The Start-up Way..

This blog is not intended to provide fixes to problems or issues, which any company might be facing. This is what I feel and believe. Few days back I attended start-up product conclave, one of the start-up CEO said “I don’t think it is going to work, but prove me wrong”, this was his way of promoting culture of innovation within his organization whenever someone from his team approaches him with an idea.

As the size grows, organization tends to lose agility, flexibility and innovativeness. Each of these large organizations,which are running business today started with that agility, flexibility and innovativeness, when their founders started years back. But that is not what I wanted to ponder on, what is more important to know that whether these organization still carries these traits in their DNA.

Four things which I think should be fundamentally questioned within an organization (especially with large one) to cultivate innovativeness are:

• Customer Value: Are you solving your end customer problems (ultimate users of your products or services) or solving internal customer problems (internal stakeholders, who participate in solving or serving ultimate users)? Large organization tends to forego customer value in solving internal problems

• Customer relationship: In your organization, are you doing sales transactions or building customer relationship? Is your internal team participate in building this relationship or Is it KRA of sales manager or business development manager? When organization become large, good HR policies forces organization to set KRAs for each functions( Sales, Delivery, Finance etc.) , which most of the time are conflicting and internal functions start competing with each other and loose the larger objective of customer relationship. Do your organizational functions operate like this?

• Business Models: Is your business finance still offering FPP (Fixed Price Project) and T&M (Time and Material) models? Is your cost model still builds around FTEs headcount to be deployed in project or builds around customer value to be delivered?

• Execution: Are your project execution still follow sequencing or long stepped processes? Do you still forces your customer to wait till the entire cycle gets over whenever they(customer) come-up with changes in business requirements? Or in simple terms are you agile in execution?

Any start-ups, which picks up scale over the period turns into large organization. Large organizations are better placed to deliver complete (end to end) services to their customers. But what is imperative is not to lose the agility, flexibility and innovativeness in crossing this chasm.  Many organization has done it in past, Apple is a ubiquitous example to this.What are you( organisation) doing to maintain agility and scale in organization's DNA?

These views are personal and doesn’t reflect to any organization specific problems. Your feedback and suggestions are welcome!!