‘Business leaders need macro vision and eye for detail’
QUICK TIPS The author of ‘Start Up, Stand Up’ offers advice for entrepreneurs looking to transition to being organisation leaders
NEW DELHI: Starting your own business can be an unnerving experience. Once you decide to do so, you need to do all the right things to grow it. In her new book, Start Up,
Stand Up, Nandini Vaidyanathan, a management professional with over 20 years of experience at various multinational firms, offers a step-bystep guide on how to build and grow your company as well as your brand. She offers some tips in this interview. Edited excerpts: How does one transition from an entrepreneur to a business leader? Let me address the “when” first. Honestly, there is no formulaic answer. As you build the product and go to market, the business necessitates that you bring other stakeholders on board—teams, customers, partners and investors.
As you on-board each of them, you lose a bit of egocentricity and gain out-worldliness. Now it is no longer just your dream, you have to balance it with the dream of all your stakeholders without losing the plot. How well you balance this not only determines how good a leader you are but essentially this is the beginning of your transition. Then comes the question: what does behaving like one mean? How do you demonstrate your leadership traits? To my mind, he should have, what I call, Garuda dhrishti and Sarpa dhrishti.
These are concepts I have borrowed from Hindu mythology, according to which the Universe is governed by the triumvirate of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva.
Brahma is the Creator; Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva is the Destroyer. If we look at Vishnu as the preserver or perpetuator, the skill set he needs is not just a 30,000 ft view of his Universe, but also the ground level.
In other words, he needs to have the macro vision as well as eye for detail. That to my mind summarises what the entrepreneur needs to cultivate, to transition from a product builder to an organisation leader. Is having a mentor at all stages of the career essential? Why? Mentoring does plenty of good things, but the single most benefit from mentoring is that it is the best risk-mitigating strategy there is.
In the entrepreneurial journey which is fraught with uncertainties, having a mentor is like performing your trapeze act with the safety net.
Your mentor prepares you in terms of your business by giving you knowledge, network and skill; strengthens you emotionally and intellectually; handholds you if the market throws a googly at you; and guides you seamlessly when you decide to pivot. What is the hook model and what is its importance? One of the things that fascinates me in this whole entrepreneurial journey is, how does an entrepreneur discover his customer and engage with him? Does it happen naturally, in the sense you have a great product and the customers queue up on your doorstep? Or does the entrepreneur make it happen? The answer obviously is that customer seduction is not a natural process but a strategically articulated one.
In this context, I have been a huge fan of Nir Eyal’s blogs for over two years now where he introduced the concept of “behavioural design”, that is, and I’m quoting him here, “the intersection of psychology, technology and business”.
Nir is fascinated by the notion that an entrepreneur can create products that can hook a customer to change his behaviour and become so addictive that he cannot imagine not just life without them but that there was a time when he actually did live his life without them!
He called it the “hook” model where customers use the product once either prompted by an external or internal stimulus which he called the trigger, responded to the trigger by acting upon it and over a period of time, became so invested in the product that he bought it without any trigger whatsoever.