The Orbit Changer

What does it take to change orbits? To go from being a ‘monkey’ in the industry to being at least a ‘chimpanzee’?

If you are a 100 crore company dreaming of becoming a 1000 crore company? We all know the usual answers: scaling processes, a big dream, good management. But how to acquire them?

Scaling before the Jump?

Imagine trying to scale your processes, whether it is your product innovation process or your people development process, in advance of their being needed. All the textbooks will say that is how it should be done. But such ‘scaling’ is always painful and always bitterly resisted. After all, you are asking people to stretch, and for what? There is no fire, why should they jump? Desirable as it may seem, I have yet to see a company actually being able to do it in anticipation of the coming growth.

Slow and Struggle?

A growing company can always try to scale its processes and management capabilities, as it grows, sort of inch-by-inch. If the growth is slow enough, it will not be disruptive, like an oak tree growing by adding rings every year. But will it result in the scaling you need? Probably not. The old processes will keep getting stretched and patched up, and they will creak and groan till they break. Then there will be chaos, hustle bustle, an army of consultants will swarm all over the place to ix the broken process, and the company will limp along till the next crisis.

The One Big Win

When EDS, now a global giant, was a much smaller company, in the early 1980s, it went through a life-changing experience. After this event, its share price went to another level, from which it did not fall for decades. The event was the winning of a deal with the US Army – project VIABLE. It was a several hundred million dollar deal – more importantly, it was won against IBM. Nobody, including the team that worked on the bid, really thought they were going to win, they just thought it would be a good learning experience. Until then-President Mort Meyerson paid the team a visit. He went to the board and wrote on it the three criteria the customer was going to use to award the contract: Technical excellence, price, and management. Turning to a bemused group of EDSers Mort told them, we know we are better in each category. The customer doesn’t know it, but that’s a problem we will have to solve. But we are going to win this deal, not narrowly, not by 2 to 1, but in every category! And they did. This is partly a story about leadership, and its ability to make people realize their own potential. But it is more a story of what the team had to do to win – it learned how to subcontract to vendors much larger than itself, it learned how to market to a customer who was bound by strict rules of engagement, it learned how to take risk, it learned how to write a proposal, how to price contracts. After the deal was won, it learned how to execute something far more complex and risky than anything it had ever done before. It learned because it had to it had to because it won that deal. Simple as that. No amount of corporate training, BPR efforts, no army of consultants, could have forced the organization to learn the essentials of playing with the big boys, so quickly and so thoroughly, as that single win did. On future deals, nobody had to create a process – all they had to do is say’ do it like we did at VIABLE’.

There are other examples, closer to home. Polaris Software, another company I know well, learned how to handle large deals by bidding on, and winning, a huge deal with NEC. It was forced to create a new SBU, to learn how to recruit hundreds of people, how to make them productive, how to manage customer communication, how to monitor projects, and a new technology, all at the same time. It learned because it had to. No amount of corporate prodding or task forces or strategic initiatives could have taken the company’s capabilities to the next level, as that single win did.
The point is – people, and organizations, learn when they have to. Make them have to, by going after, and winning, a deal one orbit further than what you are used to. There is no better way to scale. There is no other way to scale