Sandeep Chennakeshu 4:25
It’s a great question. For over 30 years, I literally had no time because I only have one gear. My wife makes fun of me. She says, all my engineering friends say I’m a series von boater, which means without a load of drugs to destruction. But essentially, when I got some free time, I said, I wanted to write the book. And I thought, why, and what am I going to write about? I had lots of ideas. And then I went back and said, why not write about my own experience? And very early in my career, I got promoted to being a general manager. And I was technical and operationally probably eschewed according to management. But I was clueless about business. Okay, and I made tons of mistakes, tons of mistakes. But every stumbling block became a stepping stone for success. And I said, what if I write about that journey, and what I learned, so that I can then teach people about my experience about building a business, and how I built myself, and hopefully, the takeaway for them, would be not to have the same pitfalls and traps that I went down. And so that was really the genesis for saying, hey, why don’t you do this? And then with the help of many editors who gave me constructive feedback, I started adding more and more to round out the core team.
Bela Musits 5:57
Yeah, yeah. Very nice. Very nice. So, I always think one of the challenges and you brought this up, when you talked about, I thought the analogy of countries was sort of interesting and civilizations. Sustaining a business, like sustaining a culture or sustaining a civilization is a challenge, because the world is always changing. Some forces get stronger, other forces get weaker, and you have to be very dynamic. So what are some of the challenges that you see, particularly given our businesses today that I think are absolutely critical for leaders to master?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 6:37
Yeah, actually, again, a very insightful question. I worked in a variety of different businesses, some that are more oriented to technology, some that are more service oriented, some that are more production oriented, some that are hardware, some software, some startups, and I’ve consulted for a number of companies in the world too. And, you know, there’s a very interesting statistic, two thirds of all companies, and this is cited in forms. Two thirds of all companies started failed within 10 years, for a variety of factors, because companies that are started by very clever people with very clever ideas, why are they here? Okay. And I think the real reason, my belief is they fail, because a lot of them opt for speed, oh, a systematic structure. You don’t have to be bureaucratic, you don’t have to have overweight of process. But you have to build it in a systematic structural manner, where you have interlocking elements like, if you don’t have a good foundation on a castle, the castle cannot be built to be tall and strong, you need to have a wall that wraps around the castle to prevent invaders from coming in, the wall has to be protected by protective towers. So people don’t mine under it, or scale it or break it. And then in the center, you have to keep and the keepers where the people lived. And you have to have a roof over them. And all of these elements need to work together in order to keep the castle standing. Likewise, there are eight elements in a company that need to be built that interlock and reinforce each other. Otherwise, the company is not likely to last and withstand both macro-economic factors as well as invaders or competitors.
Bela Musits 8:39
Yeah, of those eight elements. Is there one in particular that companies tend to overlook?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 8:47
I think that, I would say that, in my experience, everyone has a different experience. And I think that the two most important things that a company to make it succeed is to have a compelling strategy. But strategy tells you what you need to get done. However, culture determines what you get done. And if culture and strategy are not aligned, invariably you have a disaster. It’s like having a great, great strategy that you want to get somewhere. But everyone’s not aligned to get you there.
Bela Musits 9:27
Yeah, yeah. Understand. Are there warning signs that tell me that my strategy and my culture are not aligned?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 9:37
Yes, I mean, very simple. I use a very simple matrix. So when I get into a company, and I say, look, let me see if the culture and the strategy alike, I break down the strategy into a plan. And I have milestones. And I find I ask everyone to work towards just the first milestone because when you running a marathon, you don’t worry about the finish, you first have to get through the first mile. So you get to the first mile post and you say, okay, how did we do against it? And you say that, okay, you basically, you had 10 things to do, you did two. So maybe it’s a bad start. So you then start talking to everyone and saying, okay, now we got Milestone Two, let’s see if we can improve it. Now, as you score against two, you know something is fundamentally wrong. Is it that people are not accountable? Or roles and responsibilities not clear. Our objectives not clear? Why is it that we are not able to keep our commitments? After all, we’ve taken money from investors. And we’ve got to return it. So what is the reason for the irresponsible behavior in not being accountable? And that is something that I think very early on, you can find out. If the culture and strategy are light. It also could be it could be a simple thing that maybe you have the right attitude, you want to get there, but you don’t have the capability, which is an equally big failing.
