The Liberated Entrepreneur
Entrepreneurs often struggle with managing time and freeing themselves from firefighting and micromanagement. They also experience the ‘fear’ of ‘letting go’ leading them to be trapped in the management of their everyday operations rather than strategic thinking and leadership.
In today’s episode, our guest, Balaji Pasumarthy, talks about how entrepreneurs can create trusting work cultures and self-managed teams that allows them to refocus their energies on growth and scale instead of daily operations.
Source: Unsplash | Artist : Mohamed Nohassi
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About Balaji Pasumarthy
Pic: Balaji Pasumarthy
Balaji’s Passion is to Liberate Business Leaders from constraints, so they can be in their flow. His expertise is in creating self driven and self organising teams. He shares his expertise in the Liberated Enterprise Creators Group Advisory Program.
Through BNI and Golden Square Offices he smoothens the process of getting clients and having a productive workspace. He did his B-Tech from IIT-Madras, and MBA from IIM-Bangalore. An Entrepreneur most of his career, he believes work needs to be joy, and Entrepreneurship is about expressing your core.
Resources
Liberated Enterprise Creators website: www.liberatedenterprise.com
11 Entrepreneurs Share their Success creating Liberated Enterprises, Liberated Enterprise Creators
Balaji Pasumarthy sharing at IIT-Hyderabad-Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator: AISEA
Balaji Pasumarthy on the topic "living the core," interaction with Leela Gangappa
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
Transcript
Sowmya 00:13
Hello, everyone, and welcome to The WorkWise Pod, a weekly podcast in which your hosts, Deepak Menon, and Sujatha Rao dive deep into figuring out how to make our workplaces more fair, just and fulfilling, while still getting big results and meeting those KPIs. Today, they're talking to Balaji Pasumarthy, about moving away from conventional management methods to a more liberating self-management system. Stay tuned.
Deepak 00:48
The recently released 'Business as Identity' Report by Ascent and MHI highlights a huge mental pressure faced by entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs experience persistent fear of failure, performance pressure, loneliness, and fatigue. And in India, we find it challenging to express ourselves to our family, or friends, for fear of being judged.
Sujatha 01:10
Yeah, and I think that's the key point, right? Because many entrepreneurs are just so immersed in the day-to-day problem solving, right, of their organization. Sometimes they lack the knowledge, or the awareness of alternate ways of leading and managing. You're just so busy, you know, running the treadmill. I think they would be surprised at how some of these alternate models and ideas of leading and managing might actually liberate them from the day-to-day running of their operations, and instead allow them to focus on the purpose, right, of their enterprise, the values and strategic aspects of their business.
Deepak 01:57
Balaji, from your experience and what you have witnessed, what do you see that entrepreneurs struggle with the most?
Balaji 02:04
I think entrepreneurs feel trapped in their businesses in various ways. One is they identify too closely with their business. So, their business success is their success, and you know, that relationship is very strong. And the second reason why they feel trapped, is without them, the business just cannot run. And so, what about their life, their quality of life, and so on and so forth. So, I think this is a very typical problem that entrepreneurs face. But way you do it and certain thoughts we have in our mind, about how to run businesses, how to organize teams, and how we look at people, our concept of work. So, all these things that we kind of start examining, you will notice that a lot of practices that are prevalent around us today are possibly outdated, and there is a better way of doing things. I know some people might hesitate to use the better way but, in my mind, it is a better way of doing things and having a liberated enterprise rather than an enterprise where you feel that without you, things won't work. So, I'd say that is what people really struggle with.
Sujatha 03:17
So, Balaji, you said something really interesting, which is the identity of the entrepreneur is so connected to the enterprise, right? And there's no difference between the self and the enterprise. And this, this mindset of perhaps wanting to control everything, right? Because you haven't learned any other way. I just want to step back from the immediacy of this question to sort of ask you, how did we arrive at this sort of a mindset, right? I mean, is it true of entrepreneurs around the world? Or are we seeing this more sharply in India?
