I came across this beautiful write up on Subroto Baghchi's blog. It talks about start-ups and how things happen or ought to happen. I guess none of my usual visitors can draw much sense out of it yet, but if you were working for a start-up, like I am, then you would be in a better position to appreciate what I have copy-pasted below:
Three people do not build a corporation; they build a 10-people team. That team in turn goes on to build another team of ten. So, spend significant time on the strategic vision with all the senior hires. Pay attention to the on-boarding process - it begins well before the person actually comes on board. Do not wait until the joining date. From the time you have made up your mind on the right person, keep engaged and involved with exchange of ideas, information and advice until he or she actually comes on board. This is obviously within the boundaries of business sense - you do not want to take risks in matters of intellectual property either way - make sure you are not compromising yours nor are you contaminating someone else’s. After all, the person is still not part of your organization and until someone has been “badged in”, there are limits to how far you can go.
Finally, the start-up gets into stage 3 of its orbit. It is no longer a rag-tag army - or a bunch of toddlers. Now the organization has people, customers, multiple branches, systems and processes. Probably the organization is three years old!
It is time now to shed some and gain some. Taking on from Arjun, Mohinish recommends that the original team now must shift from an overwhelmingly inward focus, to an external one.
This is the time to pay attention to building a strong middle-management; it is time to focus on the robustness of operations.
Original teams rely strongly on innovation, finding solutions on the fly, trying out things never tried before and using the inventive capacity all the time.
Now, innovation alone would not do, you must build domain capability as well. Imagine you are a company that started in the wireless area. Now you have to say what you do in wireless for automotive sector, wireless in medical sector or wireless for entertainment application development! The kind of teaming required in the early stage and what you need now to build bodies of expertise are going to be very different.
Going forward, this is also the time that you have to be choosy about the kind of culture you want to take with you. All that worked before, is not going to work going forward.
In the beginning, every one pitches in. That is what built energy, camaraderie and the romantic concept of the garage! Things now must get systematic; people cannot just be doing heroic stuff all the time. People must build respect for groups and not just individuals. Quite often, as the transition happens, the original group feels disenchanted - people miss their childhood, so to speak, and cling on. Childhood days may be beautiful but imagine remaining growth-stunted!
Teams must collectively move on; in the process they must shed some old behavior and adopt new best practices. Arjun Erry was looking at issues related to acquiring key talent that completes the team. In doing so, he underlined the importance of always going the extra mile to hire the “A” players. It is tough selling, but often the most critical first step in giving booster power to the rocket. Why “A” players? “Because”, “A”s hire “A”s, then the “B”s come. What do the “B”s do? They go and hire the “C”s. Before you know you have diluted the genetic pool of the organization and that can well mean the difference between a high performance company and just another start-up.
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