Why Goodness is crucial for businesses to succeed

uh good morning and namaste

here is what i’m proposing today that

in order to run a successful business it

has to be

based on goodness or niceness

or kindness so let me state it again

a good business need to be based on

a successful business need to be based

on goodness and niceness

and kindness it does look very

counter-intuitive isn’t it

but allow me to explain my name is milan

kathy

when i was young not that i’m very old

today

i was told that a businessman

is somebody who’s challo who’s jukadu

right um now in english a chalu can

loosely translate into anywhere between

being very smart

to somebody who is a fraudster

but having spent 20 years in my

professional life most of it as an

entrepreneur

i have come to realize that

if you were to succeed in business

especially a startup

it has to be based on being good

now let’s say that you you have a great

idea and you want to start a business

and now in order for that idea

to actually translate into business

require couple of things

one of the first things is

it should be you should you should

validate the idea

firstly second thing is you should have

some idea

of that idea translating into a minimum

viable product

you should have a business plan at least

a rough one which is nothing

but spreadsheets comprising of your

costs your risks

your revenue projections and cost

expectations timelines and then so on

it’s a basic basic

business plan that you need to have

sometimes you might need some money

but you always need lots of support from

friends and family

now let’s imagine this right if i want

to get these three or four

things in order to validate my idea or

in order to vet my business plan

i need experts i need to go to people

whose advice i need

now if your business is not if you are

not a good person

it’s rare that you’ll be able to get a

sound advice from good people

it’s rare that you’ll get introduced to

people who can validate the product or

or a service that you’re planning to

launch so your launch itself will be on

the wrong footing

if you are not a good person if you are

trying to be an entrepreneur

let’s move to the second stage of it

right let’s say okay you got all of this

thing right

so you you you’ve got a great idea

you’ve got to get business plan

there is little money to start off the

next important thing that you need

is to assemble great set of people

now unfortunately good people

are hard to come by right i mean why

would they join you why would they help

you

uh good people always work in great

companies anyways and they are paid well

anyways

so how do you how do you build a great

team of five to ten

initial people uh now that

you’re ready to launch your business

now people like herzberg and then daniel

ping

have done great research around this uh

you can refer to them later

if i were to distill their research and

tell you so

there are certain factors like hygiene

factors

right which are like the salary the

perks the job security the kind of

office that you’re going to sit in and

all of those things if i put them as

hygiene factors absence of these hygiene

factors

will lead to their being dissatisfied

right but presence of these hygiene

factors

does not guarantee their motivation

though

let me say that again right absence of

hygiene factors like salary

perks benefits etc will lead to

dissatisfaction

but presence of those factors does not

lead to motivation

because motivating factors are something

very different altogether

so motivating factors are typically

the the ability for the leader to

inspire the team

inspiration comes from having a much

higher purpose of doing what they’re

doing

giving those people a sense of

accomplishment

right that autonomy that that

that inspiration so those things are the

motivating factors

right so for since most of your

engineering students and

and so so let me put that in mathematics

right

so let’s say minus 10 is a highly

dissatisfied or somebody who doesn’t

want to join you

and plus 10 is a motivated employee

right

so a lot of things in terms of the

hygiene factors in terms of what we

think

are important like pay etc will get

somebody from minus 10 to 0.

but to get from 0 to plus 10 you need

goodness

because you cannot instill that sense of

purpose you cannot instill that

inspiration

unless you are a good person and

therefore you will not get people

great people join you in your initial

team if your business

is not founded on goodness

right so let’s move on now right so

uh uh in terms of uh decision making

right

now the the

in in in the beginning at least at least

in your businesses

most of the times even at an advanced

stage of your startup frankly

there are more unknowns than notes you

know less

than what you should know and yet you

have to make a decision

now here is the thing the what i noticed

i mean having worked and i’ve

really worked hard over the years on on

this aspect of mine

is that uh there’s a very thin line i

call that

as lakshman drake of goodness right this

very

thin line that separates failure and

success or better decision making and

good

a bad decision making now what does it

mean

now when does one become from confident

to arrogant very thin line separates

that

right you don’t know i mean so a lot of

times i used to in my early days used to

sit and observe okay

was i confident was i arrogant

was i assertive and when you when do you

move from being assertive to aggressive

when you start responding and actually

stop that and then start reacting badly

so there’s a very thin line separates

very hard to even differentiate between

the two

right but it’s a conscious effort based

on goodness

based on kindness based on niceness you

will start realizing

that that that a confident person does

not

become a an arrogant person

right now when it comes to decision

making especially in critical times when

you have very little time to do

a good person invariably tend to be

confident and not arrogant

and therefore is assertive in his

thinking and not aggressive in his

thinking

therefore responds well and makes a

sound

well judged decision and not reacting

and making a horrible decision

so goodness again so every day

we need to take short-term decisions and

long-term decisions if i want to make my

startup succeed

and goodness come to your rescue if it

is just

inherently present it makes your

day-to-day

short-term and long-term decision-making

so much more better

right let me move on to the other other

other factor as to how i am

trying to justify what i’m trying to say

the the lot of times especially in my

earlier days

if something has gone wrong right or if

something has

something something has gone wrong in

the entire thing that we are trying to

we used to uh the tendency for me

was to look at again who made the

mistake right that’s what we all do we

try to fix who’s

fix somebody to blame

right but i realize that it’s not

actually who

is wrong you know what matters

it’s what went wrong not who went wrong

what went wrong if you try to

investigate

will give you an understanding of

uh of the situation so much better so

that the same mistake does not happen

again

and it requires a good person to get

into deciding what went wrong

rather than trying to fix a blame on

somebody as to who made a mistake

so therefore every day every time you

and it’s true even when you succeed

actually right

when something goes really right what is

important is

it’s not that who was the hero what is

important is

what went right so that you can

replicate that success

because heroes difficult to replicate

hero x can be replicated replicated

easily

so you have to study the heroism or hero

x not the hero

right so uh

now therefore a good person somebody

who’s kind who is nice

will always look at what went wrong and

what went right

instead of looking at who was right and

who was wrong

so therefore in order to succeed again

in your business

it has to be based on a sound

platform of goodness so if i were to

conclude on this

right so the the

we always have lot of business outcomes

an outcome of

lot of things that we do monthly

quarterly etc it can be

numbers it can be anything the outcomes

so the outputs can become outcomes

if embellished with niceness otherwise

what will end up

is is is is only an output which is not

enough

so uh

the again again just to kind of put it

into mathematical ways if you were to

maximize

and if you consistently try to maximize

profits

right uh you will eventually end up

killing the business itself

it’s counter-intuitive whereas if you

try to maximize

goodness along with the excellence

right you will maximize your profits so

don’t focus on maximizing

profits focus on maximizing goodness

profits is a by-product

so profits so our success

is always a byproduct of excellence

trust me i’m not talking about telling

that okay you should be a

non-profit you should be an ngo you

should be a charity or you know i’m

talking about

business for-profit organizations if you

want to make profits

be good else

uh uh i guess that’s the only way to

make profits sustainably continuously

over a period of long time

so uh i hope i was able to uh uh

talk about the counter-intuitive way it

has taken me lot of years having made a

lot of mistakes to get here

but uh uh goodness

works and now let’s apply all of this

forget business

to our own personal life we need sound

judgment

we need to attract great people as in

terms of relationships and friends

right we need to have lot of ideas a lot

of things that we need to discuss

irrespective business

therefore all these things hold true

again

over there we need to be making sound

decisions we need to be confident we

need to be

all of those things come true even for

life

it’s the goodness that matters and it’s

fundamental

namaste thank you