Old School Vs New Age
An ET Magazine -MavenMagnet study delves into how startup CEOs,
the rockstars of today, stack up against their traditional
counterparts
Harvard
professor Krishna Palepu has had many famous pupils.
One of
them was Sunil Mittal, founder chairman of Bharti Enterprises,
which
operates the Airtel telephony brand in India and abroad.
When
Palepu met Mittal, more than two decades ago, he was a participant
in an
owner-president programme at Harvard and was known as a seller of
telecom
equipment. It was the mid-90s and Palepu remembers him obsessed
with
landing a cellular telephony licence. “Sunil had no idea how to run a
telecom
company,“ re calls Palepu. “I will figure out if I get the licence,“
Mittal
had told Palepu.
The
brash entrepreneur of the mid 90s is today one of the captains of
Indian
industry. The outsider of yester day is today an incumbent leading
a $16
billion conglomerate spanning from retail to financial services.
Spanning
continents too, from the Asia-Pacific to Africa.
Two
decades ago, Mittal created a business, grew it, and he's now nurturing it.
Today
India is seeing a clutch of equally brash startup artistes take new
ventures
to billion dollar valuations in quick time.Their enterprises, with
an
average age of five years, are still in the early growth stage, and it will
take some time to get a handle on how they
will play out, what levels of
size
and scale they will attain, and what their evolving business models will
eventually
look like. Let's call this startup bunch the creators, who have age,
the
trust of investors, passion and the risk appetite to push the envelope.
Mittal,
for his part -along with the likes of Dilip Shanghvi of Sun Pharma –is
at a stage where he would be referred to as
visionary in business case studies.
Having
seen the future, and plunged headlong into it, he's now scaled a
business
that needs nurturing more than fire in the belly or an appetite for
risk.
Let's call this brigade, which will also include second-generation
promoters
like Mukesh Ambani and KM Birla, the nurturers, along with
the
professional CEOs at the helm of established entities like ITC, ICICI
Bank
and Infosys, led by CEOs who are poster boys and girls of institutions
built
over decades.
ET
Magazine teamed up with conversational research firm MavenMagnet
to
take a look at a pool of new-age entrepreneurs, and compare them with
the
captains of India Inc, seeking answers to questions like `How would a
Flipkart's
Mukesh Bansal measure up against Reliance's Mukesh Ambani?'
or
`Who will draw a bigger crowd in a college -Cyrus Mistry of Tatas or
Kunal
Bahl of Snapdeal?' MavenMagnet's Conversa tional Research
technology
tracks online conversations on open platforms and social
media.
The founders of the top 10 Indian startups by funding up to
August
2015 were compared to the leaders of the top 10 Indian business
groups
by market capitalisation.These CEOs were chosen to analyse the
impact
and influence these two groups have and the perceptions about them.
The
initial answers confirmed the prevalent notion that the ecommerce
czars
are the rock stars. They rule the mind space of the youth in startup
hubs
like Bengaluru or the National Capital Region. Explaining the
youth
connect, Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi says:
“Even
before the youth of India started to connect with the new-age
entrepreneurs,
we took the first step of understanding and connecting with them.
It's
simple, we are creating products for the masses.“
On a Different Trip
As the
study dug deeper for the reasons for this connect, we found how
widely
divided are the perceptions about Indian businessmen of today
-divided
between the old and the new. The study also shows that traditional
industry leaders have lost the perception
battle in their ability to grab an
opportunity.
On the other hand the younger founders are seen to be on the
ball.Palepu explains this as an
entrepreneur's readiness to jump in and
then hustle his way through a situation when
he lacks resources, money
or knowhow. The new-age CEOs are also seen
to be more professional
than
their traditional counterparts because of their ability to deliver top
valuations.
Clearly they are seen as the value creators and perceived as
being ahead of their seniors on this scale.
Adi
Godrej, chairman of the Godrej Group, accepts that he has learnt
from
the startup phenomenon in India and feels that ecommerce will
be
more successful in India than modern retail. He points out that the
conglomerate,
whose businesses range from security and storage solutions
to consumer products and aerospace, has
plunged headlong into ecommerce
via an acquisition and that the entire group
is trying to put more products
including its real estate offerings online.
That
is also true for the Tatas, the Aditya Birla Group and Reliance.
All
these groups have a significant stake in mod ern retail and are trying
to get on to the ecommerce bus only now. The
most significant tipping
of the
hat to the startup phenomenon is by Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL),
and it
helps that the gen-next at the group, Isha and Akash Ambani, are at
the
forefront of a newage business -the telecom 4G foray under the Jio brand.
