Q. 25 years, 20 countries, 2,900 employees and a client list that includes four out of the Fortune Five. What an amazing journey. As a wildly successful entrepreneur, what advice would you give to those who are just starting their entrepreneurial journey?
A. If I was an entrepreneur reading this today, I would have asked, “What do I wish, I knew 25 years ago?” And the answer is: Knowing the most important relationship that I have…and it is the relationship you have with yourself. When you figure that piece out, everything else becomes a lot easier in terms of the foundation, building a company, getting employees, finding customers etc.
One of the things that I found out about myself is that one of my big drivers was ego and ego forced me to make a lot of mistakes. Let me give you an example: In the 90s, we were growing very rapidly and my board of advisors advised me to groom a second tier of leadership. I believe I am a legend in my own mind, so being a legend in my own mind I refused to adhere to the advice. And as luck would have it in spite of the fact that we were in boom times, the company started running into a cash flow crisis and this happened completely because of my mistake. I had to go out there and get funding, buy out my partner and lost my equity position. All of this cost me actual cash. But I am glad that I made that mistake at a younger age because that gave me ample time to correct my course.
A good friend told me, “You have got a massive ego encased in a veneer of humility.” That is basically who I am. Also, fear is my constant companion; I am so neurotic I don’t even know when I wake up in the morning whether I am going to be happy or sad. But once I accepted that and I learnt to embrace and manage it, life became a lot simpler and a lot more fun.
So, my advice to those who want to build their own business is to understand the relationship they have with themselves. Without that understanding, you will have a constant battle, a constant struggle. Once you learn who you are, embrace it, don’t fight it.
Besides this, keep learning, be resourceful, develop your presentation and communication skills, be flexible and adaptable and develop your personal brand.
Q. What is the role of a mentor or a coach? Is it a journey that you have to cover on your own, make your own mistakes, reflect about them and move on? Is there a quick fix?
A. It took me 25 years to grow Kenexa, which clearly shows that I am dense, intellectually stupid and just completely ineffectual. You establish those three factors just by the duration and time it took. Earlier in the journey, because of my ego, I didn’t have mentors but now I have an abundance of them.
And so one of the things that I found really useful is the creation of a career board, and I talked about it a little bit in the book that I wrote called ‘We’. The notion of having an individual board of directors for my personal development, for the organisation’s development is a true gift. I am fortunate that I have three different boards now, including one that is now over 20 years. We are CEOs in Philadelphia. We meet once a month for half a day, I have known these people for years now and we are completely honest with each other. So mentors in my opinion are very important.
Q. How do you build those groups of mentors? Once you accept that getting help will be beneficial for you and the organisation, how do you engage people?
A. Every human has a need to teach because through teaching you learn. When you learn, you grow and the day you stop learning is the day you start dying. In your interactions through the questions you ask, you give the other person the opportunity to teach you and in effect they are learning about themselves. The insightfulness of the question you ask forces me to think about what I have learnt. So the next time you ask me to do something else, I will be more than willing because the insightfulness of your question drove learning within me. Therefore, never be embarrassed about what it is that you have to offer, be insightful in the questions you ask and that to me is the easiest way to get mentors.
Q. When you started 25 years ago what was the driver? Did you always want to build a company that could impact the society or you just started with a dream to build a company and this idea of impacting society came along the way? What was your vision?
A. My wife and I were on vacation in the US and our idea was to tour around the US and work for a little bit. I discovered that while I had the same designation as an American actuary, they were paid 50 per cent more than Canadian actuaries. So in my first year of business all I did was to call up 500 actuaries that I knew asking them if they wanted to increase their income by 50 per cent. I became a head hunter; I placed 15 of them and charged 30 per cent of the fee. You work out the math, my income went up by three to five times and I took like eight weeks off on vacation. It was all a lark.
And then along the way I started other businesses. I had the individual rights to distribute Panadol (a European equivalent of Tylenol) in the Commonwealth of Independent States after the Soviet Union broke down. Then I had guns pulled on me by the Russian mafia and being a coward I ran away. I have had a number of businesses, most of which have been flaming failures. Along the way, I realised that in order to build a sustainable business there had to be a purpose for its existence.
The purpose that was driving me personally at that time was serving humanity. I believed that if you are engaged at work, you are a better parent, a better partner, a better spouse and that’s the way we served humanity because we became a better community member. Engagement at work began by putting the right person in the right job, maximising their performance and experience and that became our mantra. So there was our purpose, there was our vision and then we started building products around that idea. I wasn’t smart enough to have a grand vision, we just happened to be at the right place at the right time.
Q. How do you integrate employee engagement with your organisational scorecard?
A.The leader of an enterprise is the CEO and most people think that CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer. That’s not true: CEO stands for Customers, Employees and Owners. The question then revolves around maximising the experiences of each one of these stakeholders in order to build a sustainable organisation. When we understand that employee engagement results in higher financial performance and better customer satisfaction, the ‘why’ becomes very clear and tonnes of data support that. Total shareholder returns become 300 basis points higher, turnover is lower, customer scores are higher. Once the ‘why’ is clear, you leverage the creativity of the business to foment and ferment the employee engagement practices. The same rules used by successful businesses to create exemplary customer experiences when applied to the employee population can result in high levels of engagement. Once the why is figured out, each organisation can figure out its own magic potion.
Q. With employee engagement being an important metric on the CEOs score card, what is the opportunity for CHRO and what can they do as a community to claim that business role once and for all?
A. The CHRO is an absolutely enviable position in today’s world. The CHRO controls the profitability of the organisation and once they realise and accept and embrace this responsibility, their journey will become a lot simpler. I believe that the CHRO is suffering from an identity crisis that is self inflicted. No one around has told them that they are unworthy of their position. The CHRO who says I am unworthy of my position is living in a world with his/her paradigms wrong and it is up to him/her to change it. It is what I have often said to my kids, “A general is never appointed, a general always takes the generalship”, a CHRO will never be appointed, until the CHRO takes the brass ring themselves and says I am responsible for this and I am going to take charge, things will continue to remain the same. In India, you have a wonderful opportunity: You have the youngest population out of the large economies, you are a driver of lot of economic growth around the world and you are in an era where your enterprises are world renowned. Why not grab it, the only person stopping it is yourself. Take it, it’s yours.