The Surprising Secret of Business Resilience 08-28

Executives dream of insulating their companies from all risks, both natural and manmade, making their company’s revenues impervious to the vicissitudes of a capricious world. This is also the implicit goal of most business strategies, achieved through the use of resource control through vertical integration, supplier dominance through buying power, persuasive political influence through lobbying and campaign finance, and of course, good ol’ market monopolies, among other things. The idea is that by gaining control of your destiny, you foster complete commercial independence.
This dream is popular, but it is, of course, a fallacy. The surprising secret is that dependence, not independence, is the way to protect the organization against risks.

The concept of resilience offers a window into the fallacy. Like the term “sustainability,” resilience has become a standard at global confabs and — as with sustainability — it is a term that means different things to different people. Experts often talk in terms of personal “psychological resilience,” referring to the ability of individuals to bounce back after being hit with disappointments, shocks, or traumatic events. This is an important perspective, and corporate wellbeing specialists have begun developing resilience practices for workers.

But a less-understood perspective is “business resilience,” that is, how to ensure your company can continue creating value in the face of disasters, both natural and manmade.

A good place to learn about business resilience is Indonesia, and a good guide is Karin Reiter, Group Corporate Responsibility Manager at Zurich Insurance Group. I met Karin at the Aspen Institute’s First Mover Summit, and she offered a compelling example.

“Indonesia is often referred to as supermarket for natural disasters,” explains Reiter, “particularly for flooding.” As an insurer, Zurich had exposure to many companies in Indonesia. One customer in particular experienced a severe flooding event and was heavily damaged. In order to reduce future losses, Zurich risk engineers were called in to recommend how to make the factory more resilient to future shocks. Protective improvements such as moving stocks off of the ground floor and building berms to divert floodwaters were made, which would substantially insulate the factory during the next flooding event.

Not surprisingly, Indonesia experienced another flood not too much later. This time, however, the factory was protected thanks to the improvements. “So you would expect that the next day the company would be up and running again at full speed,” says Reiter.

It wasn’t. Instead it stayed shuttered, just like after the last storm.

But if the company had successfully insulated their facility from a natural disaster risk — an executive’s dream — why were they unable to operate? The reason lies in the secret of business resilience. Resilience is not a condition of any single factory. It is a systems condition. It is a community condition. It is a condition of interdependence, not independence.

As Reiter explains, “The challenge was that roads were destroyed and employees couldn’t go to work. And they needed to look after saving their own lives, saving their families’ lives. They were really trying to save all their assets within their community.” An insulated fortress factory in the middle of a devastated community turned out to be worthless. The resilience of the company’s operations was dependent on the resilience of the community in which they operated.
“Look deep into nature,” said Albert Einstein, “and then you will understand everything better.” The secret of resilience can be found in nature. Individual species do not exist in isolation but are part of interdependent ecological webs. Food webs, trophic pyramids, symbiotic mutualisms — all of these relationships are vital to the health and resilience of biological communities. It is the dynamic flow and exchange — as when trees transpire the oxygen needed by animals and the animals respire the carbon dioxide needed by the trees — that makes the biosphere both possible and resilient. The same is true for business.

And, as in nature, the business relationship requires mutuality. Just as the factory was dependent on the resilience of the community, so was the community dependent on the factory. As Reiter explains, a factory closure “has a huge impact on the communities, because if the employees can’t work, they are no longer able to generate income. If they don’t have an income, they can’t invest in their communities, they can’t pay taxes, they don’t have any savings for their children to be sent to school. If flooding happens frequently, then there’s a cycle of poverty that just continues.” And, of course, as the cycle persists, the disruptions for factories and their supply chains persist.

Most business leaders would prefer to isolate themselves from worrying about these dependencies. But gone are the days of Ford when a company could vertically integrate and control everything from iron mines to Model-T dealerships. The alternative is to recognize that independence is a chimera and embrace our interdependencies.

Reproduced from MIT Sloan Management Review

How to Beat Procrastination 08-24

Procrastination comes in many disguises. We might resolve to tackle a task, but find endless reasons to defer it. We might prioritize things we can readily tick off our to-do list—answering emails, say—while leaving the big, complex stuff untouched for another day. We can look and feel busy, while artfully avoiding the tasks that really matter. And when we look at those rolling, long-untouched items at the bottom of our to-do list, we can’t help but feel a little disappointed in ourselves.

