People at Work & Play

Business Standard carries an article called “Mid Life Madness” which speaks of  successful corporate executives leaving the comfort of their well paying jobs to venture on their own in uncharted territory.

The key drivers vary from person to person. For some it is the lack of further opportunities for growth, for some one else it is the need to be different and prove to him/herself what they are capable of, for others it means wanting to be their own boss - as the old cliche goes, masters of their own destiny.

Irrespective of the reasons, such a decision does call for a certain amount of courage, self-belief and preparation. It sounds nice to hear that some one you know has started on their own and are doing well. Do remember this has not happened by chance. Planning and preparation is crucial for success. Very seldom does someone hit the jackpot without any planning.

Ultimately, it is a state of mind.

“If you think you are beaten, you are. If you think you dare not, you don’t! If you want to win, but think you can’t, It’s almost a cinch you won’t. If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost; For out in the world we find Success begins with a fellow’s will; It’s all in the state of the mind. Life’s battles don’t always go To the stronger and faster man, But sooner or later the man who wins Is the man who thinks he can.” – Walter D. Wintle.

A recent issue of “Business Today” carries an article on Vikram Akula, CEO & Founder of SKS Microfinance. The 39 year old US returned Akula started SKS in 1997 with the dream to offer microcredit to millions of poor families.

Although born in India, Akula spent many years in the US where he got his BA from Tufts University, MA from Yale and PhD from the University of Chicago. He was a consultant with McKinsey & Co before he launched SKS.

His dream is to scale SKS to 5 million clients by 2010. So far, his firm has provided $ 400 million in unsecured loans to over 1.4 million poor women and their families in more than 20,000 villages. SKS was first set up as an NGO . The first foundation to support SKS was a small, volunteer Indian Amercian organization called The India Development Services which gave him $ 10,000. Later Akula has attracted private equity from foriegn investors like Sequoia Capital and Vinod Khosla to grow into a NBFC.

SKS has been a success story. He has been able to maintain a 99 % repayment rate. As of December 2007, SKS has 1.4 million clients with 595 branches and a staff of 6100 to service their requirements. He was selected to be one of TIME magazines’ 100 Most Influential People in the world for 2006.

It is reported that SKS is adding over 50 new branches and 130,000 new customers each month and growing at an annual rate of 200 %.

SKS currently only targets women both because they are the most marginalized and because they tend to use resources more productively than men. Social science research has shown that women tend to undertake small, manageable activities rather than risky ventures and they invest the majority of their income into the household and for their children.

A very creditable success story of an entrepreneur who followed his dreams and made them a reality.

Just completed ” It Happened in India” written by Kishore Biyani (the man who revolutionised retailing in India) with Dipayan Baishya, a business writer.  A very well-written story which gives tremendous insights into what makes an entrepreneur successful.

Kishore Biyani re-wrote the retail script in India. From a position when he was almost looked down upon as a trader who wouldn’t amount to much to his current position as the Group CEO of the rapidly growing Futures Group, he and his companies have come a long way.

“It Happened in India” is interspersed with comments made by various people associated with Biyani from both within and outside his organisation. The book is written in a simple yet effective style and grips the reader. It is described as “the story of Pantaloon, Big Bazaar, Central and the great Indian consumer”.

Right from the time he first started, Biyani showed amazingly accurate perception of the Indian consumer -especially in the retail space. He perhaps understands the psyche of his typical customers more than anybody else. Therein lies the secret of his success.

The Pantaloon chain , headquartered in Mumbai, has grown to operate over 5 million square feet of retail space. It has over 450 stores across 40 cities  in India and employs over 18,000 people.

At the heart of the organisation is what Biyani calls the Pantaloon Genes. These precepts are :

• We like being simple
• Speed is the essence of everything
• We like to learn while we execute
• We like thrift
• We believe that customers are always right
• We like to think in terms of the majority of people
• We take pride in our core value of Indian-ness
• We believe in ourselves
• We do not like to blame others or external factors
• We like to think positively in every situation
• We like building and nurturing relationships
• We love to rewirte rules even as we retain our values

As is said in the book, what we become is a result of the way we think. “Sometimes we a nation of billion people, think like a nation of million people” said former President of India, Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Kishore Biyani dared to think big. His story is worthwhile reading not only for entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs but also for those who want to understand the Indian consumer.

I wonder why Kolkatta’s famous newspaper The Telegraph chose to call him “The Idli Boy”. But they did give him, deservedly, a front page story.

Sarathababu Elumalai’ s story is one of the most inspiring I have heard. Born to a poor family in Chennai, he said of his childhood: “I was born in a family of five children in Chennai and my mother worked with the government’s mid-day meal schemes. The money was not sufficient to sustain the large family, so she set up a small idli shop near our home in one of the slum areas of Chennai.”

Despite many hardships, he went on to complete his engineering from one of India’s most prestigious colleges - the Birla Institute of Science & Technology at Pilani. “I had never heard of the institution as we never got such an exposure. Someone told me that if I study there I will get a job,” he said.

After 3 years of work experience, he did his MBA from what is without doubt India’s best business school- the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Not accepting many job offers that could have come his way, he chose to start his own business. FoodKing Catering Services.

The business, which started with a mere Rs 5,000 and a small kiosk at Ahmedabad, has today spread to 6 branches employing over 175 people whose only job is to supply nutritious home-made food to corporates.

“It was an idea that I chanced upon during my internship at Pilani when I learnt that 30 per cent of the country’s population go to bed without food,” he said. “More than working for somebody I wanted to give jobs to people like me, who did not have other means of livelihood.”

To me, his is an amazing story of grit, commitment to principles and dedication. Sarath’s story is aptly described in Chennaionline as: The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of.

