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"...keeping you great" Ten Minutes with the Growth Guy

HEADLINES:

June 11 deadline -- FORTUNE Small Business magazine's pro-am business plan contest is now open to companies with 100 employees or less. Submit your business plan and compete against entrepreneurship students from the nation's top colleges for recognition in magazine—which has a circulation of 1   million. I will be judging the contest, along with business leaders including USA Networks founder Kay Koplovitz and venture capitalist Ann Winblad. Deadline: June 11. For details, go to www.fsb.com/showdown.

India is a free-for-all -- 550 executives participated in my Rockefeller Habits workshops across India last week. Key impressions of executives: wicked smart, love to debate, enjoy theory, hungry for practical, organizations too flat, and understand polarities -- more on these topics, India, and their   amazing Indian School of Business (ISB) under DETAILS below.

Best book on India -- in preparing for my trip, it was recommended I read "In   Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India" by Edward Luce. Released in 2006, it's an easy read which helped me understand some important cultural nuances and history.

Ray Kurzweil's formula for never dying -- three articles caught my attention this past week -- if you can only read one, scan this one -- it's FORTUNE's latest piece on Ray Kurzweil, one of the brightest   futurists and artificial intelligence inventors; father of the electronic keyboard, speech recognition, and the flat bed scanner; and founder of ten companies. He now has a hedge fund using his AI technology to recognize patterns and invest. But what caught my eye is that he's also tackling aging and has managed, at age 59, to stop the aging process and actually achieve a biological age of 40 and some hormonal and nutrient levels of someone in their 30s.

Hospital's "catalytic mechanism" -- offers warranty! (Note: these NY Times links expire quickly, so click and grab this article). In essence, this central PA hospital is guaranteeing its workmanship, charging a flat fee that includes 90 days of follow-up treatment. Results: less likely to return to intensive care; fewer days in hospital; more likely to go home immediately vs. going directly to a nursing home. Here is a link to Jim Collins famous article on catalytic mechanisms -- you do have a catalytic mechanism in your firm?

NEVER use a book publisher to publish your book -- Dick Cavett, famous talk show host, lambastes the publishing industry in his latest blog   -- this is exactly why I recommend all of you skip traditional publishers and self-publish your own book (are you writing one?)! Cavett details the real world nightmares here. You may have to sign up to NY Times Select.

DETAILS:

 

Attendees in my four Indian workshops included execs from GE and Microsoft and various growth firms. In addition, execs from two of the top five "best places to work" winners in India participated including an innovative company called MindTree Consulting.
 

 

Indian School of Business (ISB) -- check it     out -- I toured this ninth wonder of the world! Five years old, it's already Asia's largest graduate business school. McKinsey is the impetus behind the school and the board reads like a Who's Who of top Indian and global entrepreneurs including Michael Dell. Steve Jobs was a recent visitor as well. Its educational partners are Kellogg School of Management, Wharton, and London Business School. Google, Microsoft, and others have major facilities on or near the campus. I'll be back on campus in November speaking to 1200 top executives.
 

 

Organizations are too flat -- in order to compete on a global scale, Indian firms have had to be low cost providers. To maintain this position, I found many of the Indian companies way too thin in terms of management talent, running spans of control of 15:1 up to 25:1. This is penny wise and pound foolish.   Spending money on more and better mid-management talent would address the number one issue raised by Indian firms -- huge employee turnover. This was a real revelation for the audience.
 

 

Radical Change requires Radical Stability -- in a recent insight I discussed this important polarity of Jake Jacobs. The Indian audience embraced this idea easily, given that they have the single best culture for handling polarities i.e. their entire history and philosophy is rooted in dealing with fundamental     polarities: unity and diversity; super rich and super poor; passivity and aggression; left brain and right brain (something they discuss a lot).
 

 

Going into the horn repair business -- their traffic is the loudest and craziest I've ever experienced -- sort of like the "free-for-all" I generally experienced in all aspects of their country.