The problem is our brains are programmed to procrastinate. In general, we all tend to struggle with tasks that promise future upside in return for efforts we take now. That’s because it’s easier for our brains to process concrete rather than abstract things, and the immediate hassle is very tangible compared with those unknowable, uncertain future benefits. So the short-term effort easily dominates the long-term upside in our minds—an example of something that behavioral scientists call present bias.

How can you become less myopic about your elusive tasks? It’s all about rebalancing the cost-benefit analysis: make the benefits of action feel bigger, and the costs of action feel smaller. The reward for doing a pestering task needs to feel larger than the immediate pain of tackling it.

To make the benefits of action feel bigger and more real:

Visualize how great it will be to get it done. Researchers have discovered that people are more likely to save for their future retirement if they’re shown digitally aged photographs of themselves. Why? Because it makes their future self feel more real—making the future benefits of saving also feel more weighty. When we apply a lo-fi version of this technique to any task we’ve been avoiding, by taking a moment to paint ourselves a vivid mental picture of the benefits of getting it done, it can sometimes be just enough to get us unstuck. So if there’s a call you’re avoiding or an email you’re putting off, give your brain a helping hand by imagining the virtuous sense of satisfaction you’ll have once it’s done—and perhaps also the look of relief on someone’s face as they get from you what they needed.

Pre-commit, publicly. Telling people that we’re going to get something done can powerfully amplify the appeal of actually taking action, because our brain’s reward system is so highly responsive to our social standing. Research has found that it matters greatly to us whether we’re respected by others—even by strangers. Most of us don’t want to look foolish or lazy to other people. So by daring to say “I’ll send you the report by the end of the day” we add social benefits to following through on our promise—which can be just enough to nudge us to bite the bullet.

Confront the downside of inaction. Research has found that we’re strangely averse to properly evaluating the status quo. While we might weigh the pros and cons of doing something new, we far less often consider the pros and cons of not doing that thing. Known as omission bias, this often leads us to ignore some obvious benefits of getting stuff done. Suppose you’re repeatedly putting off the preparation you need to do for an upcoming meeting. You’re tempted by more exciting tasks, so you tell yourself you can do it tomorrow (or the day after). But force yourself to think about the downside of putting it off, and you realize that tomorrow will be too late to get hold of the input you really need from colleagues. If you get moving now, you have half a chance of reaching them in time—so finally, your gears creak into action.

To make the costs of action feel smaller:

Identify the first step. Sometimes we’re just daunted by the task we’re avoiding. We might have “learn French” on our to-do list, but who can slot that into the average afternoon? The trick here is to break down big, amorphous tasks into baby steps that don’t feel as effortful. Even better: identify the very smallest first step, something that’s so easy that even your present-biased brain can see that the benefits outweigh the costs of effort. So instead of “learn French” you might decide to “email Nicole to ask advice on learning French.” Achieve that small goal, and you’ll feel more motivated to take the next small step than if you’d continued to beat yourself up about your lack of language skills.

Tie the first step to a treat. We can make the cost of effort feel even smaller if we link that small step to something we’re actually looking forward to doing. In other words, tie the task that we’re avoiding to something that we’re not avoiding. For example, you might allow yourself to read lowbrow magazines or books when you’re at the gym, because the guilty pleasure helps dilute your brain’s perception of the short-term “cost” of exercising. Likewise, you might muster the self-discipline to complete a slippery task if you promise yourself you’ll do it in a nice café with a favorite drink in hand.

Remove the hidden blockage. Sometimes we find ourselves returning to a task repeatedly, still unwilling to take the first step. We hear a little voice in our head saying, “Yeah, good idea, but . . . no.” At this point, we need to ask that voice some questions, to figure out what’s really making it unappealing to take action. This doesn’t necessarily require psychotherapy. Patiently ask yourself a few “why” questions—“why does it feel tough to do this?” and “why’s that?”—and the blockage can surface quite quickly. Often, the issue is that a perfectly noble competing commitment is undermining your motivation. For example, suppose you were finding it hard to stick to an early morning goal-setting routine. A few “whys” might highlight that the challenge stems from your equally strong desire to eat breakfast with your family. Once you’ve made that conflict more explicit, it’s far more likely you’ll find a way to overcome it—perhaps by setting your daily goals the night before, or on your commute into work.

