“If you want to succeed you've got to work hard.” You have probably heard this a hundred times. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and a whole lot if tasks to complete- so how long do you ‘work hard’ each day? Eight hours per day is the most accepted timing, but for many its nine to ten hours or perhaps more. How good is the output? How much time do you waste on social media sites and news portals?
Despite working for most part of each day, productivity rates are often dismal, or so say many global surveys. This is the grim fact. Many have been slaving over laptops and desktops even on Saturdays and other holidays, but productivity can hardly be evaluated based on these long hours. Nor can it be measured based on the time they get in or leave. That’s an amateurish assessment, and only leads to dissolution and frustration. Clocking 9 or 10 hours in the office can hardly be equated to exceptional productivity. It’s not worth bragging about. It doesn’t guarantee success. Or else, millions across the world might have tasted stupendous success way before.
According to National Sleep foundation, an average adult should sleep 7-9 hours every night. However with competition scaling up everywhere, not many of us enjoy luxury of sleeping for such long hours each day. But working for extended hours and burning the midnight oil never increases productivity. It harms our physical and mental well being. Working smart, not hard is the right mantra.
How can we define working smart? Smart working is about making smart choices. Assess tasks, create an outline, follow a strong communication method, have the right attitude, be willing to lean, learn when to say no, team up with the right people at the right time, be flexible, make wise use of your time, but take periodic breaks – you can do more in less time.
Working our tail off for 9 to 10 hours is mismanagement of time and energy. It drains creativity and induces monotony. It bludgeons innovation and weakens effectiveness. But many continue to believe that working hard is the cornerstone of success only to end up failing, at times just short by a few inches. What goes wrong? They worked hard, but failed to work smart. Does that mean our heroes and idols never work hard? No, they work much more than most of us. An artist or a business man, it takes time to hone ones skills and stay atop. But as they grew smart, their choices too became smarter, and so did their working pattern.
Here are four productivity hacks of top business leaders:
No meetings Wednesdays - Dustin Moskovitz
Two-Minute rule - Christian Sutardi
Make wise use of the “golden hours” - Jason Kanigan
"Use sticky notes to make daily to-do lists” - Chapin, co-founder and chief product officer of Casper
Working harder and working smarter are closely entwined, or, while working hard one has can choose to work smartly and avoid getting weary, frustrated, and negative-minded. Think out of the box, innovate, experiment, and improvise to get best results with comparatively less effort. It adds positivity, boosts effectiveness, and fuels growth. That said, working smart should not be mistaken for procrastination or lackadaisical attitude. Strong vision and clear prioritization are critical. Give your best shot, be strong willed, set the right goals, and adopt the best plans to achieve them. Make mistakes, but beat paranoia. Learn the lesson and move on, you have a dream to achieve.
Swimming with the tide is toiling hard, but swimming against the tide is smart working. What's your choice?
Boom or bubble?
After short-term explosive growths, an overwhelming number of Indian startups are now tasting failures and grappling with fund woes. Their valuations have been slashed repeatedly. Revenues are plummeting and many companies are on major lay-off sprees to reduce costs.
“Successful people don’t do different things; they do the same things differently.” But, it is not the maxim that several Indian startups live by. Many businesses with international footprint took a decade or two to setup firm grounding and attain sustainable and steady growth. However, some Indian startups shamelessly copied ideas from the West, or took the easy route, and frantically burned too much cash to catch up with the global leaders. The plan worked well during financial might, but not anymore. Missteps, shortcuts, and misplaced focus have now started making them feel the pinch of cash crunch.
Copy-paste ideas, illogical hurry to set foothold as soon as possible, poor strategies and execution, aggressive expansion in minimal time, no clear understanding of ‘target’ market, failure to leverage capabilities and core competence, bad financial management that includes hefty and never-heard-of salary packages, and weak technological setup – most of the cynosures in Indian startup space are sadly standing on such shaky fundamentals.
What’s hurting their growth? What’s stopping them from succeeding? The reasons are many - they relying on half-baked business plans, fail to manage expenses, offer massive discounts, pay exorbitant salaries, and thus create a huge hole in their balance sheets. One among the top e-tailers is gearing up to cut its workforce to conserve money and turn profitable. They are not the first, and they will not be the last to announce job cuts as part of retrenchment. Other companies that are saddling with huge losses might soon hand out pink slips to many employees.
Taxi booking, e-commerce, or online rental business, replicating an international model is not innovation. However, many Indian companies are setup on cloned business models. They have amassed significant VC funding and live in their mirage-like world with the illogical hope that the original businesses will acquire them soon.
