. Kalra believes recognition cannot merely be performance-based. It should cover all achieve-ments of employees from day-to-day activities to high-impact events. “You can’t over-do rec-ognition—the more, the better,” he says. The HR department marks his e-mails to every-body in the company to demonstrate what behaviour or actions are appreciated by the senior management.

Setting a high-performance, high-reward culture can lead to the proverbial corporate dog-eat-dog world. To ensure the race to achieve sales revenue and bring more business in doesn’t come at the cost of compromising the company’s values, MakeMyTrip has also introduced schemes that reward employees who demonstrate company values in their daily work. “Our recognition policies help maintain a healthy atmosphere in the competitive corporate environment reinstating a feel good, “am-part-of-it” factor,” says founder and CEO Deep Kalra. Clearly, MakeMyTrip has worked out a formula where everybody wins—and that too, all the time!

CaCTuS COMMuNiCaTiONS

Core Value: diversity

3 2 | inC. | april/May 2012

Good Values healthy Companies

Great minds think alike. Happily, that’s not true here

Why diversity? With more than 30,000 clients across 93 countries, it was important for Cactus Communications to employ a workforce that was truly global. “Our markets are such that we needed to localise and get natives from client countries to understand different perspectives and deliver services that lived up to client expecta-tions,” says anurag Goel, the company’s co-founder and CEO. Cactus Communications provides services such as academic editing, translation and research writing. The company has offices in five countries but its head office in Mumbai best reflects this global tex-ture—as seven nationalities make up its workforce. The benefits are as easily tabulated. “The quality of solutions that come up during problem-solving ses-sions would not have been the same if we’d adopted a single-minded approach,” explains Goel.

When ai Kanoh flew from Japan to Cactus for the first time in 2007: “almost ten people came to greet me and gave me their con-tact numbers for emergency”, she recalls. Kanoh is senior market-ing manager (Japan) at Cactus, and has been working in its main office in Mumbai for the past five years.

Despite a Cactus office in Japan, Kanoh opted to work in Mum-bai, to experience the diversity and open culture that she “wouldn’t find in Japan”. “Here, I not only feel like I’m being listened to and treated equally irrespective of my nationality or gender, but I also feel accepted and appreciated for the person I am,” she says.

She’s one of the 237 full-time employees at Cactus Communi-cations, who belong to seven nationalities, and work in tandem

united Colours of hiring Cactus Communications’ Mumbai office has team members from seven different countries. it’s made their workplace a fascinating crucible for exchange of ideas and perspectives.

april/May 2012 | inC. | 3 3pHOTOGrapHS By jiTEN GaNDHi

Good Values healthy Companies

with 500-odd freelancers from 40 countries around the globe (from Israel to New Zealand) and deal with several international clients every day.

Managing such a diverse group of individuals is unlikely to be an easy task, and one usually ignored by corporates. Usually, the workforce is treated as a homogenous mix of people believed to have similar goals and working styles. As a result, innova-tive solutions that can often only emerge from contrasting view-points are lost to the organisation.

But not at Cactus. Here, the approach towards diversity has evolved with the size of the workforce. During the early years of the company, the organisation was founder-driven with a small team of 25. The well-travelled Goel—he studied at the Wharton School, the University of Pennsylvania, and then worked in Amsterdam for McKinsey & Co.—would personally mentor and train his people on cultural nuances.

“But as we grew from 25 to 237, we got so busy with business that we forgot about diversity. That is when it started to hurt more than help,” he says. Since its inception in 2002, Cactus Communications has spread to six offices across five countries. Nobody really felt at home though. The Inter-national Cactizens or ICs (as non-Indian employees are called here) felt neglected—an outsider in an Indian company. And, Indian employees believed company policies were tilted towards the Japanese because a majority of Cactus’ clients were from Japan.

“We were losing a lot of knowledge with our International Cactizens. Their average tenure in India had reduced to about a year,” says Susanne Gupta, associate vice president, HR. This diversity was imperative to Cactus because of its global base, and because clients felt reassured when they knew somebody from their country worked in the company, who could be an important communication bridge.

In 2007, Goel and his team put diversity at the forefront of company initiatives. Posters and banners extolled their philosophy—“Seven nations. Seven religions. Many Professions. One common thread” to celebrate this focus. There were weekly quizzes on the company intranet to educate people about various cultures.

“A diverse workforce keeps the environment dynamic and exciting and we wanted to nurture that,” explains Gupta.

Injecting diversity into the workforce cannot be a stand-alone activity. At Cactus, it’s backed by supporting policies and pro-

grammes. In the Mumbai office, for example, each international Cactizen is assigned an Indian “buddy” who helps them ease into the country— teaching them to take a bus or a local train, helping

them set up their company apartments or taking them out to popular hang-outs in the city. To make

this relationship non-work in essence, the company makes sure this buddy does not belong to the same team.

Both the holiday and cafeteria lists are multi-cultural too. The office pantry menu was fixed through a survey among all employees, and the company follows an open holiday policy. There are no fixed offs even for Diwali or Christmas. A Korean employee can opt to take his/her allotted leaves for the Korean New Year, an Indian on August 15, and anyone can choose to take a day off on his/her birthday.

Communicating with team mates in such a diverse workplace has its own challenges though, confess employees at Cactus. Most of them don’t use their mother tongue to interact

with each other. And the same business concepts are understood and perceived differently by different nationalities. But, it’s this discomfort that leads to the best ideas. “It may take longer to put your point forward but the trade-off is that about a hundred ideas bounce off in our brainstorming sessions,” says Igor Rodrigues, Cactus’ marketing manager. “It forces you to think out of the box as you deal with a variety of international clients.” This smartly-planned freedom has also led to key business benefits. Since the diversity initiatives were introduced, the average tenure of an IC in India has gone up from one to more than two-and-a-half years, according to Gupta.

Beyond nationalities, Cactus has mixed a wide range of employee professions into its melting pot. As an academic editing company, it has key eligibility requirements—good written English skills, knowledge of your subject and the right mix of the company’s six cultural values

(integrity, trust, innovation, excellence, communication and fun.) So, there are doctors, engineers, teachers, accountants and web designers working together in the same function, unlike say, only accountants working together in finance. Any Cactus team then is a great blend of different skills, mindsets and working styles which both balance out and complement each other—say, creativity and subjectivity from literature and art graduates meeting analytical viewpoints put forward by mathematicians and engineers. “Working with different kinds of employees teaches you to customise your communication, says CEO Goel. “You pick up ways to talk to different kinds of clients.”

company dashboard

Founded in: 2002Turnover:

undisclosedNo. of employees:

237

“Cactus doesn’t have any one culture, not

even Indian. It’s international.”

—ai kaNOHCactus employee

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Good Values healthy Companies

BriCkrED

Core Value: Feedback

where the suggestion box never goes empty

april/May 2012 | inC. | 3 5

Why feedback?Brickred designs offshore strategies for iSVs and software-enabled companies. Since its merger with Inc. 500 winner Three pillar in august 2011, it has grown to a strength of 550 employees across five countries. Even amidst such big changes, some things have remained the same at the newly-minted Brickred-Three pillar entity, such as continuous, honest feedback. integrated into the company’s DNa since its inception in 2002, raj Singhal, one of Brickred’s four co-founders, says their feedback mechanism has now become structured to keep in pace with a larger employee base. Employees are an extension of a company’s client base, and must be treated as a vital group for feedback, he adds. “They help us identify our strengths as a company—qualities we can mar-ket better—and point out the weaknesses we need to improve upon.”

hotel baron J.W. marriott used to say, “The seven most important words in busi-ness are…‘I don’t know. What do you think?’” It’s a question BrickRed, a Noida-headquartered software outsourcing firm, has asked its employees a lot since it was founded in 2002.

Feedback is serious business at BrickRed. The company has put in place a

pHOTOGrapHS By SuBHOjiT paul

listening hard Employees often find their

suggestions turn into actions at Brickred. a

game room, for instance.

Good Values healthy Companies

3 6 | inC. | april/May 2012

continuous, buzzing system to capture employee thoughts and ideas. They are asked for feedback—on issues as big as their overall compensation and appraisal methods to ideas on small, everyday con-cerns like their workstations—not just once a year, or once every quarter, but a number of times in between. Merely get-ting feedback isn’t enough though. BrickRed has closed the feedback-action loop by ensuring that the ideas they’ve

sought are translated into change. Teams are formed to take corrective actions on the insights thrown up, and employees are kept up-to-speed with how the issues they raised are being resolved.

Sample the company’s engagement study, for instance. Much like what large corporates do with their brands, BrickRed conducts an engagement study annually,

where employees are asked to assess how “engaged” they feel with the company and how satisfied they are working for it. As part of its 2011 Engagement Study, BrickRed found that employees gave its per-formance appraisal systems lowest marks (86 %). The management got to work, and came up instead with a matrix-model to measure people’s performance which mini-mised the subjectivity in the process.