Balaji 03:52
So, I think there are two parts to it. One is the way we go about building our organizations. And the second is what we have grown up with, and what we are surrounded with in terms of management practices, and so on. So, there are two aspects. So, if you look at an entrepreneur's journey, when you get started with your business, you're an organization of one typically, right? So, everything that happens in organization is what you are doing yourself, and so the relationship with organization and yourself is so close, that it's very difficult to kind of separate this in our mind space that these two are different. Organization can actually be an entity on its own right. and you are a separate person, it's very difficult to make that distinction. And it's an in the beginning, you're doing things in such an instinctive manner, that it's very difficult to kind of get others to do what you might have been doing or let go of what you might be doing. So that's one aspect. The second aspect is how our institutions are run and what we have grown up with like schools, your first job or organizations where we have worked. So, we have noticed certain way of working, certain mental models about what we mean by work, and how teams are organized, how bosses interact with subordinates and things like that. So, assumption really is that the body and the limbs are more important than the mind, and the soul, so nobody talks about the soul in organizations, right? And I think the moment we start shifting our focus to this something more important than the body and the limbs - but it's actually how engaged people are at work, which essentially means how connected you are with your mind and your soul with what you're doing on a day-to-day basis as people. The moment we start making these shifts, we start looking at organization models, which are very different from what we are used to. And since we're not used to these alternate ways of organizing people, it becomes a really tough to have that liberated kind of self-organizing teams and being liberated as an entrepreneur. So, I'd say these are the two main reasons why we find it difficult.
Sujatha 06:01
That's, that's really interesting, Balaji. Deepak, you've been an entrepreneur, right? And the sort of mindsets, learned behavior that Balaji is talking about, how much does that resonate with your experience of being an entrepreneur? And sort of looking back, do you see some of these alternate options that Balaji is talking about now make sense to you? Or were these things that you had already explored or examined when you were an entrepreneur?
Deepak 06:33
I think in my case, I had the benefit of reading about unconventional methods, you know, right back to Maverick, you know, those kinds of books. So, I had a certain grounding in unconventional methods, and have certain belief system that human beings are more than just employees? And how do you bring our entire self to organizations. In spite of that, I struggle as an entrepreneur to do that in practice. So even when my mindset was there, and the method I knew, this identity of my success as a human being so strongly linked to the success of the organization and the enterprise, I would say skittled my efforts, even though I had the mindset and the method. So, it's just not the method mindset convention. It's just the fear of failure, and the fear of this, I think, fear of failure and other attachment to success. So, I think these two, maybe five, six years back, I struggled. Now, obviously older, and not much wiser, but older, perhaps, helps in certain confidence. And then the ability to do that. I think, for me, it's definitely my experience. What has yours been?
Sujatha 07:49
Well, I think, possibly starting older, I don't know, wiser. But starting from the strong belief that, you know, Superman is fictional, and that one does not need to bring that into real life. My experience has been far more along the lines of what Balaji is saying right now. Right? The separation of yourself from the organization, I think it's a very powerful first step, because then it allows you to ask the question, what best serves my organization and not necessarily what best serves, you know, me, whether it's my fears, my anxieties, my goals, my preferences, and so on. So that has been interesting. And it started off, at least with my enterprise, it started off as something that embeds, you know, what Balaji was saying the non-factory model as the heart of what we do. So, I'd like to hear more about that Balaji. What is this better way that entrepreneurs can move towards? And I know you have an interesting model that you've been talking about. So, could you tell us a little bit about that?
