Monday, March 22, 2004		Guest Speak

BEFORE 1991, the concept of being in business was impossible for someone who did not either have deep pockets or the right connections.

In the early nineties, things started improving on the economic front. India was finally unleashed on the world and several new industries emerged, software being at the forefront. This led to the setting up of new companies in the software and Internet arena. Venture capital was made available and becoming an entrepreneur became fashionable. The media splashed success stories of '20 something Indians becoming multi-millionaires in the US, creating a huge spiral of the great India dream within India. The concept of a sale of business acquired tremendous respectability. Lots of youngsters started setting up companies and in fact, the entire dotcom era was a celebration of youth. It was almost that the younger the entrepreneur was, the better were his chances of catching an investor's fancy.

We all know what happened to the dotcoms. They came crashing down even before the ink of several of the term sheets, which investors had signed, could dry up. The most negative fallout will be that young persons will once again be hesitant to start new companies.

It is a proven fact that a country can't progress if the proliferation of business is slow. Jobs don't get created if the finest of minds with sophisticated training take jobs themselves. Jobs get created and demand is generated if these minds set up companies that hire, grow and make profits. So if India is to create companies that can scale global levels, it will have to rely on the entrepreneurs in their twenties and thirties. Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison, Narayan Murthy, Dhirubhai Ambani, Azim Premji all were in their twenties when they took their entrepreneurial plunge.

The reason is simple. While youth comes with some downsides like immaturity, impetuosity and impatience, it has an all important ingredient - energy.

A combination of energy, hunger and vision is what drives business leaders. The hunger to succeed, to see dreams turn into reality and to become rich and famous. While this can be countered by saying that as one matures with age one keeps upgrading the personal benchmarks that one sets for oneself. Therefore if a person who has already achieved a certain milestone sets up a company the company will pitch itself at a larger scale.

Let us examine this in some more detail to really understand what separates men from boys. To begin with, a 'great' company has to satisfy the following four criteria:

1. Sustained growth year after year with increase in topline and bottomline and with the rate of growth being more than what the market is growing.

2. High measure of customer satisfaction and therefore retention

3. Long list of applicants wanting to join the company and an equally long list of companies wanting to hire from you.

4. Employees who deliver higher than what they would have otherwise delivered in a similar environment.

Getting people who work in the company to deliver more than they themselves thought they were capable of will really create the winning culture at the start and that is what gets translated into a great company later on. It is here where a younger leader scores. The ability to bond with team, create an identification (and in this case, more with the person as the company still doesn't have a brand to identify with) and therefore create the necessary passion which makes a person perform beyond potential is easier when one is young. The only exception to this would be if one is trying to create a team in which the people that you will hire will be of a higher age bracket in which case being too young would be a disadvantage.