“Because it’s a less subjective appraisal system, employees perceive it as more fair and transparent. The fact that the ideas come from them helps build trust too,” says Rakesh Arora, vice president, human resources.

Apart from the annual engagement study, there is also

an all-hands open meeting every quarter in BrickRed’s Noida office. At these all-hands meeting, all employees come together to get a low down on everything that is happening, and raise issues that concern them. Employees just need to raise their hands to bring up an issue. Every concern raised is discussed and debated before the senior management

present there. These concerns are then divided into three action-plan categories—immediate attention, to be resolved within a month, and those that will take longer than even a quarter to address. Timelines are subsequently set to work out solutions. And, the scorecard reads pretty well. “I had once asked the management team to install a pool table and some play station games. And, it was done,” says solution architect and ardent gamer, Nitin Gupta.

Employees feel more engaged when they see the company cares about things that matter to them. When their feedback is taken seriously and acted upon, a high level of trust and confidence is estab-lished between employees and the man-agement, believes Raj Singhal, one of the company’s four co-founders. Plus, it’s a fundamental tool for improvement. “It’s difficult to say feedback would have reduced the attrition but the feedback process has certainly helped us act on some possible reasons of attrition,” he says.

The company is currently in the midst of its most ambitious feedback project till date. Grandly titled Mission 2012, this two-year campaign began in 2010 with an

“Employees feel more engaged when they see the company cares about things that matter to them, even if

they are small issues.”

This pool table was installed in Brickred’s Noida office on an employee suggestion.

The Brickred cafeteria decked with wall posters that urge employees not to waste food.

Good Values healthy Companies

april/May 2012 | inC. | 3 7

all-hands session. Each employee was asked what BrickRed should be like, or look like in two years. Areas that needed improvement were focused on. Once again, ideas were divided into three cate-gories—committed (suggestions that the organisation was committed to imple-menting within a specific time line), tenta-tive (suggestions that were dependent on certain conditions being met) and rejected (suggestions that could not be imple-mented whatsoever). In case of the last cat-egory, reasons for rejecting those suggestions were comprehensively dis-cussed and clarified with employees so that they know they got a fair hearing.

All committed and tentative changes suggested were assigned to teams that were formed to tackle each of these tasks. Teams were given deadlines to meet, and the mas-ter deadline was set for December 2012. Apart from quarterly updates on the prog-ress made, every fact and figure of the change process was documented on a dash-board on the office intranet to help employ-ees keep track of what was going on.

“The reporting pattern was practically reversed—instead of people reporting to

managers, managers were now reporting to people for all assignments given to them,” explains Arora.

A lot—policy issues, infrastructural obstacles and conveniences offered—has been already achieved as part of Mission 2012. For example, many employees wanted a speed breaker to be built out-side the Noida office because the office was situated at a crossroad and people found it difficult to cross the road. Within three months, the speed breaker was constructed after taking the requisite municipal authority permissions and building clearances.

Employees had also raised concerns about the amount of food that would go to waste in the office canteen every day. The team that was put in place to reduce food wastage launched a powerful, activist-genre communications campaign to bring about change. Large posters—asking provocative questions like “how many people in the world don’t get one meal a day”—were put up strategically on the cafeteria walls to urge people to introspect. Within five months, the food

going waste was brought down from 40 kgs a month to 5 kgs, says Arora.

He believes these initiatives have ensured that their employees stay with them longer. “People stick to the organisation because they want to see how the problems they had raised are solved. That’s an investment they’ve made in BrickRed,” he stresses.

But is it possible that too much feed-back may sometimes prove to be

counter-productive as employees tire of the pro-cess, and lose interest? It surely doesn’t look that way, so far. The citizens of

BrickRed seem to enjoy being listened to, and are

already looking forward to an encore. “I’d like Mission 2015 to get off the ground next year,” says Prateek Sharma, a senior tech lead and cricket buff at BrickRed, who marshalled the management to build a company cricket team some two years back. “We have a lot of new issues to take up,” he says. Some-times, there can really never be too much of a good thing.

The nap room where people can doze off after lunch, another employee idea taken up.

Brickred employees wanted a gym—and they got it.

company dashboard

Founded in: 2002Turnover:

`36 croreNo. of employees:

550

3 8 | inC. | april/May 2012 pHOTOGrapH By SurESH MiSTry

claris lifesciences

Core Value: personal touch

It’s all about loving your family

Why the personal touch?Family buy-in is an integral component of the career decisions an individual takes. Sometimes, people change jobs, or move cities for their loved ones. it’s a realisation that arjun Handa, the CEO of Claris lifesciences, a pharmaceutical company, encountered head-on in 2002-03. During one-on-one appraisal sessions with several of his 600-odd employ-ees at that time, Handa was surprised to find several of them confessing that they were ready to work hard and build their careers in his company but their families believed they were stunting their growth by staying on in one job for too long. “Families often question why an employee works so hard, and if they do, they should capitalise on that and jump salaries and designations every few years,” says Handa. it was a learning key to Claris’ growth, felt Handa. So, over the last 10 years, the company’s management has deployed the soft power of familial bonds.

Family Bonding Claris’ Hr manager Maulik patel sharing a joke with an employee and his familiy.

Good Values healthy Companies

april/May 2012 | inC. | 3 9

in this age of collaborative leadership and talent crunch, employees must be aligned with company goals to achieve better business results. But, Claris Lifesciences, the Ahmedabad-based manufacturer of generic drugs believes getting through to employees is just the first step. To really have an engaged and involved workforce, you need to get through to the employees’ families.

Here, that bonding begins even before a new recruit joins the company. Families of potential employees are invited to spend a day with the HR team in Claris’ 78-acre campus in Ahmedabad (that houses their five manufacturing plants) to get a sense of the company’s values, facilities and work processes. “We want the family to experience first-hand the life and the work their spouse, son or daughter is likely to have at our company,” says Denis Macwan, manager, human resources. After a meal at their

canteen, the family is taken on a city tour of Ahmed-abad—to visit the Akshardham tem-ple, Sabarmati Ash-ram or go shopping for Gujarati band-hani—especially when the candidate is busy in inter-views. “This initial relationship builds trust. Usually, fami-lies are more than happy and support-ive of the candi-date’s decision to join the company,” Macwan adds.

But factory visits are just a beginning of the company’s

efforts to interact with families of employees. Once a new employee joins, and moves base to Ahmedabad, the company helps them set-tle in by looking for apartments in the right locality, providing guidance on school admissions, and helping spouses who’ve uprooted themselves to find new jobs.

N Kumari, deputy general manager, was apprehensive about shifting base from Delhi to Ahmedabad to join Claris six months back. But the company pitched in with loads of help, she says.“They were with me till we finalised the accommodation and my children got admission in school.”

These issues greatly impact employee productivity at work. When people have personal problems, they can’t concentrate. Beyond aiding productivity, the connections established this way are a powerful anti-attrition tool. “People think twice before leaving

us for a job that might pay `20,000 or 30,000 more but will not have this support from the company,” Mac-wan says confidently.

When conventional logic is that the personal and professional must never mix, is the Claris method an

overkill? Arjun Handa, the 33-year-old CEO, waves away such management gyaan. With rapid strides in

technology, and the all-pervasive BlackBerry or iPhone, peo-ple spend more and more time “at work”. Often, it’s at the cost of eating into an individual’s personal life. “So we try to help families share a little bit of their loved ones’ work lives to compensate for that,” Handa elaborates.

His insights seem to be spot-on. Every quarter, Claris organ-ises an optional factory visit for employees and their families. Groups are invited turn by turn, and the turnout is usually a whopping 95 per cent, according to the company.

Families of the nearly 400 senior employees are also invited to all major company events such as the Uttarayan kite flying festival celebrated on campus, or the garbha and dandiya nights during Navratri. On the company’s foundation day, the families’ achieve-ments—a new PhD degree earned by the spouse, academic excel-lence of the daughter or other positive developments—are celebrated with gifts and awards.“There are three things employees look for at the workplace—job security, a sense of belonging and a good trajectory for their careers in the company,” says Handa. “By including the family, we create that sense of belonging.”

Claris also adeptly channels the goodwill created. The com-pany has market presence in over across 91 countries, and before every international audit, the senior leadership team visits tem-ples to pray. Families are encouraged and invited to join in. After a successful audit, the Claris HR team sends thank-you letters home with a box of sweets as a token of gratitude.

There are other business benefits as well—including a thriving employee referral scheme called Family First that was introduced in 2010. Unlike other corporates where husband-wife teams, or blood relations are discouraged to work in the same office, employees at Claris can refer members of their immediate family—wife, siblings and children—for job openings. It’s a win-win situation, says Macwan, as the company gets access to good talent, builds better relationships with employees, and families find it convenient to work in the same workplace as their loved ones.

