by Velu and Elias
Entrepreneurs are basically people with innovative ideas and inborn passion who work relentlessly to achieve their Vision and Mission. Their mind focuses and thinks about business and ways and means of nurturing and growing it 24×7. They think about it even in their sleep and lot of time get ideas when they woke up in the middle of the night or while taking a cold shower. This innate connect between the person and business makes them successful.
To take the successful businesses to next level of growth, organisations needs to gear up with strong systems and processes to scale up the operations and ensure seamless delivery of product or services to customers with zero tolerance to leakage. Process driven organisations eliminates personal bias and focus only on customer satisfaction and growth.
Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal are the most successful entrepreneurs from India who co-founded Flipkart. In Indian business environment it’s really a tremendous achievement by both Bansal’s to develop Flipkart business to such a massive scale, when so many veteran and seasoned players are struggling to keep their heads above the water. They both were really visionaries and had developed a strong technical knowledge about their business over a period of time which is valued in mutli-billion dollars as of today.
In such a scenario, when we all feel they are the important assets of the company and who will have the requisite expertise to take the company to next level, Walmart didn’t hesitate to remove both the Bansal’s from the company’s key position. It needs to be introspected why and how Walmart could take such a strong decision after investing almost USD 16 BN.
Walmart like US companies are all process oriented and system driven and they strongly believe that process is more important than person. They create the organisation around strong processes where people are not indispensable.
Basic tenets of such a company is that people at any level may come and go but company shall go on for ever, where decisions are process driven and persons are only enablers. This is one of the main factor why US companies could scale their businesses and reach greater heights faster than any other companies in other parts of the world. In addition to the process part of it, these companies give emphasis to follow business principles and ethics in a highly holistic manner. Process and ethics work as a twin strong pillars for any company’s growth.
“Both the founders were good at the strategy part of it, its revenue, finance, performance etc. but more than the commercial viability it is the institution building that is important.” It is in the latter governance becomes extremely crucial to build a lasting organisation.
Had both the Bansal’s woven their decisions making methodology around the process driven approach and followed the business principles, they won’t have felt the heat to continue at the top position even after the takeover. Even Walmart won’t have felt any gap in their capabilities and maturity to run the company based on Walmart’s philosophy.
Indian entrepreneurs are no less as compared to their US counter parts in successfully running their businesses. However they need to learn how to align their business with processes and principles which will make them scale even higher levels than what they have reached today.
As a Strategic Executive Advisors, we offer our services to bridge this gap in Indian industry and support our entrepreneurs to take their organisation into the next level of growth orbit. While the entrepreneurs focus on their core strengths of the niche business areas, we will use our expertise to ensure that the organisation is driven with process and performance focus to outsmart the competition and grow steadily.