When I had trouble, I solved it in three ways.
Focus on Customers
Serve your employees
Learn from the competitors
1. Focus on Customers
Today every body is talking about
Investors number one, and I hate that. I think it’s always customer
number one.It’s the clients who give you money, It’s the customer that
gives to innovation, It’s the customer that makes you happy.When I face
trouble my clients and friends were there to tell, Hey “Mayank keep
going, You are doing great thing, You can’t die like this “When you
think about the investor, you only think about revenues, more
transaction, and you only think how you can get next level of
investment.
It’s hard to make your investor as your customer, and
I hardly found that. I don’t believe Sachin / Kohli drove that bike or
car, and I don’t think Mr. Amitabh Bachhan Sir use navaratan
oil.Customer goes up with you, He gives you money, he gives you hope, he
gives you support.
2. Serve your employees
It’s your employee, Your team that
makes the difference. It’s your team that makes the dream happen. If you
listen to your employees’ innovation, happen, You get the ideas, love
to solve their problems, to solve their family problems. They feel it’s
not your company; It’s their business. They feel happy with you, and
They feel glad to work with you. When you believe your people everybody
start performing extra ordinary, they love their job.
Try to find right people, not the best people.
Why we are successful
We don’t have an MBA, IITs or any high experience people.
We are not smart enough, and I could not crack IIT.
We are not hard working; Rickshaw wala do more hard work than us.
We are successful because we have the dream, We have a dream to do
something great. We have hope that we can achieve anything that we want
to do. All the people that we hire from All big brands are gone because
they can only be Team leaders, they can only drive process; They can’t
drive passion.
When you are small, Don’t hire talent, Hire people. Because he is not here for the job. He is here for a dream to share.
3. Learn from the competitors
Love
competitors, Learn from competitors. If you don’t have competitors, you
can never grow that fast. Respect your competitors, learn as much as you
can. Competitors are the best laboratory for you, Don’t copy from them;
learn from them.I love my competitors, every time, and I look at them; I
admire. Competitors are not meant for fighting, find the examples, the
models, why they are successful.Most interesting part of the business is
competition. When your competitors are using the money to compete, they
start loosing.Business is about the wisdom, Business is about hope,
Business is about courage.Last and important things, never , ever, ever
keep your dream die; If you don’t know how to survive. Ping me, Call me,
and I can’t invest in your company, But I can tell the ways how you can
push yourself to feed your mind and body.
https://www.engineerbabu.com/2016/04/when-i-have-trouble-i-solved-it-in-three-ways/
Friday, April 15, 2016
Hiring Smart Failures : Why It Just Works!
If you are in the business of finding and hiring talent, specially for a
position that might prove critical in starting a new product, team or business
initiative full of challenges and unknowns, I am sure you'll have something to
think about by the time you reach the end of this short post.
Today we'll talk about a very unique set of people whose achievements are generally undervalued and not openly talked about, at least in some societies and cultures; those people who failed spectacularly at some point of time in their lives trying to make a dent in this universe. The unsuccessful Entrepreneurs who are yet to achieve that greatness so that their failures could be glorified to become inspiring stories in newspaper interviews and Facebook/LinkedIn shared posts. The Jack Mas and J.K.Rowlings who are still in their struggling years and don't know what the future has in store for them. Some of them might never become that successful ever but it doesn't matter in the context we are talking today. Today we are talking about failure, how important it is in life and how we as a society are apprehensive of the value it brings to the table.
So, what has failure to do with important hiring decisions. Well, a lot. I wonder how many CEOs building a new team, HRs and recruiters hiring for a critical position look forward to reading a paragraph starting with "I Failed to..." in a resume and then say "Wow! That's impressive. Let's schedule a meeting with her". Now you'll wonder, how many candidates applying for the job would like to mention the same. Almost none. So here is the proof of the society we live in and the taboos it nurtures. We are too embarrassed to talk about it, forget about celebrating it.
The amount of learning an entrepreneur gets exposed to, be it about the product development, the market dynamics, the customer's expectations, the fundraising game, operational hiccups, bootstrap hiring and money management, in just 2-3 years of struggle is unimaginable. That's the average life span of a failed attempt at running a new business. There are few who give up too soon and a few who keep struggling for too long but lets consider the bell curve and stick to the majority. These 2-3 years of trying, failing, fixing, getting almost at the verge of a breakthrough, finding no luck (again) and eventually running out of oxygen, gives so much of valuable experience that it dwarfs the 10 years of sitting behind the desk experience, delegating tasks in a set, organized, hierarchical corporate setup. No, I am not saying that those who haven't been an entrepreneur before are not knowledgeable or are of any less value but they hardly get to learn those aspects of a business that starting up at something new does; from the bigger holistic picture of the business all the way to the critical microscopic details of the product, things that are easy to miss when you have a set "Role" and defined "Responsibilities".
So if you as an HR, a recruiter who has gotten used to the kind of resumes you come across everyday and even expect them that way, then think again. If your company asks one of your "Technology Lead" or "Business Manager" to interview an ex-entrepreneur and he starts the interview with a question like "Ok, Can you please tell something about yourself?" then take a step back and question, 'Is this interviewer really qualified to ask the right kind of questions to this candidate? Will the interview outcome really help make a right hiring decision?'. I personally believe a CEO will always be the right person to interview another entrepreneur. Yes, CEOs are very busy people but then I am assuming this role that you are hiring for and the "Perfect" team you envision to build is also that critical and important. If not the CEO then someone who had come as close as possible to starting up a new business/product from scratch in a chaotic, unpredictable market with almost shoe string budget. If she herself had experienced a failure at least once in her life then she qualifies to be the right interviewer even more.
