Contentious nature of Indian Entrepreneurs
Its not the playbooks or playgrounds, but the Playmakers who win it for us!
My lived Explorations as a Wounded Healer
Only the wounded physician heals ~Carl Jung
Wounded Healer
I have been immersed in the Indian Entrepreneurial Habitat for close to 8 years now, and prior to that, I have close to 13 years experience in the US Silicon Valley Habitat. I might not have the pedigree of ultra-successful rockstar CEOs, but I do carry a lot of scars from my failed ventures, so I can safely say there are many lessons I have learnt in this long and arduous journey called Entrepreneurship. Also, after 40, as I lick my wounds, I am compelled to consciously help other fellows and co-travellers, while I embrace the role of a Healer, a Wounded-Healer to be precise.
Contentious Nature of Indian Entrepreneurship
One of the most striking observations in the Indian ecosystem I have noticed is, that which I call “Contentious Entrepreneurship”. Contentious meaning and etymology is that it’s largely based on Content, rather than Experience. Yes, when people read about entrepreneurship (either in their MBA courses or in the over-glorified myths-of-media) and pursue entrepreneurship without any lived experience about building-a-business, and what it really entails, then they are pursuing contentious entrepreneurship. Self-caged, Digitally boxed, Keyboard warriors are turning out to be the archetypal 21st century global-indian entrepreneur.
Nature of content-based or contentious entrepreneurship as its very name suggests, is that, firstly the same content is available freely and in over-abundance to every other wannabe, so the field is automatically ripe for contenders, and hence by default contentious.
Painful Pursuits of Contentious Entrepreneurship
While contenders, competition and achievement, might sound all heroic, lived experience shows otherwise. To achieve anything close to success in the real-world, what you actually need are collaborators, communions, communities and alliances. You cannot compete and win as a lone-warrior, that is a myth, you need to have the ability to mobilize allies, the more privileged allies, the better. This is the anti-thesis of what most education systems teach us, especially modern entrepreneurial-education (which is outdated, to say the least), is largely based on competitive advantage. So when we base our pursuit just out of books-or-content we are at risk of being complete failures in the real-world. For e.g. even today, most entrepreneurial communities exchange playbooks, and spend hours-and-hours of content-based dialogs. Pursuing entrepreneurship for satisfying Intellectual curiosity (what I call the frills-based pursuit) is the lowest form of entrepreneurial pursuit, and all gyan vanishes as we all know, within a couple of days, and very little of any content is retained. That is the fact of all intellectual-content, not just entrepreneurial-playbooks. Yet, it surprises me that Indian entrepreneurs or the Ecosystem itself, has failed to move beyond playbooks. I have in the past, been an active volunteer of iSPIRT, which as an organization based most of its activities on playbooks in its early years, but I realized that playbooks-or-gyan have a very thin margin of value. They do have a place, but at the bottom-most layer of Founder-Strength pyramid.
Founder Strength Pyramid
The image below is similar to the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, so it should be self-explanatory.
Most Indian Entrepreneurial support is in the bottom-half of the Founder Strength. Frills, Thrills and Drills, are what most communities support. Intellectual content based on playbooks and gyans, gives the illusionary rational-relief, whatsapp communities of founders-helping-founders cater to thrills or emotional-relief, while some are meant for comic-relief, other scale a notch up, to even facilitate, cathartic-relief (yes, I have been in a few communities like these myself). Then, there are communities with platform-level support, like Indiastack, Founderstack, etc which gives Entrepreneurs Playgrounds for trying out Drills. I am not discounting these 3 levels of Frills, Thrills and Drills. In fact 95% of most Founders think or know only these dimensions, all I am highlighting is that these Drills, Thrills and Frills are largely still in the contentious realm of Thinking, Feeling and Doing. It’s also anybody’s guess on why 90% of founders fail.
