Products of Idiosyncrasies

Why Business Remains Deeply Personal

Hengstream on Unsplash.com

I’m lazy. But it’s the lazy people who invented the wheel and the bicycle because they didn’t like walking or carrying things — Lech Wałęsa, Former President of Poland

Many of us have heard a business rival say “It’s not personal, it’s just business”. However, is it possible to separate Steve Jobs the person from Steve Jobs the CEO of Apple. It was tried once under John Sculley. The rest is history. This article discusses why business has always been personal and why it is almost impossible to get rid of the founders’ DNA from the mission of the company. The beginnings of every business were mostly idiosyncratic.

A Story Shared With The World

As one walks down Dalal Street,a concrete road lined with small shops, hotels and a library tucked in a corner, the cacophony of a million voices destroys the silence but preserves the importance of a legendary hub of business.

Dalal Street, in the heart of downtown Mumbai, is home to the oldest stock exchange in Asia-the Bombay Stock Exchange. The name Bombay harkens back to India’s colonial past under British Rule. In 1995, the city’s name was changed from Bombay to its present “Mumbai”.

Even under British rule, India was very entrepreneurial. Established in 1875, the Bombay Stock Exchange is the oldest stock exchange in Asia. It began with 22 traders gathering under a Banyan tree to trade with each other.

Current Residence of the BSE — Horniman Circle, 1870’s (Source: oldphotosbombay.blogspot.com)

In 1980, the exchange moved its current residence on Dalal Street. A decade and a half later, the open outcry system was replaced by the Bombay Online Trading System (BOLT). As of April 2018, the BSE had a market capitalization of US $ 2.2 Trillion.

Despite a sea change brought about by modernization, the relationships between the brokers (dealers and members of the stock exchange) with their clients and their peers remains deeply personal. A community of ruthless businessmen with deep ties to the retail Indian investor, the broking community is also built on personal and sometimes warm connections.

I must have walked along Dalal Street thousands of times as a teenager. A sandwich shop on the corner served the best snack I have ever tasted. The taste of the sweet chutney made sweeter by the personal relationship I shared with the sandwich vendor and by the price discount that I received every time I laughed with him.

Years later, a teenage fascination with capital markets and numerous interactions with members of the stock exchange left a lasting impact on me. It inserted a metaphorical strand of love for financial services in my DNA. Little surprise then that I am a banker today.

While this story is deeply personal, I recounted it to explain how completely idiosyncratic personal stories lead to our choices in life. These choices lead us full circle to doing the very thing we loved as children. Ultimately, everyone from Steve Jobs to Elon Musk have a unique background and a series of connected life experiences that led them to start a business which in their eyes is nothing but a deeply personal labor of love.

They all have a core vision that, at the time, was considered the hallucinations of a mad man. They aren’t at fault. It’s just that we fail to see what they saw.

Vision is the ability to see what no one else can. It’s the germ of an idea that brings forth a global business.

Every entrepreneurs life provides the fertilizer that fuels the growth of the idea. Perhaps, there aren’t any coincidences after all. Maybe, just maybe, everything is part of a big plan.

Lessons From The Last Samurai

Honda Super Cub 1st Generation, 1958 (Source:Wikipedia)

One of the most iconic brands in the motorcycle industry and later the automobile industry is Honda. Soichiro Honda founded the Honda Motor Co. and turned it into a juggernaut manufacturing the highest number of internal combustion engines in the world. In fact, Honda is the only major Japanese carmaker without a strategic industry partner. It is lonely in that approach considering the rest of the industry is forging alliances and pool resources to harness disruptive technologies such as autonomous driving. Honda Motor Company is a great example of one of the last companies that is stoically independent and reflects the values of its founder.

It is extremely hard, even impossible, for us to compartmentalize our lives into our personal and our work lives. This is because external variables create a seamless continuum of stimuli that our minds responds to from the time we wake up to the time we sleep where those stimuli ultimately encroach on our dreams through our subconscious.

Brian Chesky formed AirBnB because of his own issues in finding affordable housing. Howard Schulz created Starbucks to provide the same cozy experience he encountered on his visit to a coffee shop in Italy. All these businesses are born out of extremely personal experiences. Today, tech giants are manufacturing profits from one personal commodity alone — our data. If all of these stories don’t tell you how personal business is, nothing can.