So the next time you find yourself mystified by your inability to get important tasks done, be kind to yourself. Recognize that your brain needs help if it’s going to be less short-sighted. Try taking at least one step to make the benefits of action loom larger, and one to make the costs of action feel smaller. Your languishing to-do list will thank you. 

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How to Create an Exponential Mindset 08-24

How to Create an Exponential Mindset.

A three dimensional image depicting exponential thinking.  Image credit : Shyam's  Imagination Library

 

Digital business models are a bit of a misnomer. It’s not digital technology that defines them; it’s their ability to create exponential value. The music and video industries, for example, weren’t redefined by converting analog to digital formats. Just ask Sony about Minidisc players and Netflix about their DVD business.

To create exponential value, it’s imperative to first create an exponential mindset. The incremental mindset focuses on making something better, while the exponential mindset is makes something different. Incremental is satisfied with 10%. Exponential is out for 10X.

In the last century, industrial business models were defined by their use of machines to create increasing returns to scale. Digital business models use network effects to create what Ray Kurzweil describes as accelerating returns to scale. The key difference is that industrial models are linear while digital models are exponential, as shown in the chart below.

While others have written about how to design exponential strategies and organizations, I want to focus here on how to create an exponential mindset. My work with clients suggests that the incremental mindset is more deeply embedded than we might think. Unless you are conscious and diligent, you can end up with a strategy that looks digital (i.e. uses digital technology) but doesn’t actually operate digitally (i.e. achieves accelerating returns).

The role of incremental and exponential mindsets vary in each phase of the business journey: launch, grow, and expand.

Launch: Vision and Uncertainty

In the launch phase of a business, the team needs to develop and refine the business model. The Lean Startup approach of test, iterate, and pivot is the right thing to do. But you also need the right way to think. Are you thinking about your business incrementally or exponentially?

The incremental mindset draws a straight line from the present to the future. A “good” incremental business plan enables you to see exactly how you will get from here to there. But exponential models are not straight. They are like a bend in the road that prevents you from seeing around the corner, except in this case the curve goes up.

Without an exponential mindset, Google would never have created such an ambitious vision as “organizing the world’s information,” Facebook would never have set out to “make the world more open and connected,” and Airbnb to “create a world where all 7 Billion people can Belong Anywhere.” Similarly, a group of innovative organizations in the public sector are out to solve global social issues by achieving “transformative scale.”

In Maine they have an expression that “You can’t get there from here.” In the launch phase, you need to realize that an exponential strategy has inherent uncertainty. You can’t know what things will look like on the other side of the curve. You can’t draw a straight line from where you are to where you are going. There’s no step-by-step plan. The exponential mindset helps you become comfortable with uncertainty and more ambitious with your vision.

Take a look at the chart above. In the first part of the build phase, you don’t see a lot of change. It’s not until the second part when the line starts to bend. It’s simply the nature of exponential change. Things happen very slowly before they happen very quickly. If this was the only world we knew, it wouldn’t be a problem. But we were raised with an incremental mindset. So we can’t help but compare the exponential path to the incremental path. And this creates a problem.

We are accustomed to measuring progress linearly and incrementally. If 30% of the time has gone by, we assume that we should be 30% of the way there. That’s how things work in the physical world when we are traveling to a destination. But exponential models don’t work that way.
What happens is that businesses run into something I call the “expectation gap,” where the exponential strategy is at greatest risk from the incremental mindset. It’s where many companies abandon the exponential model for the incremental.

I see this consistently on a micro scale in my own work. My workshops are designed with an exponential mindset to generate new ways of thinking about marketing, culture and strategy. Somewhere around a third of the way into a workshop, the leader invariably says something like “so when are we going to get something done?” The reason is that they are still operating with an incremental mindset. A third of the time has passed, but it seems like they are only 10% of the way to our destination. In fact, most of the progress happens once the curve starts to bend. Invariably by the end of the day the same people are remarking that they can’t believe how much we got done in such a short period of time.

In your exponential journey, pay attention to when people get the most impatient for results. It’s the point in the chart where there is the largest gap between incremental and exponential paths. This expectation gap is a risk to the business strategy because the impatience can be used by opponents or skeptics to convince stakeholders to jump from the exponential to the incremental. You will have the immediate relief of having “line of sight” once again and see steady progress. But you will also have given up the possibility of accelerating returns and the opportunity to keep up with customers and competitors. The exponential mindset helps you have the courage to persevere and the patience to see it through.

