Your Company Is Your Castle: How to Build a Successful Company
By Sandeep Chennakeshu
Aleph Book Company, 320 pages, Rs 899

Companies emerge from smart people with clever ideas.

However, vision alone is not enough, as only one out of three companies lasts ten years. It takes a systematic approach to make a company sustainably successful. In ‘Your Company Is Your Castle’, Sandeep Chennakeshu, a business transformation veteran, compares a company to a medieval castle that has withstood the test of time, having weathered nature’s elements and hordes of invaders.

Sandeep ties eight structural elements of such castles to eight essential elements that make a company thrive. He describes how to assess and systematically build a company’s business model, financial health, strategy, culture, products, sales channels, execution, and stakeholder confidence to make the company formidable. ‘Your Company Is Your Castle’ will equip you with critical insights and principles to build strong businesses and, in turn, build yourself into a strong leader.

Using evocative examples from diverse companies and stories from his thirty-year career of transforming companies and launching trailblazing products globally, Sandeep gives entrepreneurs and managers at all levels and all disciplines in a company a blueprint and recipe book needed for not only building a lasting company, but defending, protecting, and expanding it.

Sandeep earned a postgraduate diploma in industrial management from the Indian Institute of Science and a PhD in electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University. He is a Fellow of IEEE and a named inventor on 180 patents. He lives and works in Austin, Texas, and plans to spend the next chapter of his life sharing his learnings through writing and mentoring.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

The Castle Keep
Culture Instills the Will to Win

Culture serves as a company’s heart and soul.

Culture is not quantitative like finance, strategy, products, and sales. This may be why it is not always prioritized in companies. Yet, it is what defines the company.

Culture is a collection of ideas, values, beliefs, and behaviors exhibited by employees. To a large extent, culture is created by the company’s leadership and how they reward and discourage certain behaviors. However, employees play a crucial role in creating culture because they need to embrace it, spread it, and own it. Hence, culture has a strong influence on execution. If strategy is what needs to get done, culture determines what gets done. You could come up with a winning strategy to transform your company, but without culture in alignment, your implementation and execution of that strategy is destined to fail.

In many ways, culture is like a medieval castle’s keep, known in old French or Middle English as its donjon—a large tower within the castle’s perimeter or curtain walls. The keep was generally a castle’s defining feature, the element that loomed the largest. For instance, the Chateau de Vincennes, built near Paris, France in the fourteenth century, stands out for its imposing fifty-two-meter-tall donjon. The keep gets its name from “that which keeps or protects—the strongest and most secure part of a castle”. The keep represented feudal authority, as aptly described by medieval Spanish writers who called it torre del homenaje, or the tower of homage.

The keep could be several stories high and topped with battlements and turrets. It was constructed with extra thick walls and was the safest place in the castle in the case of a siege. These keeps housed the chapel, great hall where inhabitants gathered and ate, residential quarters, and food supplies. In the event of an attack, the keep needed to be protected. It was the last line of defense. For example, the Himeji Castle in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan has a main keep that is five-stories high built on a thirty-six-foot tall foundation of hand-cut riverbed rock. The castle complex has a very intricate maze of paths leading to the main keep—the gates, walls, and courtyards (baileys) were all arranged so an attacking force had to approach in a confusing spiral path. If the keep fell, the castle fell. Likewise, culture is the central part of any company—it looms the largest and must be defended at all costs, because when it falls, the company also falls.

Just as a castle keep could take many different forms, such as square, quatrefoil, round (shell)—so can company culture. It is essential thatyou build a culture that is in concert with your strategy. This culture can raise your company to new heights—a monument to your company’s successes. It can also serve as a refuge in tough times. But a weak company culture is liable to render all the other elements of your company ineffective.

I have chosen two dysfunctional cultures and one desired culture as illustrations.

Indifferent Culture
This organizational culture takes root when a leader or leaders hesitate to make decisions and do not communicate clearly with their organization. The broader organization does not understand or embrace the strategy. Work goes on every day, and while lower levels of management make decisions with all good intentions, but progress is not guided by market knowledge and strategy—meaning the outcome in the long run is suboptimal at best. In the absence of leadership, these organizations foster heroes and influencers, as well as the formation of loyalist groups around these influencers. Departments are unsynchronized and operating expenses go unchecked. Results are hit and miss unless the company is a virtual monopoly in the market, where mistakes often go unnoticed for a while. Since the leader or leaders are virtually absent, it is not clear how the organization is energized.

Controlled Culture
This organizational culture is the antithesis of the previous culture. The organization has a leader or leaders who make every decision and tend to micromanage. The over-reliance on these leaders causes other management levels to be unsure and indecisive because they are often overruled. They learn to be order-takers. Empowerment, if there is any, is ad hoc. There is a lot of busywork, a bit like running in place on a treadmill, and the organization is typically exhausted. These organizations demand strong loyalty and are typically structured so that all critical decision-making is routed via a small set of leaders. Such organizations can be successful, but usually not in the long run for two reasons: 1) the leaders suck the energy out of the organization, and 2) when a key leader or leaders leave or retire, the company begins to falter as the bench has little experience in making important decisions.

Empowered Culture
Departments and managers have clear roles, and their responsibilities are coupled with authority and accountability. Leaders drive the strategy, set clear goals, use metrics to track progress, and follow through on execution status. They encourage their managers to make decisions and empower them to get things done. Most of all, these leaders are not averse to having their managers challenge the status quo for improvement. Such organizations usually reinforce a meritocracy because they are results driven. It is no coincidence that they are well in tune with the market and execute steadily. Leaders in such cultures pump energy into the organization, and the organization’s progress energizes the leader.


[The excerpt reproduced with the permission of the publishers.]