Entreprenuership in the times of disruption

Recently I was invited to speak at Entrepreneurship Summit 2022 by Symbiosis Institute of Telecom and Digital Management (SITDM), Pune. The theme of the event was 'Disruptive Dominions'. As an entrepreneur and also someone watching the megatrends unfold in the past two decades, I made a few notes for this session. I could not speak all that I had prepared for, as spontaneity ruled, but sharing here some of the realizations from my journey:

1. Entrepreneurship is about natural leadership, not just about running a business.

It is not just about running your own business. It is a bundle of traits to make things happen. Ability to dream, grit to persist, ROI thinking, critical thinking, people's skill...there is a long cliched list. But all of these also apply to people working within an organization for an employer. I have seen individuals grow 'bigger' in influence than the organizational brand while still being employees. The attitude of entrepreneurship It is an attitude, finally.

2. Persistence is key, but bigger wisdom is to know when to quit or change the track

Not everything works as planned. Humans don't have that superpower yet, irrespective of their acumen or stature. Hard work, 'advanced' technology, good partner, and sufficient liquidity may still not be able to turn things in favor if the market itself is not yet ready (the 'desirability' question!). Try, try, try....try again...and again but then quit and start something else. There is a thin line dividing the land of failure because one didn't try or wait enough and on the other side, one kept waiting in the lane of no return. Business schools don't teach this. Elderly wisdom rarely goes this way. After tasting this firsthand myself, I know that this is difficult-to-get wisdom.

3. Art of delegation vs abnegation

I haven't been able to master the art of hiring the right people after hundreds of interviews I conducted in the past two and half decades. I still go wrong despite a mature hiring process, and I have seen large organizations going wrong on this anyways. However, delegation is one thing I am sure of and proud of. People also call it the 'empowerment' of the team. Every entrepreneur essentially grows into obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) of hyper-responsibility. They see so many missing details in other persons' work or output that they rush to correct or do it themselves. I devised a formula of 60:40 for myself - expecting only a 60% turnaround from the task assigned to someone but being ready to fill up 40% from the contingency plan. Over time, one learns to get better at this and helps retain good people.

Delegation can easily slide into 'abnegation' of responsibility. One can't just sleep off the period when the team delegated with work is working hard. Mentoring, quality check, response augmentation, and supporting them with little morale boost is constantly needed. Abnegation of responsibility, under the garb of delegation, is sure suicidal.

4. Generate your energy within

Entrepreneurship can be severely draining in tough times. Forget generating more business, at times, just the compliances (especially in a country like India) can squeeze out all the initial mojo. Business problems soon get inter-meshed with entrepreneurs' health and emotional state. There are often no benchmarks and no mentors available to make some tough decisions. There are times when an entrepreneur feels all alone.

Early on, the entrepreneur needs to find the secret fountain of 'assured' energy - family, one or two special friends, meditation, etc. Something or someone that one can always return to without any quid-pro-quo. Everyone still standing after a long fight has a secret source of support.

5. Pattern sensing engine on a hyperdrive

Survival of the fittest points to the one that senses the patterns early and adjusts quickly. Humans are born as pattern-sensing machines. Over the period, 'education' dulls are sensibilities. An entrepreneur has to retrain himself/herself to keep that ability alive and boost it to a level better than others. Every situation change around us, be it about competition, new hires, customers, etc. is a signal. Passing these signals off as just an odd happening runs a risk of missing the bus or even getting decimated. While running a design company, getting some early assignments of 'research' appeared to my colleagues like an odd event driven by my passion. But that proved to be an early signal and foundation of Turian Labs that I could read right and build on it.

And yes, importantly, advice and formulae from the history or past data, don't work in the times of disruption. Experience teaches you very little :). So what works is rapid sensing and rapid iterative experimentation that 'Design Thinking' teaches us. Keep an eye on small behavioral shifts that surround us apart from tectonic ones in technology, economy and policies.

Happy entrepreneurship!

p.s. Thank you SITDM for this opportunity.

#designthinking #entrepreneurship #Turianlabs