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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  What if KV Kamath ran my business
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What if KV Kamath ran my business

When FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) strikes, it's time to sit back, breathe and think of what the best in the business would do

Photo: Pradeep Gaur/MintPremium
Photo: Pradeep Gaur/Mint

Yesterday was one of those days when doubt had taken over pretty much all of my waking hours. After over 20 years as a practising journalist, two years ago, I, along with a few good friends, thought the moment as good as any to plunge into entrepreneurship. As ideas go, it is a romantic one. And so I dived headlong into a world I had only reported and written on until then. I described what it felt like in an earlier piece in this series: These are the best days of my life.

Don’t ask me why, but like I just said, something went awry in my head yesterday. On the one hand, thousands of hours of conversations with successful professionals through my career later, I know it takes an awful amount of pain and patience to build a compelling business. On the other hand, there was a part of me arguing the tentativeness that accompanies building a successful entity is a function of some shortcoming—like the fear of ambiguity—on my part.

And so, as is often my wont, I turned to Indrajit Gupta (or IG as he is known), my former boss and co-founder at Founding Fuel, for assistance to navigate the fog I was enveloped in. He heard me out and we ended up at a coffee shop to talk things over.

The things is, when we set out to chart what we ought to do next, among the first things he did was ask me to go over a conversation the both of us had sometime ago with K.V. Kamath, the non-executive chairman of ICICI Bank. He is a man the both of us respect enormously and often turn to for advice when matters stand at a fork.

“Slash. Burn. Rethink. Reimagine," he told us then.

What he meant was that as professionals ingrained in a certain business and its way of doing things, experience compels us to limit ourselves to the opportunities and constraints imposed by that business. Instead, we ought to wean ourselves out of the box and look at the world with a fresh set of eyes. That he made a forceful and compelling argument is an understatement. In any case, the evidence of what he managed is there for all of us to see.

When at work on transforming ICICI Bank into the entity it is now, he faced a challenge. For any retail bank to penetrate a market, convention demanded it ought to have a significant presence. That meant building branches at breakneck pace. It wasn’t the kind of cost he wanted to incur. He didn’t have time on hand either if his dreams of building a world-class entity were to be achieved.

That is why he thought automated teller machines (ATMs)—a rather novel idea in India—a good solution. So in spite of the technological challenges it involved, he pushed it through. It took the country by storm, built an identity for ICICI Bank in places it would otherwise have taken ages to get to, and created a brand for the retail entity he had in mind.

“What do you think K.V. Kamath would do if he were in your shoes?" IG asked me.

Quite obviously, he would slash, burn, rethink and reimagine the business, I muttered.

“That’s what we had set out to do. Why the fear now?"

Between Kamath and him, I realized they are asking the right questions. It was time to revisit my notes and take stock of why I set out to do what I am doing and where do my fears originate from.

I got back home and pulled out my notes to create a “Fear Setting" exercise. In that I sought to ask myself a few questions:

—What is the worst thing that can happen to me if I continue doing what I am doing?

—How can I undo any damage that can possibly accrue out of that?

In putting that down on paper, I figured the only thing I was fearful of was fear. There are no downside. Allow me to explain that a bit.

The first thing that came up is that I am a prisoner of the past. I had gotten used to working in a certain way. For instance, I’d get to office at a given hour. I’d clock in a reasonable number of hours. There were friends and colleagues at my workplace with whom I bonded.

In the new scheme of things, while we do have a formal office, it is more of a meeting place than anything else that we don’t need to use often. All of us on the team are dispersed across various cities. We communicate and share documents using a powerful piece of software called Slack. Unlike the conference rooms with video-calling facilities, we now convene every morning on Google Hangouts to discuss all of what transpired and chart out a course for the day.

Mind you, there’s no rocket science here. These pieces of software have been around for a while. It’s just that these haven’t been exploited enough. That they cut costs is an understatement. And having used them, I must confess these are indispensible tools at any modern day workplace. More importantly, it allows us to work more efficiently because we don’t need to travel unless mandatory. I could very well be at a coffee shop in some part of the world; or at my home; and stay connected.

When thought about very clinically, in doing things this way, I was actually improving the quality of my life. If that is the case, then what is it I was fretting about? People who swear by Life Hacking call it FOMO—an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out".

And what was I missing out on really? When pushed to the wall, truth is, I am not missing out too much. I just have to wrap my head around a new way of working and get down to a more efficient way of doing things. On the contrary, I have more time with myself to do things I would otherwise miss out on.

But to allow this to percolate into my head, I had to discard whatever notions I have of a workplace —like having a dedicated bay to myself. This is what the knowledge economy is all about. I asked myself if my colleagues Sveta and Achyut can work on this model efficiently, what stops me?

In adopting this model, I’d be practising what Kamath would approve: slash time and burn costs.

What else would he approve of?

All my life, I thought myself a journalist. But when I chose to build something out from scratch, there was consensus only around one thing—we would build something new that targets entrepreneurs. All of the hows and whys had to be explored in imaginative ways. This meant treading ambiguous ground. On the back of some experience, I can assure you, ambiguity can wear the hardiest of souls out. That is exactly what happened to me.

Extrapolate Kamath into a situation like this. When he was rethinking the existence of ICICI, a development financial institution into a retail bank, he had to demolish many shibboleths. That included his own role, the kind of people he inducted into the system, and everything else the organization stood for until then. For people in the system, the ambiguity was enormous and the transition was painful and exhilarating at once.

Those who couldn’t handle the ambiguity and pain had to be culled. Those who could absorb the pain thrived. That explains why Chanda Kochhar, who joined the institution in its early days, is now at its helm after Kamath’s stint. She had it in her to rethink and reimagine herself.

But it’s not just those in the highest echelons of corporate hierarchy who make successful transitions like these. Many come to mind. But to cite just one instance, my friend and former colleague Rohin Dharmakumar was a public relations professional before he seamlessly moved into journalism. Some time ago, he reinvented himself as an entrepreneur and is now at work on a new technology-driven platform.

My limited point here is that ambiguity holds the potential to paralyse the best of intent. That is why, as Kamath puts it, we must rethink and reimagine. Not just businesses, but our workplaces and ourselves as well, if we are to stay relevant in the long run.

Some thinking, a good night’s sleep, and all of the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) are now a thing of the past.

Charles Assisi is co-founder and director at Founding Fuel Publishing. He tweets on @c_assisi. Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com

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Published: 22 Nov 2015, 01:10 AM IST
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