I have all along maintained that all jobs at most levels in the organisations of today are entrepreneurial. If you are the CEO working for the entrepreneur, promoter and the board you need to be entrepreneurial and it’s a pre-requisite for a leadership role in any job.
I have noticed this trend in the last few years and I see it getting accentuated more so in recent times. A lot of entrepreneurs who became entrepreneurs and have created enterprises have gone back to being the CEO of a larger firm in an entrepreneurial role. What made them do that? How does this large firm ensure that this new switch works for the entrepreneur and the organisation and the larger entrepreneur? What happens to the enterprise this entrepreneur had created and how is this entrepreneur transitioning and what happens to his own baby, now that he or she is now leaving for a bigger enterprise? Is it a phenomenon driven by difficulties of being an entrepreneur and/or more by the ambitions of size and scale?
In my business school at MDI 15 years ago I had organised and attended a lecture in 1995 by Udyan Dravid who said to us, “Do you want to be a small fish in a big pond or do you want to be big fish in a small pond?” In today’s context, I would say an entrepreneur going back into a big job is akin to being a “Big Fish in a Big Pond” to use Dravid’s analogy which still rings in my head. It’s a Win-Win, Big-Big situation. I have been in recent times thinking a lot about this as in my / our media industry recently the affable and visionary Raj Nayak of Aidem (a venture he had created almost a year back) joined Raghav Bahl and Viacom-promoted Colors GEC as a CEO.
Colors is a big media brand and a big ship wanting to be bigger. Raj Nayak, a close friend and respected industry leader joined Raghav Bahl and his management team led by Haresh Chawla and B Sai Kumar. I know a lot of my friends in the industry who are also Raj’s friends, who critically dissected and analysed this move and asked why Raj did this. Only the person as in the entrepreneur who did this can give you the real reasons and answer the whys and hows. I personally thought that the move was a smart one and out of the box, and took him into the big league where he belonged always, and that his entrepreneurial energy and background got him this new big job.
A smart entrepreneur even quipped, “The owner of the business has deserted his men and his ship.” I had a more measured and nuanced take (to be honest I do not know enough and haven’t had a chat about this with Raj ji) and the reasons really do not matter to me but I believe it was in some way a merger of equals to create a bigger winning ship with audacious goals and targets for the future. In my view in the event of Raj Nayak joining Colors , two entrepreneurs came together to collaborate in a certain working relationship and it would be myopic to look at it any other way.
I am reminded of what Steve Jobs said when Raj Nayak made this move, “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Let me quote Mark Twain on this one, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” The fight for the monies, both advertising and subscription, is a big fight and the collaboration augurs well for success.
“An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.” Maybe I am the engineer telling you size is important but still missing the big picture. Raj Nayak and entrepreneurs are tuned into this big dream and big picture, and that has got them to make this big switch.
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