[CTQ Smartcast] Importance of Culture for Future Relevance, with Monish Darda
Monish Darda is the CTO and Co-Founder of Icertis, a unicorn company that provides contract intelligence software to enterprise businesses. He is a deep thinker who has many varied interests, and profound thoughts on building software and enduring companies, organisational culture, and values. We speak to him about FORTE - the strong guiding principles behind the culture at Icertis. He tells a very interesting anecdote on how they came up with those values.
He’s also an avid reader and gamer. We spoke about how he learns from the world of gaming and applies those lessons at work and some interesting experiments he’s running at Icertis.
This Smartcast conversation (hosted by BV Harish Kumar) is packed with valuable lessons for entrepreneurs about how to build their companies and technology leaders about how to build resilience in their team.
Prefer an audio version of the Smartcast? Listen below.
Follow CTQ Smartcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or on your favourite podcast platform.
(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)
SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
3 life lessons learnt from being an ardent gamer.
The importance of identifying organizational values.
The FORTE principle.
Outcome of deliberately introducing chaos in the team.
Experimenting with reorganization.
Future relevance of HR function.
LINKS TO BOOKS, PEOPLE, ARTICLES AND WEBSITES MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST
FROM THE WORLD OF GAMING
PEOPLE
LITERATURE AND BOOKS
MOVIES
OTHERS
TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
00:00:00
Harish Kumar: Monish Darda is the CTO and co-founder of Icertis. Icertis is a unicorn company that provides contract management software to enterprise businesses. Monish is a deep thinker who has many varied interests, and profound thoughts on building software and enduring companies, organisational culture, and values. He’s also an avid reader and gamer. So we had lined up questions on FORTE to find out his guiding values at Icertis. He tells a very interesting anecdote on how he came up with those values. We also spoke about how he learns from the world of gaming and applies those lessons at work, some interesting experiments he’s running at Icertis, and a couple of quiz questions. This interview is packed with valuable lessons for entrepreneurs about how to build their companies and technology leaders about how to build resilience in their team. If you are a noob gamer like me, you’ll also get some good gaming recommendations. I hope you’ll enjoy this as much as we had recording it.
00:01:15
Harish: So, welcome Monish, to the CTQ Smartcast.
00:01:17
Monish Darda: Thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure to be here. It’s good to be doing this more than once.
00:01:24
Harish: Yeah. Based on the questions that I have planned for you, there are going to be quite a few references to earlier conversations that we’ve had, but let me start with a so-called tough one. What are the three life lessons that you have learnt from the gaming avatar of Monish?
00:01:46
Monish: That is a tough one! I’ll start with the basics. I don’t know if it’s a life lesson but it has definitely come very useful in life. That’s typing. I remember one of the first games I played was Typing Tutor, and you have these words coming down and you have to type them on the keyboard before they fall. You probably know the game. That helped with my typing. I think that’s a very big edge in our profession, isn’t it?
00:02:12
Harish: Correct.
00:02:14
Monish: So that was definitely there. I think the second one was, I actually didn’t think about it this way till you asked me this question. But if you think about it, especially the games I love like Call of Duty, you have to deal with adversity. You get shot, you get killed, and then you wake up again, come to life again and come back with a vengeance. You hate to give up. That’s taught me a lot about how to deal with adversity. There’s another very interesting game. I never thought I would ever like a zombie game, never thought I’d play that in my life. Except maybe three or four years ago, I played Last of Us, and then the remastered version came in, and the second one now. It’s been very interesting and one of the things I vividly remember every time I think about the game is, it’s a very tough situation. There’s a girl and a guy who’s more like a father figure in her life. They are being attacked by zombies and so on. As they are going through all this mess in life, there’s a nice pause in the game with beautiful music and background. You see the animals go by, there’s rain, song of birds, right in the middle of all this that’s going on. It taught me to enjoy small things in life and you need to see those animals go by, streams flow, and the leaves rustle. In between the pandemic, I’m thankful that I’ve been lucky to be able to do that. That’s been very big. The last thing is, it’s incredible when I think about it, and I’m counting more than three things but this is probably 3A. So it's bonding with my kids over games like Patpat and The Magic School Bus. It’s incredible and it's a life lesson to be able to bond with my kids at that age when they were really small and got excited with the smallest of things. That’s why I thought this was a 3A because there’s a lot to learn, doing the things you love with the people you love.
00:04:30
Harish: Right. Finding those common interests, I guess. A big takeaway from what you just mentioned was hitting that pause button from time to time. Just pausing is very important. One of the earlier Smartcast that we had done with you Monish, we talked about how you’ve brought lessons from other worlds like gaming, the open source movement and how you apply them to the world of organisation design. So is there some way that you do this, applying lessons drawn from one area to the other? Is there some metathinking? How should people go about this?