Bela Musits 9:38
Yeah. I always think that one of the most challenging things for leadership is to modify or change the culture, right? You come into an organization, and it has a culture, maybe that culture was set up a particular way on purpose, or sometimes it just evolved to what it is. And as a leader, you may say, you know what, we need to move our culture we need to take our culture and make it more collaborative, or we need to take it and make it more technically savvy or whatever the metrics are. Do you have some tips and observations on how to sort of change culture?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 11:57
Absolutely, because in at least three businesses that I was asked to transform or help, because they were in trouble, financially, the talent was very high. And it’s not always that the employees are not doing the right thing. It’s how they are aligned to do what the company wants. And the most important thing, in my mind, is to bring awareness. So it’s extremely important for the leader to walk around and talk to employees, ensure that they all understand what the priorities are. And I used to do this by a number of three different techniques. The first is I used to have town halls, and in these town halls, I would basically talk about the company very simple objectives, and always present to the employees. How did we do against what we said we would do since the last town hall? It was my scorecard about me, not them. Okay, because me as the leader, I had to show as that I was doing, what the company needed. And then I would actually, marketing leader of mine had a brilliant idea. They said, Hey, why don’t we go to customers and ask them whether we can videotape them and ask them some simple questions? Make it a small clip for less than five minutes. And employees, I used to play these video clips. And it was very interesting. In one interview, a big CTO of a company told us that we were the most brilliant group of engineers he met. But he lost his bonus for the year, because he trusted us. And that one video was worth more than anything I could have said in 100 meetings, because the employees got it straight on their customer. Okay, so it brought awareness that they were doing something wrong. The second thing I used to do is I would basically have a couple of meetings every month with people selected. Anyone who had a birthday that month came to have breakfast with me. So I had this big meeting, we’re all get a little bit of breakfast, we sit around a table, and they was asked me anything but be brutally honest, they would ask me any question in the work, personal anything, and I would just tell them exactly the truth. And this was to build trust. I would always start off with a little joke or something to basically liven up the meeting and get someone to talk and then we exchange ideas. By doing that I got to understand in an unvarnished way, what were their challenges, which helped me also then work on that with my talent leader, HR leader, how to fix these things. The third area is that I wrote a newsletter every month. I wrote the first page on what we wanted to do or achieve in the next phase, or the next month, and then the next page, and then it would be written by my head of sales. And the next page was written by my head of engineering. So the employees every month got five pages of articles of everything that happened in the company, whatever he was thinking, what was everyone doing and what progress had they made. And so the employees felt that the leaders were equally invested in reporting what they did, rather than just reviewing what the employees did. And that established a really trustful relationship where we could then have discussions about how to change things that will move our company forward.
Bela Musits 15:47
Very nice, very nice. So I think one of the big challenges in organizations is figuring out what the proper metrics are for measuring performance. Because oftentimes, when you measure something, you end up getting some unintended consequences, because the employees are reacting to that measurement. And they may be doing something else that is making that measurement looks good, but maybe being detrimental to some other aspects. So how do you think about various different metrics? And how do you sort of come up with them? And how do you sort of fine tune them?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 16:25
Again, an excellent question, because these are all goes to the heart of execution. And so I always start with an annual operating plan. So if it’s 2023, I start building the annual operating plan in August of the previous year. And I say, what are we going to achieve in 2023? What are my financial objectives? What are the objectives to increase the value of the company? Why will people want to work with us. So you set the annual operating plan, and that is approved by the Board of Directors, then I take that plan, and I break it down into concrete, achievable targets for each department. And that’s broken into goals. All of this is then these goals in order to achieve them, I basically started designing diagnostic metrics. You want your metrics not to be thermometers, you want them to be thermostats. Because the diagnostic metric is one that tells you something is going wrong, go fix it before it goes completely wrong, you don’t want to know after the fact that something went wrong. And the simple example is, everyone knows me for my delivery accuracy metric. And this delivery accuracy metric measures what every employee delivers into a project. And it’s measured, there are hundreds of these little things and you total them all up. And I came up with a simple rule that 95% of them are not on time, it’s near impossible for the project to be on time. And so when I measure it, I start seeing that things are going off track. And I can say wow, that’s a diagnostic metrics, I got to pull it in, before things go completely off track, and you have to move mountains before you can actually fix it. So the key is to, and my book talks about some of these diagnostic metrics.
Bela Musits 16:37
Very nice. Very nice. Now, there’s established companies that, you know, have existing employees, maybe several 100 of them are doing 50, 60, 100 million in business, and then their startup companies, how are the challenges between those two different types of companies different?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 18:48
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge, I mean, we know that they’re two different, they’re slightly different challenges. An established company that has revenue and a functional profit and loss statement, has to basically look and saying two things I like to look at it as one is they got to look at what I call operating leverage. That means for every dollar that they bring in, how much of that flows to the bottom line. If they are more efficient, more of it’ll go to the bottom line. Okay, if they’re less efficient, less of it comes down. Now that of course, depends on what product you’re selling also. So established companies must learn how to basically grow their revenue and their operating leverage. And that’s their challenge. A startup is little different. Startups have to first produce a viable product, then establish go to market and sales channels and sell the product, support the product, make revenue, and it takes a few years. And so for the startup, it’s extremely important for them to focus on how are they going to get a marketable product to the market and make money. Okay, and that’s the fundamental difference in many startups, what they try to do is be they do a lot of very cool technical things, and I come from the technology area, but they forget all the other things that are needed to sell the product. Okay, so it’s not a balanced structure in many cases. And when you try to do all of that you run out of money. So for a startup, the biggest challenge is, how do they manage? How can they be fiscally prudent to achieve what they want to achieve with the money they have? Because investors won’t trust them if they just burn all the money they have, and have nothing to show?