Grow: Agility and Control

In the third phase, you have managed the uncertainty of the early days, the impatience of the middle phase, and now you are firmly “in the curve.” Growth is happening faster than you can handle. At this point, the incremental mindset is to try to rein things in and get things under control. But that would be a mistake. To sustain the accelerating returns, you need to shift your mindset about how to mobilize and manage resources.

The incremental mindset assumes that it takes more inputs to produce more outputs. So as growth starts to accelerate, teams start to look for more resources in proportion to the growth. But the addition of too many people or too many resources can “flood the engine” of growth. You need an exponential mindset to figure out how 1X additional input can create 10X additional output.
You also need to apply an exponential mindset to how you manage the resources you have. The incremental mindset about management is like creating a line of dominos. Everything needs to be highly coordinated with active oversight to make progress one step at a time. The exponential mindset is like this demonstration with ping pong balls in which things happen in parallel with a focus on the interactions among participants.

As I’ve written about separately, there is a way to let go without losing control. In the exponential mindset, managers replace control of people with control of principles. The use of doctrine to guide decision-making generates alignment, consistency and empowerment. But most leaders are accustomed to making decisions rather than empowering decisions. The anxiety from a loss of control can easily push companies off the exponential path back onto the incremental path. The exponential mindset helps to grow output faster than input, and empower teams to achieve both alignment and autonomy.

To summarize, digital business models require a shift from incremental to exponential. At the start, it takes vision and a leap of faith to commit to the unknown. In the early days, it takes courage and patience to build the foundation for growth even when results aren’t yet apparent. When growth kicks in, agility comes from empowering others and letting go without losing control. In all of the stages, the challenge is to “unlearn” familiar ways of thinking and embrace the unfamiliar. But with a shift from the incremental to exponential mindset comes the opportunity for real innovation. 


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Airbnb, Uber, and Others Used 'Time Collapsing' to Skyrocket From Zero to Millions 08-23

Fast-growth companies speed up success by incorporating digital tools and breakthrough innovation into the core of their business.

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library

In 2007, Airbnb appeared on the scene and completely changed the world of travel and hospitality. But unbeknownst to its three, 30-something founders, they forged a new path for startups.
Uber, Spanx, and NetJets also blazed trails from zero to millions nearly from inception. These standouts have rewritten the rules of building a business, proving innovative startups can play on the same field as their much larger competitors. So how did they do it?

According to business and marketing experts like Ed O'Keefe, modern longevity has everything to do with eliminating risks. When timeworn manuals advising slow-and-steady wins the business race were tossed out by innovators, a unique phenomenon was enabled, challenging much of what we know about the formula for success.

O'Keefe, the founder of EOK Marketing, who has just written a book about a theory he calls "time collapsing," says leaders who practice his theory--which can be summarized as the process of speeding up success--incorporate digital tools and innovation into their business's essence. "It isn't just one thing that leads to ignition," he says of his theory. "Multiple methods have been adjusted and optimized to permit more instantaneous gratification."

O'Keefe outlines other practices used by upstarts like Airbnb and Uber to accelerate success:

1. Leapfrog over older organizations.

This is the action taken when someone skips several stairs--typically paving the way to success. Instead of implementing a plan to increase metrics by x amount month over month, modern marketing means money can be made faster, and companies can cement their footing sooner.
Older establishments are finding younger companies competing neck-and-neck, because the steps 21st-century startups must take to reach their pinnacles are fewer and take less time to institute.

2. Consider a contrarian view to speed up emotional attachment.

In the case of Spanx, Sara Blakely inventoried the plagues of the undergarment industry. Instead of noting the wins of longer-lasting brands and consumer devotion, Blakely took everything she didn't know and based her standards on non-information.

For decades, intimate apparel manufacturers had adhered to few absolutes. They'd used the same material forever--even though it was scratchy, awkward, and ill fitting. They'd ensured their designs fit a mannequin. But Blakely broke that two-step mold when she created something she loved that was comfortable to wear, in a material she adored. And finally, she tested her prototype on humans.
In a world where no updated and intuitive patterns existed, Blakely devised her own. When consumers got wind of her impressive unmentionables, sales skyrocketed. Blakely collapsed time by engineering new guidelines for research and development, and instead of waiting for consumers to become loyal, she sped up their emotional attachment.