Just
last week the refining and petrochemicals giant let on that it has
adopted another common practice at startups
-an open-office system
with
plain workstations for everyone, including Reliance chairman
Mukesh
Ambani should he choose to drop by.
Others
are turning investors. Harsh Goenka, chairman of RPG Enterprises,
has
set up a `100 crore fund to invest in startups and has manned it with
McKinsey
type professionals. Goenka told ET Magazine:
“I see
the startup phe nomenon as a renaissance of entrepreneurship
fuelled by personal ambition and confidence
in the India growth story.“
The Question of Ethics
The ET
Magazine-MavenMagnet study finds that when it comes to people
management, the old school is way ahead.
While traditional large
conglomerates
have a positive vibe of 1.30, the startups have a negative
vibe:
0.46. Recent anecdotes prove that it's not an unfair assessment.
India's
top ecommerce startups have fumbled with their manpower
management,
over-hiring at first and then issuing pink slips. TinyOwl,
Housing and Zomato are three higher-profile
startups that are in the midst
of downsizing. Management consultant Rama
Bijapurkar says: “We need
to
constantly remind our selves that there is the other half or even two-thirds
of India's youth whose dream is a permanent
job in a large company with
benefits and predictability of income,
increasing over time, so that the
family
can move up the ladder of living rapidly.“
A
common concern around both traditional Indian companies and startups
is on
ethics. While conversations hover around the personal interest of
traditional
CEOs, and their inability to maintain an arm's length in conflict
of
interest scenarios, the new-age CEOs score poorly when it comes to
business
pricing practices or lack of any display of social responsibility.
However,
both groups also inspire people in general and aspiring
entrepreneurs
in particular. As Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder of
Paytm
and Naveen Tewari, both write, they were inspired by the
earlier
generation; today both groups act as inspirations, maybe in
different
parts of the country.
An
India-Bharat divide emerges if the data is split along metro and
nonmetro
lines. The traditional CEOs of India Inc score high in non-metro
cities in the perception battle, whereas the
metros seem to be more
enamoured
of the startups. While 64% conversations about startups
originate
in the metros, 54% conversations about the leaders or the
larger
companies come from non-metros. The startup hubs of the
NCR
(34%) and Bengaluru (25%) contribute 59% of the buzz around startups.
Innovation is the New
Licence
The ET
Magazine-MavenMagnet study clearly identifies startup CEOs
as
innovators. The traditional CEOs are, on the other hand, associated
with
vision, and tenacity, linked with their ability to nurture their businesses
and keep going over a long period. Even if
these large companies innovate,
unlike for a startup, the innovation does
not get associated with the CEO.
For
the startups of today, innovation cuts through the licence regime.
Take
the taxi aggregation business for instance. A sector that operates
with
multiple and state-wise licences has suddenly been turned on its
head
by an innovative business model that can afford to ignore the
licensing.
Or take the ecommerce retailing model. It has already got
the
nod from the government to bring in foreign capital, even while the
brick-and-mortar
modern retail business is denied. Innovation is allowing
Indian
startups to hop, skip and skirt around licence regimes.
One
Indian businessman who is working closely with the new-age
innovators
was also part of the earlier generations.Dilip Modi, son of
BK
Modi, had worked almost shoulder to shoulder with telecom czars
like
Mittal two decades ago. Father BK and his 20year old son Dilip had
led Modi-Telstra, the country's very first
telecom operator with a licence
in
Kolkata. Under its Spice brand Modi had three more licences, all of
which
were sold to Mittal's Airtel subsequently.Dlilp, now 40, makes
and
sells mobile phones under the Spice brand.His retail venture has tied
up
with Flipkart for a new offline-online experiment. Modi says:
‘The
entrepreneurs today are much more confident. Finance is also much
more
readily available. Twenty years back we did not have this kind of
confidence
in ourselves.“ Modi feels that the entrepreneurs of today can
actually ride on the mobile boom to markets
that will be a mobile-first
market
like India. “Africa for instance will be mobile-first unlike the US
or
China, which have higher PC penetration than mobiles. Indian startups
are
competing well against global ecommerce companies in India. I am
sure
they can take this ex perience and conquer Africa and then become
the first
true Indian MNCs.“
There
are signs already. The likes of Zomato and Practo have already
moved
abroad. Godrej feels the key will be the Indian startups' ability
to
create business models of their own, not just copying a global
business
model. In fact he says that it is his advice to the new generation
to go out and find new roads. The journey
has already begun, and it
will
be vastly different from the roads travelled by the generations
before
them.
(Additional
reporting by Rahul Sachitanand and Rajiv Singh)
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Suman
Layak
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ETM15NOV15
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