A Multi-Disciplinary Approach

Think about it — most of the new technologies today are a combination of ideas that already existed. Take any technology, for that matter, from Artificial Intelligence to Virtual Reality and you can trace back their origins for ideas that couldn’t be commercialized in the past because of a wide variety of constraints. As Moore’s law progressed and computers were able to create and manipulate big data, machine learning took off again. This is because any deep learning algorithm is dependent on an extremely large and high quality data set. With the advent of digitization, millions of pictures of animals can be stored and provided to a machine learning algorithm to hone its judgment. In the human world, we call it experience. Many inventions and great businesses lie at the intersection of various disciplines. Let’s look at a few examples:

Yamaha started as a piano manufacturer and subsequently applied its knowledge of material science to manufacturing everything from outboard motors to audio speaker systems. General Electric (GE) formed by Thomas Edison grew into a conglomerate that included financial services and aerospace engines at a point in it’s history. Steve Jobs famously utilized his knowledge of calligraphy to create beautiful fonts for the Mac operating system.

Even if an entrepreneur does not like to, he is forced to learn about a variety of disciplines to run a business.

The Emphasis on Empathy

Source: CNBC on Youtube

There are two messages loud and clear in the business community- a business built on serving society and a focus on the long term.

In January 2005, John Mackey and Michael Strong formed an organization FLOW (Freedom Lights Our World). Within FLOW, one category of projects is called Conscious Capitalism. Conscious Capitalism Inc. recently announced “Heroes of Conscious Capitalim” which recognized many corporate champions who believe in serving society notably Indra Nooyi (CEO, Pepsico), Bob Chapman (CEO, Barry Wehmiller) and Unilever CEO Paul Polman. Unilever Paul Polman has long been an advocate of business serving society.

In 2018, Larry Fink (CEO, Blackrock) wrote an open letter to CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies urging them to consider serving a societal purpose and to give up focusing on the short term.

Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon called for listed companies to stop giving quarterly guidance in a bid to discourage short term thinking. Eric Ries of Lean Startup fame is working on a unique kind of stock exchange called the Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE) which allows companies listed on the exchange and to focus on their long term strategy.

Why is there so much focus on serving society? Its because business has learnt humanitarian lessons the hard way. While a focus on the client is nothing new, a renewed emphasis on the clients’ best interest is a result of a maniacal focus on profits at any cost.

Why Do We Cook?

Biryani is a spicy rice based dish enjoyed throughout the Indian subcontinent. The word Biryani is derived from the Persian word ‘Birian’ which means fried before cooking. According to historian Lizzie Collingham, the modern biryani developed in the royal kitchens of the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), as a confluence of the native spicy rice dishes of India and the Persian pilaf. However, some historians believed Biryani already existed before the Mughals invaders settled in India.

A very thought provoking movie made on the subject of cooking ‘Biryani’ in Malayalam (a language spoken in the south of India) is ‘Ustad Hotel (2012)’.

Towards the end of the movie, the protagonist — a third generation cook hailing from a family of cooks is faced with a dilemma: take over his grandfathers small business in South India or accept a job as an executive chef in Paris. Think about a common dilemma between money and a higher purpose. While the protagonist struggles with the conundrum, a distant friend of his grandfather helps him rediscover his purpose.

While the grandfather taught the hero how to cook, the grandfathers friend teaches him why they cook? The movie focuses on a small van carrying containers of cooked food that stops at a busy street filled with poor people starving for food. The grandfathers friend steps out of the van and starts the feeding the impoverished. This may seem like a common ideological clash ie that between socialism and capitalism.

Perhaps, the answer lies in finding prosperity by following the tenets of capitalism only to then distribute your excess wealth amongst the destitute through charity. It is very hard to think about others when your stomach is rumbling with hunger.

Even though you can satisfy your hunger by eating, the mind can be appeased only by doing something truly meaningful. A very simple question to ask yourself is: If I had all the time in the world, what would I have enjoyed doing and done it better than others? Use that to build a successful venture.

Once the body and mind are appeased, one of the very natural tendencies is giving back to society. Many billionaires have done so but many haven’t. Therefore, giving everyone an education in altruism is society’s responsibility.

Business, always, has to be guided by a higher purpose. If humanity created business, business should serve humanity. The path to servitude could follow from the establishment of a highly profitable business. However, the idiosyncratic beginnings behind every business have to have a common driving force : a beating heart filled with empathy for fellow humans. Only then does a personal dream serve the dreams of others in the society. In doing so, a selfish necessity becomes society’s single biggest triumph.