00:05:20
Monish: I think everyone's thinking and metaphors are very different. You have to find yours, if you haven’t already. There’s definitely a thought process behind it to make it work, that’s for sure. It’s a basic postulate that metaphors make complex things simpler. Nowadays, forget about software, even personal relationships have become complex. So how do you bring a metaphor that helps you deal with the complexity in life and gives you a mind, a way to make things simpler. Then what you see is patterns, any decent engineer will tell you that it’s the first thing to solve a really nasty bug. How do you make things simpler? How do you break them down? How do you break them into simpler things that you can comprehend one thing at a time? That’s the important thing, whether it’s the open source movement or some of my metaphors come from, as you definitely know. Big influence of Isaac Asimov. Some of these from his world that stays, how do you find that one thing that makes a difference in a situation? In a very complex situation with a customer or a design problem or a tough relationship, it always boils down to figuring out that one thing that’ll make the most difference and then making that thing happen. Second one also I’ve seen, again I’ll draw from Isaac Asimov, there’s a character there called Golan Trevize, he’s appointed or elected by some powerful people to take a decision that’ll affect the lives of the galaxy and fate of the galaxy. The reasoning is that he has intuition. He’s one of those very rare resources in the galaxy who can come up with the right decision if the data is insufficient or even misleading. So how do you find these Golan Trevizes of the world, how do you find these priceless resources who can help you solve the problem and help you think differently. You can improve yourself and scale the company. Those kinds of things, taking those metaphors and then figuring out how to apply them in real life. Just making complex stuff easier. It’s very important and that’s how we deal with the complexity in Icertis also. The complexities of global organisations like Microsoft, Google, Accenture, Airbus and so on. These large organisations in the world, how do you tackle the large complexities of their problems. I think it’s just breaking them and applying some of these learnings from other worlds. Applying these patterns that you much easily recognise because you are deep into a story or sports, tennis or golf, or the open source movement. You take what you have already learnt there and what you’ve recognised there as a pattern and apply that pattern in a more complex situation.
00:08:34
Harish: Right. So what I’m also hearing, Monish, is that there are somethings that you need to leave at the subconscious level where it is just probably lurking at the back of your mind. And you need to be able to make connections as and when it becomes more obvious. Not try to force fit a connection as well because you can very easily fall into that trap as well.
00:08:56
Monish: That’s very true.
00:09:03
Harish: At this point, I know that you know, we love quizzing, and I know that you love to answer quiz questions. I’m not going to let you go without taking shots at some of these quiz questions. The first quiz question for you today - there’s this concept called the game transfer phenomena which is basically people showing automatic behaviours linked to video game content. For example, seeing power bars over people’s heads, but this was first described as an effect named after a game where people saw coloured moving images when they fell asleep. So which game was this effect named after?
00:09:46
Monish: Pacman, most likely.
00:09:48
Harish: Not Pacman, coloured moving images.
00:09:53
Monish: Coloured moving images…
00:09:55
Harish: From the other more
00:09:59
Monish: I still see those rockets going all over the place when I sleep. They are coloured.
00:10:05
Harish: Yeah, but geometric shapes, let me make it clear, and a landmark game. Probably one of the most famous games.
00:10:16
Monish: Ever, huh? That’s the one on the cigar?
00:10:20
Harish: I think yeah, yes.
00:10:23
Monish: Mario. Super Mario?
00:10:25
Harish: Not Mario, this is Tetris.
00:10:27
Monish: Oh Tetris! I should have got that.
00:10:33
Harish: Yeah, so this is the Tetris effect. Have you also suffered from that?
00:10:46
Monish: Not Tetris, actually nowadays especially in the last year or so, I play Tetris on the Oculus Quest which is a completely different experience. I have seen space invaders and maybe Super Mario a little while in my dreams. Spots over my eyes but not Tetris. It has always made me think about structure, it doesn’t last long. So structure and patterns, not very persistent.
00:11:19
Harish:You know people have been known to have seen these images before going to sleep over their eyelids, so that’s when it was actually called the Tetris effect and then later they realised it’s a much widespread phenomenon affecting people who were following all possible games, not just Tetris.
00:11:39
Monish: No I’m ashamed of myself, I should have got that. Especially, when you say it’s an effect. Effect is well known.
00:11:47
Harish: No, we’ll let you take another shot at another question later in this.
00:11:52
Monish: Hope there’s a prize!
00:11:54
Harish: Oh yes! There’ll definitely be a prize for this. Right, so Monish, let’s move to the next section that I wanted to talk to you about which was around organisational culture and values at Icertis. I know for a fact that at Icertis, you’ve been very particular about the organisational values on which you build a company. But when and how did you realise the importance of identifying these values and living them? Was it like a gradual realisation or was there a trigger that made you go “Aha!”, saying, “This is what I need if I want to build an enduring organisation”? How did that happen?
00:12:38
Monish: That’s a very good question. I think it took me maybe 30 years to realise that. Idiot me! As you probably know, this is my 7th startup and whenever we’ve done that, subconsciously I’ve always had my own values as everyone does. You have your personal values, you have your organisation values, company values and so on. How do you project them and use them as building blocks of your company, was only when we started thinking about Icertis. That was 11 years ago. I think when Samir and I came together, it was that we’ve learnt all these lessons. Now if we have to build something lasting, which ones are the ones that we should take to heart? I think the values popped up there when we were having the inception discussions of Icertis. So this was really a thought out thing as opposed to realising in the middle of your journey that your company actually needs to have those values built in from the ground up. So that realisation came over a period of time, it was not an “aha!” moment. It was a moment which said, “hey, when you think about building a lasting and substantial organisation, then what are the foundation stones?” There are people of course. There are values, I think they are very critical and then you think about what you do, how you do, how you make money, and how you make customers, and how to make them happy, and so on. All that follows, but there are these 2 or 3 pillars of an enduring organisation that you have to think about. So that’s what happened with us. I think it was at the inception of the company that we thought that this is what we will start with and believe in. We gave it shape a little bit later which was different but the concept was there right at the beginning of the inception of Icertis.