Dhara Makadia is a good example. Her husband has been work-ing in Claris since April 2006. He referred her, and it’s been a year since she was hired as an officer in the process quality assurance department. “I knew a lot about the company already, thanks to the regular company events I attended over the years. Now, I plan to refer my sister for a job,” she says. To prevent any bias or favouritism at the workplace, the company ensures relatives are not placed in the same team or function. And to keep the selection process fair, they have to go through the same rigourous screening as everyone else. As a result, around 12 out of 45 referrerals have been recruited so far and the HR team hopes more would join the ranks soon. Yes, it’s all in the family for Claris Lifesciences.

company dashboard

Founded in: 1999Turnover:

`738.7 croreNo. of employees:

1330

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CEO arjun Handa (wearing the hat) flying kites with families during the uttarayan festival.

as told to Meenakshi kuMarphotograph by s.radhakrishna

raMakrishna karuturi

sweet sMell of success

For Sai Ramakrishna Karuturi, life is quite literally a bed of roses as the world’s

largest producer of the beautiful, red flower. A

mechanical engineer by training, Karuturi began his company with `5 crore and

three employees in 1994. Cut to today where just in the last

quarter, Karuturi Global’s revenues were `633 crore.

The company produces 650 million rose stems annually

and exports 1.5 million every day, mostly from their farms in Ethiopia and Kenya. Now,

Karuturi is hoping his new focus—agriculture—will reap

even greater harvests. He’s acquired vast tracts of land

in Africa, and aims to produce three million tonnes

of food annually by 2020.

entrepreneurship runs in my blood. My father, Surya Rao Karuturi, was a first-generation entrepreneur who started as a small rice trader, went on to become a large-scale farmer and eventually became a manufacturer of cable and transmission towers. While growing up in Bengaluru, I was greatly influ-enced by him. His foresight and never-say-die attitude have been my inspiration all along.

i always knew I would join the family business. After graduating in mechanical engineering from Bangalore University in 1988, I went to Case Western Reserve University in the US to pursue an MBA. Back to India in 1990, I joined the business as technical director. It was a great experience; I was young and full of dreams. I really worked hard at Deepak Cables (India) Ltd, the family-owned power transmission towers business. Entering into the Far-Eastern market was one of the decisions I took there.

chancing upon a rose garden was a serendipitous moment for me. After working at Deepak Cables for four years, I had started feel-ing the need to do something else. I took a break and visited Israel

how i did it

4 0 | inc. | april/May 2012

the Perfect stem Ramakrishna Karuturi believes glory comes with ambition, and being “perennially paranoid”.

how i did it

to explore new transmission tower busi-ness opportunities. For some time, I had wanted to build greenhouses so that we could combine our power tower business with our large agricultural assets. I was not prepared for what was going to come next. When I went to see greenhouses in Israel, I was struck by the variety of roses being cultivated. It was a fascinating sight, and I couldn’t get it out of my mind even after I returned home from that trip. I was so struck by it that I decided to take up rose cultivation in India. I spent nearly one-and-a-half years just research-ing how to grow roses.

My family was sceptical. They thought it was a momentary fancy and would soon pass. But I was certain that I wanted to be in the business of roses. I was in love with

aged to cut costs by almost 30 per cent because of that. We were the lowest cost farm in Bengaluru when we set up. Unlike other farms in the area, we didn’t have too many fancy equipment or high overhead costs. We were producing roses with lim-ited resources at a very low price. In fact, when the vice president of a bank visited our farm, he called it “primitive”. I wasn’t offended. It was a compliment.

i dreamt really big. In the mid-90s, the flower export market was in the early stages. We didn’t have the wherewithal to compete with the international market and nobody expected that India could be successful one day. But I had a gut feeling that we could be big. I knew it was about hanging in there. We began to expand. Between 1996-2000, we developed Singa-

sold their produce at whatever price they could fetch. I bought all their roses, nego-tiated for a flight to Europe from Chennai and sent the consignment of roses by road to Chennai. I had bought the flowers for `4 per piece and sold them on Valentine’s Day for `48 per stem. Similarly, in 2007-08, when Kenya erupted in violence and it was tough to find labour for the farms, I refused to abandon my operations. Instead I continued with rose cultivation, exporting nearly a million roses annually. I provided housing, food and blankets to over 6,000 labourers and children in schools and hospitals that were part of the company’s complex.

By 2000, i had set up the Indian market, and was doing well in other global markets. Our turnover now was `12-13 crore. Around then, I managed a personal coup of sorts. I started a chartered flight from Bengaluru which began flying out roses to Amsterdam. It was a major decision for us. We were still small players in the business but it meant a lot to me. Even today, I cannot forget the day when I saw a Boeing 737 take off from Bengaluru airport with our homegrown roses. It was surreal, almost. It marked a turning point in the business. Today, we operate several chartered flights every week to ship our roses to Netherlands, the hub of Europe’s flower business.

things were going fine with the business. But, slowly, it was clear that the biggest threat to our business was competition from Africa. My best people started leaving for cultivators in Africa. Sometime in 2004, an employee of mine, and somebody I consider a guru, told me I should look at Africa as a potential base for rose cultivation. He had left Karuturi to work for an African company. I laughed off his suggestions at first. But later as we were driving to our farm outside Bengaluru, he kept at it. And, the facts he listed—high yield of roses and high profits—were astounding. I was stunned by the potential for what Africa could do for us. I immediately turned back to Bengaluru and booked myself on the first available flight to Africa.

them and nothing could stop me from ful-filling my dream. At that point I didn’t think how it would turn out or whether I would succeed at all.

our cultivation beginnings were humble. I acquired 18.6 acres of land outside Beng-aluru and started growing roses on it. Karuturi Floritech was incorporated in 1994 and was renamed Karuturi Global in 2004, when we entered Africa. I invested `5 crore, part of which was loaned from a bank. Our turnover was in the range of `2-3 crore in the first year itself. I had grown nine varieties of roses. At that time, most other cultivators were importing roses from Netherlands, because of which the costs were high. Our roses were all homegrown, and we man-

pore, Australia, Middle-East and Japan as our markets. These were not traditionally on the radar of big flower cultivators but it was a good time to go global and tap these markets. Markets across the world were on an upswing and people were spending more. We were successful in most mar-kets we entered other than South Africa. That didn’t work though—somehow we didn’t find too many buyers in the South African market.

it’s not like business was a bed of roses. Yes, we were growing but we faced our share of challenges. Ironically, we found success in these challenges. In February 1999, just before Valentine’s Day, the flight taking our roses to Europe was cancelled. Other local rose cultivators panicked and

4 2 | inc. | april/May 2012

“even today, i cannot forget the day when i saw a Boeing 737, take off from Bengaluru airport with our homegrown roses. it was surreal, almost.”

Most of all, it’s important to look after one’s employees. I started with only three. Today, there are 10,000 across our offices in Africa, India, Holland and Dubai. Soon, we are looking at increasing that to 25,000. Essentially, everybody is a human being first and so it’s important to relate to them at that level. There’s nothing that a smile can’t solve.

over the last year or so, I realised there aren’t too many peaks left to conquer in the rose business. I have diversified into agriculture. We have leased 3,000 sq km land in Ethiopia and are growing rice, maize, sugar-cane and palm oil. In total, we have 100,000 hectares of land in Africa. By 2014, I plan to acquire a million hectares. And, produce three mil-lion tonnes of food by 2020. My vision is to help convert Africa into the food basket of the world

expanding in india is also a prior-ity. We started a food processing business plant at Tumkur, 85 kms from Bengaluru. It has a capacity of 6,000 tonnes per annum and we are processing and bot-tling gherkins for exports to Europe and the US. I hope to be a substantial player in the global gherkin market soon. We’ve have acquired a flower retail chain Florista and renamed it Flower Express. We oper-ate 25 stores across India, and are in the process of opening 50 more. In addition, we have entered into a public-private part-nership with the government of Karna-taka to manage 1,500 acres of farmland for a long-term lease to grow vegetables for its captive consumption.

as an entrepreneur, you can’t let yourself perish. You have to be at it—that’s my sole philosophy. When things get really tough, they egg you on to be better and more suc-cessful. I’m very competitive that way. In hindsight, being perennially paranoid has helped. It’s that level of passion you bring to what you do that I think differentiates the successful from the also-rans.

it was the second turning point for Karu-turi Global. Once there, I discovered how they were miles ahead of us. Their air freight was cheaper; they had duty-free access to Europe and were shipping roses round the year. Their scale of operations was phenomenal. On the other hand, we were playing to the seasons. We moved from one season to another, from one country to another. We were moving between six markets in a year and as a result, there was no stickiness with the brand. That made me enter the Africa market. By then, I knew what I wanted. I had to be the rose grower for the world.

a bit of prudence and pragmatism paid. It wasn’t easy to break into a world inhab-ited by seasoned players. The African growers saw me as a Johnny-come-lately breaking into their stronghold. I decided against going to Kenya, where all the major rose growers were. Instead, I went to Ethiopia where the government was offering free land and cheaper air freights. Once we got a foothold in the African

market, we bought large farms in Kenya. We bought 188 hectares for $67 million in Kenya to take on the global competition. In the last seven years, we have grown to become the world’s largest producer of cut roses with an annual production of 650 million stems. We export 1.5 million roses every day.

i don’t have much of an appetite for tak-ing risks. People tell me that I took risks when I decided to set up farms in Africa. But I don’t see it that way. I felt that I was going into a market where my overhead costs would be much less and I would gain access to the world market. I am not scared of perceived risks but of actual ones. Business can throw up some very tough times. For example, last year, we lost our maize crop and incurred a loss of $15 million due to flash floods in Ethi-opia. You have to take it in your stride. I’ve always believed that when it’s high tide, you’ve got to sail and when the tide is low, you’ve got to make sure that you don’t get sand-banked.

how i did it

april/May 2012 | inc. | 4 3

“i’m very competitive. in hindsight, being perennially paranoid has helped.”

