Vikrama Dhiman's Blog

In his seminal work, Good to Great, Jim Collins and his team highlight 3 key people decisions that universally helped companies transition from Good to Great (exceptional performance much above the industry standard they were in for 15 years in a row). They used quite a strict criteria to not only select who made the cut but also whom to compare with.

Why did these 3 things stuck with me?

• When I coach teams and organizations on Agile Frameworks, invariably the question of people management comes. These 3 points are broadly what I have been recommending.
• The likes of Google, Facebook and more recently Flipkart in India, have been following these principles and, talking about them. It was good to see support from empirical research driven findings.
• Finally, the recommendations themselve make sense.

Here are the 3 key people decisions you can 'choose' to make:

1. When in doubt, keep looking. And keep looking could take several weeks and months. Hence, companies like Google, Facebook, Flipkart and Directi (where I had an opportunity to work) are always hiring. Bhavin Turakhia, the CEO of Directi has "Always Hiring" in his email signature and unless the entire interview panel is sure of the candidate, the person is not brought on board. Always Hiring means 'Always keep looking'. 
   • So, what happens if you find a great person but there is no opening? Simple. Create one.
   • Jim Collins and his team concluded that while to be good, your business performance can outpace your rate of acquiring good people; to be great, your rate of acquiring good people should outpace everything else in your business. Else, you'll not only hit a plateau but actually decline.   
2. When you need to make a people decision, act. Good is the enemy of great. Colman Mochlar, the ex-CEO of Gillete said, "Every minute devoted to putting the proper person in the proper slot is worth weeks of time later". Not only should you get the right people on board, you should also make sure that you put them at right place as well. When you realize that the fit is not happening, try to move honest and able people around. You don't have an option but to let go off others. 
3. Put your best people where your best opportunites are, not where your biggest problems are. The 'right' people should be solving the 'right' problems and not dousing fires. That is one key difference I see in companies that are ranked great to work at, and those that burn people out -> the more productive you are, more you focus on something classified as extremely important for the company / team and not solving urgent issues. Take the case of Marlboro. At a time when Joe Cullman was at Philip Morris, international revenues of Marlboro were 1% of company revenue. However, Joe and his team saw a major opportunity there. What did they do? Rather, who did they entrust? Their top performing person : George Weissman. At that time it looked like punishment to be handling something so insignificant after handling a major revenue line. However, quickly, Weissman developed markets like Europe and Marlboro became the best-selling cigarette in the world three years before it became number one in the United States. 

How important are these people decisions?

Well, Jim and his team again go back to data and bring out an hypothesis. They also test the hypothesis to see if it worked in all the cases of "good to great" and was absent in all the cases of "good to average" or "good to poor". The hypothesis is this ->

Decide who you want onboard before you decide where you are headed. What does that mean?

The book uses the analogy of a bus (a lot of CEOs used that too in their interviews). Before deciding where to take the bus, first get the right people on the bus [1], shuffle or remove people so that they are sitting on the right seats [2] and have them debate where to go, and then go [3]! That is correct. Don't decide your strategy before you have the right people on board.

P.S. Agile goes a step further. It recommends that you evolve continuously as "right" people and "right" knowledge comes along. 

We can round off with a quote from Walter Bruckart, VP, Circuit City during the good-to-great transition years. When asked what were the top five factors that led to the transition from mediocrity to excellence : "One would be people. Two would be people. Three would be people. Four would be people. And, five would be people."

How do you know whether or not you have found the right person [1], or a person is not working [2]?

For [1]:

According to Jim and his team, would you hire that person again?

According to me, if you did not have an open position, would you create a position for that person? 

For [2]:

According to Jim and his team, if a person came to you and said, "I am leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity", would you be terribly dissappointed or secretly relieved?

According to me, same :)

Recently, I interviewed the Chief Products Officer, Make My Trip, Amit Somani at the Scrum-India NCR Meetup. The meetup was held at Xebia India Labs, Gurgaon (great hosts as always).

The talk was on the theme "Product Manager 2.0 : Beyond Product Ownership". It was a rich talk and touched on a variety of aspects of Product Management - right from hiring to culture to growth to metrics. The talk video is available below. It goes roughly like this:

1. First 3 minutes : Journey of Amit Somani to CPO, MakeMyTrip.com
2. Next 6 minutes (up to about 9 minutes): What does it take to crack a Product Manager Interview at Make My Trip
3. Next 4 minutes (up to about 13 minutes) : Where should Product Managers be recruited from
4. Next 7 minutes (up to about 20 minutes) : Product Management at Google
5. Next 6 minutes (up to about 26 minutes) : Why is the culture of building and excellence so less in India?
6. Next 4 minutes (up to about 30 minutes) : Role of Product Manager in an Agile and Scrum world
7. Next 6 minutes (up to about 36 minutes): Integration of Product and Services side in B2C portals like MakeMyTrip, and the role of Product Managers
8. Next 2 minutes (up to about 38 minutes) : What's the conversion rate for users to customers at MakeMyTrip, and is this a Product Manager metric
9. Next 3 minutes (up to about 41 minutes) : What is the role of Research in Product Management, and what role do Product Managers play in Positioning
10. Next 2 minutes (up to about 44 minutes) : Why is it hard for companies to be customer focused unlike say Google
11. Next 6 minutes (up to about 50 minutes) : Does Indian culture comes in the way of Innovation or following your passion
12. Next 3 minutes (up to about 53 minutes) : Does Domain Knowledge matter for Product Managers?
13. Next 4 minutes (up to about 57 minutes) : Who makes the best Product Manager?
14. Next 3 minutes (up to about 60 minutes) : How do you decide if a product has reached its shelf life?
15. Next 4 minutes (up to about 64 minutes) : When should a startup look to hire a Product Manager?
16. Next 4 minutes (up to about 64 minutes) : How would you respond to Product Managers, who say that "They did not have the authority to get things done"
17. Last few minutes : Book recommendations

Recently I read the blog post by GigaOm, recounting his 10 years as a blogger. He has written a blog post every single day (sometimes three posts a day, weekends included) for more than 10 years. I reflected back on my own Agile blog. Even during my most productive period, I blogged only thrice a week. Now, this may explain why I haven't become a GigaOm but it also raises another question. Maybe, I "want" to blog but not "want it bad enough". It is an uncomfortable thought. And, as the many variations of this tweet suggest: "If you really want it, you make time for it. Else, you make an excuse." Unfortunately, I do not have a recipe or a cookbook to make me "want to blog really badly". I can only hope to surround myself with blog posts such as above and create a vision where there is a halo of a successful blogger around me to possibly create some action. Let's see :)