3. Scoop up customers through unique inventory and inventive services.

Airbnb used the collateral of participating members' houses. Uber snapped up their drivers' cars, and in doing so, both elementary-age firms displayed marketing prowess. Their potential wasn't contained by a lack of funds needed to acquire product. Instead, they expanded their resources by using abstract solutions to leap everyday hurdles.

4. Climb as high as you want.

No companies need grant you the right to pass, to take their place--or to topple them. You are clear to climb as high as you want, and you are provided level playing terrain through the existence of free enterprise.

Simplify and cut shipping, eliminate overhead, identify your dream client--and then replicate the steps to actualize early success.

5. Put your company on the map through the law of opposites.

Dollar Shave Club, which was recently purchased by Unilever for $1 billion, tackled the micro-industry by refusing to follow the same old dusty plan. When high-quality affordable generic razors became obtainable at reasonable rates through subscription, consumers beat down the door. By positioning with a price incapable of sinking much lower, demand went up. So did profits.

6. Be powerful because you're small and flexible.

Your company must be nimble and allow you to control your presence, costs, and inventory. Multimillion- and billion-dollar corporations have discovered that massive footprints limit prosperity. But the new entrepreneur doesn't need to lease a monstrous space. The staff should be remote, the product moved on demand, and the SMM analytics liberated from third-party consultants. The business should operate location-free.

7. Use the right technology and tools for zero-barrier entry into the marketplace.

The same tools are available to businesses of any size and are accessible to entrepreneurs. Anyone can develop a relationship with a delivery company, pop up a website in minutes offering packages for immediate purchase, and send automated emails.

You also have access to breakthrough marketing and innovation at your fingertips. My agency, Trepoint, for example, leverages the power of influencer marketing to deliver 11X higher ROI for companies of all sizes. Outsourcing your lead generation and marketing support needs is yet another way to squeeze time.

In this modern marketplace with a zero-barrier entry, nothing is stopping you from going head-to-head with the leaders of an industry--the same way the creative founders of zero-to-millions companies like Airbnb and Uber have.

How can you apply these insights? What aspects of your business can you immediately time collapse and reap the rewards?

One of the best pieces of advice I have received was to do what I do best and outsource the rest. Time collapsing is another powerful way to accomplish this objective.

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How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers 08-18

Image credit : Shyam's Imagination Library


How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers... 


New businesses often struggle finding their first customers. The challenge is even more difficult with startups in the sharing economy that launch as platforms connecting independent service providers with consumers.

Take Uber. Its platform is two-sided, connecting people who need rides with people who have rides to offer. (Same idea as Airbnb, which connects people needing rooms with home-owners.) So to launch as a platform service, these companies need to find users on both the supply and demand sides.

“Poaching customers is something all competitors do in different ways”

“When you have a two-sided platform, you have to acquire both the customers and the services,” says Harvard Business School’s Thales Teixeira, Lumry Family Associate Professor of Business Administration.

“It’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem,” he says. You can’t have one without the other, but which one do you find first—the customer chicken or the service egg? “As a small company you cannot afford to focus on both with the same amount of effort. You may need to prioritize one side.”
Preparing to teach a new course on e-commerce marketing next spring, Teixeira made it his goal to find an answer. He studied three of the best-known and most successful startups—Uber, Etsy, and Airbnb—hoping to find some commonalities in how those businesses solved the dilemma.
Spoiler alert: it’s the egg that needs incubating.

As Teixeira reports in a new HBS case, Airbnb, Etsy, Uber: Acquiring the First Thousand Customers, all three platforms concentrated on getting the service side of the equation first, customers second. But there’s a catch. “It’s not just the chicken and the egg, you also want to select the right eggs,” explains Teixeira. “If you acquire the wrong eggs and ostriches come out, then you are in trouble. The chickens will run for the hills.”

LESSON ONE: THINK LIKE A CUSTOMER

From the beginning, it was clear to the founders of apartment-sharing site Airbnb that they’d need to find people willing to list their homes before finding people interesting in staying in them.

“If you don’t have a supply of houses and apartments, people are not going to come,” says Teixeira. The problem was, where to find people willing to let strangers stay in their places. It’s not like they could go around San Francisco knocking on doors.