Balaji 08:58
Okay, I was just thinking maybe for the benefit of the listeners, I might contrast what the existing way of doing is, and what you know, a liberated way of doing is. Just to kind of get a contrast. So, this is an experience I had a year back or so. So, I was driving my car from Coimbatore back to Bangalore. And suddenly, there was a burst sound/ loud sound in my car in my accelerator, you know, started giving way to slow down quite a bit. And this was near Hosur. So, we parked the car and called up the company for help. So, what do we do? So, they said, okay, we just wait there, we'll send you a tow truck. So, I told him that see, we are very close to Bangalore and the car is moving, so slowly, I can take it home and you could actually pick it up there. And they kind of said no, no, you be there only we'll pick it up. But you know, I didn't want to wait for few hours there. So, I said, okay, you know, just do this like so later we reached home and we kind of logged in again the complaint to just send somebody to pick up the car. And they insisted that we're sending a tow truck. Because somewhere I think in their system, it was that we had to send you a tow truck. So finally frustrated. I said, “Okay, fine, send a tow truck”. Okay, and the car is in the basement, the tow truck can't come into the basement. So early in the morning, around 7.30, in the morning, the tow truck came, and we said, okay, fine, we'll bring the car up. So, we brought the car up. And then they said, okay, fine. Why don't you take it? So, the driver says, no, just wait, our person has gone to get two bottles of water. Okay. So why have you gone to get two bottles of water? Because we are supposed to give you two bottles of water, right? They say we just came out from home. So, why do you want us to get water, we have water at home, if you want, I can give you water? They said no, that's what is the thing. And now it's early in the morning, all the shops are closed. So, my boy has gone to get it. So just wait. So, we waited there waiting for two bottles of water that we didn't need for some 15 minutes. And the boy came, he gave us the bottle. And you know, we signed the documents, etc. He took the car. Later in the afternoon, a call came from the call center saying that did you get to two bottles of water? So, if you kind of look at that example, you'll see how the organization has been designed like a machine, right? Because they're following checklists. And the driver knows that we don't need water, but he has to follow the process because that's what is mandated. Right? So, you are kind of taking away the human initiative out of the whole process of delivering good customer service.
Deepak 11:28
That's, that's really funny, Balaji. We've all had these experiences from machine kind of organization. But you were about to speak about alternative methods. So kindly go ahead.
Balaji 11:40
So now contrast that this to what happens in Golden Square. And now we are a serviced office, right, serviced office is offices with teams of people who will make sure that our clients, our members are really productive at work. So here, there was a conference happening and one of the participants, you know, he was about to go out. And he had parked his car, a few roads away, right? And he went there, and he noticed that his car tire was punctured. So now he was you know, frantically moving around looking for help. One of our team members noticed this, and his name is Murugesh. So Murugesh noticed this and said, "Okay, sir, what's happened?" He said, "Yeah, there's something wrong with the car tyre." Immediately Murugesh said, "You just come sit in the lobby, you know, I'll get you some coffee and tea and read this newspaper will take care of it." And Murugesh actually went ahead and replaced the tyre and in a few minutes came back and said, "Sir, it's done, you can take your car." Now, if you look at it, we are not a mechanic company, we are not into automobile, nothing. This was not a call of duty for Murugesh at all, I know. But he took it upon himself to make sure that the client was happy. And he was taken care of. So, he lived by the motto of our organization, which is joy at work, right? He enjoyed whatever he was doing in terms of serving the client, but the point is our client as well experienced joy. So just to contrast, the two types of behaviors, right, when you're thinking about an organization like a predictable system, or machine, and human beings are part of the machine, they just have to follow instructions, and some KRAs and things like that, right? Whereas in Golden Square, what we believe is people know exactly what's to be done, people are responsible. And at any given point of time, at any situation, they will know exactly how to respond and how to take care of our clients. And we give them the total freedom, authority, and leeway to be able to do whatever they need to do at that point of time. So that is the contrast in terms of the two types of organizing, organizing your teams.
Deepak 13:45
Balaji, that really mean that entrepreneurs have a choice. They have a choice to design empathetic, responsibility-driven organizations, where people have more freedom, more autonomy, more leeway, instead of just a machine-like kind of an organization. But how do you get started on something like that? How do you get started designing such a system?
