How can you instill an owner's mindset?

The year was 1995.

After a month of working in the regional sales headquarters in Lucknow, I arrived at the company’s sales office in Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India.

It was a small office. There were two of us in sales, my boss and I, and a few support engineers ably supported by an office admin.

The sales manager had a small office with an air-conditioner. The rest of us survived on rickety ceiling fans. It was an open seating arrangement, with no cubicles.

A PC-AT and a dot matrix printer were the only sophisticated equipment in the office.

The office expense was closely monitored, from utility bills to tea from the roadside hawker.

The office setup was frugal.

Trophy for frugality

As an outpost, we shared correspondence with regional & corporate headquarters.

Our admin came up with the idea of using the inter-departmental envelopes to courier documents to the Regional headquarters in Lucknow.

She will send documents to Lucknow. Her counterpart on the other side will re-use the envelope to send correspondence to us.

This would continue until the envelope ran out of all empty address blocks.

Usually, it took 15–20 trips for the envelope to shout — Give me a break!

Some envelopes miraculously survived the wear and tear, their journey used to start again by pasting empty address blocks.

In 1995, the cost of a single envelope was less than INR 2.0.

An owner's mindset

As a rookie, I was proud that I worked in a company that took responsibility for customers’ hard-earned money.

This was reflected in our interaction with prospects and customers.

We just believed that it was our company without being a shareholder.

You don't need a memo to manage expenses. You need pride!

Not all innovation is about automation & technology.

Trust your employees to do the right thing.

HCL was one of the original start-ups in India. It clocked a revenue of over $12 B in 2023.