The art of business

If OKRs, blitzscaling, compassion management, business alignment issues, leaders, managers etc. are the word that sounds you familiar this is for you.

You run a business, company or organisation exactly as you want, only if you are the only person in company. You can run it exactly as you want to run. But this starts changing as soon as more people moves in.

When people comes in, they bring man power, their own thoughts, process and thinking power. This is the beauty and this is the challenge also. You want them to use their expertness, but you also want them to think as the company.

You hire them because they can think or have excellence in something, you want them to keep thinking better and doing what they are best at and yet you want them to think from companies point of view. If you can do that, you are a winner.

We will see in this article how we look at business at Frendy and how we could achieve our milestones. I’ll try to share the frameworks that helps us also and how we implemented them.

Doing business is an ART

literally, Okay, so let’s get started. Let’s understand it by my own way.

Consider, you are an artist and can create a painting like this. And you yourself can do it perfectly, exactly like how you wanted.

To convert your passion into a business you hire a bunch of artists and starts your StartUp. So now, you have a have a bigger canvas, where everyone can contribute their own work.

And the problem starts, The first problem is when you explain that what Picture you want to make, as soon as you start telling they all start imagine that by their own way. They all imagine the picture in their own ways and then executes by their own way too. Without alignment the outcome wouldn’t be nice. So you hire a bunch of managers and the problems increases as now there are now three level of imagination about picture. But you yourself cannot make it done as you want scalability.

The final outcome might not be as good as you wanted but you are still happy as this team is making pictures, selling and you are having profit.

This is the current scene of almost every company. But still it is not THE PAINTING. Top top businesses do not works like this.

Think if you could yourself created that painting, wouldn’t it be more beautiful with your own love, passion and harmony.

You want team to work like a body, in full harmony, not like lever, heart and lungs but as you, like an organisation not like departments or persons.

How we are painting at Frendy

Every company or leader or CEO who is willing to have a successful company knows the value of the following points.

• Clear Vision and Mission
• Company culture (Not how you dress or what cafeteria you have, that is not culture but what drives behaviour of your team is the culture)
• Product market Fit
• Alignment between teams and members
• Fail fast, Fast over accurate, If you are not embarrassed with your first product you are late.

Since Frendy’s core team has more entrepreneurs, we all knew what is coming to us and we were all set. This LockDown, was kind of a bonus to our team to rethink, course correct and more to align with each other.

We all completed blitzscaling course from Stanford at our own, we read and listen as many books/content we can to refine ourself.

The course CS183 Blitzscaling had been taught by Reid, John Lily formerly Mozilla and partner at Greylock, Allen Blue of Linked In. The lecture were available on Greylock’s YouTube channel and the Class Notes are available on Co Writer Chris Yeh’s Medium page

Best part, we were doing exact things and we could relate, why the core of Frendy is a success.

While it was my turn to moderate Eric Schmidt’s lecture, I defined these all aspects as “four F”

• FUN
  If you and your team enjoys doing their work?
  It all related with your hiring process for right candidate, to culture, to alignment.
• FIT
  Is your product market Fit?
  Is your product ready to scale? (In Oppose to Brian Chesky “Do things that don’t scale)
• FAST
  You have to move fast, don’t try to make things perfect, nothing is perfect, run fast, fail fast
  You must know when to start Blitzscaling
• FUND
  A clear vision about funds you have to survive (To reach Product Market Fit)
  and Fund Availability to Blitzscale

We all couldn’t agree more that we are all set for everything. And we were all aligned to this also.

HOW WE DO IT at Frendy

And this is the section, for which, you have read so far. How we do it at Frendy.

As “Fred Kofman” says, “what is you working for?”, and if everyone of your team member replies “To help win the company”, you are already a winner.

Aligning every member on the team to a common goal, and making them feel and see how, their day to day work is helping company is one of the reason we wanted to implement OKRs.

For those who don’t know what OKR is, you are missing one key-stone that has been common in Google, Apple, Linkedin, Microsoft … almost every successful company. You must read this book by John Doerr https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Measure_What_Matters.html?id=u2NDDwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y

But for us as a startup and still finding our space, we must have to deal with one thing first before implementing OKRs.

Make team play as a team not departments or their own jobs. We at Frendy always discourage the tendency to play safe or save your own a**.

And to make it happen, it was needed that everybody understands the final impact of his each and every day routine or even writing a single line, how this effects the final step of company. When you really understands, you enjoy your work.

And the biggest hurdle everyone from top management understood that micro management is not the key and answer, we all knew the power of compassion management. While keeping proper professionalism, we tightly integrated in our culture the fact that “People do mistakes”, some times small and silly and some times silly and big. And when team knows that we understand mistakes happen, they responded more carefully.

They always knew that if any error is found or mistake is found, we all jumps in together as a team to solve the things. We even take care that this must not create a false impression on member who did that. We make them understand that we are one as a team.

This was a big step, but it resulted in more focused team. People become self managed. They started doing dual checks not only their own work but they started asking next seat developer to look at code and review it in case he missed something. I have never seen such open minded environment before.

So, What happened to our painting. Just with proper approach, We almost eliminated managers to do micro management and encouraged each and every team member to look for their won work in reference to related nearby team, department and as a company goals.

In our example of painting, they started discussing with each other, intra department and inter department whenever they feel it is related. So person painting river know first time himself went to sky team and asked if they are painting night sky or day and what is their planning and alignment that he should reflect in his work.

And that’s where OKRs jumps in to manage things in more easy manner. While totally based on compassion management is good but still you need some tool to make it happen as not every person can be on same skill and understanding level. Once you understand how compassion management works and you know the power of alignment, and value of every one working “to help company win”, then only you can implement OKRs in its true sense.

Wish you a very happy painting.