Balaji 14:13
So, I started with some simple things. For instance, the simple thing even to my team, right? So early in those days '95. See typically, we had outsourced the housekeeping work, right? So typically, the thought process is you need somebody from our organization to make sure that everything is safe, you know. After all, so many laptops of our client all this are there, right? So first initial discussion was a team member said "see, then we need to also come in at least one of us needs to come in early in the morning to make sure that everything is safe." I said, "See we can trust our housekeeping staff, right? So why don't you just give the keys to them, and they'll take care of things okay?" And till date, 25 years, we have not had a single incident where we had to point a finger at our housekeeping staff, right? I outsource. They are there only for a part time, but you know we can totally trust them. So, this kind of thought process, this kind of language that we can trust, we can assume that our team members, whether full time or part time, or whatever, they are responsible people. What typically happens as entrepreneur is, you know, okay, fine, you're created all the systems, you're done all of these things. But somehow, what do you do with your time, right? So, if you're, so since you have time, and you need to do something, you start doing things in your business. And that's what I was doing. I realized quite later that I was actually involved with clients, and I was involved with operations. And I was kind of, they're all over the place. But then I started a new business, which was a magazine. And when you start a new business, that requires a lot of your attention, right? And I realized that I was not able to do what was required to be done in this new business, because I wasn't in that office, even though I was talking empowerment, and I was talking all of that it was not really so. People were still reaching out to me. So, what I decided was, let me disappear from this place. Let me disappear from Golden Square. So, I took another office close by, and I said, "Okay, I'm going to shift my 'Businessgyan', magazine's name was Businessgyan's team to that office. And, you know, don't contact me, from now on, I told my golden square team. And whenever a client used to call, I used to just say, you know, Sandeep, he will handle it. Sandeep is now my COO in Golden square. So, he'll handle it. I kept saying that, even if a team member calls me up, Sandeep, we'll handle it. So, I kept doing that for three - four weeks, and after that those calls stopped. So that was my first, what shall I say, truly getting liberated from my business, that is Golden Square business. And I believe that actually Golden Square did much better once I did that, you know. They may not have done it the way I might have done it when I was taking those decisions but once I did that, actually, it did very well, it has scaled up. And I think only now in the last two, three years, I'm getting a little more involved with Golden Square because of the changed environment that it is facing. But you know, all these years, I think, out of those 25 years of Golden Square, maybe I would have been hands off for more than 15 years, I would have been totally hands off. I wouldn't know what's happening in Golden Square. New branches would come up, I'd be just involved in the initial stages, and so on. So, the rest of it, the team does it. So, it's been that self-organizing.
Sujatha 17:23
And using the example that you have before you, what would be some of the characteristics of the self-managed teams that work with you now, right, across your organization? What would be the nature of these teams? And if as an entrepreneur, I wanted to move in that direction, what are some of the things that I should start considering when I say, let me move towards self-management?