Instead, founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia thought like customers themselves, trying to figure out where they would go if Airbnb didn’t exist. It didn’t take them long to figure out the answer: Craigslist. The entrepreneurs figured they could do a better job of making apartments appealing than the online classified site, but first they had to siphon away its customers. To do that, Chesky and Gebbia created software to hack Craigslist to extract the contact info of property owners, then sent them a pitch to list on Airbnb as well.

The strategy worked. With nothing to lose, property owners doubled their chances of finding a potential renter, and Airbnb had a ready supply of homes with which it could attract customers.
“Poaching customers is something all competitors do in different ways,” says Teixeira. “If you are a website and you are providing content to users publicly, others can grab that information.” It’s not enough to just take someone else’s customers, though, he warns—you’ve got to give them something better than they had before.

LESSON TWO: CREATE A BETTER EXPERIENCE

Once they had apartment owners on the hook, the Airbnb founders realized they had a problem: the subpar photos that property owners were taking for Craigslist on their iPhones would never work for customers looking for an alternative to a hotel.

“The first time a person goes on Airbnb, they are comparing the quality of photos to hotels that take glamorized shots,” says Teixeira. “They needed to compete at that level.”

In order to do that, Chesky and Gebbia did something that would never be scalable: hired professional photographers to go to property owners’ homes to take inviting pictures. The gambit worked, making the site much more attractive than the competition, and setting a standard for photography that later property owners rose to match in order to compete against other homes.
“The underlying principle of this is you should help your suppliers portray themselves in the best way possible, even if that is not scalable,” concludes Teixeira. “If you don’t have customers, there is nothing to scale.”

Ride-sharing app Uber pursued a similar strategy. Rather than starting out with Uber Pool or Uber X, in which drivers use their own cars, the company started with black cars driven by professional drivers. That way, they could ensure that customers would have a great experience virtually every time they used the service—and they could then rely on customers to spread the news of that experience by word of mouth. “That’s why you get the supply side first—if you get the right suppliers, the customers will experience their high quality service and then do the marketing for you,” says Teixeira.

Etsy also pursued a decidedly non-scalable strategy in finding the right eggs with which to launch its business. The platform, which serves as an online marketplace for craft vendors, started its business with an offline strategy: scouring craft fairs across the country to identify the best vendors at each, and pitching them on opening up an online store on the site. “They first brought their customers, and then they brought other artisans who followed the customers.” Once Etsy had the first-tier artisans on the site, the next tier naturally followed them.

LESSON THREE: SEQUENCING IS EVERYTHING

Uber and Airbnb were also smart about how they chose to expand, picking the right cities at the right time to maximize their success.

Since Uber’s main competition was taxi cab companies, the startup researched which cities had the biggest discrepancy between supply and demand for taxis. They then launched during times when that demand was likely to be the highest, for example during the holidays when people tend to stay out late partying. It also ran promotions during large concerts or sporting events, when big crowds of people all needed cabs at the same time, and an individual might be more likely to take a chance on an unfamiliar company named Uber.

In that way, the company acquired a large group of customers in one swoop. “First, they figured out how to get a bunch of customers all in one night, when the demand was high. Then, they made sure this first group of users had a great experience and brought in the next wave of customers via word-of-mouth,” says Teixeira. The company banked on the fact that once users realized how easy it was, it was only a matter of time before they started using it to go to work, then shopping for groceries, and so on.

Airbnb followed a similar strategy with its rollout, launching in Denver in 2008 to coincide with the lack of hotel space during the Democratic National Convention and adding new cities at times when they had major conventions or other events.

In addition to the obvious demand, the strategy has another benefit: “Your competitors don’t see you as a threat, since you are not taking away from their demand,” says Teixeira. By the time you have a foothold in the marketplace, it’s already too late for them to do anything about it.

Launching in situations of high demand and low supply also helps startups acquire the right type of customers—those early adopters who might be more forgiving of a company while it works out the kinks. After all, beggars can’t be choosers, and if you are thankful to even have a room during a conference, maybe you’ll forgive the lack of hand towels. The last thing a company wants during its early phases is negative word-of-mouth.

“You are still a startup,” says Teixeira. “You have to find people who are willing to accept your flaws and cut you some slack. Satisfying all their needs and wants is just not feasible at this early stage.”

