Thursday, September 13, 2012

SPIRIT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP... Nurturing Talent



SPIRIT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Nurturing Talent
    Sridhar Vembu, who founded Zoho, picks up students completing Class 12 (or in the second year of a diploma after Class 10) in corporation schools in Chennai and other towns in Tamil Nadu and puts them through a one-year classroom training and a six-month, on-the-job training. The students are mostly from poor backgrounds.
    When they join Zoho University, as it is called, they are provided with a laptop with unlimited internet access, free lunch and dinner, and a stipend of Rs 6,000 a month. They are trained in computer programming, as also in math and English.
    Almost all are absorbed into Zoho, and when they join, they are given salaries at par with those joining from the IITs and other engineering institutes. “Today, 170 employees out of Zoho’s total strength of 1,600 are from Zoho University,” says Aravind Natarajan of Zoho.
    Vembu’s philosophy has been that it does not require an IIT graduate to create world-class products out of India, and given the tremendous success of his office and business applications — Zoho has six million subscribers globally and competes against Google, Microsoft and
Salesforce-.com — he seems to be right.
    Natarajan says Vembu’s objective is to ensure that 50% of Zoho employees would be from Zoho University. The training facility started with six students in 2005; the latest batch has 59.
    Some of the fastest growing startups in India are employing Vembu-like strategies, creating talent themselves instead of hoping that the external environment would generate the talent required, which it does not, at least not fast enough. The strategy also often helps them to keep costs under control. Smaller firms typically have to pay higher salaries to attract skilled people from more established companies. An intense training programme for freshers obviates that.
    Mu Sigma started what it calls the Mu Sigma University around the same time that Zoho did. The company, which helps clients analyse the massive quantities of data they deal with and arrive at decisions, needed people with analytical skills.
    “India has plenty of talent in math and quantitative techniques, given that parents emphasize math for their children at an early age. That was very good for us. But we needed to convert that into analytical talent,” says Ambiga Rajaram, who handles talent creation in the company.
    The emphasis of the training is on inferential learning. The contrast here is with experiential learning, where past experience is a guide to the future. The understanding is that in today’s environment, businesses have to be very innovative, often doing things their industry never did before. “Like when Apple started a retail store,” says Ambiga.
    Mu Sigma has developed its own methodologies in inferential learning.
    Ambiga says the programme has over time become almost a mini-MBA. “We are even training employees on how to consult with customers in order to bring new business,” she says.
    The Mu Sigma University is a big reason why the company has so rapidly scaled. It has 1,500 employees and is expected to cross $100 million in revenue in 2012.
    RedBus, the pioneering bus booking portal and software company, has its internal training programme and is now looking at establishing a RedBus Academy that pools all the knowledge that it has gained about the bus industry and associated technologies ever since it was founded in 2006. The idea is still at a concept stage, but Charan Padmaraju, co-founder of the company, notes that the quality of skills makes a huge difference.
    “We need to particularly develop soft skills, managerial, leadership and communication skills,” he says.
    The startup, which has been funded by VC firms Seedfund, Inventus and Helion, has been more than doubling its revenues over the past several years. Last year it touched a revenue of Rs 320 crore and turned profitable. “We believe we’ll cross Rs 700 crore this year,” Padmaraju says. That kind of growth requires more and more quality talent, and the best way to do that would be to produce them internally.
Sujit John TNN TOI120815

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