Balaji 17:54
Okay, sure. So maybe first in terms of the nature of things, right? So how do my teams work? How do they take decisions and so on? So typically, the one of the rules about self-organizing, is you create small teams, right? So, we have got six locations. So, each of the six location branches has a team, which is kind of identified with Okay, this is the team which looks after this. And within that, it is more or less, the team figures out who has to do what, right. So, there's a fundamental assumption over here, that and which is different from the machine, or in a factory type of mindset, where you look at people as distinct individuals, right? In a sense, they come with their own passions, their own talent, their own limitations, their own capabilities, and so on. So, you, we don't believe in standardization of what a particular person has to do. Okay? That doesn't mean we don't have best practices. So, there are best practices in that "Hey, this is how you handle clients. This is how you either use the CRM", all of that is there. But as an individual, you're unique, and you need to be doing things that you're really good at and you're passionate about and so on. So, while these various tasks which need to happen in a particular, say, department or an organization or a unit, who does these different tasks depends on who is good at that task in that, and who wants to do it in that particular team? Right? So, we kind of have that differentiation, that it's not the job description, but it's really about the right composition of a team. So, the composition of a team also matters. So, we have in each team we have people who are may be good at talking - the relationship part, that people are good at the analytical part. So different skills are required. So, as a team, you have the different skills which are required or different passions, which are required to get the various tasks which are there to be done right? Now, who does what is dependent on the team to figure it out? Right. So that is one key aspect of it. So, our teams figure out who needs to be there in the team, who needs to do what, who takes leave, who doesn't take leave. In fact, there is no leave policy. As an organization, we don't have a leave policy, we don't have an attendance policy, we don't track who works, how much. All of that, you know, people know who's working, who's not working all that, because these are small teams, 12 people maximum, you know, that's the thumb rule. So, people know exactly what everybody else is doing, right, it's so visible to each other. So that's one principle of the design. So, they are able to take decisions on their own. Right. So, we also have cross-branch teams, because there are a lot of shared activities like marketing, website, all of these are shared activities, right? So, we have people from, so we call them "Circles" in Golden Square. So, we have branches as circles, we have marketing team as a circle, we might have accounts as a circle. But we are very lean as a head office or a central team, we don't really have anything like that except for, maybe three people who don't belong to any branch per se. But you know what, their salary is actually paid by the branches, so finally, they are accountable to the branches. So that's the kind of structure that's one of the principles around which we organize it.
Sujatha 21:07
So, when you say that the teams in a sense, decide, right, so A, you've separated the person from the role, right? So, I could play multiple roles within my team, right? I might do a little bit of marketing, or I might do customer or, you know, or I might do client, you know, I might do different kinds of roles. But you also said that the sort of, the teams figure out what needs to be done and who does what? So, are there supervisors within the teams? Is everybody at the same level? Does this happen through a process of just consultation? How does that happen?
Balaji 21:39
Yeah, so there are there is nothing called a supervisor or a boss or something. But typically, what happens is, in any Circle, there will be someone who kind of starts taking the initiative, right, and others kind of look up to that person to take charge of the team and show some direction, and so on. Okay, recently, we started putting a name to it so far, we didn’t. But recently, I'll tell you why we did that. We started giving a name called Galvanizer, okay. Because in a team, you need somebody to kind of say, "Hey, no, we need, we need to go in this direction", right? There has to be some consensus and some direction needs to happen. So, who does that? Whoever has the passion for it. Okay, so anybody can say that I'm the Galvanizer. And there's no special privileges or anything, for a Galvanizer. There's no, you know, a person from a different pay scale or something like that. There's nothing like that. A Galvanizer is somebody who's passionate about galvanizing a particular activity or particular cause or particular initiative. So, it's as simple as that. So, they're the ones who kind of coalesce that and within a circle, there could be multiple Galvanizers, for various different, you know, activities, which might be happening there. And it happens naturally. And it can change as well. It can be very dynamic. Somebody is getting tired about whatever they're doing, and they're kind of off their thing. So maybe somebody else will start taking initiative, and they become the Galvanizer. So, it's as natural, as fluid, as that.
Deepak 23:06
So, Balaji is self-management, emergent leadership, these models are really, really fascinating. The skeptic in me, though, would ask, "do these models work well, in a crisis?" For example, how is your system responding to the pandemic?
