Leaders of companies of any size, at any stage of development spend a lot of time focused on growing the business. We develop our game plan and ensure that we are optimally executing on our objectives. We concentrate on looking forward.
Profits are one of the most important goals of any successful business, and investors are one of the most important constituencies of public businesses.
HCL is a corporation. It is for profits. A corporation stands for its shareholders, its profits, its employees, its discoveries, and its customers.
There are three reasons to be in business. To make money, to have fun – and to make money.
People who decry the fact that businesses are in business "just to make money" seldom understand the implications of what they are saying. You make money by doing what other people want, not what you want.
I'm not in business to be loved, but I am in business.
Despite their good intentions, today's businesses are missing an opportunity to integrate social responsibility and day-to-day business objectives - to do good and make money simultaneously.
Any approach to strategy quickly encounters a conflict between corporate objectives and corporate capabilities. Attempting the impossible is not good strategy. It is just a waste of resources.
Objectives are not fate; they are direction. They are not commands; they are commitments. They do not determine the future; they are a means to mobilize resources and energies of the business for the making of the future.
It's easy to be a short-term hero. It is very easy for me to get tremendous results very short term, get that translated into compensation, and be off sailing in the Bahamas. But the goal for this company - and it's very difficult to do - the goal is to follow a four- or five-year process.
The basic definition of the business and of its purpose and mission have to be translated into objectives.
The goal of an ISP or a broadband provider is to get as many subscribers as possible. It's not to try to annihilate consumer interests.
What I've found is there is no barometer that allows you to chart when you're oversaturating a desire. You're left really trying to respond on a gut level, because by the time you might do research, it's already too late. There's also a healthy tension between what are very sound business objectives and a very amorphous desire to preserve what's special.
If I would have to sacrifice R&D investments to fulfill a goal, that would be the wrong goal to have.
You have to have in mind what you want when you go public. It's not just an end in and of itself. Suddenly, you have investors to satisfy. Investors who want - who demand - a return.
Most good founders that I know at any given time have a set of small overarching goals for the company that everybody in the company knows.
My suggestion is that if you need someone outside your company to prepare a mission statement for you, then you really don't know what your mission is, and you probably don't have one.
As a company, we are not interested only in investments.
It is incredibly important to set goals for your business, as if you have no direction for your business, your online business will be a failure.
One of the most important tasks as a leader in a startup is to pick the right metric to track. This is often referred to as the 'compass metric' because it will be your compass for growth. It's important to note that 'compass metrics' will likely change over the lifetime of a business.
What are you doing at the moment? How does that compare to your competitors? What do you want to achieve? How can you create something people want?
Management of an industrial company must be giving targets to the engineers constantly; that may be the most important job management has in dealing with its engineers.
Ratings translate into corporations, corporations that need a profit statement this quarter that's larger than the last.
One of my major objectives is to build a long-term enterprise, to build shareholder value over time.
Too many companies are just being big for the sheer sake of it. Too many CEOs thinking bigger is better.