If you ask an entrepreneur what all he has worked on in these 2-3 years, he'll not know where to start. The ground reality of facing challenges, getting the door slammed on the face truth, the client who ditched at the last minute truth, being in the market too early truth, the never say NO investor tactics truth, the scaling too fast too soon truth, the BIG fish taking over market truth, it's unending series of learning experiences.
I believe, a team and an organization should have a lot of people with insanely successful history because they did something right at some point of time in their lives. But at the same time there should be a good mix of people who also know 100 things that you should not do because that leads to a dead end. They learned that the hard way.That's the value they bring to the table.
To embrace a culture that is highly innovative, an ecosystem that values risk and respects failure, the HR and recruitment community might need to unlearn a lot, start fresh, challenge the old, reserved thinking of what risk and failure is. Once that happens, everyone will realize why at times, the best problem solver in the room might not be that talkative, full of ideas guy who recently had a glorious success but that quiet, observing, last to speak person who has tackled failures up close.
Note: Original Post appeared on linkedin.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-smart-failures-why-just-works-vikas-singh
Today we'll talk about a very unique set of people whose achievements are generally undervalued and not openly talked about, at least in some societies and cultures; those people who failed spectacularly at some point of time in their lives trying to make a dent in this universe. The unsuccessful Entrepreneurs who are yet to achieve that greatness so that their failures could be glorified to become inspiring stories in newspaper interviews and Facebook/LinkedIn shared posts. The Jack Mas and J.K.Rowlings who are still in their struggling years and don't know what the future has in store for them. Some of them might never become that successful ever but it doesn't matter in the context we are talking today. Today we are talking about failure, how important it is in life and how we as a society are apprehensive of the value it brings to the table.
So, what has failure to do with important hiring decisions. Well, a lot. I wonder how many CEOs building a new team, HRs and recruiters hiring for a critical position look forward to reading a paragraph starting with "I Failed to..." in a resume and then say "Wow! That's impressive. Let's schedule a meeting with her". Now you'll wonder, how many candidates applying for the job would like to mention the same. Almost none. So here is the proof of the society we live in and the taboos it nurtures. We are too embarrassed to talk about it, forget about celebrating it.
The amount of learning an entrepreneur gets exposed to, be it about the product development, the market dynamics, the customer's expectations, the fundraising game, operational hiccups, bootstrap hiring and money management, in just 2-3 years of struggle is unimaginable. That's the average life span of a failed attempt at running a new business. There are few who give up too soon and a few who keep struggling for too long but lets consider the bell curve and stick to the majority. These 2-3 years of trying, failing, fixing, getting almost at the verge of a breakthrough, finding no luck (again) and eventually running out of oxygen, gives so much of valuable experience that it dwarfs the 10 years of sitting behind the desk experience, delegating tasks in a set, organized, hierarchical corporate setup. No, I am not saying that those who haven't been an entrepreneur before are not knowledgeable or are of any less value but they hardly get to learn those aspects of a business that starting up at something new does; from the bigger holistic picture of the business all the way to the critical microscopic details of the product, things that are easy to miss when you have a set "Role" and defined "Responsibilities".
So if you as an HR, a recruiter who has gotten used to the kind of resumes you come across everyday and even expect them that way, then think again. If your company asks one of your "Technology Lead" or "Business Manager" to interview an ex-entrepreneur and he starts the interview with a question like "Ok, Can you please tell something about yourself?" then take a step back and question, 'Is this interviewer really qualified to ask the right kind of questions to this candidate? Will the interview outcome really help make a right hiring decision?'. I personally believe a CEO will always be the right person to interview another entrepreneur. Yes, CEOs are very busy people but then I am assuming this role that you are hiring for and the "Perfect" team you envision to build is also that critical and important. If not the CEO then someone who had come as close as possible to starting up a new business/product from scratch in a chaotic, unpredictable market with almost shoe string budget. If she herself had experienced a failure at least once in her life then she qualifies to be the right interviewer even more.
If you ask an entrepreneur what all he has worked on in these 2-3 years, he'll not know where to start. The ground reality of facing challenges, getting the door slammed on the face truth, the client who ditched at the last minute truth, being in the market too early truth, the never say NO investor tactics truth, the scaling too fast too soon truth, the BIG fish taking over market truth, it's unending series of learning experiences.
I believe, a team and an organization should have a lot of people with insanely successful history because they did something right at some point of time in their lives. But at the same time there should be a good mix of people who also know 100 things that you should not do because that leads to a dead end. They learned that the hard way.That's the value they bring to the table.
To embrace a culture that is highly innovative, an ecosystem that values risk and respects failure, the HR and recruitment community might need to unlearn a lot, start fresh, challenge the old, reserved thinking of what risk and failure is. Once that happens, everyone will realize why at times, the best problem solver in the room might not be that talkative, full of ideas guy who recently had a glorious success but that quiet, observing, last to speak person who has tackled failures up close.
Note: Original Post appeared on linkedin.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hiring-smart-failures-why-just-works-vikas-singh
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