Balaji 23:23
The interesting thing is now our organization is really getting tested because of the COVID. And our business is totally, totally affected, because people are working from home, people are downsizing their teams. So, we are actually getting tested a lot in these times. And the interesting thing is things like you know, salary cuts, there is no negotiation in our organizations. People have decided how, because they know the numbers, right, they know the financial numbers, and so on. So, people have, so the only thing I did was "Guys, let's come up with a model, where we think about our business in three stages, right - Survival stage, Sustenance stage and Success stage, right." And by the way, we are very good at our numbers. Our team members know exactly what's happening in our business. "So, let's create a model where survival happens at a very, very low occupancy rate. Right? So can we create a model where we need to spend very little to survive, okay?" And so, I just created this broad framework of how to think about it. And then I left it to the teams to figure out how to make it happen. Teams figured out how to reduce their team size, reduce their salaries, and, of course, renegotiating with our building owners and so on. There, I had to get involved because the building owners and I have a relationship or they believe that, you know, I need to be involved. So, I had to get involved. And we were able to, you know, cut down the costs. Some people had to be let go. And so, we don't have HR department to do all of these things, our teams did it. So, they talk to members, so some people we had hired recently. So, they talked to them that "see I think our expansion plans are getting stalled; so why don't, you know, you come back later, right now we are not able to afford you." So, all of these conversations happened, you know, by the team members within the teams and so on. And other beautiful thing that is happening is where teams have, the other direction, so to say was that I gave was that "Guys, we don't how far this COVID thing is going to last and how it's going to impact office space uses and so on. So can we think about creating other business models, where our salaries are not dependent on space, income from space, right". And so many different ideas have come up and initiatives have come up. And some small projects already started giving results. So, this is the kind of thing that's happening. So, this is really testing time for the model, as well as for our organization. So, let's see what comes up on top because - is it the COVID or is it our organization, which comes up? But for me, as an entrepreneur, it's very, very satisfying that my team is responding to the situation in this manner. So, it happens the other way around. Often it is the team member who says that I think we need to reduce salaries and so on, it's not me saying that "Hey, guys, you're to reduce salaries". It's more the other way around because people have taken responsibility for these things.
Deepak 26:08
Sujatha, some of these principles that Balaji has been talking about is fairly known in the holacracy frameworks in team organizations. What are the things which are common in many of these models, alternate management models?
Balaji 26:27
So, if you look at it, you know, so we might be using different terminologies. But the fundamentals are very, very similar. Whether it's holarchy, or Teal, or Senko style, self-organizing or chaotic organization. So, there's so many different terminologies, we use for these organizations. But if you look at fundamental look at it, very similar characteristics in these organizations. And I totally recommend 'Reinventing Organizations' by Frederic Laloux because he actually captures what are the essential aspects about these various types of organizations, gives it some color names. And these, so most of the organizations around us are what he calls Orange organizations. And the teal is the main color he has given to organizations like these liberated organizations is my word.
Sujatha 27:21
I think none of this can happen without trust, right? Your fundamental belief that human beings work best when they are empowered, right and have a sense of agency and ownership. I think the other thing is the notion that if you are growing larger or scaling up, it's not necessary that your organization must immediately deal with large numbers, right? The essence of small and that's where I think self-managed teams really shine, right? That you get decision making happening quickly, because you can work with a smaller group of people, having conversations and decision making can be done through negotiation, rather than the checklist in that manner. So, I think the second would be just this notion of small. I think the third is differentiating the person from the role that, you know, most of the time, you attach a job title and a job description and say, I am a marketing manager or I am, you know, a HR person, whereas you're asking the question, “what are the tensions my organization is facing and what can we do to address that?" And anybody can do it right, the person with the inclination, the opportunity, the competency to do it. So, I think separating the person from the role. And I think for entrepreneurs, all these three are a little difficult, right? Because it's your baby. I think as organizations grow, traditional models of organizing, creep in, right, and you don't allow, I mean Balaji was talking about the extent of decision-making authority that teams have. You know, as an entrepreneur, are you willing to do that? And are you also saying, well, I trust my teams to do it well? And lastly, I think, you know, Laloux talks about it as 'evolutionary purpose', right, redefining the purpose of your organization, which could grow beyond your initial idea of what you want your enterprise to be, right? You may start off by saying, "This is my enterprise" but it takes a life of its own. And if you allow that to happen, then the enterprise could be far more than what you had initially conceptualized it to be. So, I would say for me that the those three are sort of similar across all of them, right? When you talk about holacracy, whether you talk about Teal, all of them, a trust, agility, it really in terms of small, an openness of conversations, and just the evolutionary purpose, right, you keep re looking at the purpose of your organization. And I think entrepreneurs find all three of it challenging, certainly in our country, and certainly, that's what data is telling us. The 90% that I, you know, we started talking about 90% of enterprises fail. Why? Because you have, you have the wrong model for the wrong purpose, right? The design is incorrect.