00:14:39
Harish: Right. You spoke about how you and Samir actually got together and thought about this. So when you started thinking about this, how did you zero down on FORTE as the set of values that you want to build the organisation on?
00:14:55
Monish: Yeah. That’s another very good question because when we said we both agreed on having values as our foundation and a way to work, and a way to live. We also thought, as we started growing, how do we make sure that this is really enduring. The whole idea that we have in mind, the values that we believe in, how do we make these identify with people? And the reminder to ourselves, both of them actually go hand-in-hand. That’s how we said let’s synthesize, let’s put together all the words that are there and we strongly believe in. Let’s see if some of these words actually find their sense or represent their sense of what we think are our values. Because again it’s very hard to quantify what values mean or to give them a name and so on. The whole process was very interesting. We put all of these words on the board, we underlined stuff and we removed those underlines to underline other words. Then we said that these are the words that are actually important to us and that’s how FORTE happened. We thought Fairness was extremely important. Fairness in everything, the way you hire, the way you behave with people, treat other people, the difference between throwing your visiting card in America on the table. Samir gives this very good example: you go to Japan, it's a bow and that’s how you present your business card. Nowadays with COVID, you may not have too much of an opportunity. But it’s about how you respect these completely different cultures as well. So starting from there to Openness, how open you are with your colleagues, the whole Icertian family, how do you make sure that it extends to your customers, your partners. And how do you make sure that you measure that because it’s very hard. Respect, Teamwork and Execution. I think yeah, “it’s motherhood and apple pie” but it’s very critical to make sure that motherhood and apple pie is something that you imbibe in your everyday work and life. That’s how FORTE actually happened.
00:17:17
Harish: Right. So was this even before you zeroed down on product? Was this before or after that? How long did that process take you? Was it just the two of you? Just if you can walk me through that, it’ll be more concrete.
00:17:31
Monish: Yeah, absolutely. No, the ideas of the values, what we agreed on when we had our conversation, Samir and I, was even before the inception of Icertis. When we were thinking of doing something next. I remember having one of these deep conversations in one of the coffee shops in Wilson College road and saying, “hey, how do I actually think about a company? What does it mean to me? How do I think about behaving with each other and my co-founder? How do I build that trust, what do I do? All of that actually happened before the inception of the company but FORTE or putting words to your thoughts and principles, came about 2.5-3 years down the line. The process was actually simple. We said now we are more than 50 people, we probably will not be able to keep in touch with everybody, especially Samir in the US, me in Pune, and the team heavily in the early stages was tilted towards India, and even today it is. If you are losing touch with people at that level, at the family level and so on. How do you make sure that you can articulate your values well for the people that you’ll now hire going forward? People who are working with you now will hire them. So it’s now already one level away. That’s where we started thinking and it took us two days, I remember, 4 hour sessions and two days. We did all of that underline exercise, put the world cloud in there, figure it out. It was Samir and I, and our HR Lead, Sulekha. Three of us looked at it and said, “what do these words mean? And how can they be articulated?” I remember I had a customer call, so I said, “you guys, I’ll leave it to you. I’ll walk out of the room, take care of it.” I walked out of the room and I came back and they already have FORTE on the board. I looked at it and said that I love it!
00:19:43
Harish: They held the fort and gave you the FORTE, is it?
00:19:48
Monish: I’m going to use that!
00:19:53
Harish: Nice. So, this is really fantastic, Monish. Just listening to this story and if I were to ask you, is there a right time for other founders on when they should be doing this? I actually asked this question to Pranali who was on this Smartcast earlier. The reason why I ask this is because some people tend to understand the importance of it but they sometimes feel that it is so important, so valuable that we want to do it exactly right. Right now is not the time that I can devote so much time to it. I want to do it right, so I’m going to push it ahead. And it ends up just getting pushed down the road. So Pranali was very clear that it has to be done right at the beginning. Do you have any nuance or how would you look at this with founders also worrying about existential issues, right? Like product-market fit to start with? How does that fit in?
