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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

August - 2010 - issue > Entrepreneur 101

Designing a Winning Organizational Culture

Gunjan Sinha
Sunday, August 1, 2010
Gunjan Sinha
It is critical for entrepreneurs to build an organizational culture which can help build enduring and successful companies. How do you think about the culture of your organization, and how do you shape the culture as you hire your employees and build the team. I feel, beyond the obvious elements of startup success, the organizational culture determines the winners from the losers. It filters out organizations that are indeed going to get the gold medal of success as they make their mark in their respective fields. Here are some key elements for designing the right organizational culture.

Quality
Sounds obvious, yet I can overstate the importance of building a high quality team. Team quality is not just determined by the resume of the people in the organizational, but it is more to do with how well are the various team-members selected, such that they have a strong role to play in their respective areas of competencies. If you start with a weak team, you are clearly at a disadvantage. So, it is important that from the inception of the startup, one is very focused about hiring the best team for the job. Remember, if you hired the best 100 people for your company, they will effortlessly attract others like themselves, and help you scale to the next thousand.

Open Culture: Embrace Partners and Suppliers

Winning CEO’s and entrepreneurs know the role of the partner and supplier ecosystems for their business. You rely not just on your own employees, but you embrace the carefully chosen and select set of partners and suppliers with whom you try and build long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. Right from the beginning, you have to instill an openness culture, where you treat your partners and suppliers with equal respect and value as you do to your own employees. A good example that I can site is from my own company Metricstream. We now have over 1000 Compliance experts who we regularly work with as partners and who are contributing significantly to the success of Metricstream. We were deliberate with this strategy right from the early days of the company.

Continuous Innovation culture

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