Balaji 30:15
Yeah, I totally agree with, you know, why do entrepreneurs find it difficult? It's not because fundamentally, it's difficult. It's like, they don't know that something else is possible. And that's been my experience. People who, entrepreneurs who believe that I want to do it or what shall I say, that feeling that "hey, you know, what I need to kind of get, make this happen". So, it actually starts with that. But once that belief is there, and you start appreciating some of these methods, it is actually not difficult at all. And I've seen results happen within two, three weeks of people embracing some of these concepts. So just change these assumptions and focus on what's really important. What's really important is the results, right? So, what are the results that you really care about? So, once you make these fundamental assumptions, things change. Another important concept over here is people confuse lack of skills with lack of responsibility, there are two different things all together. So, if something goes wrong, or something doesn't happen, as per our standards, it could, the last thing we should look at, think about assume is a person is not taking responsibility, that's the last thing we should assume. The things may not be happening for fundamentally, these reasons - One there's an expectation mismatch - the person doesn't know what really is expected. The second is they don't have the skills to be able to do that, right? The third is because they don't have the aptitude for this. They don't have aptitude. We have put the wrong person in the wrong job. Okay, so the only the last assumption is, if you kind of, and all of these can be corrected, right? You can set the right expectations, you can train someone on the skill, you can actually make the change in terms of the, you know, what the person is doing, in terms of the aptitude is not there for that particular; the inclination, sometimes it's also the motivation, right? So, the inclination, aptitude is not there, sure, we can make the change, or you know, or work on the inclination, why this is important for the person. If all of these things, you can have an intervention. Only then you, kind of, you know, question the person, whether this person is an irresponsible person, or not. Totally. If then if the conclusion is somebody is irresponsible, why have them in the team at all right? We don't want the irresponsible people in our team. So, I think that framework is a good way to kind of think about people, help them and so on and so forth. But what really happens is people go to the last assumption first, right? These people are not responsible to do their work, so I need to kind of be there to supervise and control so that they will do what they're supposed to do, which is the last thing people should be looking at.
Deepak 33:05
So, what would your advice be that entrepreneurs can take to move forward in this direction?
Balaji 33:12
So, one advice would be surround yourself, start you know, start absorbing these concepts. You know, we can read books, start with Maverick, read Reinventing Organizations, you know, or attend one of our workshops. So, I conduct workshops on this called under the 'Liberated Enterprise Creators' banner. So, attend these workshops, so get into this, kind of, get all these concepts inside. And then the other thing is maybe surround yourself with people who are also doing these kinds of things. So that's the other thing that I'm doing as part of the LEC program, that I'm creating small groups of entrepreneurs who have already done some of these things, and so that they can share their experiences, you know, and that gives a lot of confidence and belief and learning. Well, because there's always something a better way of doing it, right. So, you, you learn from each other, and keep so I suggest do these things. What I did was I started reading a lot of stuff around these concepts - self organizing, empowerment, and or kind of similar books and things like that. They just often move to kind of give me the sense of "Balaji, what you're doing is fine, you just do what you're doing. You don't have to do it in some other way." So, and learning as well, because when you read the case studies, which are there in Reinventing Organizations, you know, you start learning new methods, new ideas, and so on absorbing them as well. So that's what I'd suggest people could do to get started.
Deepak 34:49
Is there a question that you felt we didn't ask you Balaji?