00:20:52
Monish: I think that’s an incredibly hard question to answer because every situation is different. Even basic stuff like if you ask most founders, if you asked me 20 years ago, “Monish, you are starting this new startup, what’s your objective?” My answer would have been, “hey, I want to do 20 million dollars or I want to get acquired or I want to go unicorn or I want to do the best HR software there is.” Those would be the answers I would have given you. With Icertis, my answer on day one and Samir’s answer on day one was very different. In our initial conversations when we started, we were not thinking of product-market fit, we were not thinking of product at all, not thinking of revenue. We were thinking, can we build a substantial and consequential company? Now, that thought process not many founders including me start with. It’s actually when you’ve done 4 or 5 startups and do your kind of thinking about this in that different way. So I would say, I don’t think it’s as important to articulate your values and define your culture when you are about 50 people. And 50 people is just a benchmark, take it with a pinch of salt. Where you have so much intimate connect and where you are driving people everyday and they are driving you. You are working with them 18 hours a day, that culture and values are not far away. That culture and values is driven mainly by the founders. 99.99% of that is driven by the founders in the initial stages as we all know. So that doesn’t need articulation, putting on the wall. It is nice if you can do so, but I don’t think it’s essential. Those values, any startup at around 25, 40, 50 people if you ask them, they’ll tell you what the culture is, they can explain. Can I go to Monish? Is it fair? Are the work hours fair to us? Whatever that means, whatever openness, respect, and customer satisfaction mean to you. People have different things as part of their values as well. These are words to describe what those values are but they never adequately cover that. In a 50 person company, generally everybody will know and will be very close. The company will thrive if it comes together, it won’t thrive otherwise. Primarily because there is too much friction between people and that doesn’t bode well for a product and for a fledgling company. But as you grow bigger, I think this definitely becomes important. That’s when you start to market, in the true sense of the word, it is actually marketing because you’ve to market it to yourself. You have to see it everyday, you’ve to internalise it everyday and remember that this is where we really want to do it.
00:24:10
Harish: Yeah, so before I ask you the next question, I’m going to ask you a quiz question first because I think it’s a nice segway to the next question that I have. This is from the world of Bollywood. This Bollywood actor prepared for a certain role by reading a book called ‘Abhishapta Chambal’ and this book was written by Taroon Kumar Bhaduri. So what role was he preparing for?
00:24:41
Monish: Chambal means probably the…”What he was preparing for?” I would say Phoolan Devi but that’s wrong.
00:24:52
Harish: Right, you are on the right track. I’ve thrown in two clues there and you’ve picked the scent of the main clue. The second clue is the name of the author, Taroon Kumar Bhaduri.
00:25:09
Monish: Man, you’ve got some hard questions for me. This CSI quiz I remember from many years ago was much easier. It was at least software.
00:25:21
Harish: So Taroon Kumar Bhaduri’s daughter acted in this movie. How many Bhaduri actors/actresses…
00:25:27
Monish: No, I know Jaya Bhaduri. I made the connection, I could even go to Rita Bhaduri if I had to
00:25:34
Harish: No, it’s not Rita Bhaduri. It’s Jaya Bhaduri.
00:25:37
Monish: I know.
00:25:39
Harish: Jaya Bhaduri, Chambal and dacoits. Come on and I’m asking you this question
00:25:46
Monish: Oh my goodness! No, I give up, I cannot remember.
00:25:52
Harish: A landmark role, one of the most famous roles in Bollywood history.
00:26:00
Monish: In history, so it’s an older movie of course.
00:26:04
Harish: Okay I’ll give you a date, August 15th, 1975
00:26:10
Monish: You’ve decided to kind of completely shame me. Saat Hindustani or something?
00:26:20
Harish: Not Saat Hindustani, but yeah this is Amjad Khan preparing for the most iconic role.
00:26:29
Monish: Oh my goodness. I should have gotten it.
00:26:33
Harish: Now you are really kicking yourself. You should have got it. It was Amjad Khan who read this book Dacoits of Chambal and that’s how he prepared for the role of Gabbar Singh. It’s just coincidental that it was written by Jaya Badhuri’s father and she also acted in it. And the reason why I picked this question was because we know how much devotion you and Samir have for the film Sholay. My next question was actually going to be how do you ensure that the larger team understands what living these larger values really means? The reason why I picked this was I remember we did a session on FORTE based on Sholay, which is probably the most interesting way of actually conveying those values to the whole organisation. So what else do you do besides doing these fun events based on things like Sholay?
00:27:42
Monish. See that’s where you got me and now I’m analysing this, I think you are asking me too simple questions. If the questions are hard enough I’ll get them. I didn’t think you would ask me such simple questions. So now I get it. Okay, no this was good and actually one of the things. Again it is about how do you simplify things? How do you make it simpler for you and for the people you work with? Values and culture are a very complex conversation, you can live them but a complex conversation to explain when people are new. So we do all the, I would say traditional, normal stuff. Like onboarding, we have FORTE interviews as part of our HR process. During onboarding we share videos, anecdotes where it’s more of how we missed our values rather how we live them- what are the situations? That’s a very good way of thinking about “oh, this is actually wrong.” That’s a better lesson in my mind and the other thing we do is like imitation, it’s automatic motor responses. I’ll go on a limb here and say it’s a little bit like religion. You think about religion and all the rituals and the power of God, fear of God. it’s always targeted to imbibe a sense of values. You do this then this is going to happen and this is the way to live life. I think one of the things that religion does is repeat, repeat and repeat. Values and culture also kind of come to the fore and become part of your life because of that repetition. So Samir and I never ever forget an opportunity to bring up our values to the point where people say “oh my god, not again.” Every conversation, every meeting, even customer conversations. We start with this line which is “hey, here’s our mission, vision and values”, and we talk about them. I think that repetition really really helps. I think it does. You have to be constantly reminded of it, and it’s not for other people, it’s for you as well. What happens as a result of that is actually very interesting. So, people always say you’ve to remember your values when you are in a bad situation and I say that is when you forget them, which means you have to not remember values but that reaction in the bad situation has to be automatic. Now how does that become automatic, make sure that when you are not in your difficult situation, keep repeating. Like this is how you behave, this is what is really important for you. I think that when your actions are automatic and those automatic actions are governed by your values, that is when you can say you are living your values.
