Selecting various vendors

Selecting various vendors

After setting-up the vision for the center and hiring guidelines, we turned our attention to actually set-up the entity. You'd need a handful of vendors/consultants to set-up and maintain the operation. Here is the list:

0. Bankers
1. Consultants to take care of legal formalities, including STPI registration
2. Real estate agent to get an office space
3. IT consultants to plan the IT infrastructure
4. Vendors that could supply hardware and software
5. Security agency
6. House keeping and pantry service providers
7. Payroll service provider
8. Internet and telephony service providers
9. Group mediclaim service providers
10. Someone that can provide various office equipments like refrigerator, TV etc.,
11. HR consultants for special hiring
12. Someone that could print our letter heads, business cards, signage etc.,
13. Floral decorators
14. General insurers for office equipments, PCs etc.,
15. Someone that can take care of AMCs for our UPS, A/c etc.,
16. Travel agent (air tickets, hotel booking, cab etc.,)
17. PR consultant
18. Courier service provider
19. Clearing and Forwarding agent
20. Temp staff providers
21. Caterers

Some of the choices were straightforward. We are working globally with a few who have their local offices (a choice that was a big regret later on due to poor service, yes from some multinationals). We knew a few folks directly for years, like our IT Consultants Tathsthu Technologies, who were our ex-colleagues and whose services we had used in our former companies. For the remaining 15-17 vendors, on an average we decided to get atleast 2-3 quotes. It means we were dealing suddenly with over 35-45 vendors, who had confusing quotes (no matter what is your requirement, they will offer some standard they are used to).

The problem of dealing with so many vendors got compounded by the fact that we didn't even had an office space. For over a month, we worked out of my childhood friend's office, who kindly let us use a part of his office and infrastructure. We had, on an average 2-3 meetings with most vendors - first meeting where we explained our requirement, second one where they came and explained their quotes, and subsequent ones mostly for clarifications and negotiations. So, we had over 100 meetings in a month.

I must confess that its not been a great experience dealing with vendors. Except for a small percentage of them, most won't appear to be keen to do any business, even during recession hit times. For example, we were talking simultanesouly to Airtel, Tata, Reliance and Spectranet for internet. One of these was providing voice and data to the building we would eventually rent. This operator had nothing to loose as all the infrastructure was in place, but refused even to come down for a chat on their quote. "Its a standard one, take it or leave it" was the reply. Most are not punctual. They won't understand the needs or more importantly care to understand the needs. Its so very surprising that when these companies spend so much monies on ads, irritating telemarketing etc., etc., don't care when we ourselves approach them for business.

We are now settled and almost everything is in place. It was fun when we started, but it got frustrating as things took lot longer to close and lots of energy was spent in getting the office up and running. I'm glad its over and that we have been focussing on our core engineering activities.

Wharton's Top 30 innovations in the last 30 years

Knowledge@wharton recently published their list of Top 30 innovations, that have changed the life dramatically in the last 30 years.

The list is as follows, in order of importance:

1. Internet, broadband, WWW (browser and html)
2. PC/laptop computers
3. Mobile phones
4. E-mail
5. DNA testing and sequencing/Human genome mapping
6. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
7. Microprocessors
8. Fiber optics
9. Office software (spreadsheets, word processors)
10. Non-invasive laser/robotic surgery (laparoscopy)
11. Open source software and services (e.g., Linux, Wikipedia)
12. Light emitting diodes
13. Liquid crystal display (LCD)
14. GPS systems
15. Online shopping/ecommerce/auctions (e.g., eBay)
16. Media file compression (jpeg, mpeg, mp3)
17. Microfinance
18. Photovoltaic Solar Energy
19. Large scale wind turbines
20. Social networking via the Internet
21. Graphic user interface (GUI)
22. Digital photography/videography
23. RFID and applications (e.g., EZ Pass)
24. Genetically modified plants
25. Bio fuels
26. Bar codes and scanners
27. ATMs
28. Stents
29. SRAM flash memory
30. Anti retroviral treatment for AIDS

The elite panel of judges defined innovation as more than simply a new invention. "It's something new that creates new opportunities for growth and development". Another qualification the judges used to highlight the most sophisticated, powerful innovations was the problem-solving value.

Guidelines for hiring

Once the top level vision was in shape, the focus shifted to actually hire people.

We are fortunate enough to have access to a large talent pool that we could dip into, to get some of the best people around. However, we wanted to put it in writing as to what would be our guiding principle in selecting the people that could come and help us realize the vision. We spoke about these with all the candidates, ensured that they understood and answered any questions they might have had, even before getting into the technical discussions. I'm happy to share these:

1. We wanted to hire people smarter than us.
Philosophy: Only A players would hire A+ players. B players would hire C players and C would hire D players. We were hiring only about 20enggs and our task was made that much simpler because of smaller numbers.