Balaji 34:53
I'm just wondering. Yeah, so one question which keeps coming is, you know, blue collar workers versus "my team is not educated enough", right? And so, we have had some lovely examples. For example, one of our early entrepreneurs who came in came into this Liberated Enterprise Creators, he makes chemicals for the foundry industry. So, he started embracing these concepts. And one day, he had a supervisor in his factory, and that person left. So now he was wondering, should he hire another supervisor or not? Right? And since he was exposed to this concept he decided not to. And two his surprise the quality of the work actually went up. Okay, so see he noticed, and so he just told his workers, blue collar workers, that "Hey guys, you're in charge, you can do it." And he started noticing people are actually proactively doing things like maintenance works on Sundays, not mandated, no overtime, okay. They're doing it on their own. They're buying spare parts and things like that with their own money, and then getting it reimbursed. Okay. And he doesn't have a quality control department. And he was saying that my rejection rates, there's no rejections actually, from the client. Okay, so the quality of his output has actually gone up. And so, it works everywhere. So, it doesn't have to do anything doesn't have anything to do with, you know, education, maybe education is an impediment, if at all, it has nothing to do with education, it's nothing to do with, you know, the background or the person. You know, once you assume your people are responsible, and they can take responsibility, they will amaze you with so many, so much of their initiative.
Deepak 36:49
And maybe they've been waiting all the time for somebody to trust them in the first place.
Balaji 36:57
Yes, exactly. That's right. That's right. And the other very important assumption over here, if you're, you know, if you're aware of the Theory X, Theory Y, McGregor’s thought process. So, whatever is your assumption as a manager, right, or as a leader that actually comes through. So, if you believe in people, the evidence will show that people can be believed or trusted, right? If you kind of start with the assumption of that you know, people don't like work, they need to be supervised, your assumption will come through, you know? So, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. So just changing a few, making those few tweaks in your mind about what is it that you assume about people, about organizations, about why we are, why do we need to exist as a company, a lot of these things change. And I think another fundamental in terms of Teal Organizations and so on, is that, as an organization, we make money, we create value not by exploiting things, right, not by exploiting things, but actually genuinely providing value. And I think a lot of our management practices is about exploiting something, you know, exploiting natural resource or exploiting people or exploiting a monopolistic situation and so on. I think that that's also another very fundamental thing, because if, you know if you kind of aligned at that level, that we are here to provide value, not to exploit people, not to exploit resources. I think a lot of lot of our activities, actions become very, a lot more genuine.
Deepak 38:41
So, what I found fascinating in today's conversation was certain key principles that we ferreted out that could be applied in any context. It could be applied across industries, it could be applied with supposedly blue collared workers, doesn't really matter. And also, there are two key principles that we could start off immediately, we don't have to wait.
Sujatha 39:09
And I think some of the things that Balaji has spoken about are very practical, simple steps, right? Start by educating yourself, reach out and find where you can find support mechanisms to do this. And some of the things he's spoken about are not complex, right? They're, they're complex in your mind, because you have to bring a mind shift change to it. But they're not complex in practice, right? Because there's so many examples of this and how it works. So, I want to say thank you very much, Balaji. It was really a very interesting conversation.
Balaji 39:39
Thank you so much. It was lovely speaking to both of you, since you also you're already aware a lot of a lot about these things, right? You kind of absorbed in it. So, you know, it was lovely speaking to both of you. Thank you so much.
Sowmya 40:03
Thank you for listening. That was Deepak and Sujatha talking to Balaji about applying liberating self-management methods in every context. You'll find some of the resources he talked about in the show notes as well as on our website www.workwisepod.com. We'd love to hear from you. Please write to us at hello@workwisepod.com or comment on our website. And don't forget to hit subscribe. We're available on all podcast platforms. Today's episode was produced by Sowmya Karun. Our cover art is by Sanjali Ranjan, and our intro outro music is by Derek Clegg.