00:31:09
Harish: Correct. In fact when we had done a recording with an Indian Army veteran and when I posed this question to him about how this works with the Indian Army, he said the same thing. The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war. It's very similar to what you are talking about and it is also about building that whole mythology around it, again going back to the religion context here. The way we would have been taught about religion as children, what are the right values to live by and why should you do that is through all these stories that you’ve read. In the case of Hinduism, all the Vedas, Puranas, Panchatantra, those are the stories which talk about how you live a good life, and that’s what you want to do. Automatically those things get imprinted in the child’s brain,, I guess that’s what you are referring to here with that repetition.
00:32:09
Monish: Yeah absolutely. It is also that you have these stories, these anecdotes, the relationships to show and the metaphors to simplify things. I think that is how you imbibe that, even in people who we have never met. 400-500 people we hired without any Icertian meeting them, they became Icertians and they embraced that culture just because of, at least in mind, this repetition and knowing that this is important to the company.
00:32:45
Harish: Slightly different kind of question, you mentioned the cases where you have missed. Are there any concrete examples that you can share where FORTE made you take a slightly unpleasant decision in terms of letting go of someone or probably not even letting that person join because there was a misfit of values there, but you were tempted that this person was really skilled but know that this person is not fitting into my values. Was there a situation like that?
00:33:20
Monish: Many. Actually it is very interesting and this is something that we’ve analysed. In the last stages of the interview, you lose about 7-10% depending on geography of people where you don’t feel there’s a fit. So everything’s gone well, this is like the last one or two interviews where you are really looking at fit, you are actually discovering that fit. And we say no, this probably doesn’t work. So 7 to 8-10% in the hiring conditions that we are in, the talent that you find, and the growth we are in so the speed at which we want to hire, is actually a fairly large number. But it happens all the time. It’s not that the values of the person are bad or anything, just that they are so different that you immediately realise that this is not going to fit. So we do two things, like we used to obviously like any other founder, Samir and I used to interview everyone who came into the organisation. Now we’ve kind of raised that bar a little bit in terms of what level we talk to people. After a certain level, everyone usually talks to both of us, but at least one of us. One of the things that we usually do is, it’s not an interview to find out capabilities, unless they are a direct report. It’s an interview to find out that fit and there’s lots of examples where we say no, and we were open enough to share that like “hey, this thing doesn’t match, so it’s going to be very hard for us.” Sometimes very rarely, people have come back and said, “you know, what you said is right but here’s what I meant and here’s how it probably fits in your parameters.” Things like what you tell your customers, how you manage, when you ask how you manage people. Most will say I do this, I give incentives, work closely with them, meet them every week, I lead by example. Then you say what kind of examples? Sometimes examples are not that great or they are not fair. Then you say this doesn’t fit very well and that becomes an important thing for us to judge. Not just that, it also actually flows down, so all of our executives after a certain level in Icertis have a FORTE bonus. Some part of the variable is assigned completely, it’s at the discretion of the skip level manager usually. It becomes interesting, most of the execs actually come to me and Samir in terms of FORTE bonus. I usually defer to Samir because he usually sees people in action in a variety of situations. And it’s complete discretion, so even in the offer letter it is very clear that there is no argument here. It could be perception, it could be wrong but it's’ there. It’s there because we want to see, we are hearing what other people are saying, what we are thinking about that person when it comes to these values. So obviously as we grow, this is not a scalable example, it’s not a good example because it gives power to individuals which is not good as you expand. We have to figure out a way of scaling this out and having a better way of measuring this. This has actually helped us because everytime someone doesn’t get the 100%, most people do, but sometimes when they don’t, it leads to a very interesting conversation. That conversation is not about performance usually, it’s about behaviour. Then in the spirit of openness if someone asks me a question of who told you this, we tell them who told us this. Then they have to figure it out, why that person said what he/she said, then you have to go back and check. I think it is such a healthy process that we’ve been able to correct a lot of empire building, politics, whatever you call it. As an organisation grows, people get more and more conscious of how they build it especially when they have power. This actually dissipates a lot of that. I think as we grow that’ll be very critical for us to keep doing well.
