Are you in business with your friends?

Posted on by
Reply

One of the most misleading lines, often cited from The Godfather is: “It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.”

An entrepreneur will smile wryly whenever this line is thrown about. Business for entrepreneurs is rarely “strictly business”. It is very, very personal. Which brings us to the title of this post.

The short answer to that question for me is “yes”. I have client relationships with several friends, who are professionals in their chosen areas. My ventures too have always involved friends as co-conspirators and service providers. The tougher questions arise thence. How and when to switch on/ off your friend persona versus your client persona? Is there a priority order of personas, which one can invoke in a situation of conflict? Do all roles/ personas co-exist and you dance seamlessly from one to the other?

Here’s what I have learnt about working well with friends (and not falling out with any of them. Yet.)

Understand each other’s work styles. One of my friends mixes work and non-work so much that he fears no work gets done between gossip, coffee and often a meal. I prefer to work to agendas in work meetings. We now have a happy mix of the two work styles and it works for us. We both work on the agenda, taking segues and tangents, that often enrich our conversation. I am the one in charge of bringing back the tangent to the agenda. He is the one in charge of ensuring we stick to it. In the end we are both in charge of ensuring the other person didn’t feel hemmed in, screamed at or generally disrespected.

Trust each other’s professionalism as much as you trust each other. And be professional yourself. This absolutely cannot be overstated. Professionalism is symmetric — if you are a professional service provider, and I am a client who doesn’t know her brief, pushes you around and is unreliable with her side of the bargain, I shouldn’t expect to be seen as a “professional” client. It either works from both sides or doesn’t work at all. Your choice.

Know when and how much to push back. This is the tricky bit. I have been in a situation, where I have had to defend a professional service provider we engaged, with my collaborators. My friendship was an asset in this conflict but equally possible was that my collaborators thought of me as favouring said friend, because, well, she was my friend! And it did happen. The first couple of times, I tried to explain gently that it was not the case. But at the third instance, I made it amply clear that I did not appreciate the insinuation of impropriety and lack of integrity. I also made it clear that I was working hard to make things work, because others were not fulfilling their job of building an independent relationship with the professional, taking the easy route of “Oh, she is Shefaly’s friend!”. The push back seems to be working. I have taken a back seat in managing that particular relationship, and one of my collaborators is working to build his own equation with the service provider.

Professionalism #fail does not mean friendship #fail but lessons are learnt. In one of my ventures, we hired a professional to render essential services. He is a competent professional in his field but turned out to be most unreliable in many ways. Despite several reminders from me, an engagement letter was nowhere to be seen for months. Absolutely no advice was forthcoming on broader matters. Finally we disengaged. We are still friends but having seen his competence being compromised by his loose professional standards, I do not recommend him as effusively as I used to.

Communicate. Emails. Phone calls. Twitter direct messages. LinkedIn messages. Whatsapp. Google Hangouts. Whatever works for you. But, communicate. It prevents confusion that silence may create. Communicating about what pre-occupations may be keeping you from responding quickly on a mutual matter can foster trust and can enable the other person to extend help as a friend rather than just be the professional you engaged to do some work.

Know your bottom line. What will you walk away from? Every human interaction is but a negotiation. And while there are best outcomes we would like, we also need a back up. So it is best to think ahead: if you had to choose between the friendship and the professional engagement, what would you walk away from? It is a harder call than it looks. Something to think about. In advance.

Coming back to The Godfather, in my view, the trilogy is an object lesson in vision, strategic thinking, organisation building, leadership styles, ethics, “work life balance”, the political economy of business, individual freedom, and heteronormative patriarchy and its discontents. And the futility of it all.

Which brings me to the line that I find most affecting in the film.

“Your father did business with Hyman Roth; Your father respected Hyman Roth; But your father never trusted Hyman Roth.”

This line sums up why being in business with friends can and often does work.

Vito Corleone and Hyman Roth were never “friends” but they did business together. Between friends, however, there is pre-existing trust. Also, hopefully, shared values, a consideration for one another’s well-being and mutual respect. The business comes at the end of all this and benefits from all this.

If, however, in the end, business triumphs at the cost of friendship, it is worth remembering that above all, The Godfather is a story of distrust and mistrust. And this is how it ended.

