The Liberal (St)-Art Up Experience

April 2014 marks the completion of my first year as an entrepreneur. ConveGenius, a technology consulting company that I co-founded as a student, is now based in Singapore and India. We have three offices and 22 employees. Sixty per cent of our team is older and much more experienced than us, the founders. We are yet to raise our angel round of funding, as we continue to boot-strap and grow.

What we do is not extraordinary. In fact, we have made innumerable mistakes over the year. Sometimes we were on the verge of giving up due to cash-flow problems and rising opportunity costs. However, we kept truckin with an intrinsic hunger to succeed against odds. As I reflect upon the key decisions I have taken in my business, I am convinced about one thing - we couldn't have done this the way we did, if not for my one year study of Liberal Arts in the Young India Fellowship programme.

I am an engineer and it was natural for me to start a technology company. Little did I know that my liberal arts education was adding a paradigm to how I thought and made my decisions as an entrepreneur. Anticipitating the non-plausible and embracing the paradoxical kept adding a new perspective to how we looked at a problem or a situation.

It's a natural tendency for us as rational humans to perceive more order and regularity than what actually exists. We are forced to find logical deductions in what we do and follow a pattern that we deem right based on our "pre-conceived" notions. I had learnt this in the philosophy of science class during the YIF program. Henceforth, every time i came up with a business strategy at ConveGenius, and if it seemed to be a logical thing to do, I would question the foundation of the logic itself so that we could revisit it from a new angle with a completely new strategy.

The paradoxes brought a new way of managing and strategizing business decisions in our start-up. These were the same paradoxes, we were taught in our Leadership course of our Liberal Arts programme. I give three examples on how we use the paradoxes for a business decision

1. To foster trust, risk losing all:
As student entrepreneurs, we tend to hire juniors and peers from our alumni network to build the initial team of employees. It is easy to put together a base team this way and get started immediately. It is affordable as well and seems the most logical thing to do.
However, we chose not to hire juniors or freshers in our company. The primary reason was that they had nothing to lose if we failed! We decided to build a team with people who were highly experienced in our domain. We preferred employees who had families.  A simple paradox of trust where we decided to pay a little extra and opt for an experienced team, thereby making sure the people we worked with were equally sharing the risk by actually trusting the start-up's vision and the idea behind it. This we knew asthey had the responsibility of their families and would always opt for a safety-net jobunless they truly believed in what we were doing.
The outcome:  Almost no attrition and faster delivery-time for our projects due to the years of experience they brought to the team.

2. To build authority, authorise others:
As a start-up that has recently cracked its initial clients, it seems very logical to be over-protective of what is being communicated to the clients. Most founders' keep full authority over communications, as this is the most logical thing to do. However this leads to spending a lot of time over e-mails and focusing a lot of energy on keeping the existing clients happy.

We chose to work differently, we authorized a few key members in our team to take the lead and bear responsibility for client interactions. As we are revenue driven with no funding to back us up with, client interaction and management was a very important role, as cash-flows depended on it.

We still took the plunge and gave responsibility to our team members to interact with clients and encouraged them to take lead and respond creatively. That brought in a sense of moral confidence and created mutual respect for each other, thereby working well for the company.

Outcome:We as founders were able to focus our time more on growing the business and acquiring new clients, while our team took care of all communication and management for existing projects.

3.To create unity, emphasise diversity:
As a start-up with a small team and highly stretched work-hours, it is often common to create a highly competitive environment amongst employees to improve time-lines for delivering projects. It seemed logical to keep the competitive spirit high in the team and thereby improving productivity.

However as a business we were sceptical about introducing competition among employees as it might hinder synergy and growth within the team. We embraced and emphasised diversity within groups. At every opportunity we asked team-members to point out and take note of each other's strengths and use it in the projects. We also diversified our centres and emphasised core competencies in them.

Outcome: The team focussed on excellence and delivering quality rather than finishing up faster.  

These minor decisions on how we shape the values and processes within a start-up can influence the overall growth and vision of a company. It's the team and people that shape businesses. Businesses are run on trusting the people you work withas clients, employees, peers and superiors. It is the 'inter-personal' that adds the special sauce over rationale skills that we learn every-day in our jobs.

A Liberal arts education gives us insights about how we function as a social-structure; much different from the way we are taught to think as rationale engineers. It allows us to leap through our "in-experiences" as young entrepreneurs and learn what people gain from years of work-experience in their usual corporate jobs. It fosters interdisciplinary thinking and nurtures ambiguity to look at the same problem via multiple paradigms. A skill, that India needs for its future leaders and change agents.

(The author is founder and managing director of ConveGenius Group of Companies.

Disclaimer: The author was a Fellow in the 2012 batch of the Young India Fellowship Programme of Ashoka University. Views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and assumptions made are not reflective of the position of any agency other than the author himself.