00:38:24
Harish: Right, yeah. As Ben Horowitz says, culture is not just something you just write and forget about it, it’s a set of daily actions, and you’ve listed some very important and prescriptive actions, I must say. Anyone who’s listening to this can start using some of these things that you’ve talked about in their own organisations. Going to move to the next section here, Monish. This is something I’ll be very interested in, if any listeners actually employ this in their organisations and teams, because it definitely comes out as something very daring. We've kind of co-authored an article earlier where your biggest contribution was your photo that you created and gave me. So that was about the whole idea of resilience and chaos monkeys. So I’ve actually heard you speak about this where you talked about deliberately introducing chaos in your teams by taking away your key team players from time to time and getting them to work on other projects. This sounds like a great idea, again you probably picked this from the software architecture model and put this into practice in real life. But how does your team take it? Yes, you have great intentions, it looks awesome but how does your team take it, both the stars who have been asked to leave a project to which they have contributed a lot in building, and those who are left to deal with the absence of those stars. How do both of those sets of people deal with that?
00:40:08
Monish: It’s a very good question but the trick here is that they don’t always realise what has happened. So the way I’ve always done it is, I love experiments and validations. You try something new, you break the mould and see what happens. You try 10 things and you find one which really works. This has really worked. It has worked so well that I cannot remember an exception where it has not worked. It’s that good. So when you take away the star two things happen, either people are resilient, by nature humans are resilient. They figure out and you get new stars, that’s the beauty of the whole thing. In most cases when you make those changes, you don’t say I’m going to take your best person and put them there. We say “hey, here’s a reorganisation, and it is needed because…” and it’s true, I’m not faking it. The reorg is needed because I need this particular person in a different position and people are okay with that. There’s always a dip, then you come back but then you come back much stronger. I’ve tracked this because I’ve done this very deliberately. It absolutely works.
00:41:36
Harish: If you can give some concrete examples or anecdotes of the pain that happens so that people can actually be ready to sort of expect something. So what can possibly go wrong? You said there’s a dip, so what does that mean? What does the dip really mean?
00:41:56
Monish: Yeah, so think about it like you’re not doing this when you are setting sail from a port where the port is very hard to navigate, and then in the middle of the navigation you are not taking away the captain. That’s not what you’re doing. What you are doing is when the ship is on the high seas with a strong wind at the back, that’s when you take away the captain. So the dip essentially happens when there is an auto-run period in any team where it just continues to do what it’s doing, goes through their scrums, they do their next release, it’s all being planned. Depending on what size your team is and what complexity, 4-6 weeks or 3-4 months. You don’t see a direct effect, that's how you deal with downstream reactions like customers. You don’t want your customers to be affected by your experimentation. But when the next circle or cycle comes back, when you start planning, there are people who then, that’s when the dip happens. There’s a period of who’s now going to take the lead? Who’s going to do the job that was always done by this person who got removed? This always happens when pressure starts mounting, not when it’s business as usual. That is when you see these people step up, that’s when you see these new stars start to shine. That’s where you pick them up and say okay, you lead this because you took the initiative already. One anecdote that I can share, it’s actually very interesting. We did that with a team, a very small team of 10 people. There was this one guy and he was the one that held the team together. He was really good with people. I thought he was the one who made the team really productive and delivered more than expected. We were doing really well with the team and that’s when I moved him into a pre-sales role which was very interesting because I thought this was a technology role, obviously working directly with me, I moved him into a pre-sales role because we needed someone there at that level. What happened was that the effect was very immediate. Immediate in the sense that you could see there was a void because you didn’t take away a star who was actually over performing or performing well. Over performing is probably a bad word. You took away who was holding the team together. That was an interesting problem to solve because the dip was fairly heavy as there was no one who could actually step up into a role of holding a 10-people team together. They could support 1,2,3 people. No one individual in that team could support 10. Then I had to go back and be deeply embedded in that team to help them realise what they were missing. It was an interesting experience because then I had to tell them why I did this and they said oh, but you should have told us. And I said yes I should have told you, if I would have told you then you would’ve lost the reason why we were having this conversation. Then you would have reacted very differently. So I said I’m telling you now because you’ve realised how important that person was in holding the team together and what you have to do now to hold yourself together. I think that lesson and the whole thing was actually a very big learning lesson in terms of how you look at, what kind of stars to take away. I think it was a learning experience for the team because they actually realised that when they dipped, why did they dip? The dip was usually more infighting, so it was very interesting. This guy didn’t do his job, QA didn’t do his job, that kind of stuff. I said you don’t need other people to tell you, you don’t need that person to tell you how to behave with your co-workers. Now you’ve to grow up in his absence. I think they did it very well after that, so I’m glad that it worked.
00:46:41
Harish: Right. So I recently read an article by a friend, Avneesh Anand who has also appeared on the CTQ Smartcast. He wrote about glue guys. When you were talking about this, the term to be used here for that person is glue guy. The guy who’s actually the glue for the whole team. I’ll share that article with you later. It’s a very nice read. One subquestion to that, Monish, you talked about this reorganisation, it’s in the spirit of experimentation. So what other kinds of experiments that you do at work, with respect to org-level design that you’ve tried and found to be interesting experiments.