Bela Musits 20:47
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So let’s talk about customers a little bit. And sort of finding customers, you know, 2530 years ago, if you were a b2b business, you’d go to a trade show, or maybe you go to two or three trade shows a year. And that’s where you find most of your customers. These days, there’s so many different outlets, trade shows are still there. But there’s social media, there’s internet advertising, there’s just so many different channels. As you build your strategy for a business, how do you think about how I’m going to obtain new customers?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 21:27
And that really depends upon your product. In most of the businesses that I worked in, all my products were what I call high touch. A low touch business is one where you can go and look up the product in a catalog on the web, and read all about it and make your purchase or at least then talk to a sales guy. High touch product, there’s a lot more of personal touch, where your sales and your marketing people and your product people have to be with the customer. And they have to establish, right, that the product is solving a need for the customer. Okay, and so a lot of my questioning of the strategy is not just how good the can cool the product is, but how are you going to sell it? And why will the customer buy it? What problem is it solving for them? If you can’t answer that, and it’s part of this old strategy, I have a more simple module and strategy called ORCA, ORCA. O stands for opportunity. Obviously, you want to go after big opportunities. R stands for relevance. Is your product relevant to the market? Is it meeting an unmet need of a customer that brings great value? What’s its relevance? If others are providing it you’re not going to get in? Especially if they’re entrenched? C in ORCA stands for capability, how will your capabilities aligned to deliver to that promise? Right. And if you can’t figure that out, I don’t think anything else matters, because you will not be able to get customers and convince them that you have the relevance to them as and they need as well as the capability to deliver to them. Because if they invest in you, they may be making a very big bet.
Bela Musits 23:30
As a result, they don’t want to fail. Yeah, yeah. So, I understand what you just said, what I’m trying to understand a little bit better is how do you find those customers? How do you know which doors to go knock on? I guess, is the question.
Sandeep Chennakeshu 23:48
I think that’s that is part of your go to market strategy. You have to basically look at the market and say, okay, these customers, it’s very difficult for me to directly address them, but it’s better than distributors address them. You could say another group can be by partners, another group of customers can be addressed by partners. Right? And there are some customers that you need to address yourself, which is the high touch approach. Okay, so it depends. When you look at your customers. If you try to do everything for everyone, you will get terribly diluted, especially if you’re startup because you don’t have resources. Yeah. And customers need that attention and focus, because they have a lot of questions. And especially if you have new kid on the block, you have to make sure you answer that thoroughly and have their attention. So the part of the go to market strategies to find out how to get a sales force multiplier through the various channels and leverage how you support them.
Bela Musits 23:54
Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Excellent. Do you have some sort of turning points in your career where something happened that sort of really gave you some terrific insight into some of these things that you’ve written about?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 25:15
Yeah, I think, oddly enough, you know, I’m 65. But I look back, I’ve had this phenomenal journey. And I started off in 84. I had this, I read an article when I was sitting in Canada, about mobile phones, and I wanted to go work in it. And everyone told me, you’re crazy, people are predicting that they’ll only be a million guys. And by the way, the ones they’re building in the 80s are big and bulky and you scrap them on people’s backs. Well, I’m glad I went and did a PhD in it. And it was good because I took that risk. And I got a great job. I did research for a few years. And as you and I spoke earlier, I was a GE corporate research in Schenectady. And I got our group got bought out by Ericsson and I became head of research for mobile phones, and I research products. And I realized one day, the products I was writing all these algorithms for and doing simulations, I didn’t know how to build them. And I said, gosh, what am I doing? So even though I was a volunteer researcher, and respected, I said, the first opportunity, I got to go build products, I put my hand up and they said, Okay, let’s try you. It was out of my comfort zone. And I went overnight from being a very respected expert, to being the runt in the litter. Nobody listened to me. I mean, your mindset, but it taught me that I if I studied, and I dissected products, and I talked to experts, and I put in the hours, I could learn to build products. And once I did that I regularly once I was able to overcome that barrier. And especially, Bertrand Russell has a great quote, he says that conquering fear is the first step to wisdom. So once I was able to conquer the fear, I was actually able to learn more. And so I then started rotating in different departments of the company. And that is how I got promoted to being a general manager. So, a few years later, I said, now that I know how to build products and run a company, why don’t I learn how to go and fix a broken company, not a stable company. And that was a different challenge. So what I’ve done throughout my life is to volunteer to things I’ve never done before, and to learn, and learn on the job and from the school of hard knocks. How you do things?
