Building deep engineering and technocratic leadership skills for India, at Hexmos
Hexmos started with a goal to develop deep engineering and technical leadership skills in India with a view towards durable wealth building. India has a tremendous amount of talent and with the right leadership skills, it can be a large technical powerhouse. At Hexmos, we have been hard at work for the past 2 years to achieve the goal by setting up the culture, building teams, practicing effective problem-solving techniques, and much more. Our journey and efforts in this direction are documented in this article
Setting the foundation
Starting with culture
Organizational culture is at the root of performance, productivity, and financial growth. For the organization to survive and thrive, financial growth is a must. Financial growth is dependent on productivity and productivity on performance. Performance in turn depends on the culture of the organization. This makes culture really important. The Initial focus when we started the organization two years ago, was to set up the right culture. The three core values that are at the foundation of Hexmos are Curiosity, Audacity, and Discipline.
Collaboration at Hexmos
Collaboration at Hexmos happens through sessions. Session is a fixed period of time; minimum being 2 hours. Everyone connects on call and makes an effort to move the organization forward. Discipline is strictly followed; it is mandatory for everyone to join on time and not be even a single minute late. Joining on time makes meetings efficient. It reduces conflict between the attendees and is a sign of respect for everyone.
Another important aspect of sessions is the reflections. Daily reflections reassess our actions and help us improve continuously. Making efforts to improve every day is a sign of an intelligent man and knowing that fact one should not miss making efforts to improve. In order to improve it’s important to know your weaknesses and mistakes. This can be best done through reflections. Hence, after every session, we reflect and post our reflections on the forum.
The reading policy
Reading every day expands our thinking base, makes us mentally agile, and thus a good leader. Everyone at Hexmos reads for at least 15 minutes every day and posts the insights on the forum. There would be a record of what you have read and a summary of what everyone else read on the forum. Reading is a non-negotiable policy at Hexmos, and anyone who is not willing to put in 15min a day for reading will not be encouraged in the group. More about the policy in the video
Adhering to the values
Organizational values are above everything. We prefer separation over breaking of organization values. There have been instances of opposition to the agreed policies by internal members and we have separated from them rather than compromising the values
Building the team
Cooperation and competition
Lee Kuan Yew suggested a balanced blend of Competition & Cooperation for highly productive teams. Practical experience shows that lack of competition leads to monopolies in sectors (such as inefficient government departments) whereas excess competition leads to fragmentation (no compassion, cut-throat behavior, low quality of life experience). Hence, it is a leader’s task to establish the right proportion of competition and cooperation to deliver the highest levels of happiness and productivity to a population. LKY’s Singapore is an example of a serious attempt at finding the right balance between larger cohesion and individual competition
Cooperation is the essence of team building and competition is the key to increasing productivity. As a leader, managing cooperation and competition is a key skill to have, without which it is hard to build and sustain teams.
Team building in India
India has a great pool of talent in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. What is lacking is good leadership and training. Zoho built by Sridhar Vembu is the best example of a world class software company based out of rural India. Taking this as an inspiration, we made an attempt to build teams out of rural India.
Reality of team building: How long does it take? How many people stay? . At Hexmos we contacted students from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. The activity started by calling colleges and offering them a product building course. For every 20 colleges we called, one of them would respond positively. We had to get 3 to 4 such positive responses (close to 100 calls). Students from 1 or 2 of these colleges would register and turn up for the session. For every 100 students we teach, 1 or 2 of them would continue working with us
We started with an aim to train the students to be leaders. The idea being — “Leaders create leaders”. Training was hard and a lot of them gave up in between. Students who stayed are now capable of building teams, managing software projects, and building real world usable software.
Problem solving and philosophy
Practice Consistency
Consistent practice yields compounded results. It is effective to practice consistency, the results can be seen in the graph below. At Hexmos, we are consistent in all our activities which include sessions, reading for at least 15min, and working out for at least 10min. We do them every single day.
“Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world; he who understands it, earns it; he who doesn’t, pays for it.” — Albert Einstein
Use Polya’s heuristics to boost problem solving skills
Polya’s Problem Solving Heuristics applied consistently can boost team problem solving skills. Poya’s process to solve a problem can be read in his book How to Solve It . Methods such as working backward, and key questions that help you focus on the data and unknown while solving the problem are some of the highlights of the book. Polya’s methods are used extensively while solving the problem at Hexmos.
Stephen Wolfram’s rule: Be action oriented — 80% doing 20% planning
Hexmos activities are mostly action oriented. Out of 7 days we have only one “planning” session, which is a meagre 14%. We want to actively write, code, problem solve together to produce artefacts rather than consign ourselves to abstract arguments. An interesting application of this principle by Wolfram is his Working session Live Streams.
Prefer shaping over coping
Shaping is engineering mindset, coping is primitive mindset. For instance, a tribal person, when confronted with a fast moving river, may merely use it for day to day purposes and be a bit afraid of the nature & movements of the river. Whereas, a modern engineer is not daunted by the river, but also can see an opportunity to dam the river and generate tremendously valuable electric energy out of it.
Tool building as a way to accelerate bootstrapping speed
Bootstrapping means pulling oneself up through one’s own boot straps .Doug Engelbart suggested that special attention must be paid to the collective IQ of an organisation. Building internal tools & processes to speed up the rate of knowledge creation, acquisition, communication, and reception, one can make an organisation powerful and capable. Hexmos initiatives in line with this philosophy are: our daily reading/exercise programs, building our own internal video platform, woof, hexlets, sslify, etc. More about the tools that we have built can be seen below
Practicing Audacity
Technically fearless
Solving technically hard problems is encouraged at Hexmos. If you are a gamer we start with ray tracers; if you are interested in reverse engineering, we start with compiler design. We are developing the capability to build our own language. As a group, we are technically fearless and we start solving the problem by hitting at the core.
Stepping into the business
Start small and fast; Being new to the field of business we wanted to understand its nuances. For this purpose, we opened a retail outlet in Bangalore. This helped us get insights into inventory management, people management, bureaucracy, and people’s reaction to hard problems.
Contact Us
If you find the read interesting and would want to know more about Hexmos. Drop us a mail at info@hexmos.com. We would love to connect!