Four For Friday (21)

Posted on by
Reply

Before long, the title of this sometime-series of readings will be just an alliterative poetic licence. The week serves up worthy readings far more numerous than four, way before Friday. If I take into account the entire gamut of my interests — that all feed off and feed one another — then the task of curation becomes trickier still. The liberty of sharing more than four however shall be taken. Liberally.

Good story-telling makes for good products. While the article focus on technology product design, it is also an idea core to design at Livyora (declaration of interest: founding COO!).

On Twitter and in the workplace, it is power to the connectors, says Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

Older minds make better decisions. Because they selectively retain information. This link came via @chrisyeh who is a brilliant person to follow on Twitter. (Bonus reading: this review of a well-written, accessible book on the matter of the grown-up brain.)

Chief Marketing Officers must embrace technology. Or fail. This link came via @syamant, one of the most thoughtful strategists and doers I know. Related to this theme I spent a brilliant day at Chinwag’s Psych event about neuroscience and marketing.

If, like me, you have a penchant for spending guilt-free days at the British Museum or the Victoria and ‘s jewellery section, you probably have an altruistic streak. Say scientists.

Our mothers, ourselves and risk literacy

Posted on by
2

The web is on fire with Ms Angelina Jolie’s honest and unsentimental account of her elective, prophylactic double mastectomy, appearing in the New York Times. She writes about her mother, who died at 56, having suffered cancer for a decade. She also writes about how she is a carrier of the BRCA1 gene. Her risk profile, she writes, was estimated at “87 percent risk of breast cancer and a 50 percent risk of ovarian cancer”. This risk would manifest itself before menopause is reached.

Not for me to comment on how our mothers – living or not – continue to shape our lives. I lost mine when I was 4. As far as I am concerned, I will never find out what she may or may not have suffered from, had she lived to age 46 (which was the age at which Ms Jolie’s mother’s cancer was diagnosed, according to publicly available information). Or longer. Every day I live defies all risks I may or may not know of.

But in this age of “austerity”, and living in a country with a publicly funded healthcare system being ravaged by budget cuts and the looming threat of privatisation, I worry. Alas the NHS’s postcode lottery is all too well-known for us to hide from it.

When TV celebrity Jade Goody died of preventable cervical cancer at the age of 25, it increased the uptake of pap smears in the NHS. When Kylie Minogue made the news of her breast cancer public, there was a 20-fold increase in the uptake of mammograms and early screening. There may now well be a worldwide surge in the uptake for genetic testing for BRCA mutations, which may be attributable to Ms Jolie sharing her experience.

Which is not all bad news. An estimated 20000 breast cancer related deaths could be prevented every year in the UK, not all attributable to advance knowledge of genetic markers.

I am sure you all know everything I have written so far. So I come to my main point. It is both a policy concern and a societal concern.

Risk literacy in the general public is rarely if ever discussed, even as risk communication remains ever-present, slightly sensationalised, yet incomplete or poor. For instance, BRCA mutations are almost exclusively discussed as a risk factor for breast cancer, following which ovarian cancer. Why not discuss that BRCA mutations may almost double the risk of cancer of the fallopian tubes? Which can be detected early and treated.

We still haven’t fully explained, in plain English, what it means to have a risk of X% versus Y% of getting A or B type of cancer. Risk really is a two-part concept: an undesirable outcome and the probability that it will come to pass. The probability may be expressed in numerical terms — making it sound, to most people, very accurate and reliable, which may not be the case — or in generalised terms such as “negligible”, “considerable”, “very likely”. Thereon it is a case of how one’s own risk propensity matches up to the description of a risk. That is what decisions are often guided by.

Here’s a story. A friend of mine, who had her first child at age 34, was told she had 1 in 1200 chance of having a baby with Down’s Syndrome. She said she took the chance. She is a highly educated, mathematically literate, senior pharma industry executive and struggled to explain to me what it really meant. To take that chance. She finally said: “Whatever I get I shall deal with.”

So that is what it comes to. Dealing with it.

Ms Jolie dealt with her risk in a certain way and shared her decision in unsentimental language with the broader public. It will increase awareness about BRCA for sure, but will it lead to better-informed decisions? Hard to say. Not everyone who gets tested — with the myriad (if you will ignore the pun**!) of genetic testing firms mushrooming in the market — will have access to the sort of counselling Ms Jolie might have had access to. Increasingly the choice to get screened or not is being left to the patient, even as this review took place because too often women are informed of the benefits of screening but not the harms. Back to risk literacy then.

