Everyone needs a coach.
No matter how good you are, having someone knowledgeable to observe / listen to you, and point out where there is room for improvement, is very useful. We all know this.
What is even more important, but is often forgotten though, is the tremendous value of someone who can just point us in the right direction, when we need it the most!
MSMEs and Start-ups are usually started by people who excel in their fields**, because we are the ones with the confidence to try something extraordinary. We also usually have the expertise required (by ourselves or via long-term consultants / mentors) to easily tackle any of the usual issues that crop up in our domains.
But what happens when, as it happens from time-to-time, it is slightly outside our area of expertise?
In a big company, this is not a problem. One can always find someone in another department who knows, or one can saunter into any university with one’s brand name and get their attention.
What if one is a small company though? Being the ‘tech person’/ CTO there means we usually don’t have anyone senior to bounce ideas off or to just point us in the correct direction when we are stuck. And that is usually all that is required…
Just as what Shri Rama needed at that critical juncture was Jatayu, to tell him which way to go and what to expect. Without that critical information, the quest for Devi Sita would have been so much more difficult!
It is not that, given enough time and resources, we can’t figure out the path to the solution on our own. After all, a love for problem-solving is what brought most of us to engineering in the first place. But here again, being an MSME or a start-up means both time and resources are in short supply!
What is a more effective use of one’s time and energy? Spending days or weeks trying to establish contact with a top-consultant, who then expects a fat contract but may not even be the right person to advice you? Or spending days or weeks going round in circles, researching the solution (and maybe missing some crucial point that will lead to a big disaster later)? And all this while your business partners / employees are breathing down your neck, waiting for instructions on what to do, and maybe wondering if you are lazy or incompetent because you are taking so long to proceed.
And we have all faced this as tech entrepreneurs!
This is why we decided to try and create a system where everyone has quick and easy access to experienced experts. The experience part is the key when it comes to guiding people effectively.
Being great warriors in the fields of engineering & entrepreneurship, we already know how to fight our battles. But sometimes we need a Jatayu to point us in the correct direction!
*The title & the original idea for this post comes from a blog post with the same title by the wonderful Nandini Bahri-Dhanda, an interiors architect par excellence!**I stick to discussing engineering here, but it is applicable to most other fields as well.
Photo by Rohit Durbha on Unsplash
