MANAGING MONKEYS AND OTHER STARTUP TALES
A book on cutting jargon has much pontification but little handson wisdom
The challenge for contemporary Indian business writers is to match promise with performance. Some reckon that a quick way to articulate promise is to use bold, even brazen, titles and subtitles as authors Sharma and Hari have done. Competitive jostling for market space is rough enough for even true-blue conservative publishers to go with the flow. Compromises are inevitable. A book has better chance of being picked by an intrigued browser when a colourful snappy cover emblazoned with a savvy title catches her eye. Production shortcomings don’t hinder her purchase decision. A sale is registered notwithstanding undesirable features like cramming as many as 30 chapters of approximately 125,000 words into 300 pages. And then, the congested print format makes for strenuous reading. The authors probably weren’t consulted about the font so I’ll let it pass. Their fault, though, lies in the failure to write a manuscript where crap and jargon have been well and truly scrapped. Oddly, brief pedigreed endorsements don’t warn potential readers that the book is full of pointless advice.
Here’s a gem titled Manage Monkeys: Monkey management is about consciously or unconsciously taking ownership/commitment/accountability for something that someone else is responsible for. Consciously, and more often unconsciously, we pass on monkeys every day and create confusion when we should have been striving for quality. This confusion is one of the biggest derailers in a start-up! Develop the habit of avoiding monkeys (passing or receiving). Establish clarity on ownership and accountability.
This is plain and simple gobbledygook. Naturally, leadership issues are covered in the book’s 30 chapters. Questions are asked and authors’ answers follow: How should start-ups forge leaders? What is a good leadership framework for start-ups? Are there some universal competencies that leaders in start-ups need to demonstrate?
People in start-ups are starved for bandwidth and time. Putting them through traditional development programmes, like the way large and mature companies do, simply won’t work. Therefore the fundamental design feature of a leadership model for a start-up should involve building leadership capability on the job . ... Leaders are forged through tough experiences. Leaders are shaped by other leaders. This is true in companies as much as in real life. Some situations make men out of boys or women out of girls. Life presents these situations to individuals mostly by accident, and when presented with these situations, individuals often curse their misfortune. However after going through these successfully they figure out that they are much stronger after the experience and better equipped to deal with similar situations in the future.
There’s pontification and waffle, no hands-on wisdom enriched with firsthand quotes from start-uppers who have battled from trenches to lead or fail.
The last paragraph on page 310 is pure comedy. “We do not claim this era is any different when it comes to the dynamism in the start-up ecosystem. We feel the start-up world is a different place. You would either love it or hate it. We loved it and wanted to share our experience in helping you make a success of your start-up journey. We made a lot of mistakes – we do not want anyone else to make those same mistakes . ... If there is even one lesson that an entrepreneur can relate to, and have an ‘aha’ moment, we would have met our objective. We hope you enjoyed reading this book!” I refrain from answering rudely. Sujoy Gupta is a business historian. He lives in Kolkata.