The Leader's Task Is To Find Ways To Move Forward.

“Innovation is hard. It's not always going to be a bed of roses. There'll be thorns. A leader needs to love the thorns as much as the roses. I often tell my teams: "When you have bad news, text me as fast as possible." You must create an organization and a culture where bad news travels upwards, intending to fix and move forward, not to find the culprit."

Anand Chandrasekher ,?Founder and CEO of Aira Technologies , Board Member and Co-Founder of DeepSight Technology , and Board Member at Avalanche Technology, shared his key leadership lessons in my latest "Leading Through Disruption" interview. Subscribe?here ?to receive future interviews.?

Lauterbach:?Could you please walk us through your entrepreneurial journey and tell us what eventually led you to co-found your current enterprises?

Chandrasekher:?I spent two decades working at Intel and Qualcomm and doing what is called intrapreneurship in current business literature. It implied growing businesses from scratch inside these companies.?Centrino from the early 2000s at Intel, was a good example of innovation incubated within a large business. Another was an ARM-based server business at Qualcomm.?

Large businesses can execute strategic shifts, but none of these is without risks. A tremendous commitment from the team and a laser focus on the mission are paramount to success, whether you innovate within incumbents or in a venture-funded environment. But your audiences vary when it comes to receiving support for your innovation.

You must convince your venture backers if you create a startup. You might assume that corporate leadership and the board resume a similar role in a large company. Your peers are sometimes as important as the board or the CEO for the simple reason that in large corporations (particularly in challenging times) new initiatives cannot be run as protected activities, leading to a zero-sum game mentality.

So, you start investing time to educate them about the opportunity. Sometimes, what you preach touches on well-oiled processes, technology standards, and how a company interacts with the broader ecosystem of vendors, prospective partners, and customers. Sometimes, what you tell your colleagues isn't based on the accepted assumptions about the market or the technology standards.

A good example might be power mgmt. functionalities in the cellular modem of a phone. Such a tight integration wasn't in the DNA of experts who spent their work life in the PC- and the computing ecosystem. Switching into the thinking of the "mobile first" technology world couldn't happen overnight. Another example might be IP licensing, which was conducted differently in mobile chipsets vs. server businesses. The speed of closing a contract with a vendor or a prospective customer was very different from one segment to another, and this time gap was a decisive factor in winning a competitive race.

What might appear small to external observers can lead to strategic disconnects within a business, impeding innovation's success. I remember spending 50 if not 60 percent of my time on internal lobbying rather than facing customers, getting their feedback, and addressing novel technology requirements. Changing into a venture-baked environment was highly motivating. There was an excruciating focus from the board down to every single employee. Everybody was clear about what needed to happen.

Lauterbach:?How do you reframe the problem for an incumbent if you want to embark on an innovation journey there??

Chandrasekher:?While reframing, you must focus on the opportunity rather than the problem. Ensuring people’s buy-in isn’t trivial.?

First and foremost, your success depends on a certain degree of self-awareness on the part of the leaders with the power of the pen. Successful leaders might be victims of arrogance if they operated in a business with great margins and growth. Arrogance blocks the need for self-awareness, which, in its own way, might blind anyone to opportunities and alternative ways to think about problems.?

A while ago, I adopted a term to describe a phenomenon happening left and right in large companies. I am describing it as a "the world is flat" mentality. The way out of this trap leads through openness. Listening and actually receiving new information facilitate engagement with current shortcomings and encourage new solutions.

On the other hand, those who communicate new information require sensitivity and receptiveness for signals from those you need to convince. It is like dancing tango – you have two actors, not just one.

Lauterbach: How do ecosystems enable innovation??

Chandrasekher:?Industry standards are essential to facilitate innovation even more than ecosystems. I've seen that on the computing side as well as in telecommunication.?

In the 1980s, computing was vertically integrated. As an example, IBM made its own CPU and operating system. They developed their own applications and even managed the business with the help of their own Salesforce.?