00:47:30
Monish: Yeah, I can share a couple which are very interesting. One thing and this is Samir, not me, when things are not working well, One function, one team or this one hotspot that you find where things are not working well. I think what we do, basic principle, is just change. Doesn’t matter what change, just change the organisation and tell people about it. Get some suggestions, people will come from some very different angles. Not the whole team but the team leadership, when you say I want to change this, what would you do? They come up with ideas and as part of coming up with new ideas, a new org takes shape. Then you go to the team and say here’s what looks logical, here’s what we would love to do and this is the reason for it. Sometimes there’s no reason, just need change. I think that works, not always, most of the time it works. But for that you need two things, one is elasticity in the organisation where people are okay with that kind of change because in most cases organisational change leads to apprehension, and you don’t want that emotion to come in. You don’t want the “what is going to happen to my job or what’s going to happen to my career.” It’s the “what’s the new thing that’s going to happen tomorrow.” That’s a fine balance in terms of how you manage that but we do that all the time and people have gotten used to it now, and they know why we are doing this. Now it;s gone down the line where manager’s experimenting with this and they are getting help from the HR as a catalyst to figure out whether this is the right thing to do. They come to us and say here’s what I’m thinking, here’s the model. Can you see any holes in that thinking? I think there’s another experiment that I’m actually trying, it’s in process, it’s very interesting. I would love to share that once it finishes. What I’ve done with my team which is about a 40-45 member team, so very small compared to our entire engineering. I’ve said end of the year, we want to promote X number of people, and that’s limited and fixed. We as a team are going to promote so many people. You have two votes, each one of you, every two months for the next six months. So you have 6 votes in all. For you to choose, give the votes to anyone you think deserves to be promoted and we said there’s only one parameter. It is that if you use your vote to tell Monish to be promoted, then Monish should already be playing the role that he should be promoted to. That’s the only cue so it doesn’t matter what the role is and what level it is and so on. We just want X number of people in a 40-member team, say 4 people 10%, actually 20% so 8 people let’s say. So we want to promote 8 people right from the lead to the junior most person in that team. The number is fixed and not at what level. So use your vote carefully. You can vote for yourself and make sure that you actually vote for a person who is already playing the role. That’s the only rule. And it’s actually worked very well and these are anonymous votes. But people are actually proactive and they come back and say I voted for this person, and I didn't vote for this person and I didn’t vote for myself. It’s been a revelation because, so far, we’ve gone through one cycle, let’s see what happens as we go through all the 3 cycles. So far, the results of the first pole are exactly what I would have done and I’m thinking if this succeeds and if I can roll it out across Icertis, the manager's big conundrum at the end of an appraisal cycle of who to promote just goes away. The bad effects of why was he promoted? Why was this guy not promoted? Why was I not promoted, this goes away hopefully. Let’s see. This is a certain kind of chaos because the first reaction was no, we are not going to vote. “Impossible, Monish, this is a really crappy idea.”
00:52:38
Harish: Correct, I can imagine.
00:52:41
Monish: And I said yeah, it is. I know it’s a very crappy idea but bear with me. If you think this is all wasted exercise, at the end of the year let’s revert to the old system. Make it fun. I thought we would get 30-40% reaction, we got 98% voting. And two people probably because the pandemic has caught up and couldn’t vote or something. But it’s incredible. People are loving it.
00:53:11
Harish: Looks definitely very promising. I would like to hear the results of this at the end of the six months and see if and how you roll it out to other teams as well. That’ll be really a very interesting experiment to watch out for
00:53:26
Monish: I’m looking forward to it as well.
00:53:28
Harish: Yes! Alright Monish, that brings us to the last section which is going to be a short one. I’m going to ask you for your hot takes. What are the three apps that you can’t leave without?
00:53:38
Monish: It’s become truly hard now. I keep switching between stuff and I have this iPhone feature where I swap apps, if I no longer use them they just go away, have to be installed. Because Google Maps etc, I have not used them for many years. I think TripIt for example was one of my go to apps. I think it’s now Drink Water, that’s one I use absolutely regularly. I realised now that I need reminders for meetings so now I have Siri, wake me up at this time, 10 times a day. Though I’m not asleep at that time, it’s not an app, it’s just a discipline. Apart from Outlook the regular one is well. It’s not an app, it's a game. A friend’s company called SuperGaming, is a very exciting company. They released a Beta game called Amongst Us. it’s a take on a really famous Among Us, oh my goodness, that’s so much fun. It’s incredible fun.
< Note : Among Us is a 2018 online game developed and published by Innersloth and Devil Amongst Us is the game developed by SuperGaming >
00:54:58
Harish: Great. My son is going to love this when I tell him that you are a big fan of this game.
00:55:02
Monish: Oh he is?
00:55:03
Harish: Among Us and Amongst Us, is the same right?
00:55:08
Monish: Yeah. So the original game was Devil Amongst Us. It’s a classic, many years, decades ago, old time game. This is a take on that. It’s so much fun.
00:55:23
Harish: So which game would you have loved to create?
