Zen and the entrepreneur

K. Srikrishna

A friend recently resolved to read one book a week in the new year. Being an entrepreneur, most of the books on his initial reading list were on topics such as marketing, selling and strategy.

He had been at it for several weeks when our paths last crossed. Far from exuding enthusiasm from his new-found knowledge, he sported a frown that creased his usually smooth brow.

My subtle probing unleashed an unexpected torrent. "What am I to make of it? Just when I think I have learned something useful, along comes another book stating quite the opposite of what I had just convinced myself was an absolute revelation!" He was almost apoplectic and ready to throw in the towel on the whole reading thing. Alas, despite my attempt to calm him, his experience is not all that unusual.

An entrepreneur, like a novitiate seeker of the truth, is bombarded with contradictory advice, insights and stories, where all truths seem to come wrapped in paradoxes.

Zen masters have been known to use a koan - a story or a piece of dialogue that seems to raise more questions than answers. "What is the sound of one hand?" is an example. Koans are a way to get a student to think beyond the rational.

As an entrepreneur, all too often, you will face the same quandary that a Zen student does. "That makes no sense," might be your first reaction. And many times it will not make sense. And unlike the Zen student you may not have several years to comprehend the true meaning of a paradox you face, but may have to act immediately.

Rather than add to the body of contradictory advice, I'll highlight some of the most common contradictions that entrepreneurs are likely to face. As my high school math teacher was so fond of saying, how best to handle these can be left as an exercise to be done later!

Persevere

Most writers and experienced entrepreneurs talk extensively about the need to persevere, despite all the naysayers, in order to succeed. The example of Thomas Edison and his innumerable unsuccessful experiments en route to his invention of the incandescent bulb is often cited, as are the electoral attempts of Abraham Lincoln.

In more recent times, the story of Infosys' N. R. Narayana Murthy persevering, when the other founders were ready to throw in the towel, and then all of them together creating the success story that it is today, inspires the struggling entrepreneur. Persevering, it would appear, is the key to entrepreneurial success.

Yet, in the same breath, we are told be prepared to change our minds - 'Don't be married to the idea.' 3M, the maker of industrial adhesives and one of the most admired companies, started as a mining company and if it had not embraced change, it would have been long dead. Did not Next Computer, despite Steve Jobs and cool technology, encounter near death for being pig headed in the face of a changing marketplace?

In other words, we are to persevere when we are right and change our minds when we are not. But who is to figure out when we are right and when we aren't? If struggling entrepreneurs listened to others, it would seem that they are always in the wrong and if they listened to themselves, their vision and dream are not merely right but downright inspirational. If there is a topic that is more suited to be a Zen koan, I'd be hard-pressed to find it.

Grow

As anyone who has attempted to raise potted plants will attest, growing anything, even a sturdy cactus, is hard. Raising a child, who unlike a cactus has both mobility and a mind of his/her own is even harder. Growing a business, where it seems everyone can act as a child - and unlike with your own child, you don't get to yell at them - is harder still.

Yet entrepreneurs, particularly venture capital-funded, rocket growth visionaries are told to grow their companies. The dotcom bubble of the late 1990s and the years immediately preceding the collapse of 2008 epitomised this grow-and-attain-scale mantra. The real success of Google, the growth and seeming success of FaceBook further strengthen this school of thought - that success stems from growth or, worse yet, growth is success.

From late 2008, however, achieving profitability has re-emerged as the right thing to do. Conserving your cash and focusing on getting to profit is all the rage. Fifty-plus pages of PowerPoint presentations are doing the rounds of the Internet, sage advice from the best venture capitalists. It seems almost a return to quaint old-world values of building a sustainable, profitable business before seeking growth or in many instances, merely seeking sustainability rather than growth.

As with any koan, with a little reflection, this sustainable profit versus rocket-fuel growth seems a non-issue. We can just get to profitability first and then build on it for growth. However, further thought peels another layer off the onion and muddies matters. Without growth first, could a mySpace or even a business newspaper survive long enough to be profitable? So maybe there's something to this growth thing. But isn't growth without a conceivable profit model (can you say Twitter) a one-way ticket?

Listen to your customers

It would take a truly brave man to advise an entrepreneur not to listen to their customers. Henry Ford, a successful entrepreneur and fearless man by all accounts, would have been making faster horse buggies rather than motor cars, if he had listened only to his customers. Similarly, when Yahoo! (and remember Alta Vista) ruled the roost in search engines, it was not customers clamouring for a better search engine that gave birth to Google.

Despite a century of car making, innovations such as the mini-van for soccer moms did not arise from focus groups or customer demand, but from innovative thinkers who were able to ignore the short-term chatter of paying customers. Before we dismantle focus groups or quit walking around the local mall, isn't the entire US auto industry on life support because it didn't listen to its customers' changing needs and concerns? Continuing to build gas-guzzling SUVs when its Japanese counterparts were back to building smaller and greener hybrid cars?

So, should an entrepreneur talk to customers? Even if he does, should he listen to what they are saying? When does he ignore what they seem to be saying? Should he listen to prospective customers but not existing ones? Should he just ignore customers and listen to his engineers? I can see a koan coming: "What does silence sound like?"

Much like a modern scientist who has to be comfortable with the nature of light - particle and wave at the same time (or is it neither), today's entrepreneur has to accept the inherent contradictions of all business advice. A Zen koan from the 9th century Chinese master Linji expresses this idea the best: "If you see Buddha, kill him."

(The writer is founder and minister for culture and finance at Zebu Group, a marketing start-up)

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