When my company grows up it wants to be a startup!

That seems to be an interesting intent right? Just imagine after years of journey and being in the marketplace, a company decides to be a startup. Possibly meaning that it wants the fire back into the organization’s soul. Come to grips with change and disrupt the order of things.

Burn the midnight oil and don’t take a ‘no’ for a failure. Bring back that agility which it sacrificed at the altar of processes and size. Or for that matter reinvent the way to stay ahead by thinking and doing things on the fly. Action, action and more action. All driven by a passion to do things right and do it in an ingenious manner.

And that bandied word ‘change’? That is part of the startup DNA, certainly. Startups thrive on change; they welcome it, embrace it and try to mold it their way. Innovation is a default setting. How does a startup get to do all this and actually enjoy the outcome? Success is a high; failure is a restart with more gusto?

In my interviews with several startup founders, I discovered that one quality stood out and was common across all of them. They wore the lenses of their idea. They saw the world from within the boundaries of their idea. For the healthcare startup the world was dotted with healthcare only — with all the nodes and the touch points. For the food startup it was all about the world of food.

Having taken a few liberties and oversimplified that a bit, here is the observation — they live and breathe the field or line of business. No weekdays or weekends. Non-stop thinking, non-stop tossing up of ideas and ways to look at the world afresh.

On the face of it seems like we all know this, right?

But more often than not, companies miss out this very startup attitude. They think they are established.

And therein lies the ostrich…!

My components of startup attitude:

INTUITIVENESS, EMPATHY, ENERGY, BENIGN ARROGANCE