Blooming Profits going to africa—and buying tracts of land to produce roses in Ethiopia and kenya—was

the main turning point for karuturi global.

pH

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AuAutonomy

PiPower and Influence

MpManaging

People

FgFinancial

Gain

AuAutonomy

PiPower and Influence

MpManaging

People

FgFinancial

Gain

AuAutonomy

PiPower and Influence

AAltruism

VVariety

The MoTIVATIon MATrIx Why people start businesses,

what they want out of the entrepreneurial life, and how their

values change over time

20s 30s 40s +AltruisM

Altruism is more important to men

later in life, perhaps as they begin

to consider their legacies. By their

40s, men are willing to sacrifice money

for the chance to be of service

to others. After two decades focused on financial gain,

they may also be satisfied

with what they have amassed.

AutonoMyThe No. 1, definitive

motivation for entrepreneurs of all ages and both genders. The only

distinction is between the independent

and the fiercely independent.

In general, the motivations of

company founders change less over time than do the

motivations of other professionals.

Not surprisingly, founders’ motiva-

tions are also the inverse of non-entrepre-

neurs’.

VAriety Variety grows more important as older entrepreneurs—

male and female—graduate from

constantly fighting fires and begin

to recognise the myriad opportuni-ties to sculpt their roles within their

businesses.

FinAnciAl GAinMen see money as a symbol of

success, though money matters

less as they age—perhaps because they already have

enough of it. Women want to be independent and

powerful but don’t care as much

about getting rich.

Men

4 4 | inc. | april/May 2012

AuAutonomy

PiPower and Influence

MpManaging

People

AAltruism

AuAutonomy

PiPower and Influence

VVariety

AAltruism

AuAutonomy

icIntellectual Challenge

VVariety

AAltruism

20s 30s 40s +

AltruisMMore so than

men, women of every age view

their companies as vehicles for making

a difference.

MAnAGinG PeoPleYoung entrepre-

neurs may conflate managing people with another early motivation: power.

As leadership experience teaches

them the joys of inspiring rather

than directing, their interest

in pure manage-ment wanes.

intellectuAl chAllenGe

Female entrepre-neurs, like their

male counterparts, are often financially

comfortable in their 40s, which makes room in

their lives for seek-ing satisfaction

elsewhere. Many women may have been forced to put intellectual growth on hold while they struggled to build

companies and raise children at the same time.

Ask entrePreneurs ABout their companies, and they answer with alacrity and specificity. Ask why they wanted to start those companies, and they grow vague: “It’s in my DNA.” “I have a passion for it.” “No one else would hire me.”

But entrepreneurs’ true motivations are more nuanced than that. They are also important. Founders who understand what matters most to them are more likely to create ventures that sat-isfy them emotionally as well as materially, according to Noam Wasserman, an associate professor at Harvard Business School. “One of the key things about entrepreneurs is that they have far more potential to make decisions with both head and heart,” says Wasserman. “When you’re taking the world on your shoul-

ders, you have to ask yourself, Why am I doing this? If you only listen to your head, the decisions you make at every fork in the road can drive you farther from your personal promised land.”

Wasserman’s book The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup will be published this month. Based on his popular Harvard Business School class, Founders’ Dilemmas, the book helps aspiring entrepreneurs think through the crucial decisions about when and how to launch. It also urges people already running businesses to conduct a little soul searching about what they want from the experience.

Wasserman and Timothy Butler, senior fellow and director of career development programmes at Harvard Business School,

WoMenPower And inFluence

Entrepreneurs care almost as

much about being the boss as about not having a boss. They want to be

leaders. The exception is older women, who may

feel they have already proved themselves and are looking for ways to make the work itself

more meaningful.

april/May 2012 | inc. | 4 5

the MotiVAtion MAtrix

Auif your chief motivation is aUTonoMy, consider flying solo, without partners or significant investors. That

may mean settling for slower growth or a smaller-scale business. a lifestyle company may be a good choice. This advice applies to founders who cherish their independence fiercely, far above such potentially conflict-ing motivations as FinanCial Gain.

Piif your chief motivation is poWer anD inFlUenCe, be wary of teaming up with like-minded partners. Co-founder

discussions can get ugly when everyone is gunning to be Ceo. likewise, VC money jeopardises the crown. power also comes into play when the company starts hiring senior staff. Founders say they want the best talent available, but sometimes, in areas near and dear to them, they have trouble letting people do their jobs.

Mpif your chief motivation is ManaGinG people, prepare to feel frustrated as distance grows between you and your

troops. Fortunately, this is a motivation that scales as you go from being the doer to managing the doer to managing the manager of the doer. Still, if your true love is hiring, counselling, evaluating, and rewarding, the answer may be the same as for autonomy huggers: Keep the business small.

Fgif your chief motivation is FinanCial Gain, you may have to surrender some control. it’s a consideration

when bringing on co-founders or professional investors. according to noam Wasserman, founders who retained full control of their board and Ceo roles ended

up with an equity stake 52 per cent less valuable, on average, than that of those who ceded significant decision making to others. Wasserman calls the clash between aUTonoMy/poWer anD inFlUenCe and FinanCial Gain the “rich versus king” dilemma.

Aif your chief motivation is alTrUiSM, the non-profit or socially responsible routes naturally beckon. But there

are also plenty of ways to scratch that itch within a traditional company. you do so whenever you base decisions first on what’s best for other people and second on what’s best for the bottom line.

Vif your chief motivation is VarieTy, the obvious decision is to start lots of companies. alternatively,

you can stick with your existing business and explore unfamiliar product lines and markets, or encourage employees to develop new ventures in-house. Variety becomes more important to entrepre-neurs as they age, so consider developing a strong no. 2 whom you can trust with crucial functions if, at a later time, you find your attention wandering.

icif your chief motivation is inTelleCTUal CHallenGe, then, as with VarieTy, you should seek opportunities to

diversify. even if intellectual challenge doesn’t matter much to you now, be aware that (for women, anyway) it will probably become more important later in life. So consider launching special projects related to your next generation of products or exten-sions of the business—projects that will give your expanding curiosity space to roam.

surveyed roughly 2,000 founders about their motivations. They carved out results for men and women in their 20s, 30s, and 40s-and-beyond, and compared the results with those for thousands of non-entrepreneurs who completed the same survey. Among their findings: Entrepreneurs are from Mars; non-entrepreneurs are from Venus. When respondents were asked to rank 13 motivations, entrepreneurs gave priority to things such as autonomy and power. Non-entrepreneurs, by contrast, valued security and a congenial work environment. The study also showed that motivations change with age, with women’s motivations shifting more than men’s.

Theoretically, entrepre-neurs who anticipate shifts in their needs can structure organisations that change along with them. Of course, human beings are driven by multiple desires, and so founders have to weigh some-times conflicting motivations when making such crucial decisions as how much equity to take, what to delegate to the senior team, and whether to sell or stick.

