#SoG35 — The Red / Yellow Cards.
This one comes straight from Hareesh Tibrewal (linkedIn, twitter). Along with Sanjay Mehta (linkedin, twitter), Hareesh is the co-CEO of Mirum India (which was Social Wavelength in its earlier avatar, which got acquired by JWT at some point in time in past).
On the 30th of Nov, 2018 they launched their first book, “If I Had To Do It Again” (Amazon link). In the book they talk about their journey as two friends from an engineering college in Mumbai, their first start up and the ups and downs of the journey. I am yet to read the book so cant comment but knowing them it would be a great read!
So, at the event, someone asked how did they manage conflict as two different people with different ideas that could pull them in different directions. And especially in the industry that changes fast, has so much uncertainty and outcomes are ambiguous.
Hareesh gave a brilliant answer and today’s lesson is a direct lift off from that.
He said, like in football you have yellow cards and red cards? Sanjay and he created those cards for themselves. And each of them had a limited number of cards. And when there was a point of contention and one of them vehemently opposed it, the other could use the Red Card. And they would drop the discussion and move on to the next thing. And if the difference in opinion was a tad less and you could live with it, to show for your dissent, you could use the Yellow Card. And since cards were limited, each of them was judicious was the usage of their respective cards!
This reminded me of Jeff Bezos’ famous Disagree and Commit .
More I think about it, more I realise that its such a simple tool to manage things that can potentially stall the growth of the business. This is as emotion-less, as practical, as tangible, as pragmatic tool I can think of to manage things where partners can go in different direction. You can easily manage issues and conflicts.
Funny thing is that the answer was in front of us all along. We’ve seen it on TV for so long. In each match. And yet we failed to see it.
That’s why you need mentors! Go get them great ones that are accessible to you. Get them to lend you a shoulder. That can allow you to stand on and see further.
That’s it for the day. See you tomorrow!
P.S.: I picked three more things from the discussion they had. And since I cant attribute the ideas to one of them, I will use the mnemonic ‘A’ as the person.
- A talked about how for an entrepreneur work becomes the first thing that they ought to think about. He echoed what I talked about in #SoG34 (talks about Elon Musk and his long hours)
- A talked about how these are early days for everyone. He said that rather than aiming to grow your business from, say, 10 crores to 12 crores, you ought to think about 100 crores. And how we are often limited by not the opportunity but by the vision and ambition. He said that at Mirum they can grow at a 50x!!
- A talked about how “valuation” is a bad metric to chase. Rather you ought to chase “value-creation.”
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