Ms Jolie’s candid sharing of her experience needs to ignite a debate on risk literacy — not just BRCA mutations, breast cancer, or preventative mastectomies.

I have a final point. Men get breast cancer too. Because the absolute risk is low, the increase in the chances of a BRCA mutation carrying man getting breast cancer by age 70 or beyond is dramatic. This is also the age, when a lot of medical and health insurance policies start to enforce exclusions on the insured. With institutionalised differences between how men and women are treated by the healthcare system, surely risk communication about BRCA should include the risks to men, shouldn’t it?

Of course, I care about the issue as it affects men — I have only one parent left and it is my father.

(** If you missed the pun please read this. As well as the history of the company. Thanks.)

Brands and the coattails of success

Posted on by
1

“TAG Heuer congratulates its beautiful rebel – MC Mary Kom into the Semi Finals of the 2012 London Olympics.

The glamorous TAG Heuer Woman shares Mary’s restless and rebellious nature. Like her, she excels at her game, knows how to win, and how to celebrate. Creative, confident, always plugged in, she never stops building on her achievements and pushing herself to be better, but she also knows how to relax and have fun.”

Says the TAG Heuer brand page on Facebook.

This is Mary Kom, who now needs no introduction. Do click on the link to see Ms Kom looking beautiful and resplendent indeed.

Did you do a double take on seeing that photo? If so, join the very large club. To feature as a TAG Heuer ambassador, Mary Kom has to be airbrushed to look like someone she is not. Yes, being adorned and looking gorgeous is a woman’s right and privilege. But when that adornment makes Ms Kom’s appearance and not her performance or character the centre piece, one has to wonder about the O word in brand marketing. Objectification.

Objectification is central to “celebrity endorsement” in brand marketing. Picking a person to represent a brand’s abstract, often fuzzy, promise is the purest form of objectification. It also happens to be, in my view, the epitome of laziness and paucity of creativity in brand marketing. That is how TAG Heuer, that uses film actor Shahrukh Khan as a brand ambassador in India, now thinks Mary Kom is a fit for their brand. Yes, it is ok to take a few moments to get one’s head around what Shahrukh Khan has in common with Mary Kom.

Nor is the post-Olympics upsurge in luxury brands rushing to sign up medal winners – particularly in emerging markets – a compliment to brand managers.

In a mature market, brands sponsor and support promising athletes. When a sponsored athlete succeeds, the brand can stake a legitimate claim to associating with that success. In the UK for instance, RBS has sponsored Andy Murray since he was 13, when he was a relative unknown playing junior level. Like athletes, brand building isn’t an overnight success of TAGging along to someone else’s, but actually investing in it. But is that what is happening in the emerging markets (emphasis on markets)?

Mary Kom wasn’t entirely an unknown before the Olympics. Even if women’s boxing isn’t your thing, heck, the Intelligent Magazine did a superb piece on her stardom before the Olympics. Did the five-times World Champion Mery Kom not strike TAG as a woman who “excels at her game, knows how to win“? Or was her life story not an example of her “pushing herself to be better“? Her close shave with poverty can’t have been much about how to “have fun” but TAG could have eased all that by promising her support before she became famous. Instead of sponsoring her when she needed help, the brand now wants to ride on the coattails of her success.

Of course, emerging markets are less about brand building and all about reaping the rewards from the “markets” overnight. Aren’t they? Investment? What investment?

Four For Friday (20)

Posted on by
Reply

This week’s readings are mainly about cultural themes – openness, archiving, sustainable thinking (yes, even in luxury!) and – in the week that welcomes Olympics to London -  performance enhancement.

Academic research should go from “filter, then publish” to “publish, then filter“.

How can museums preserve our digital heritage?

Rio Tinto (yes, them!) launches a sustainable jewellery collection. It is the only miner certified by the Responsible Jewellery Council at every stage of the pipeline.

British Medical Journal discusses the science of hydration and sports drinks, and the links between the industry and academia. You may be able to watch this BBC Panorama programme titled The Truth About Sports Products too.