Just came across quite an interesting presentation that describes NetFlix‘s winning culture especially focusing on it’s core points which are listed below:

Don’t quit when the night is darkest,
For it’s just a while until dawn;
Don’t quit when you’ve run the farthest
For the race is almost won.

Don’t quit when the hill is steepest,
For your goal is almost nigh;
Don’t quit until you are not a failure,
Until you fail to try.

Reader Contribution:
1. If you have trouble succeeding , Fail [Kent Beck] – Bhasker V Kode, CTO of Hover
2. When the going gets tough, the tough gets going - Vaibhav Pandey

Below are some of the lessons(which are listed in the form of one liners) :

1. The ultimate reward for the leader of people is to be able to say, “I saw someone grow today and, I helped“.

2. Intensity (Goal, Focus, Action) + Enthusiasm (expectancy of better things to come) = Charisma.

3. High Performance is often the result of a sudden change in direction.

4. Accomplishment is your birthright. Limitations are adopted.

5. To achieve great things, know more than the average person considers necessary.

6. An organization quits improving RIGHT after the manager quits improving.

7. Help a team member grow and you will receive respect in return.

8. Team morale and customer service, on a scale of 1-10 receive the same score.

9. Take a mentor to lunch before somebody else eat yours

10. Determination makes failure impossible.

11. Be aware of their weaknesses, but talk to their strengths.

12. An organization will never rise above the quality of it’s leadership.

13. A person out of a place in his/her vocation is only half a person.

14. Deciding not to have a specific goal is a specific goal.

15. If you don’t know what to do on a daily basis to achieve your goal, then it is not a goal- It is a fantasy.

16. Goals are all found upstream.

17. Your team members are no better at planning time than you are.

18. Team member’s morale will never be higher than the leader’s morale…..for long

19. Aim for striking originality, it gets attention.

20. A leader never forgets that creativity is contagious and can build enthusiasm.

21. Conflict overcome is strength gained.

22. “Embrace Change” , it’s saying “Yes“ to Tomorrow and “No” to repeated yesterdays.

23. Some of the world’s greatest achievements were made by those who were self-instructed.

24. Fear has strength of its own , only that which you choose to give it.Ironically, that’s the very strength you need to overcome it.

Related Posts:
Good Leader or great leader

Guard against complacency all the time.Complacency makes you blind to the early signals from the environment that something is going wrong.

For every problem that change represents, there is an opportunity lurking in disguise somewhere. It is up to you to spot it before someone else does.

While routines are useful, do not let them enslave you. Deliberately break out of them from time to time.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to manage fear without getting paralyzed. Feel the fear, but move on regardless.

You have to constantly learn about people and how to interact effectively with them. In the world of tomorrow, only those individuals and organizations will succeed who have mastered the art of rapid and on-going learning.

Spend time with people who have a “can-do” approach.Reasonable optimism can be an amazing force multiplier.

Playing to win would help you to concentrate your energy on what you can influence instead of getting bogged down with the worry of what you cannot change. Do your best and leave the rest.

If you succeed 90 per cent of the time, you are doing fine. If you are succeeding all the time, you should ask yourself if you are taking enough risks. If you do not take enough risks, you may also be losing out on many opportunities.

In spite of all the change around you, decide upon what you will never change: your core values.

All of us have a responsibility to utilize our potential for making our nation a better place for others, who may not be as well endowed as us, or as fortunate in having the opportunities that we have got. Let us do our bit, because doing one good deed can have multiple benefits not only for us but also for many others.

You can have a look at the complete presentation below:

The important excerpts from the speech are given below:

Pre Infosys:
1. Sometimes advice can come from an unexpected source, and chance events can sometimes open new doors.

2. Entrepreneurship, resulting in large-scale job creation, was/is the only viable mechanism for eradicating poverty in societies.

Post Infosys:
If you want to create a great company, we should be optimistic and confident. They have more than lived up to their promise of that day.

Below are life lessons from these events,in his own words.
Note: “I” in the article refers to Narayana Murthy

1. I will begin with the importance of learning from experience. It is less important, I believe, where you start. It is more important how and what you learn. If the quality of the learning is high, the development gradient is steep, and, given time, you can find yourself in a previously unattainable place. I believe the Infosys story is living proof of this.

Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions.

2. A second theme concerns the power of chance events. As I think across a wide variety of settings in my life, I am struck by the incredible role played by the interplay of chance events with intentional choices. While the turning points themselves are indeed often fortuitous, how we respond to them is anything but so. It is this very quality of how we respond systematically to chance events that is crucial.

3. Of course, the mindset one works with is also quite critical. As recent work by the psychologist, Carol Dweck, has shown, it matters greatly whether one believes in ability as inherent or that it can be developed. Put simply, the former view, a fixed mindset, creates a tendency to avoid challenges, to ignore useful negative feedback and leads such people to plateau early and not achieve their full potential.

The latter view, a growth mindset, leads to a tendency to embrace challenges, to learn from criticism and such people reach ever higher levels of achievement.