The motivations survey is part of a larger self- assessment tool called CareerLeader, co-developed by Butler and used by hundreds of universities and business schools around the world. You can find a modified version at www.inc.com/motivation. Use it to rank your motivations, then look to the right for Wasser-man’s and Butler’s thoughts on how what makes you tick might make you act. —Leigh Buchanan

now You Knowyou’ve gone to inc.com and gained some

insight into your motivations.Here’s how to use what you’ve learnt

THe Top-ranKeD MoTiVaTionS, in orDer:

4 6 | inc. | april/May 2012

HiringC’mon, stay a whileHow to fight turnover? Create a system to help new employees find their way

Hiring How to help a new hire ease in, and feel at home this page Finance Why advertising agencies in the US

are investing in media and technology start-ups page 49 Leadership Achieve maximum effect through

minimum means, by being an elegant leader page 50 Design A website makeover can bring back your online

business page 52 The Way We Work Hitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj, co-founders of LetsBuy.com, lay

out their partnership formula— complementary skills and personalities. page 56

Elevator Pitch Will investors experi-ment with 8 crore for Building Blocks? page 54

strategy

Over the past year, Big Fuel has seen its reve-nue more than triple, to $40 million, and its head count swell, from 70 employees to 140. But with growth, comes growing pains. Like many start-ups, the New York City-based social-media marketing agency had never bothered with a formal orientation pro-gramme and was finding it difficult to train all these new staff members—many of whom came from disparate industries and lacked experience in social media. As a result, Big Fuel began to experience a problem it never had: employee turnover. As the churn mounted, Avi Savar, the company’s founder and chief creative officer, grew concerned that the company would lose its competitive edge when pitching clients. “It’s a matter of staying ahead of the curve,” he says. So last June, Big Fuel unveiled an onboarding process for new

ApriL/MAy 2012 | INC. | 47iLLUStrAtion By AniL t

strategy

page. “It’s a great social media dictionary to have on hand,” VanAllen says.

Step 3: Watch and learnThe company also has begun an informal apprenticeship programme, in which senior employees mentor new hires within their departments and on their project teams, which include staff members from a number of departments. VanAllen has been working closely with Ross Sheingold, one of the com-pany’s channel managers, who leads brand management for T-Mobile’s account. Under his wing, she says, she has become more aware of new platforms—such as Pinterest, a site on which users can compile and share clippings from other websites—and their impact on social media strategy. Plus, VanAl-len says, consistently working alongside senior employees has given her more oppor-tunities for career development. “I wanted to do community management from a different angle,” she says. “This is not only a profes-sional match but a personal match.”

Step 4: Face time with the bigwigsAs Big Fuel’s head count rises, the company’s senior partners have fewer day-to-day inter-actions with rank-and-file employees. So the firm’s three partners take turns leading a monthly session known as “drinking the fuel,” in which they meet with a randomly chosen group of eight to 10 employees, both new and old. The partners generally talk

hires. Here’s how the system worked for one recent hire.

Step 1: Meet your colleaguesTaylor VanAllen joined Big Fuel in November from PicsCliq, an online sales platform for photographers, where she managed the company’s content on Face-book, Twitter, and YouTube. She was hired as a community manager to work on Big Fuel’s T-Mobile account.

VanAllen’s first day at Big Fuel began with a visit to human resources, where she met with Yashira Guzman, the company’s HR generalist. But VanAllen was quickly handed off to her new colleagues on the T-Mobile team, who walked her through the client’s current projects and explained Big Fuel’s best practices and communica-tions processes. VanAllen, who was accus-tomed to the largely unstructured work environments of start-ups, appreciated the rigour of the orientation. “It helped me feel comfortable working with people from so many departments,” she says.

Step 2: Back to schoolVanAllen’s orientation didn’t end there. Because Big Fuel’s employees come from a range of industries—from public relations to television production—they often bring vastly different approaches to social media. To get people on the same page as quickly as possible, the company developed a curriculum for new hires called Big Fuel University, which is designed to teach the company’s approaches to social media, business and client strategy, and values. In November, the curriculum was expanded to a series of 12 courses and made available online. It now includes videos from each of the company’s department heads and case studies of clients, as well as short quizzes at the end of some units.

Employees go through the curriculum at their own pace; it takes most people about a week and a half to complete it. VanAllen still finds herself going back to the material during breaks in the workday. It has helped her quickly understand the workflow between departments, she says. For instance, she may work with someone from analytics or strategy to evaluate selected content on T-Mobile’s Facebook

about how to apply Big Fuel’s three core values—humanity, innovation, and collaboration—in the real world and ask employees about their experi-ences at Big Fuel. They try to keep it informal; the sessions are usually held off-site, at restau-rants. “We’re still a people-based company,” Savar says. “We want to make sure the human con-nection is still there.”

Because of the company’s brisk pace of hiring, it has taken some time to get around to every employee. VanAllen, for instance, has yet to “drink the fuel.” Even so, she says, she hasn’t had any problems getting access

to the company’s leadership team. “They have a true open-door policy here,” she says.

Step 5: tell us how you really feelAfter a month or so on the job, new hires meet with the company’s vice president of talent and operations, Anthony Onesto. He hasn’t had a chance to debrief VanAllen, but Onesto says the feedback he receives goes right back into the orientation pro-cess. Several employees suggested periodic refresher courses in Big Fuel University. Others asked for more in-person discus-sions with senior employees—something the company plans to initiate. “This is an iterative process,” Onesto says. “We’re always building more into it.”

and the verdict?Although it is too soon to assess the onboarding process’s impact, Onesto says the company’s turnover rate fell to about 10 per cent in 2011, compared with 15 per cent in the previous year. And employee response has been so favourable that Big Fuel is developing additional courses that will cover each of the company’s functions in more depth. The process has also impressed would-be clients and potential employees, says Big Fuel’s CEO, Jon Bond. “Social media is a very complicated sub-specialty, and there’s a lot to learn,” Bond says. “Formalising a training programme been very valuable for us.” —April Joyner

Lack of flexibility/

scheduling

Limited career advancement/ promotional opportunities

Unsatisfied with pay and benefits

Lack of fit to job

Management/general work environment

Lack of job security

Source: Gallup

why people leaveEmployee turnover has been falling over the past five years, and it’s no surprise

4 8 | INC. | ApriL/MAy 2012

strategy

Financethe angels of Madison avenueTech start-ups get a helping hand from an unlikely source—ad agencies

as marketers struggle to keep up with the next big mobile platform or device, adver-tising agencies now need to be as proficient in new technologies as they are in pitching clever ideas. Rather than wait for new tech-nology to come to them, a few innovative ad firms have gone straight to the source and taken an equity stake in promising young tech companies.

Ad firms such as Ignited, Rockfish Interactive, and kbs+p have recently begun investing in media and technology start-ups. It makes sense, given that they already spend a good deal of time scout-ing media and tech start-ups to stay hip to the latest marketing technology. By investing in these businesses, agencies not only stand to make some money should they discover the next Twitter, but they can also tailor the new technology to the needs of their larger clients.

“Ad people are famous for making promises and then running back to the office and saying, ‘How do we do that?’, ” says Eric Johnson, CEO of the El Segundo, California-based ad agency Ignited, which launched its investing arm, Ignited Labs, in 2010. “Now when I’m in a meeting with potential clients, I can say, ‘Not only can we do that, but we’ve actually invested in a company that’s mak-ing this technology.’ ”

Ignited has invested in six start-ups so far, selecting com-panies based on word-of-mouth recommendations or from pitches it has received from aspiring busi-nesses. One of Ignited’s first investments was in PixelMags, a Los Angeles–based business that makes a platform that allows magazines, catalogs, and advertis-ers to publish digital content on smart-phones and tablet computers. Partnering

Pitching ad firms is much the same as pitching VCs, although there are some nuances.

with Ignited “was a strategic move for us,” says PixelMags co-founder Ryan Mar-quis, a software-industry veteran and founder of two previous start-ups. “The ads we publish inside each magazine are a major part of our platform. We thought,

if we could tap into Ignited’s experience with advertisers and get some funding, it’d be a perfect fit for us.”

To make that happen, Marquis and his co-founder, Mark Stubbs, submitted their financial statements to Ignited’s Johnson and met with him to demonstrate Pixel-Mags’ technology. Johnson and his COO, Bill Rosenthal, evaluated PixelMags as an angel investor would, using criteria such as the founders’ prior business experience, scalability of the company, and quality of the prototype. They also considered whether PixelMags would align with the needs of Ignited’s customers, which

ApriL/MAy 2012 | INC. | 49iLLUStrAtion By prince Antony

strategy

include NBC Universal and the NFL. “If three of our clients can use the product, there are probably a lot of other people who can do the same,” Johnson says.

PixelMags has raised two rounds of funding from Ignited Labs, totalling a few hundred thousand dollars. (In similar deals, Ignited has taken a 20 per cent stake in the companies it has invested in. The investments have ranged from $50,000 to $500,000.) In addition to cash, Ignited also provides office space, man-power, and, most important, industry contacts. One of the first companies to run an advertisement on PixelMags’ plat-form was Princess Cruise Lines, a former Ignited client. “We would have had a way harder time going to that client on our own,” Marquis says. “Our relationship with Ignited got us in with them and gave our platform credibility.”

For start-ups looking for funding, the protocol for pitching ad firms is much the same as for pitching traditional VCs, although there are some nuances. “Just like when entrepreneurs present to a VC and know what other start-ups they’ve invested in, it would serve entrepreneurs well to know who our customers are and the industries we’re working in,” says Dave Knox, chief marketing officer for Rockfish Interactive, which launched its investment arm, Rockfish Brand Ventures, last year. “If they can walk in and show us how it’s immediately applicable to our partners, that’s a plus in their column.”