00:55:28
Monish: Oh my god. That’s a hard one. Maybe Gods of War or God of War rather. Primarily because of the visuals and the puzzles, and the mechanics of the game are really stunning. Especially on the 4k on the Xbox series X, it’s a phenomenal game to play. I’m actually confused, I think it’s the PS5 and not the Xbox but yeah PS5. I think the other one I would have loved but am not creative enough so I know I’ll never be able to do it is Ghosts of Tsushima. It’s just stunning imagery. I’ve spent hours and hours, not playing it, just wandering around the world, it’s just beautiful. Some of these games are really interesting. There’s another called Lightsaber on the Oculus Quest which is a very good workout game. If you think about it, it’s a lot of fun, you play with lightsabers with blocks coming your way in 3D and then you kind of do the Ninja stuff. You cut those blocks, you have a red sword and a blue sword and you’ve to cut the right blocks with the right sword colour. I think that would be something great to build. It’s a lot of maths and mechanics and just some stunning game play. That was a tough question actually.
00:57:07
Harish: Alright. Next one, what do you think is the future relevance of HR?
00:57:14
Monish: I mean, in an ideal world you don’t need HR. So the future relevance of HR in my mind actually becomes very interesting. The objective is to make themselves redundant which is hard. It’s like customer support. You talk about it, you want to make it redundant but it’s almost impossible. It’s also how do you catalyse? Especially in a potential new normal where we’ll have satellite offices, much more offices than these big ones in the centre of the city. These spread out offices will make HR’s job and relevance, both actually very interesting because now most of it is going to be remote, online and most of it is “when HR comes visiting to town,” it used to be “when CEO comes visiting to town.” HR is in office today. I think it’s a challenge in my mind for the next, if I may say so, the decade. Where does HR go from here in the new normal? People are talking about going back to the office and hybrid work and so on and so forth. I firmly believe that the one and half years that have gone, whatever the time that has gone for around the world, I think we have fundamentally changed. I don’t think we can just go back to working in the office, just think about this as something that never happened. I think most people don’t and I’m also convinced that it’s true. So now we have to have this balance of people working from home on a regular basis or a permanent basis or even not having any offices which many companies, well not percentage wise. But at least in numbers have tried for many years and done this successfully earlier and there what happens is HR becomes more of how you design your workspaces and policies and your environments and your screens. One thing, and this is a slight diversion, I would take it. But it’s very useful to think about it that way, so we’ve always done these screensavers for many years. Every domain joined laptop gets its own screensavers, it shows FORTE, it shows something, who won an award and things like that. We are using those channels now to do a lot more deeper messaging. This is HR doing this in case of owning this and driving this and saying how do I drive these messages when you open up your laptop? Everyday or in the afternoon? Whenever you pick it up the first thing you see is the screensaver. How do you give out these subtle messages? That makes you feel more comfortable, that cheers you up. So it’s now not only about showing ‘philosophy’ and ‘values’ and ‘news’. It is about making you smile. And that transformation to HR being more people and high-touch oriented to more technology-oriented, introducing mobile apps for many things, introducing no-code platforms to do your own stuff. I think it’s going to go a long way in re-defining and changing the role of HR and the relevance of HR in the future. These are the things while experimentation becomes important, figure out what works well and then double down on what works well, and leave everything aside. I think HR is going through that big transformation in my mind right now.
01:01:31
Harish: Right, yeah. Agreed on that Monish. So we started this question on gaming so I’m going to end with something related but different. So what is the future relevance of football as a sport? Especially given the whole economics around it and the ESL issue and all of that, what is your take on the future relevance of football?
01:01:52
Monish: Yeah that’s a good question. You mentioned ESL otherwise I would have thought about American football as well.
01:02:01
Harish: I’m talking about real football.
01:02:06
Monish: Exactly. I think it’s a good question. It’s a sign of the times. Money, entertainment, what has happened to cricket to a certain extent. What has happened to Formula One by the way, very interesting, is also happening to football. I think it’s such a great sport it will survive, it’ll enhance itself, it’ll become a better sport out of all this. But it is going to have its ups and downs in mind. I think the popularity is not going to go away, it’s such a great sport. It’s a part of so many cultures around the world that it’s built for resilience in my mind. But all of the stuff that’s happening today, all of the Euro Cup is a very good revelation. It’s extremely interesting and the way different parts of the world have taken to kind of enjoying that in different ways is very interesting. I don’t read too much into it as it happens. I think it’s a great sport, it’ll just remain great and survive all of the stuff that happens. It’s what is happening in India which will be very interesting. A lot of other sports are taking a backseat in my mind to football, which means the next decade could see us in the World Cup.
01:03:47
Harish: Hope to see that happening. Fingers crossed. Touchwood, everything. Since 1950, we haven’t had a great time performance-wise, we’ve had some great players over the years. But I think it’s probably high time now that this team starts putting together the performances that we know we can expect from these people
01:04:14
Monish: Absolutely, and there’s always a time and place and serendipity. It just needs one catalyst to make it all come together. Talent is there, the opportunity is there, definitely, the money is there. All they need is that one catalyst. So yes, fingers, toes, everything crossed.
01:04:38
Harish: Alright Monish. I think that is a fantastic conversation and the last answer sort of summed up multiple threads. We spoke about resilience, catalyst, serendipity, the right time for an idea, so it sums up the entire conversation for me. As usual, lots and lots to learn from anybody who watches this, I’m sure should probably sit down with a notepad and put down what all to follow from this. So, thanks a lot, Monish.
01:05:08
Monish: No, absolutely my pleasure. I think the questions you ask always makes me think so makes it really exciting. Thank you!