Bela Musits 25:16
Yeah. Excellent. Let’s talk about people a little bit. How do you think about what are the important elements in hiring new employees? What do you look for?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 28:01
Yeah, so obviously, you look for competence. But I look at two other things. But in an always an interview, I tried to find out what the person knows, and not what they don’t know. A lot of people want to find out what they don’t know, I think that’s wrong, you got to find out what they know. So I first tried to find out what is their competence? Can I use that competence in my company? But more importantly, I’m looking at their attitude. What sort of attitude do they have to solve a problem? So I give them some examples and say, just walk me through how you do this? Like, can they collaborate with others? Can they take feedback? How do they go about solving a problem? And I’m a big believer that, you have to basically have that ability to work with others and bolster your own ability, with that collective ability to bring an impact. And usually, I cannot stress, I add more value to attitude than competence.
Bela Musits 29:18
Yeah. Excellent. Excellent. I think I agree with you 100% on that, absolutely. So if there’s someone listening to this, that’s maybe in the early stages of their career, do you have some words of advice or, you know, top three tips to sort of think about as someone is embarking on the early part of their career?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 29:40
Yeah, it again, depends on in whichever way they want to rise in their career. I’ve actually written an article in the CEO world about seven beliefs that I have. I tell them to my children, I tell them to my mentees, I tell them to everyone. Now, everyone’s beliefs are personal. Everyone’s career journey is also personal. So what I basically tell them is, the first thing is dream with conviction. Okay, if you have a dream, dream and believe in it, go do it. The second thing, as I said, regularly leave your comfort zone. Just like I mentioned my own career, I kept switching to basically learn more, because at some point, you plateau, and you don’t learn very much more. Third is I said, reflect on success and failure. Most of us are related by our successes. And we get depressed with our failures, at least for some time, or it just gives you it’s a gut punch. But what can you learn from it? What can you basically take away? And say, how can you basically do something different? And to do that, then, basically celebrating success. I also believe that dealing with adversity, you get disappointed when you’re not picked for a job. There’s so many ways of getting disappointed. How do you deal with it? That’s what builds character. Right? You either have to deal with it, you walk away from it, but never let it swallow you. I talk about a story in my book. And a professor friend of mine from RPI, actually told me that he was very disappointed at some point in my life, that something didn’t happen. And he said Sandeep. Look, you’re a guy with a lot of sandwiches on your plate. And if you had one sandwich, and somebody took that away from you, you shouldn’t be angry. But if you have a lot of sandwiches, if somebody took away one sandwich, why are you upset? That to mean that, you know life will present you with lots of opportunities go chase that don’t dwell on the past. Then I always tell my mentees go get battle tested. I love playing cricket. And I said no practice in the nets meant anything you really tested on the field with a formidable opponent. Right with the ball coming at you at 80 miles an hour. What are you going to do? It’s a test of talent, technique and temperament. So just like that, on the job, on the job, you basically have to prove that you can deliver. Okay, and the last two things are I say be curious. Every day, learn something new. Jot down the little things you don’t know. As Lord Thomas Doer said, right, the mind is a parachute it only functions when open. And lastly, stay true. Nobody will believe in yourself more than you will. So believe in yourself, do the things you like, and walk your talk.
Bela Musits 32:53
Yeah, very nice. Excellent, excellent points. Great way to start wrapping this up. If people want to find out more about you and your book, where’s the best place for them to go.
Sandeep Chennakeshu 33:03
So my book is on Amazon. And if you go to Amazon, and you type out my full name, Sandeep Chennakeshu, it’s right there. And you get it in both the Kindle version or you can use the Kindle app on every other device. Or you can get a hardcover book. And then I have a website. It’s www.sandeepchennakeshu.com. That’s my website. And they also can find me on LinkedIn.
Bela Musits 33:35
Perfect, we will make sure all of that information is in the show notes so people can find you and find your book. Is there something that I have not asked you that you’d like to share with our listeners before we sign off here?
Sandeep Chennakeshu 33:48
No, I think you’ve covered almost everything. And it was very nice talking to Bela. I’m very appreciative of the opportunity to share my thoughts. So thank you very much.
Bela Musits 34:03
Oh, you’re very welcome. And Sandeep, thank you for being a wonderful guest. I really enjoyed our conversation. And I certainly learned a lot. Thanks again.
Sandeep Chennakeshu 34:12
Thank you so much, Bela. Thank you again.
Outro 34:14
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