Obviously, not every start-up is a good fit for this kind of funding. Both Rockfish and Ignited have a narrow list of industries they are interested in. Mobile technology, digital commerce, and location-based technology rank high on Rockfish’s list, while Ignited wants start-ups that are working on next-generation research, Facebook apps, tablet computing, and video technology. Businesses that do fit those moulds should be prepared to teach as well. “We ask ourselves, ‘By working with this team, can we learn something new about this space?’ ” Johnson says. “That’s the X factor.” —Issie Lapowsky

Leadership When less is moreForceful? Sure. Agile? Of course. But elegant? Really?

Most leaders seek to boost their performance by becoming more: more decisive, more communica-tive, more masterful of complexity. Matthew E. May prefers the oppo-site approach. A former consultant for Toyota, May sums up much of what he learned there about the art of simplification in the word ele-gance, which he applied to prod-ucts, processes, and problem solving in his 2009 book, In Pursuit of Elegance. (A new book, The Laws of Subtraction, will be published this fall.) In a recent conversation

with editor-at-large Leigh Buchanan, May discussed how elegance applies to leadership.

Let’s start by defining elegance.Elegance is the ability to achieve the maximum effect or impact through the minimum means. One of the best examples is the Google interface. There’s a box; there’s a lot of white space; you enter a term and search for it.

What’s the leadership analogue of the google interface?Elegant leaders would be very accessible and easy to connect with. There would be nothing excessive about them. They would do nothing wasteful. Someone asks a simple question, and they get a simple, meaningful answer. Bill Bratton had an elegant way of leading at the New York Police Department. Doug Conant, who recently stepped down as CEO of Campbell’s Soup, had the strat-egy of using small, informal points of daily contact to deliver meaningful messages about the company.

addition by subtraction Matthew e. May suggests that action isn’t always necessary

5 0 | INC. | ApriL/MAy 2012

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How does one become an elegant leader?Elegance requires that you subtract. Lead-ers should ask themselves two questions: One: What would the people in my organ-isation like me to reduce or stop doing? Two: What would my competitors hate for me to reduce or stop doing?

This is challenging, of course, because adding is a human inclination. A couple of days ago, my wife and I were at Costco, watching people walk out with big, happy smiles because they got 36 rolls of toilet paper and enough meat to feed an army. We love to accumulate. That’s what business leaders do in terms of staffing and building their companies. And all of a sudden, growth becomes the strategy, and you wake up and, lo and behold, you realise we’re a lot slower than we were a few years ago.

What kinds of things might leaders subtract?In the case of what employees want you to stop doing, subtract anything that complicates an organisation or how its people work. Leaders like to put structures in place, but a very structured organisa-tion can be extremely inelegant. Small companies tend to be much more elegant than large companies, because they are simple, agile, and resourceful, with a clear focus. Entrepreneurs often start out as quite elegant leaders.

What about in terms of competitors?Competitors would hate it if you stopped doing things that get in your own way. Google’s leaders would hate it if Micro-soft’s leaders stopped adding features the engineers think are cool but people have no use for.

What does elegant leadership look like in action? It’s the difference between karate and aikido. Karate is hitting and kicking. It’s meeting force with force. Aikido is using the momentum of your opponent to your advantage. It’s meeting force with give. If you were to watch aikido in action, you would see very, very little movement on the part of the aikido master. You would see a lot of movement

on the part of the attacker. So it’s the ability to use external forces in a way that moves us forward. Yes, the world is getting far more complicated. Things are changing faster than ever. How do you exploit that? How do you make it invisible to customers?

are there things leaders are told to do that are inelegant?Immediate action is supposed to be a sign of a forceful leader. But I remember what Boyd Matson, a longtime journalist for National Geographic, once told me: If the hippos charge at you, stand still. If you’re on a safari and come across a watering hole with Mama Hippo and her calf, and she doesn’t like the way your camera

sounds and decides to charge, you can’t fight her, and you will die if you run. The only way to survive is to stand still.

Leaders of businesses face 2,000-pound beasts every day—they’re called competi-tors or the economy. When they’re press-ing down on you, doing something isn’t always better than doing nothing.

surely doing nothing is dangerous. It’s not dangerous if you develop a skill set around two important things: observation and reflection. In the Western world, we are driven by short-term cycles: the 10-day sales report, the monthly close, the quarterly stock report. In the East, they take the long view. First, you observe the problem and try to understand it from the perspective of others: the user, the employee, the customer. Only then do you begin the design or the decision-making process. If you don’t take time to observe and reflect, you risk making things worse.

Is it possible to be a Zen leader?Did Steve Jobs qualify as a Zen leader? He was certainly into it. I don’t know how he came out to be such a toxic individual. A Zen leader would embrace the notion of masterful work and constantly get better at it. He would do what he did for a worthy reason and in a noble way. That constant pursuit of perfection while understanding perfection will never be achieved flies in the face of how we think. If we can’t achieve something, then why pursue it? Well, because we have to. That’s what Jobs did so well and Jeff Bezos does so well.

Leaders are always being told to com-municate. Is too much communication antithetical to elegance?

You have to think about where that advice comes from. Some leaders don’t communi-cate at all. Study after study shows that the two extremes—radio silence and TMI—don’t work. So instead, use the Goldilocks principle of straight down the middle. Communicate just enough, just in time, and in such a way that you intrigue employ-ees enough that they want to learn more. You want them leaning forward rather than sitting back with their arms folded.

should the CeO also be a CsO—chief simplification officer?No. Because, though all elegant things are simple, all simple things aren’t elegant. You could make the case that “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap was all about simplicity, because all he wanted to do was cut, cut, cut. Jack Welch wanted to neutron-bomb busi-nesses that weren’t one or two in their markets. A leader must bring artfulness and emotional intelligence to how he thinks about simplifying.

“Small companies tend to be much more elegant than large companies, because they are simple, agile, and resourceful, with a clear focus.”

ApriL/MAy 2012 | INC. | 51

strategy

Butch & Harold’s peel-and-stick wall art, dry-erase boards, and sticker picture frames were a hit with wholesalers and retailers. But online sales were virtually nil. Michele Gold, who founded the company in 2007, wasn’t surprised: Butch & Harold’s website didn’t make it particularly easy for would-be shoppers to make a purchase. She gave Blue Fountain Media, a web design and marketing agency in New York City, a limited budget, just $15,000, and asked what it could do. The revamped site debuted in April 2011. —Issie Lapowsky

DesignButch & Harold’s wholesale business was thriving. The online business? Not so much

BeFOre

LOgOthe company is named after a pair of pretend pooches Gold and her sister played with as kids. She briefly considered a canine-oriented logo, but she was concerned that Butch & Harold would be mistaken for a pet care company. “in the end,” says Gold, “we liked this logo’s simple, clean lines and colour combination.” Gold also came up with the tag line peel…stick…love…repeat and placed it below the logo.

expert OpINION

What’s for sale? When I look at a website, I should know what it’s selling in about five seconds. I don’t find that here. Instead of Peel ’n Stick, the site should say Wall Stickers. Then Butch & Harold needs a defined call to action. The little Post-it that says original stickr looks like a call to action, but I try to click on it and can’t. Since it’s not adding any

value, I’d take it out and make the Shop Now button stand out more.Pete Juratovic, president, Clikzy Creative, Washington, D.C.

pay more attention to seO I think Butch & Harold dropped the ball on its SEO work. The whole section that says Peel ’n Stick is currently an unreadable image, but it could have been done with CSS or Webfonts, which would have enabled it to be read by Google. That way, it would have had an SEO and visual impact—and

lost that ugly font in the middle of the page.Andi Graham, principal, Big Sea Design, St. Petersburg, Florida

BaCkgrOuNdA cousin of Gold’s husband’s built the original site for free. Gold’s main goal was that the site reflect the brand’s style. So the designer used patterns from Butch & Harold’s first line of wall decorations to create a striped background. Gold found the homepage attractive but admits that she forgot to add crucial elements: pictures of the products. “We were more concerned about aesthetic and whether the colours worked together,” she says. “We were totally off on what the point of an e-commerce site is.”

tHe COpyFlash back to 2007, when the site was launched. twitter was just a year old, Facebook was just three years old, and search-engine marketing was a mystery to many. that accounts for this description of the company, which Gold admits is not geared toward turning up on Google searches. “We were smart enough to know we needed a website,” she says. “But back then, we were clueless about online marketing.”

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5 2 | INC. | ApriL/MAy 2012

strategy

Jeffrey Zeldman, on the right way to retoolZeldman is founder of the online web design magazine A List Apart and the new york city–based design firm Happy cog.

Q: What’s the biggest mistake people make during redesigns?a: they’re seduced by lots of features. A restaurant might be tempted to add a virtual tour. But these days, people look for restaurants on mobile devices; if you have a Flash site that doesn’t work on 15 per cent of smartphones, that’s bad.