The word ‘entrepreneur” originates from the French “entreprendre” which means “to undertake”. In today’s context, it has come to mean to start and run a business. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the entrepreneur as one who organises, manages and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

“Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?” asks an article in “Fortune”. Although many Universities and B-Schools have started courses in entrepreneurship, it appears certain that certain traits like risk taking or passion for what one is doing cannot be taught. What can be taught are ground rules for sound business.

Here is some insight from research at the University of Arizona in 2002. The average annual income for entrepreneurship majors and MBAs who concentrated in entrepreneurship, 5 years after graduation, was almost $72,000, or 27 percent higher than for other business majors and students with standard MBAs.

Moreover, entrepreneurship graduates were 3 times more likely to form new companies. And these were not mom-and-pop shops. On average the businesses had annual sales of $50 million and employed 200.

Even those entrepreneurship graduates who took jobs within large companies earned bigger paychecks: $23,500 more a year on average than for other business graduates. Of course, students ambitious enough to enroll in entrepreneurship classes in the first place are likely to be more driven and confident than their peers. Even so, the gap in numbers is striking.

Ultimately, I guess the entrepreneur must have business smarts.

“Ever-Younger Entrepreneurs” in the Boston Globe talks of the trend for young people to become entrepreneurs on the strength of their ideas and the internet. The article profiles interesting examples of today’s young entrepreneur.

Thanks to cheap bandwidth, online advertising, broadband access, and the ability to spread ideas through blogs or social networks, even younger people with little funding and few connections have been starting Internet-related companies in recent years.

People don’t need a development team or a big budget - they just need a good idea and a laptop.

Inspiration possibly comes from the successes of young entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and the launchers of Google. Gates dropped out of Harvard to found Microsoft and Larry Page & Sergey Brin left a PhD program at Stanford to launch Google.

The word ‘entrepreneur” originates from the French “entreprendre” which means “to undertake”. In today’s context, it has come to mean to start and run a business. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the entrepreneur as one who organises, manages and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.

“Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?” asks an article in “Fortune”. Although many Universities and B-Schools have started courses in entrepreneurship, it appears certain that certain traits like risk taking or passion for what one is doing cannot be taught. What can be taught are ground rules for sound business.

Here is some insight from research at the University of Arizona in 2002. The average annual income for entrepreneurship majors and MBAs who concentrated in entrepreneurship, 5 years after graduation, was almost $72,000, or 27 percent higher than for other business majors and students with standard MBAs.

Moreover, entrepreneurship graduates were 3 times more likely to form new companies. And these were not mom-and-pop shops. On average the businesses had annual sales of $50 million and employed 200.

Even those entrepreneurship graduates who took jobs within large companies earned bigger paychecks: $23,500 more a year on average than for other business graduates. Of course, students ambitious enough to enroll in entrepreneurship classes in the first place are likely to be more driven and confident than their peers. Even so, the gap in numbers is striking.

Ultimately, I guess the entrepreneur must have business smarts.

An XLRI alumnus we are proud of is K. Pandia Rajan, Founder & Managing Director of Ma Foi.
This is now part of Vedior NV, a 6.85 billion Euro staffing company and the third largest in the world.

Ma Foi says they have placed more than 1,16,370 personnel in 31 countries worldwide, over 693 of these being at the GM and above levels.

They are likely to provide more employment than all the Govenrment employment exchanges in India put together. According to statistics, the 998 employment exchanges in the country place 1.10 lakh employees per annum in various government jobs. Ma Foi, which recruits over 5,000 staffers per month, is all set to cross the 1.20 lakh within the next 12 months, company managing director K Pandia Rajan told Economic Times recently.

The company’s revenues, which were to the tune of Rs 328 crore in calendar year 2006, is poised to cross Rs 450 crore in the current year. Mr Rajan said the company is targeting revenues of Rs 1,000 crore and a presence in 20 countries within the next two years

Came across the name of Dr. Ramakanta Panda the other day and was impressed by what I read about him.

He is the Vice Chairman of the Asian Heart Institute which he set up in Mumbai.
Dr. Panda was the topper in the All India Institute of Medial Sciences but favouritism led to dissatisfaction and compelled him to go abroad. This was possibly the best thing that happened to him. He trained at the Cleveland Clinic and did his Fellowship there working under the pioneer of by-pass surgery, the legendary Dr. Floyd D. Loop.

Dr. Panda has himself performed more than 10,000 by-pass surgeries making him one of the highest volume surgeons in the world. More importantly, he has performed more than 1500 high-risk surgeries which have given a new lease of life to those considered “inoperable”.

A striking feature is Dr. Panda’s habit of taking all his fees by cheque, never accepting cash which many doctors do to have an undisclosed income. The Income Tax department of the Government of India has honoured him for being amongst the highest tax payers.

There is a lot of useful information on heart care – useful to heart patients and others alike because after all, isn’t prevention better than cure?

I must thank Brian Reese for writing in his blog about Ben Casnocha.

I was amazed to hear that at 19 Ben had started two companies and written a book.

His book is appropriately called My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on his Journey Thorugh Silicon Valley.

The New York Times called his book “precocious, informative, and entertaining.” He founded Comcate, Inc., an e-government software company, at age 14.

BusinessWeek recently named Ben “one of America’s top young entrepreneurs.” He writes prolifically on his blog which the San Jose Business Journal called one of the “Top 25 Blogs in Silicon Valley.” Ben has given speeches at more than a dozen universities including Duke University, The Wharton School, and Boston University.

What struck me was the importance Ben placed on mentors in his life.

He writes: A famous Harvard Business Review article published in 1979 reported that mentored executives earned more money at a younger age, were better educated, were more likely to follow initial career goals, and had higher career satisfaction. This isn’t all that surprising—experienced practitioners transferring wisdom is bound to do something!