| Sunday, 10 September 2023 |
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Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
As we approach the September equinox, the days are getting brighter. And after a few really good spells of rain, Bengaluru’s skies are bright electric blue. The rains have breathed new colour into the trees and plants too. Even the air smells fresh and crisp. No wonder that Gabru, our five-year-old indie dog, loves to laze near the balcony doors and stare out into the green and blue horizon.
I hope you are having a content Sunday too. My theme today is very much in keeping with the overall mood. Let’s talk about subtracting, deleting, and forgetting.
I had an entirely different subject planned for today till I saw a LinkedIn post by a business leader I’ve also known as a friend since the late 2000s—Srikanth Rajagopalan, the CEO of Perfios Account Aggregation. We first met when Srikanth was a founding team member at one of India’s earliest “fintechs” in India, ngPay, a company that was perhaps five years too early in my opinion. He’s incredibly opinionated, energetic, and ambitious, perhaps even infectiously so.
Srikanth’s post said, “Beware the addiction to busyness. The best leaders I’ve worked with have asked clarifying questions rather than given directions, and been available when I needed them, rather than insisting on being consulted on everything.”
But it was the article from The Economist he had linked to that stood out even more. It said, “The best bosses know how to subtract work.
[aesop_nutgraf_quote_block title=”Companies are used to celebrating addition. Profits, customers and share prices should go up rather than fall. Innovation is the adding of new products. Larger numbers are a measure of career success: managers climb the corporate ladder by taking on more reports, running heftier budgets and trousering bigger salaries. Genuine superstars don’t just add. They multiply. The best software programmers are tagged as “10x developers”, for supposedly being ten times more productive than their peers.<br/><br/>
Firms are not always opposed to subtraction. There are good kinds of cuts: carbon emissions, most obviously. Reducing costs is a necessary part of management, though not a welcome one. But the value of doing less is underestimated. The best bosses are those who take things away as well as add them on.
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Hari Buggana
Chairman and MD, InvAscent
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Harshil Mathur
CEO and Co-Founder, Razorpay
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Kiran Mazumdar Shaw
Executive Chairperson, Biocon Limited
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Co-founder and CEO, Obvious Ventures