Next Lesson: From 1,000 to 100,000,000

With early adopters in place, a company can start thinking about how to expand their customer base through more traditional means of marketing.

To tackle that problem, Teixeira wrote a sequel case study, Airbnb, Etsy, Uber: Growing from One Thousand to One Million Customers, and is currently working on a third entry in the trilogy that will examine how a platform can go from one million to many millions of customers.
In each case the strategies are different. While word-of-mouth might work for the first thousand it’s not going to get you to a million. “You have to be more proactive and control the acquisition process, which word-of-mouth does not allow for.”

That’s where digital marketing can help, allowing companies to target specific customers through search ads or social media at a low cost.

“It’s highly targetable and you can do it on the cheap,” says Teixeira—adding that digital marketing also makes it easy for companies to rapidly iterate its advertising message, tweaking it to figure out what works best. “Only after passing the millionth customer can you go into advertising on traditional media. That’s when you need massive scale, so you go to mass marketing.”
As a company grows, it must consider the purpose of advertising in order to achieve the best effects in gaining new customers.

“Some tools are better for the beginning, some are better when you are bigger,” says Teixeira. “It’s not about, should I use digital marketing or word-of-mouth or TV ads. The question only makes sense when you say, 'I am at this stage, what approach should I take?' Only when you answer that question will you know what tool is most appropriate.”

In other words, he says, “You need the right size of eggs for each stage of your nest.”

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Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy: Indians have highest ego per unit of achievement 08-17

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy: Indians have highest ego per unit of achievement.

Shyam take on this.....

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy: Indians have highest ego per unit of achievement

And what about the cover up ratio per unit of failure???

I think, we need to work on that create parameters and metrics to measure that too.

I think it also must be quite high...

Yes, the expertise that we have in creating alibis for our misadventures. Even in that we Indians must be ranking quite high, probably next only to the United States. You can't beat the American bureaucrats in that, they create honest and perfect looking alibis for waging war and invading countries. The façade of dignity and inevitability they impart to their misadventure is the best.

Coming back to Indian bureaucrats the moment they clear their civil services exams and get a posting, they feel that they have special endowments and entitlements, when compared to the normal human beings. Specially the brain and the brain parts. They feel that their Cortex, Hypothalamus, and the Cerebellum are of larger size and superior quality. Add to this, the training they undergo implants in them a false sense appropriateness and completeness which creates the ego in them right from the beginning, and it keeps growing with the growth in their career.

One probable reason for the highhanded behavior of the bureaucrats must be the shabby treatment they receive from the less educated and unreasonable politicians. They find a reason and the occasion to vent out their disappointments and frustrations when corporate businessmen like Narayan Murthy and Nandan Nilekani meet them.

This being the scenario, the situation is not likely to improve any time soon.

And for ordinary mortals like you and me, the situation must be worse than the worst.

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy delivered the fourth annual Independence Day Lit Live lecture in Mumbai last week. The first question he was asked as he reached the venue was if he found the 90-minute long commute from the airport to the venue frustrating. Murthy brushed it off saying he's used to worse in Bengaluru, his home city.

It was a good point to start the conversation since his lecture's topic was city systems. Murthy quoted several numbers and international examples to highlight what's holding Indian cities back from being world class.  

"The biggest challenge for all of us, not just politicians or bureaucrats, is that we, Indians, have the highest ego per unit of achievement. I would humbly request, we be open-minded to those who have performed better than us," he said.

He spoke of having worked with so many governments and realised that somehow things don't move fast. It's partly due to the know-it-all attitude. He shared that Nandan Nilekani (co-founder, Infosys and the force behind Aadhaar cards) too had a similar experience while working with the establishment in Delhi.

"Nandan was giving a lecture on his experience in designing and implementing Aadhaar sometime back. Somebody asked him how difficult was it to work in Delhi," Murthy said. Nilekani's response: The first hurdle that you come across is that they (bureaucrats) say we know this. The toughest hurdle is if they say we are already doing this. There isn't much to do then.

Murthy contrasted this attitude with his experience as an IT advisor to the Thai PM, more than a decade back. "They (Thai officials) would make a presentation and I would give suggestions. They would write those down. The next time I went there, they would show me how they've (the suggestions) been implemented," he said.

In comparison stands the Indian bureaucrat, who as per Murthy never writes anything. Probably because he already knows it.

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