Why Goodness is crucial for businesses to succeed
hi
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
us
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
do
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