That said, not every startup is guilty of having weak fundamentals. Some of them are growing leaps and bounds with well-thought-out business models, while some others are falling by the wayside. The downturn is slowly engulfing some high-profile companies. Want to know why? They focused on the unicorn model and overlooked the cockroach model. They kept building unsteady businesses with fragile market presence. They never curbed their spending, and quickly moved from one unviable business model to another, only to soon ramp them down for lack of profit and sustainability. In other words, the reasons include myopic business decisions, careless spending, and major defocus from the core business models and long term goals. They just simply ran out of runway, and even failed to save money in reserve to avoid complete derailment.
In their frenzy to grab more market share, many companies expanded exponentially without focusing much on making sizeable profits from their increasing market presence. All that they needed was the easy money from VCs who mistook vast market presence for sustainability and profitability.
Dreaming big is not a sin, but entrepreneurs should not overlook the basics. Here are a few timeless tips - “What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.” “No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long-term if you don’t have a sufficiently good product” or service. ““Make something people want” includes making a company that people want to work for.” Let's add two more golden rules - "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1."
There is a clear uncertainty in Indian startup ecosystem and this might tempt many investors to step back. Funding will soon dry up, but many companies still haven’t figured out what went wrong and how they can adopt corrective measures to start running their business feasibly. They must soon cut back on their costs, move towards profitable business models, provide better customer service, build brand loyalty, innovate incessantly, and exploit market opportunities faster.
P.S. - The implications of founder’s syndrome too can jeopardize the very existence of a business. Founder’s Syndrome or founderitis kills opportunities and lets ego overpower the potential and entrepreneurship skills of a founder. When founderitis strikes, founders feel the strong urge to micromanage everyone, take complete control, ignore inputs from experts, and turn into an autocratic I-know-it-all mode.
“Successful people don’t do different things; they do the same things differently.” But, it is not the maxim that several Indian startups live by. Many businesses with international footprint took a decade or two to setup firm grounding and attain sustainable and steady growth. However, some Indian startups shamelessly copied ideas from the West, or took the easy route, and frantically burned too much cash to catch up with the global leaders. The plan worked well during financial might, but not anymore. Missteps, shortcuts, and misplaced focus have now started making them feel the pinch of cash crunch.
Copy-paste ideas, illogical hurry to set foothold as soon as possible, poor strategies and execution, aggressive expansion in minimal time, no clear understanding of ‘target’ market, failure to leverage capabilities and core competence, bad financial management that includes hefty and never-heard-of salary packages, and weak technological setup – most of the cynosures in Indian startup space are sadly standing on such shaky fundamentals.
What’s hurting their growth? What’s stopping them from succeeding? The reasons are many - they relying on half-baked business plans, fail to manage expenses, offer massive discounts, pay exorbitant salaries, and thus create a huge hole in their balance sheets. One among the top e-tailers is gearing up to cut its workforce to conserve money and turn profitable. They are not the first, and they will not be the last to announce job cuts as part of retrenchment. Other companies that are saddling with huge losses might soon hand out pink slips to many employees.
Taxi booking, e-commerce, or online rental business, replicating an international model is not innovation. However, many Indian companies are setup on cloned business models. They have amassed significant VC funding and live in their mirage-like world with the illogical hope that the original businesses will acquire them soon.
That said, not every startup is guilty of having weak fundamentals. Some of them are growing leaps and bounds with well-thought-out business models, while some others are falling by the wayside. The downturn is slowly engulfing some high-profile companies. Want to know why? They focused on the unicorn model and overlooked the cockroach model. They kept building unsteady businesses with fragile market presence. They never curbed their spending, and quickly moved from one unviable business model to another, only to soon ramp them down for lack of profit and sustainability. In other words, the reasons include myopic business decisions, careless spending, and major defocus from the core business models and long term goals. They just simply ran out of runway, and even failed to save money in reserve to avoid complete derailment.
In their frenzy to grab more market share, many companies expanded exponentially without focusing much on making sizeable profits from their increasing market presence. All that they needed was the easy money from VCs who mistook vast market presence for sustainability and profitability.
Dreaming big is not a sin, but entrepreneurs should not overlook the basics. Here are a few timeless tips - “What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.” “No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long-term if you don’t have a sufficiently good product” or service. ““Make something people want” includes making a company that people want to work for.” Let's add two more golden rules - "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1."
There is a clear uncertainty in Indian startup ecosystem and this might tempt many investors to step back. Funding will soon dry up, but many companies still haven’t figured out what went wrong and how they can adopt corrective measures to start running their business feasibly. They must soon cut back on their costs, move towards profitable business models, provide better customer service, build brand loyalty, innovate incessantly, and exploit market opportunities faster.
P.S. - The implications of founder’s syndrome too can jeopardize the very existence of a business. Founder’s Syndrome or founderitis kills opportunities and lets ego overpower the potential and entrepreneurship skills of a founder. When founderitis strikes, founders feel the strong urge to micromanage everyone, take complete control, ignore inputs from experts, and turn into an autocratic I-know-it-all mode.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)