Those Who Can’t Keep Up With The New India Should Die With The Old
As with politicians, it should be the same for businesses and employees
Version 1.0 (Created 02-April-2019)
Here we discuss what the Old India looks like, and what we’ll be doing to get our initial Unicorn 20.
Operational Phase 2
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As of April 2019, we’re moving to Phase 2 of our operational plan in India. We’ll first reiterate a couple of things.
We’ve stated it before, and we’ll state it here again. One of our most important internal goals is this:
We’re going to break the Slumdog Millionaire stereotype of India.
For those of you who have never traveled outside of India, we always recommend visiting the following Reddit (the world’s largest online community) subreddits: r/india, r/indiadiscussion, and r/bakchodi. First get a sense of how the rest of the world perceives India, and what it needs to do to battle those prejudices.
Stating what the problem is right now for McKinley & Rice Creativity Pvt. Ltd.
The management is doing most of the work for the company. They pinpoint mistakes in UI, mistakes in film editing, mistakes in recruitment, and mistakes in the code. So when management is partially sick or goes on leave for a few days, the entire process goes apeshit.
Then again, it’s not currently an option to delegate major roles and responsibilities to others because should we do so, we feel everyone will revert their processes back to an ‘Old India’ style of work.
The Unicorn 20
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Our rule and belief is simple. There are startups in Silicon Valley creating 10x value. Twitch.tv reached a valuation of $1 billion between its 30th and 100th employee. Heck, even law firms in South Korea are generating $20 million revenues with under 50 associates. We believe that within 1.3 billion people in India, we can find our initial 20 amazing teammates, the Unicorn 20.
If you don’t agree with this, you should get the hell out of McKinley & Rice.
Additional Note: Honestly, this is a problem even for tech giants like Infosys and TCS. If they had solved their quality control problems by now, they would have destroyed all software companies around the world, as China’s Lenovo is doing to U.S. PC manufacturers. People only worry about cost insofar as that quality is not compromised.
Old India — Communications Gaps
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This is something we’ve observed about a lot of companies, and a lot of employees.
They keep asking for more and more instructions. Even down to text spacing and alignment. And this is what we say to them every time:
What’s the difference between a construction worker and an engineer?
If (a) you need the company to give you exact instructions on how to execute your work, or (b) you are going to say you can’t work on X technology because you’ve only worked on Y technology, that means you’re just going to be a factory worker or a construction worker, yet you want to be paid an engineer’s salary.
Simply put, engineers have intellectual capabilities. Construction workers don’t. (No offense, We’re just talking about their roles given a certain project. You don’t expect a brick layer to decide major architectural alterations. Please don’t attack this generalization.)
Old India — Half Assed Reviews
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Another thing we’ve observed about a lot of companies, and a lot of employees.
Given a deadline, the team does about 70% of the work and asks for a review. (e.g. Sloppy typos and grammar in reports.) To this I’ll just say:
Mediocre.
While few in number, English Reports in South Korea and Japan are proofread and edited at least once before being submitted. And yet India is the country that has English as its official language. I don’t want Indian Reports being degraded because of their grammar by a Japanese Client.
The same goes for the tech and design teams. When I set a deadline, I mean I want 100% percent of the work to be finished at deadline. Not 70%. Not 90%. Only 100% completion is acceptable.
Basically, we have a contractual liability to complete all projects by their respective deadlines. If we deliver 99% of the project by deadline, it’s still a breach of contract. It’s pretty much worse off than if we had never taken on the project at all.
Old India — No Proactivity
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Again, one additional thing we’ve observed about a lot of companies, and a lot of employees.
Given a title, no one really looks at ‘why’ they were given that title and position. They just try to emulate‘whatever their peers around them’ are doing. For instance, for the Tech Team, no one really keeps thinking about ‘how are we going to build the strongest tech team in the world; should we hire better or should we teach better’, and for the Human Resources team, no one really wonders ‘how are we going to target our recruitment campaigns better so that we end up sniping the best candidates with minimum ammo’.
Again we say to this:
Not proactive enough.
We expect everyone to enhance their game, until we have the Unicorn 20.
