The lunch-hour traffic in Woodlands is thick, and the restaurant is noisy, but my eyes and ears are tuned to what Shekar is presenting on a laptop, cosily next to business thali in front of us and hungering for our attention.
The subject-matter of discussion is Shekar’s forthcoming book, ‘Sky High: 7 steps to building an Everlasting Company’ (PQP). Thankfully, for my video-shoot, he obliges to re-present his ideas, sitting in the car, under a tree. Let’s catch up with R. Shekar and his slide-set, beginning with ‘Dream play’.
Every business leader aims to transit his/her business from one level to the next, says Shekar. “Starting out as an entrepreneur, they strive ever harder to stabilise their operations first. Next, they aim to scale up and expand their market and branded presence. It is precisely then that they discover a loss of business confidence, executive ineptitude, and erosion of their competitive advantage. Finally, they envision breaking out into the next orbit, be it into new geographies, technologies, or even user segment.”
In their hurry to secure quick gains, the top executives mistakenly invest in piecemeal remedies, hoping to secure immediate relief, he rues. “All businesses are in a state of perpetual transition. Yet, the majority of organisations, despite the best efforts of their leaders, resist change, and become most vulnerable.” Evidence of a ‘discount war,’ postponed investments, indiscriminate cost-cutting, delayed payments, ad-hoc borrowings, and a prayer for subsidy and write-off, are examples of these, mentions Shekar.
His book ‘Sky High,’ written as a business novel, chronicles the evolution of an immigrant founder CEO, Harpreet ‘Happy’ Singh, as he learns to graduate from a cottage industry to become a publicly-listed company.
The seven sequential steps to building an ‘Everlasting Company,’ according to Shekar, are as follows:
1) Business Alert: Learn to read the business signals and interpret the likely trends in the future.
2) Business Acumen: Discover the magic; a mere 1% change can bring about a lot to the business.
3) Business Clinic: Compute the value of needless daily waste and how much one could gain by arresting it.
4) Business Pulse: Install ‘Early Warning Alerts’ and detect opportunities and risks, ahead of time.
5) Business Mandate: Install cash-flow disciplines to generate definitive cash surplus.
6) Business Presence: How to exploit the current investments and envision shifting into the next orbit.
7) Business Showcase: How to showcase future potentials and bid up the valuation of the company.
Thus, shows Shekar, you can move from ‘suspense and self-doubt’ to building an everlasting enterprise.
A book, perhaps, that is worth skipping a meal for, Happy-ly!