2. Loyalty to the vision:
Philosophy: We wanted people to join us for what they can contribute, to work on something cool and attempt to change-the-world and have fun. We were wary of people that focused little too much on what they can extract out of the company. Its not that we do not like money. We do like and want tons of it, but we are happy talking to people that are excited about the vision and can tell us how they can be part of the journey.

3. Growth is about learning and contributing:
Philosophy: A leader is the one who can influence and it has got nothing to do with official title or #yrs or whatever. We want all of us to be leaders. Since we are small and a niche product company we won't grow fast. Growth only means that you have become better in your role, that you are lot more effective, that you know more, that you are now contributing more to the organization this week/month/year compared to last week/month/year.

Most of us took the same titles that we had in our previous organizations. We did not succumb to the easy route of giving fancy titles, just because we could.

4. Need people who can push their seniors
Philosophy: The juniors should be pushing their seniors to operate at a higher level all the time. One of the question we ask ourselves, even while hiring a fresher is that "can this person reach the level of his immediate senior in say next one year?". If this happens, the senior has no option but to push his senior to higher level and so on. Personally, I'd be looking for a bigger challenge about 1-1.5year from now and would like to hand over my current responsibilities to my deputy.

5. No traditional managers
Philosophy: We believe growth comes from leaders who create change and engage their organizations, instead from managers who push their people to do more for less. Initiative become key. We want passion and ideas to lead people and not bureaucracy and threats (My favourite mantra is "lead and inspire" than the boring and irritating "manage and drive"). I always keep asking the question why should someone be led by me? And we believe there is no need for leaders without followers.

Even with 20+ people we do not have a designated manager, people step-up when needed, to do managerial tasks and focus most of their time on technical things.

6. Need people that are positive, optimistic and energetic:
Philosophy: We hire for attitude. We believe products and associated deliverables are by-products of people having fun. Fun doesn't necessarily mean partying and dancing. Solving a complex problem is fun. Working with cross functional teams and making the customer happy is fun. Learning new things regularly is fun. Supporting colleagues is fun. Having diverse interests and hobbies and willingness to share knowledge is fun. We spent lot of time talking to people about what they do on weekends for its a pointer as to how they approach their life.

We are yet to work out our HR policies on several things, including titles and career paths. Infact we do not have an HR person and do not plan to have one in the near future. So we did all the talking during interviews. Once the technical competency was demonstrated and we had a reasonable idea that this person could fit-in, we used to explain the above 5-6 "ways of working" and used to see whether they "resonated" with the person. We used to do this, before getting into salary discussions. We did loose some people because they thought we are crazy and/or its all HR gibberish to give lesser salary. All the best to them, our salaries are comparable to the best in the industry. We could see the excitement in the people and some of them started-off by telling that salary is not the criteria. Not bad that we hired top talent mostly from MNCs. There is a huge responsibility on me though to live upto the vision that we have set for ourselves.

SoL South Foundation: A not-for-profit community

I have been heavily influenced by Peter Senge's work and especially his celebrated book The Fifth Discipline. I've tried to practice the disciplines and have undertaken "personal vision" exercise twice (in 2002 and in 2007) which has greatly improved both my personal and professional life.

Last year, Raja Chidambaram, a friend, mentor and a leadership consultant called and invited me to join the governing board along with him and several other highly distinguished folks, to start a not-for-profit community under the aegis of SoL (Society for Organizational Learning). I was naturally thrilled and excited to see how we can bring SoL's concepts for the benefit of people in India.

SoL, is an intentional learning community composed of organizations, individuals, and local SoL communities around the world. A not-for-profit, member-governed corporation, SoL is devoted to the interdependent development of people and their institutions in service of inspired performance and meaningful results. SoL serves as a space in which individuals and institutions can create together that which they cannot create alone. The purpose is to discover (research), integrate (capacity development) and implement (practice) theories and practices of organizational learning for the interdependent development of people and their institutions and communities such that we continue to increase our capacity to collectively realize our highest aspirations and productively resolve our differences.

The governing board of SoL South Foundation is a very diverse set that includes an innovation consultant, two leadership consultants, CEO of a mid-sized IT/ITeS organization, someone who is running an NGO for ages now, a healer and wellness advisor, two IT professionals that include me, two HR professionals and a sculpter. We have been meeting every quarter in Chennai and Bangalore for the last 9 months to chalk out the vision and the action plan. One such meeting was with Jeff Clanon, Director of SoL, who introduced us to the various activities of SoL and helped us formulate a vision and an operating plan. We also registered SoL South Foundation with the Registrar of Societies and approval from SoL. We want to kick-start our activities publicly by offering SoL's flagship two day program Foundations for Leadership.

• Apart from offering the standard SoL courses, the broader vision for SoL South Foundation include:
• To discover, integrate and implement theories and practices for theinterdependent development of people and their institutions.
  