4. The fourth theme is a cornerstone of the Indian spiritual tradition: self-knowledge. Indeed, the highest form of knowledge, it is said, is self-knowledge. I believe this greater awareness and knowledge of oneself is what ultimately helps develop a more grounded belief in oneself, courage, determination, and, above all, humility, all qualities which enable one to wear one’s success with dignity and grace.

Read the complete article here

Leaving the teen age aside(which is more for enjoying rather than taking things too seriously),the age when a person starts working is very important.A person looking out for a new job could be facing failures by not clearing interviews though talent/knowledge is not proportional to clearance in the interview.When a person starts to venture out,difficulties become double but the excitement is also doubled since , it is your own baby

But failing (again and again) leads to de-motivation and you tend to look into yourself “Are you worth it?” but the important thing what we forget is “Trying” which is more than “Failing”.With every failure you see yourself improving(which also depends on the individual whether he wants to improve or not) and the distance between you and your destination becomes lesser and lesser and one day “You are there at your desired destination”

Some of my personal failures(or ares of improvement, which I always remember):

It is not so much that people like to fail but rather than they see “Failure” as a necessary side trip in the journey to bring great offerings to the market.

“It is very important to break away from your past in order to absorb new ideas.You should be comfortable in saying “I’m going to start something new,I better shut off the past and begin a different chapter in my life” – Umang Gupta,CEO of Keynote Systems

Never lose sight of the past (The Gururaj (Desh) Deshpande story):

Gururaj “Desh” Deshpande is the chairman of Sycamore Networks and he is on the board of directors of many IT companies.But he was not successful like this before.He has a pay cheque of $26.95 framed in his office.This cheque helps him to remember how someone can overcome failure with success.As Deshpande says: “Failures broaden your comfort zone and allow you to view risk a little differently”

He co-founded network hardware company Coral Network Corp in 1988 and “boot-strapped” th company while trying to raise $4 million in VC funding.When funding came in , it was a dream come true for him and his wife.His wife who was in IT also quit her job to take care of their two young children.
But soon,there was an ugly misunderstanding between him and his co-founder and they parted ways.When Coral Networks was sold to Synoptics,$26.95 was all that Mr Deshpande earned from the sale.

But Coral’s experience strengthened Deshpande’s belief that it is important to find things that excite you and do things you want to do and you should not be afraid of making a living.In India,culturally, people don’t want to accept failure because if you fail,you are marked for life.The irony he says is more you can deal with failure,the faster you can bounce back,whether you are an individual, a company or even a national economy.

After a (so called) failure,Deshpande was out with his new venture Cascade Communications Corp.Cascade became a huge success and very soon grew to $500 million in revenues.In 1997,Ascend Communications acquired Cascade for $3.7 billion.

From his early days,Deshpande learnt a lot: “To get things started , you have to be slightly crazy ,since if you are too thoughtful and too analytical , you would probably never pull the trigger“.These things are not so different from the critical decisions that we take in personal life like when to get married,having children or buying a house etc

Once Cascade was sold,Gururaj Deshpande went on to start his new venture Sycamore Networks.This time around he was able to finance himself and raising money for this venture took him only 15 seconds Today,along with his work with Sycamore,Deshpande also acts as a VC and is an investor in many startups in India and the US.

This is just a small story of a successful Entrepreneur who was hit by failures and bounced back well.Every Entrepreneur(or should I say person) is hit by failures but it all depends on how you come back after failure.

If you have reached so long in this post,I really appreciate it but you would ask this question “Why only Gururaj Deshpande? The reason is a. I cleared the Datamatics Interview (4 years back) but I did not join there and b. I keep his photograph on my desk in the office since,I really appreciate his effort.

Finally before I end this article,last words of success: “The successful innovators don’t let failure stop their internal quest to succeed“

You can also check out “The Steve Jobs Story about failures and success” here , which is really very motivating and also also teaches you many lessons in just 14 minutes

This post comes from his blog and is based on his book “Life Beyond Code” , where he mentions about 25 ways to distinguish yourself,which are mentioned below:

1. Care as if it’s your own
2. Do your daily work with passion
3. Build strong relationships
4. Dream BIG!!!
5. Set the right expectations (Under promise and Over deliver)
6. Ask for help(when needed)
7. Celebrate small victories:

We know that:
a) Failure is the stepping stone of success.
b) It’s NOT not falling down but standing up every time we fall down that matters.
c) A bend in the road is not the end of the road.