Q: How do you hire a good designer?a: Beware of people who seem in a rush to say yes or sell you features; often what you’re getting there is a template that they use for all their customers. you’d do better with someone who takes the time to learn about your business and figure out what you really need.

Q: Should you trust your designer, even if you disagree with his ideas?a: Business owners should think of designers as archi-tects, not decorators. you wouldn’t tell an architect to build something that’s not structurally sound. A good designer has technical knowledge—don’t treat her like someone who’s there to decide whether something should be pink or orange.

aFter

Better, but still needs work This is an improve-ment. On the original site, the content was mean-ingless; on the new one, you get a good sense of what the business is about. But Gold and Blue Fountain didn’t make any changes to the main nav-igation bar at the top of the page. meanwhile, the product categories are buried under Shop. Prod-

ucts are what people are looking for, so that’s what should be at the top. Dan Brown, co-founder, EightShapes, Washington, D.C.

Be bolder The new design pushes the product to the forefront, but without much clarity. Gold and Blue Fountain squeeze a lot of information into a small space, so it’s confusing. Launching with just one dominant element—like the Peel ’n Stick image—would have made a more confident splash. Not showing any product on the original was a big

mistake, but at least it felt upscale, crafted, and a little more intriguing. Simon Endres, creative director, Red Antler, Brooklyn, New York

tHe BOttOM LINe In 2011, the site received 82,000 page views, four times more than it received the year before, and it is now the No. 1 search result for several keywords, including vinyl stick on picture frames. Online sales, negligible prior to the redesign, topped $9,000 by year’s end.

prOduCt sHOtsMany of Butch & Harold’s products are now displayed on the homepage. Gold also tried to make the homepage more playful by adding photos and brighter colours. the price of the sticker frame was added to appeal to twenty-somethings decorating their spaces on a budget.

tag LINeGold wanted the new homepage to be more direct about what Butch & Harold sells—and both she and Blue Fountain’s team agreed that amplifying the tag line would help. “that line describes what our product is. Butch & Harold doesn’t,” Gold says. So Blue Fountain’s team changed the line’s font, size, and colour to make it as prominent as the logo and as lively as the rest of the page.

searCH-eNgINe OptIMIsatIONthe new description of the company is loaded with key terms such as vinyl wall art and wall stickers to boost Butch & Harold’s search rankings. Blue Fountain created a blog for the site, which improves the chances that other sites will link back to Butch & Harold.

VIdeOposting photos of the stickers was a start, but Gold wanted to show customers how to use the product as well. the 58-second video tutorial, shot by the company that designs Butch & Harold’s packaging, clearly demonstrates how to put photos in the frames.

Q&a

ApriL/MAy 2012 | INC. | 5 3

5 4 | INC. | april/May 2012 photograph by Subhojit paul

Robotic Fun Can tarun bhalla build the country’s scientific future?

april/May 2012 | INC. | 5 5

stRategy

the Pitch “Schools and colleges are always on the lookout to provide hands-on activity-based experiences to their students. Given that there are 20,000 schools and 5,000 colleges in India, the market for experience-based learning tools stands at 1,250 crore. To tap this huge opportunity, Building Blocks sets up robotics, science and technology centres, and operates them on a BOT (Build, Operate and Transfer) model. Our do-it-yourself robotic kits combine hardware, software and education solutions to make the educational experience more exciting and engaging. Our typical sale to a school or college is worth 5 lakh per annum. Each contract has a 50 per cent margin and goes on for four years. Since we began in June 2009, we’ve run science centres in more than 100 schools including DPS Sonepat and The Shri Ram School, Delhi. With a strong team of engineers, technologists and educationists from top colleges in the US and India, we now want to cater to engineering colleges also.”—As told to Inc. India

the experts Weigh In

COMPaNybuilding blocks

FOUNDeRtarun bhalla

LOCatIONNew Delhi

LaUNCHeDjune 2009

ReveNUe `60 lakh (2011-2012)

PROjeCtIONs (2013)`14.5 crore

FUNDINg sOUgHt 8 crore

FUNDINg sOUgHt FOR Expansion in all domains (Sales, Marketing, product Development, operations) 

FOCUs ON sCaLe building blocks’ ability to attract some quality names as customers in a short time span is commendable. however, our experience of companies oper-ating in the school ecosystem has been that selling to them is challenging. For instance, think labs is a company that has tried ideas similar to tarun’s venture. unfortunately, business practices employed by some publicly-listed education technology companies with similar business models (not necessarily similar products) have muddied the waters as well. So, scalability and sustainability of the business model can be a challenge.Parag Dhol, MD, Inventus Capital Partners, bengaluru

gOOD teaM aND gOOD PRODUCt the product and the business model have helped the entre-preneur to draw up a good pitch. it’s certainly one of the better and more evolved elevator pitches i have seen. yet, my suggestion is that tarun needs to equally focus on the individual consumer side as well. the team background seems pretty solid, and is a tes-timony to the present success of the company. of course, there are questions around opera-tions, marketing, scaling and eventually competition. but there is tremendous potential in the current business model. as a VC, i’d definitely be interested to know more. Puneet Vatsayan, chairman, the hatch Incubator, Chandigarh

FIgURe OUt FUNDINg aMOUNt both the idea and the product it has led to, look good. garnering a `60-lakh revenue in 2011-2012 is a promising figure for a company in this domain. typically, schools and colleges look for educational kits made by market leaders like lEgo and Fischertechnik. but their products are expensive which has created opportunities for ventures like building blocks. they must back product sales with training services too. Consid-ering the robotics education mar-ket, having these many customers is good progress. plus, we can expect the customer base to grow in the next year. but the funding sought is too high and needs to be negotiated.abheek bose, Ceo, robots alive, benglauru

Elevator PitchBuilding Blocks sets up science centres inschools and colleges. Will investors sign up for the `8-crore experiment?

strategy

“the way we work | hitesh Dhingra and amanpreet Bajaj, LetsBuy.com

Over the past 18 months, Hitesh Dhingra and Amanpreet Bajaj, co-founders of LetsBuy.com, an e-commerce portal specialising in digital and electronics products, have continuously found themselves in the news—first, for raising a $6-million investment from biggies like Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Helion Venture Partners, then for scaling up to become a leading e-commerce player with more than two million unique visitors per month and shipping 3,500-plus products a day, and most recently, for being acquired by market-leader Flipkart for a reported $25 million. Dhingra and Bajaj, friends from their college days in Delhi University, seem well-adjusted and at ease with their exciting journey. Still, surviving hyper-growth, and cementing a working relationship through it couldn’t have been easy. Even as they get ready to enter into another partnership of sorts (LetsBuy.com will continue to work as an independent entity post the Flipkart deal), Dhingra and Bajaj delve into how their own partnership works.

as toLD to shreyasi singh | PHOTOGrAPH By SUBHOjiT PAUL

You can’t create silos when you grow a company together. In ours, anybody can approach anybody.”

5 6 | inC. | april/May 2012

strategywell-Matched Hitesh Dhingra (right) and amanpreet Bajaj have perfected the good-cop-bad-cop drill.

strategy

hitesh Dhingra: We get to office by 10am or so. Usually, by 10.30am, we’ve got our daily dashboards up—we know what is happening in sales, we’ve seen the call centre reports, and the other metrics. This helps us get to the nerve of the business, and to know what needs our special attention. Once we’re done with that, we can get into the more strategic stuff for the rest of the day. Honestly, this structure has evolved only in the last six months or so. Before that, we were still building up functional departments and their teams. We couldn’t plan our days. We would just do what-ever was required.

amanpreet Bajaj: Having a much more structured approach—des-ignated weekly meetings and set Monday morning meetings with the entire team—has really helped us. In fact, our BlackBerry calen-dars fill up fast with appointments now. I put more on Hitesh’s calen-dar on a daily basis.

hD: Operationally, the last year-and-a-half has been incredible. We were 13-odd people in December 2010—just before we raised our first round of funding of $6 million from Accel Partners, Tiger Global and Helion. From then on, the scale up has been almost unreal. We did business of `14-15 crore in the 2010-11 fis-cal. This year we should be closing at `150 crore plus. That’s 10x growth. We hired 370 people last year which is more than a per-son a day. That was a massive task. We’d interview around 15-16 people a day and added an entire layer to the organisation by key recruitments like CTO, CFO and Director, Operations. Cut to the present, where we have the Balance Scorecard method imple-mented across the organisation. Now, every function knows what its KPI (key performance index) is for every month and every quarter. That keeps everyone on their toes, and with our dash-boards, we’re on top of those indices. Today, we’re trying to make a company that is driven by analytics and metrics.

aB: We managed our hyper growth because both of us brought different skills to the table. We’ve known each other since college, and had launched a youth portal back then. After that, Hitesh worked with technology start-ups and an IT distribution company. I was with Ernst & Young for six-and-a-half years, advising businesses on how they should structure their supply chain and logistics. So, we had complementary skill sets. I took over the operations, and Hitesh took care of the business side—interacting with investors, managing the category and building the team. While I was building warehouses, he was building the company.

hD: Because of the clarity of our roles, and our respect for each other, we’ve made it work. Of course, in a start-up everybody does everything, but at a macro level, there needs to be an understand-ing of who’s driving what. In the last one-and-a-half years, we have been interacting with investors continuously. The first round took almost six months to come through. Even the Flip-kart deal took almost four to six months. So, we decided that I will focus on managing our investor relationships.