• To unearth the systems and practices, models and methods that were helping sustenance of culture, knowledge maintenance, and holistic systems and practices for the growth of individuals, institutions and organizations.
• To discover the systems, the basis and practices that are integrative in nature amongst body mind and soul of individuals, institutions and organizations
• To evolve a healthy and effective method of dialogue process which can be effectively used in different areas like political, communities, institutions, diverse cultures, conflicting situations, differential socio economic stratum of society, multi-linguistic groups, etc so as to promote collaborative communities, and institutions which can accommodate co-existence with difference through research, studies relating to different fields, conducting field works, examining suitable dialogue stage, etc and developing capabilities of people, systems, processes and skills in such areas as may be needed.
  
• To help build schools and other learning institutions the principles and practices of quantum and continued learning models and methods and systems
• To research and document alternative learning methods, systems, and models in health promoting areas both physical and psychological in nature in India and other neighbouring countries that holistic, systemic and complete and dessiminate the knowledge through different formats like publishing, lectures, and hands on training in curative and disease preventive areas for people and institutions.

The vision may sound grandiose, but simply put the aim is to apply the principles of learning organizations for the betterment of individuals, organizations, communities and schools. The governing board is excited about the vision and is determined to make a difference. Some of the board members have put in lot of time, money and efforts to get the community started. I plan to contribute through some research work this year.

Reading List for Feb'09

Messiah's Handbook: Reminders for the Advanced Soul - Richard Bach
I'm a big fan of Richard Bach (who could forget Jonathan Livingston Seagull). I had read his other master piece Illusions. In this book the reluctant messiah Donald Shimoda used to carry with him a handbook titled Messiah's handbook ("whatever you need to know is there") and this book is now made available. I love Richard Bach's books as the essential message is one of the free spirit, asking us to follow our dreams without compromise or apology. This book is no exception.



The 4-hour work week: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere and join the New Rich - Timothy Ferris
Who wouldn't want a 4-hour work week. I heard quite a bit of buzz on this book and also happened to listen to Timothy's interview with Leo of ZenHabits. When I glanced this book I felt that a few things were not doable, atleast by me and also saw a few useful things. Even if it helps to save 4 hours a week, I'd be glad.





The Black Swan: The Impact of Highly Improbable - Nicholas Taleb
I came to know about it when Tom Peters posted, perhaps his shortest blog post that read "Read It, Damn It". TP rates this book very highly and keep refering to the same every now and then. So, I thought I better read this. Nassim argues that most of the really big events in our world are rare and unpredictable, and thus trying to extract generalizable stories to explain them may be emotionally satisfying, but it's practically useless. A short summary on the book by my friend Vinay Dabholkar here and his analysis of Apollo explosion with Black Swan theory here.


Small Giants: Companies that Chose to be Great instead of Big - Bo Burlingham
This book too is a must read per Tom Peters and praised regularly in his blog. It makes more sense now to read this, as I've joined a start-up and hope to do something remarkable.

Jan'09 - Best of the blog posts

I regularly read several business blogs. Thought of sharing the posts that I thought was good, thought provoking and actionable. Plan to post this entry end of every month. Here is the one for Jan'09, in this series:

Tom Peters reminds us to commit to lifelong learning as a core value, in his series of posts titled "100 ways to succeed" (In case you have not read TP's post in this series you can get the same here - Part1 and Part2)

ChangeThis presents a new manifesto Leading with Agility by Kevin Cashman. Learning Agility is Change Mastery--the ability to learn, adapt, and apply ourselves in constantly changing conditions.

Learning Agility, which has four dimensions--Mental Agility, People Agility, Results Agility and Change Agility--is a key to unlocking our change proficiency. Learning Agility is a complex set of skills that allows us to learn something in one situation and apply it in a completely different situation.

Zen Habits is one of the Top 100 blogs on the Internet, and covers: achieving goals, productivity, being organized, GTD, motivation, eliminating debt, saving, getting a flat stomach, eating healthy, simplifying, living frugal, parenting, happiness, and successfully implementing good habits.. Here is a list of their top posts - The Essential Zen Habits 2008.

Seth Godin asks the question what are you good at?. He asks us to distinguish between process and content. He says content is domain knowledge and easily learnable. Process on the other hand refers to the emotional intelligence skills that you have, which is hard to learn.

As the world changes ever faster, as industries shrink and others grow, process ability is priceless. Figure out which sort of process you're world-class at and get even better at it. Then, learn the domain... that's what the internet is for.

Seth also offers five pillars of success.

Folks at Psychology Today explain how to change your personality.

Your inner mettle may not be easily altered, but with the right tool kit, some aspects of personality may be works in progress.

Finally, Steve Yastrow writing in Tom Peters blog urges us not to think current economic crisis as a recession. Instead, think of it as a recalibration, so that you don't you are not tempted to "hunker down" and wait for the economy to cycle back.

If you think of it as a recalibration, you will be motivated to focus on what you have to do differently, since everything is different now.

The way your business generates results is different, now.

Your customers think differently, now.

Your customers care about different things, now.

Your customers act differently, now.

Your customers may actually be different people, now.

Customers aren't disposable anymore; more than ever, you have to create sustainable customer relationships.

Everything is different now.

Thank you very much,


RamP!