Prune the Yellow Leaves: Interview with Sandeep Chennakeshu, Former CTO of Sony Ericsson
I recently went one on one with Sandeep Chennakeshu. Sandeep was the CTO of Ericsson Mobile Phones and Sony Ericsson, president of Ericsson Mobile Platforms, SVP at Freescale, president of BlackBerry Technology Solutions, and EVP of AMD. Sandeep is the COO of Uhnder Inc. and is the author of the new book Your Company Is Your Castle: Proven Methods for Building a Resilient Business.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Sandeep: My passion for math led me to earn a PhD in electrical engineering. The next thirty-four years flew as I got immersed building products in three incredible industries that have transformed all our lives -
Cellphones, semiconductors, and software.
As time went by, my passion evolved beyond just math (though I have never left that entirely behind!) to building and leading engineering teams who worked across borders and around the world to develop products that would be useful to everyone everywhere. And then my passion evolved again. While I worked in established technology companies, I wanted to go beyond engineering and so took on fixing business units that were either in trouble or not making money. In effect the businesses I was entrusted with were like large start-ups that needed a reboot. The lessons learned in doing turnarounds helped me start my own consulting business where I was engaged advising multinationals, tech start-ups and investment firms, giving me the extra perspective of an outside-in look at company operations.
Today I work as the chief operating officer of a disruptive advanced start-up building radar chips and software for autonomous driving and industrial robots.
Along this journey I worked globally, enriching me culturally, got tutored by the school of hard knocks and constantly moved out of my comfort zone to take on unfamiliar roles and responsibilities that made me reboot, adapt, and grow my skillset. Every stumbling block became a steppingstone for success.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Sandeep:
Know your market and competition thoroughly to create a winning strategy and a sticky business model.
Ensure that your strategy addresses large enough opportunities, your product or service is relevant to the market, and make sure you have the capability to execute -timing is everything
Hire the right people and align the company culture with the strategy. Strategy is what you want done. Culture determines what you get done.
Reinforce your strategy by:
Creating winning products – transform disruptive ideas to disruptive products
Delivering your products or services with a maniacal focus on time quality and cost
Building productive sales channels
Executing flawlessly – day by day
Build stakeholder (investors, customers, and employee) confidence.
These steps (what) along with recipes (how) are in my book Your Company is Your Castle and available on Amazon.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Sandeep: There are seven principles that I follow:
Bring awareness and purpose through high engagement and inclusion with your employees
Make sure everyone knows what is important to deliver – Know Your Numbers and measure them with metrics that are visible to all
Create clarity in roles and responsibilities – don’t play like a kindergarten soccer team; play positions like a professional soccer team
Engender a sense of urgency every day
Grow each team’s capability cube (competence, capacity, and clarity of communication)
Prune the yellow leaves – don’t waste energy on difficult and unaligned people
Reinforce and validate, to your employees, that your strategy is working with tangible proof
Adam: What are the most important trends in technology that leaders should be aware of and understand? What should they understand about them?
Sandeep: There a numerous technology trends in the market. A few key ones are:
Artificial intelligence that is being used for natural language processing to perform “skills and actions” via smart speakers, language translation, drug discovery, autonomous driving, voice response service, autonomous driving, creating art and identifying fake art and even handling patent filing. The applications grow every day.
Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) that can help with immersive experiences such as telemedicine, counseling, and training and education.
An increasingly connected world through wireless and internet that has given rise to social networks, streaming on demand, ride share, online food delivery and budget hotel rentals.
With everything connected bad actors have more opportunities to hack into and steal valuable data, which has spawned major advances in cyber security.
Powerful semiconductor technology that powers almost everything in our daily lives.
Blockchain and smart contracts have found application in financial clearinghouses, supply chains, identity management, and simplifying complex buyer-seller transactions.
Technology evolves at a rapid pace and constantly. There is a lot of it. The key is to determine what is important to your business and selectively adopt what can help your business grow profitably and be more productive. Pick technology when it is ready and try not to be the pipe cleaner.
I found having periodic strategy sessions, with my team, is essential to promoting new thinking. At these strategy sessions, you should challenge the status quo. Dedicate different sessions to focus on how global trends are impacting every facet of your business—business models, products, HR and talent, compensation, manufacturing, contracts, marketing, and so on. Ask your managers to present how can they leverage global trends to grow their capability cube.
Every few sessions, you should try to invite a broader group of managers to attend so they too could participate and add to the conversation and thinking. It is important to stress at these meetings that you must always expect your competitors to do the unexpected.
In short, a healthy dose of paranoia in every element of your business will prepare each team to evolve and not get consumed by their daily work.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Sandeep: Empowered organizations are created by leaders who build understanding across the company and reinforce positive behaviors. These leaders gain credibility through substance and are typically admired and respected by the organization. It is easier to follow someone you admire and respect. The leaders I admired and learned the most from possessed the following five qualities:
Vision (coupled with conviction and perseverance)
Leading by example
Managerial courage
Communication clarity
Curiosity to evolve
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Sandeep:
Get out of your comfort zone regularly, reboot, change your mindset, and adapt
Get battle tested – volunteer for tough assignments. You will never know your limit until you try
Learn from success and failure – while the memories of success are confidence-boosting the bitter lessons of failure are enlightening should you wish to confront and reflect on them.
Learn to deal with adversity – don’t ever let it swallow you
Stay true – believe in yourself as you will need this belief to act decisively when you lead. And finally walk the talk.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Sandeep: I have three quotes to share that have guided me in what I do every day – try them.
“Success is a product of unremitting attention to purpose” – Benjamin Disraeli
“Minds are like parachutes; they only function when open” – Lord Thomas Dewar
“To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom” – Bertrand Russell
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Sandeep: It is all in the revenue and returns that each of these teams generates.
Maximize the three Cs of revenue by increasing the
Coverage for your products or services
Competitiveness (tangible) of your products and services
Conversion of products or services to sales revenue
Optimize your go-to-market channels by
Prioritize channels with fast conversion rates and higher net return on investment
Use growth and efficiency metrics to gauge each channel
Prune channels that don’t perform to your metrics
Pay for performance with the right model – If your salespeople are making a lot of money and you are setting good targets, it is safe to assume your company is doing well
Create productive sales funnels – don’t chase shiny objects; it all about opportunity prioritization, conversion velocity, and profitable revenue
Forecast well and hit your numbers
Manage channel incentives effectively – “Pay for Performance”, don’t “Pay to Participate”
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Sandeep: My journey, influenced by everyone I worked with, has given me four pieces of advice.
Believe in yourself, do things you enjoy, work with people you respect, and focus on the bright hope that the future always brings.
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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