8.Set high standards:
Always try to prove that you are the best to your ownself.Setting high standards would always help you to perform better
9. Know your values
10. Pursue right memberships:
Right memberships would pay off big time..May be,unconferences , TiE could also come in this category
11. Help people,help themselves:

12. Be a reader:
This point is amazing.As Rajesh says “Every good leader is a reader.Most of the people don’t read”.Once you have the right set of books with you,than you don’t need any other motivation
13. Plan by outcomes
14. Think long term:
We overestimate what we can achieve in a day and we underestimate what we can achieve in a year
15. Embrace uncertainty with ease:
There is more help than you will ever need but only if you are humble enough to ask. For that, you need to develop an attitude to embrace uncertainty with ease.
16. Ask the right questions:

17. Engage with a coach:
It is very important to be guided by the right mentor or coach.This would have a positive effect on your business
18.Be relevant
19. Get back on your feet fast(Failures are stepping stone to success):
I can easily this point to the current happenings in my life(personal and professional,both are filled with “N” no of failures) but this is really refreshing and motivating .Failures happen and you will fail or fall down at times. If you want to distinguish yourself, learn to get back on your feet fast every time you fall down.
20. Lead a volunteer effort:
21. Balance innovation and Continuous improvement:
Whenever an innovation project succeeds, the next immediate step would be to put that project on a “continuous improvement” roadmap. Because no project is really “complete”.So, in summary a good framework can be “Innovation > Continuous Improvement >
Innovation”.
22. Learn to sell:
Every person is a salesman some sell skills at workplace,some sell ideas….
23. Learn systems thinking:
Systems thinking, in essence, is an understanding of the system as a whole and the mutual interaction of the underlying parts of the system.
24. Walk away from free:
Nothing comes for free though in some cases the price that you pay is not money.So get rid of things that come for Free !!
25. Influence the influencers

Found motivating and intersting than you can download the pdf of the complete article from here

Dated 16th February,2007: It was just a normal working day and guess what “I walked all the way from Koramangala to my house in Indiranagar(which is around 15KM) and this where I tried to recollect some memorable things in my life that have changed my professional and personal life.” and this post was born.So here it goes:

Lesson 1:
It was very difficult getting a good job after passing out in the year 2001.Yes,dot com bust and Y2K were responsible for this and to some extent even I was responsible!!! Imagine a situation where a middle class boy living in Mumbai is not getting a job even after doing his so called (computer) engineering and damn I finally got a job where I was getting paid mere 4000 bucks(there is nothing to hide here).It was in 2003 when I decided to quit my job and move to Bangalore, which was one of the biggest risks in my life and now I feel my life has traveled a full circle.
Learning:
I never thought of having any kind of entrepreneurial skills but this incident made me realize that I can take risks which is in the genes of Entrepreneurs.And yes,this blog has been my friend, philosopher and guide in this journey.Remember “The biggest risk in life is not taking one”.
Did you know “N R Murthy was refused a job in Wipro before he started Infosys“

Lesson 2:
This incident would rather seem funny to you but I taken guts to write the truth.The same day,I got a call from Citibank officer for a credit card and he asked my Driving License as a proof(since,every person knows how to drive,isn’t it?).I replied in negation and believe me,he was shocked after hearing this.But this is a truth which I have to accept.I still have to learn driving a car or a bike,but I don’t regret this since,it opens a world of opportunities for me.
Learning:
I like going by bus and also by auto rickshaws since, I get to know more about a common man’s thinking(though I am also one of them ).You would really know your worth from these people and they are your best teachers.This in turn helps in understanding consumer needs and also helps you building a network which you might have never thought about . I would be learning driving very soon but even after learning it,would prefer the other mode of transport since,“Business is all about relations,no matter with whom you are trying to get connected to”.
Did you know “N R Murthy of Infosys also doesnt have a driving license and he had publicily announced on TV” and he was never afraid what people would think about it.

Lesson 3:
Be it my job,my blog or playing cricket,I do all the things with full enthusiasm and with a winning attitude.I have one thing in mind “I want to win(but by fair means)”.I have lots of heroes(motivators) from different fields of life eg Sachin Tendulkar from cricket,Sunil Mittal of Bharti as an entrepreneur,Guy Kawasaki as a blogger/VC/entrepreneur but at the end of the day,it is me who has to perform.
Learning:
Enthusiasm is very important for your success.Do everything with a full heart and good results would follow soon.You need to be motivated to achieve something , but the first person with whom you should be motivated is yourself(ie. you need to be self motivated).If you are not motivated, no one else can be a source of motivation for you.
Did you know “Gururaj Desh Deshpande failed in his first venture but he stood up tall and started his next big successful venture Sycamore Networks“

Lesson 4:
Everyday,when I look at myself , I feel there are lots of improvements that I need to make and I need to work(a bit harder), in order to achieve my goals.I need to fight against my weaknesses,capture my dreams,work for other’s betterment etc. Improvement is a continual process and would continue until the end of my life.I never thought that I would reach this stage(though I have a long way to go to achieve my dreams) but continuous improvement has helped me achieve it.
Learning:
Success is a journey and not a destination.Take small steps towards improvement and it would lead to a larger improvement(over a period of time).Try to celebrate your achievements but never be satisfied with them and learn from your failures.
Have a look at what Mr Laxmi Mittal has to say “He has not under achieved in life but there are more things that he wants to achieve” and this is what makes a successful person

Hope this post was motivating enough for you and all the best for achieving your dreams.