Standards enabled the designing and building of processors, chipsets, and memory technologies. They accelerated innovation, ultimately leading to the disintegration of vertically layered computing systems. A new vibrant ecosystem emerged, where a processor vendor needed to compete with and beat companies such as AMD or Intel. Software companies emerged, building operating systems, applications, and services on top of hardware. In the end, consumers and businesses benefited.?

There is a nascent movement toward an open ecosystem in the telecommunication industry. The likes of Ericsson, Nokia, Samsung, and Huawei provide vertically integrated solutions and dominate 70 to 80 percent of the market. The industry is looking into lessons learned from the computing industry. It is willing to benefit from innovation happening across all the layers of the technology stack.

We are witnessing similar movements in AI right now. A lot of AI today relies on research that was done in the universities and academic arena decades ago. Today, it fuels tons of innovation and can potentially reset productivity curves. Automation and Machine learning are essential to keep GDP growth in an environment with challenging demographics.?

Lauterbach:?Do geopolitics influence how innovation is done today?

Chandrasekher:?I think geopolitics tends to have a dampening effect on innovation. Since World War Two, most humans enjoyed a long period of peace. We built inter-country mechanisms facilitating trade, information flow, and IP rights protection during that era. We established a rules-based structure for trade and inventions. Peace and the rules-based system enabled, to a large degree, the free flow of talent. People were moving from one country to another, getting into regions where a particular person's area of excellence was in high demand. We got interdependent on a global basis.?

When we say now that owning 'x' is essential to national security, we limit innovation from circulating freely. We start a process of decoupling, in some cases, even of isolationism. It's not entirely clear to me where that ends. I only expect it will impact the rate of change and innovation cycles.

Lauterbach:?How do you execute in a challenging innovation environment as a leader?

Chandrasekher:?Innovators and leaders must focus on things that they can control. There is a teaching coming out of Bhagavad Gita, a Hindu text. Focus on the things you can directly affect or control. Things you can't do anything about will take care of themselves. "Just focusing on the things you can influence and doing your best job there" feels incredibly liberating.?

Lauterbach:?How do you build an innovation-focused team?

Chandrasekher: The fundamental element of building such a team is to allow people to speak their truth. Innovation is hard. It's not always going to be a bed of roses. There'll be thorns. A leader needs to love the thorns as much as the roses. I often tell my teams: "When you have bad news, text me as fast as possible." You must create an organization and a culture where bad news travels upwards, intending to fix and move forward, not to find the culprit. When your team falls flat, you must pick them up so they can proceed. It is not about putting on a smiling face every time something challenging happens. Being sad, honest, and credible with your emotions is okay. Owning your humanity and respecting humanity in others matter. But it is still the leader's task to find ways to move forward.

Lauterbach:?Who influenced you the most in your early years of formation as a leader?

Chandrasekher:?I've been very fortunate to work with some great leaders, such as Andy Grove and Craig R. Barrett. They were highly self-confident but incredibly open. They knew what they knew, but more importantly, what they did not know. For the things they did not know, they were willing to let others influence them, asking tough questions but never shutting down those in front of them.?Speaking the truth, regardless of how ugly it might have been, and practicing constructive confrontation was vital.?

There could be many interpretations of what a ‘constructive confrontation’ implies. The fundamental interpretation is that everybody's equal.?

When you're debating an idea, everybody's ideas are valid. You have to beat it to the point where everybody gets comfortable.?

The other thing I learned from Grove was mission focus. Teams that believed in a mission delivered amazing things. A leader must inculcate in the team that the mission is achievable.?

I like using the example of Roger Bannister's four-minute mile to highlight the importance of belief in your mission. Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile in 1954. Until then, experts and physicians felt it was physically impossible for humans. Bannister's record lasted just 46 days. In the upcoming months, several people achieved similar results. It became clear that the four-minute mile wasn't a physical limitation. It had to do with a barrier of imagination. It was a belief issue, and many athletes embarked on a mission to achieve new performance hights.

Being clear about the mission and demystifying beliefs translates into better teams. There is much research about recruiting people with the same background from the same universities and letting them work on similar problems. The outperforming team will always have a clear mission and a leader who inculcates it.

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