True founder strength however starts to unfold while on-the-job, founders learn to Amp-up their Skills (yes, skill is not a drill, its very personalized), and founders need to understand how to bolster their Inner-Will, especially when facing business-annihilating pandemics or similar crises. These 2 dimensions of Skills and Will are in the top-half of the Founder-Strength pyramid and are in the Conscious dimension not the contentious or compulsive dimension. However, few have understood how to consciously pursue these dimensions, and even fewer communities or ecosystems have tried to systematize these deliberate activities.
Founder Strength is a composite of Will, Skill, Drill, Thrill & Frill. It is the DNA and seed for any business establishment.
What makes a Successful-Founder? The make-up of the Founder himself/herself. In short, the strength of the founder and the traits that nurture that strength. Most successful founders, embody all the 5 dimensions of the Will, Skill, Drill, Thrill and Frills, as a whole, they are able to co-hold both the Contentious and the Conscious. However, Conscious and Deliberate Practices of Skill-and-Will are what differentiates the winning ones from the failed ones. Some founders have started to take Mindfulness, Vipassana, Yoga and other similar psycho-spiritual practices seriously, but they are few and far between. Its not just the Habitat (the playgrounds) and Drills (the Habits), but as Pierre Bourdieu says, the Habitus, that “feel-for-the-game”, that founders develop, that differentiates them from the others. Players who develop their own feel-for-the-game become Playmakers. An AB Devilliers, a Dhoni or a Sachin are true playmakers, they are not just players. So my question to most founders is to reflect and ask whether they are mere Players or Playmakers? As a Founder, is Self-Reflexivity a lived reality?
Further exploration: Playmakers, not just Playbooks or Playgrounds.
Playmakers deliberately practice Self-Reflexivity. Playmakers are ones who are willing to self-actualize their founder-strengths, and help others self-actualize as well. Self-actualization is a process of knowing who-you-are, what your strengths or qualities are, and then making it a material reality, not just in your life-time, but every day. In short, Self-actualization is to be deliberately and consciously connected with your Spirit-or-Quality and embody it in day-to-day activities, thus making that quality a lived material reality. Tendulkar’s quality of living-and-breathing cricket most of his life (not just intellectualizing, or emotionalizing it, but actualizing it), gave him the title God-of-Cricket, Dhoni’s quality of a Finisher created a new-role in modern cricket called Finisher, AB Devillier’s quality as a 360-degree player (in any sport that he has played), also makes him a 360-degree cricketer. Its only when you Self-actualize, you are able to embody your Founder-strength.
Feel for the game and Skin in the game
There are many scientific research studies today, especially neuroscience based ones, that have proven that players who develop their own-feel for the game, founders who practice Self-Reflexivity regularly, are able to Self-Actualize faster than others and also become better Leaders for tomorrow. Yet, the bleeding-edge and cutting-edge technology entrepreneurs of today, seem to be blissfully ignorant about adopting new sciences of personal-growth and technologies related to self-mastery, yet expect their customers, to adopt all their newest technology creations. This itself shows the split-personality, asymmetric quality and hence the fragility of the contentious entrepreneur. Nassim Taleb has clearly shown that asymmetric nature leads to fragility, and unless there is skin-in-the-game to fix it, any system will not be anti-fragile. This applies most to high-tech entrepreneurs of today, and also to the venture-backed communities which invest in the founder and the founder-strength, yet do very little to grow those strengths. In my various conversations and coaching sessions, not many founders are able to answer who they are, and what their primary quality is. Worse, even the institutions which bank so heavily on founder-strength, have underinvested in founder’s ability to self-actualize. So, I assume not many of my fellow Entrepreneurs are clued-in about what Self-actualization means, and how to go about it in daily life?
May be we can begin with understanding how to co-hold the contentious (content or material-based) and the conscious (experience or spirit-based) together. Stay tuned for more! If this post has created at least intellectual curiosity, please leave a comment and please share it with like-minded players, and help us build the playmakers of tomorrow.