B: Beyond being responsible for our verticals though, we’ve made sure there is constant communi-cation with all the teams. At times, I’ll have an evening session with his marketing team and dis-cuss ideas out. Or, he’ll go to the warehouse or talk to the procure-ment and logistics team. When you are growing the company together, cross-functional com-munication is very important. You can’t think this is my team, and I’ll only interact with them—you can’t create silos like that. It’s important to have an environ-ment where anybody can be approached by anybody.

More than our skills, our personalities complement each other. Hitesh is very intuitive. He

tends to follow his gut. When we are working on a solution, the first thing that comes to his mind is often what we end up doing after debating all the other options. That’s a huge strength, we want to make sure he’s given an environment where he can follow his heart, and come up with what his instincts tell him.

hD: On the other hand, Aman is very detail-oriented. That’s what one needs in operations. It’s run on precision. Plus, he’s great with people. Even after the Flipkart deal, people want to continue to report to him. He commands a lot of respect from the team. In fact, 250 of our 370-odd people report to him. That was impor-tant for me. I didn’t want to be the only person being looked up to. Plus, we’ve made the good-cop-bad-cop philosophy work very well for us. It’s something we’d decided early on. Today, the per-ception of our team is that I’m the carrot, and he’s the stick.

Whether a partnership will work out or not depends on how mature the partners are. When I began LetsBuy, another college friend of ours was working with me. He stayed with the company for six odd months and then decided to move away. We didn’t gel well together. When Aman decided to join the idea, I felt personally responsible. I had to make sure he stayed longer. In fact, just before he joined, I told him we were entering into a marriage. If any of us decided to move away, we’d have to shut shop. There was no other way.

A5 8 | inC. | april/May 2012

strategy

aB: Thankfully, conflict-resolution hasn’t been a problem for us. What we’ve seen is that both of us have the habit of reasoning things out. We both bring 10 points to an argument or discus-sion, and come to an agreement.

hD: Interestingly, we’re both Geminis. So, at any given point, they’re actually four people making a decision! It’s great. Both of us always have two options to choose from. Jokes apart, we argue a lot but we haven’t really faced a situation where I’ve wanted to punch him, or he’s punched me. We’ve met Sachin and Binny (co-founders of Flipkart), and like us, they are very hands-on too. There’s a lot of synergy in what we like—we’re all very passionate about e-commerce and the internet. And, I’m expecting that the four of us will be able to work together the way Aman and I have been working so far.

aB: I think one of the main reasons we’ve managed to grow and sustained that growth is because we had a lot of entrepreneurs in our team. Even when we were just a company of 70-80 people, around 10 people in key roles had been entrepreneurs in their previous avatar. As we scaled up, those functions also grew in toto with the company. Our company was a great place to be through that year when we expanded from 50-300. Everybody was driv-ing everybody, and that really worked.

hD: That micro-entrepreneurial culture is intact even now. For example, the CTO sets the rule and the culture for the technology team. Because we ended up liking a lot of failed entrepreneurs, we got a great bunch of people with a lot to prove to the world. They feel a lot of ownership here, and because they are leading most functions, the start-up, entrepreneurial culture has been easy to maintain. We really value that. Actually, in the e-commerce space, we probably have the lowest attrition. In our technology team of 150 people, we would have lost only two or three people so far which is incredible if you consider that we’re based out of a hub like Gurgaon. That is a big achievement—to have a great team who loves working with us.

aB: Of course, our people mix has begun to change now. It depends on what stage of the company you’re in actually. When

you want to grow exponentially, and there are no rules and pro-cesses, what you need is hard-core passion. As you scale up, you need people who have seen that scale and have experience.

hD: For our first 50 people, passion was our priority. A relevant job experience came in second. But now the proportion has changed. For certain roles, we want people who have years of rele-vant experience. You need a balance.

aB: We’re trying to bring some of that balance to our work-life relationship as well. We’ve been working 14-15 hours a day. That’s been our lifestyle for the past 18 months. We’d work every day of the week. On weekends, we would have meetings or call people for interviews at a Cafe Coffee Day or Barista. Our operations run 24x7 so we're always tempted to drop in at the warehouse, and check on things. In fact, there was a time when my wife took my BlackBerry and put it in the cupboard so I could not check or send e-mails at 3.30am. Now, at least Sundays are reserved for the family though honestly, even that is still a work-in-progress. But this is what passion means, I guess. Most entrepreneurs will tell you it’s not just about money. It’s about creating something. I know that sounds clichéd but it's exactly what makes you happy about working like this. We are slowly beginning to let go a little. It's important to understand that somebody else is handling it, and that you should look over it only from a macro level.

D: How much you want to know about what goes on in your company is a preference. I’m sure if Aman doesn’t check the warehouse status at 1am, nothing will go wrong. But, it’s your attachment to your venture. There were times when I think my wife began to think I was up to something else, because I’d be calling and talking to Aman in the middle of the night. Both of us live close to where one of our main warehouses is. So, typically, we get there at 10pm after office and stay on till midnight. But, that’s fun, right? In fact, more than the business

growth, the highlight of my past two years has been the relationship I shared with Aman and Manish, an angel investor who has also been involved with us operationally. We know that whatever the new venture we have four-five years down the line, we’ll do it together.

Hapril/May 2012 | inC. | 5 9

“whether a partnership works or not depends on how

mature the partners are.”

I wIsh I knew then...

Pankaj Keswani began Alufit, a facade engineering company, in 1984, with meagre funds and little experience. In fact, when he won his first contract—a 35,000 job to do aluminium cladding for a guest house—he didn’t have factory space or contractors. By the middle of 2000s though, Alufit was a thriving curtain wall provider with hundreds of successfully completed projects. The twist in Keswani’s tale happened around the same time, and taught him crucial lessons.

Pankaj keswani, Alufit

The first two decades of building a business was tough especially since I was a first-genera-tion entrepreneur. Both, in terms of access to capital and to advice, there was always a pres-sure to survive. Success really only hit me around 2005-06 when Alufit was around a `300-crore company. Plus, we had a great rep-utation. I had begun to feel I had the Midas touch. It was then that I decided to backward integrate the business and set up our own alu-minium extrusion facility. It made perfect sense for us to have that in addition to our fab-rications units. We could produce what we needed for our projects, and market the rest.

Aluminium was something I believed I could do anything with. I didn’t bother to do much research or make a project report. I made an investment of `60-80 crore to set up our Kuppam plant near Bengaluru straightaway. In fact, I was so confident about the project that I refused to take the tax holiday my bank offered. I don’t need it, I told them. Unfortunately, my optimism was misplaced. This was around 2008. The global economy was in trouble—first, the dollar depreciated and my costs for setting up the plant shot up. By the time the facility came up

in February 2009, my fabrication business was beginning to tank. Existing orders were dwindling, and new sales had dried up. Moreover, I soon had to begin debt payments of `60 lakh a month on the new plant. The next two years, 2009-10, were terrible. I was worse off when I had started. It was a struggle to stay afloat. I managed for a year by selling a real estate asset for 20 crore.

I realised the only way out of this scenario was to get private equity funding. I planned to give away 30 per cent. Around the same

time, the Indian subsidiary of Sapa Group, a Sweden-based alumin-ium solutions giant, came to visit the Kuppam plant. They were very impressed—we had the capacity to produce 1.2 million tonnes annu-ally, and our processes were in place. Sapa wanted to expand in India, and I knew Alufit would be in greater trouble when that hap-pened. So, I suggested we join hands. The next thing I knew the top management was doing evalu-ations, and wanted 51 per cent. I agreed because I wanted to get out and needed the money. Eventually, they upped the stake and bought us out completely. The deal went through in May 2011. We came out positive.

Although it ended well, I’ve learnt a big lesson—never take up anything without a proper study. I wish I knew then how important homework is. But, I was over-confident. It happens to entrepreneurs a lot. When you become successful, you begin to believe you’re always right. Today, I’m better off with this experience. I’m more detail-ori-ented as we expand into new cities, and over the last one year, we’ve got Alufit to 200 crore again. —As told to Shreyasi Singh

not without My homework Pankaj Keswani learnt the hard way that not being prepared is a foolproof plan for business disaster.

6 0 | InC. | aPril/May 2012

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