Awarded the
“RodinStar” Post
of the week!!
There are some stories that break your heart and that happened to me after reading Hardik Shah’s article End of a Chapter. It really compelled me to think of being in his place and going through the ordeal. As an Entrepreneur, I am open to failure but as a person am not open to break a friend, brother and partner away. Especially when you’ve been through the thick and thin of things for so many years.
I co-founded my venture 2 years back with my friend / brother from other parents Mr. Rashmirathi Tiwari. We had a strong friendship of 5 years to rely on before starting. People around us always said “we have not seen two different people being so alike in every respect”. So, we both exactly knew what we were getting into. We rocked our steady life boats, trusted each other and started off.
The 2 years’ journey has been AWESOME to say the least. We found a different kind of rapport being business partners, matched each other’s frequency while taking tough decisions and always complemented the other.
But, are we sure the same would continue through infinity? Would there be a time when things would not be as normal as they are now.
We have discussed such things and try to prepare ourselves to face such situations together, rather than against each other. Some of the things that we usually do are:
- Understand each other’s personality traits and assume they would stay as they are
- Complementing the limitations of other’s personality and skillsets to build a strong entity together
- Appreciating and criticizing the other in mails, verbally or through IMs (even if we sit an inch away)
- Adopting a culture to respond but NOT react
- Leaving few things alone that are out of our control
Still, we realized that this is not pushing us to the limits and the actual scenarios might be drastically different than what we have faced so far.
So we decided to start ‘You are a b!tc#’ session.
Here both of us would go ‘No holds barred’ at each other, criticize each other, find faults, blame for specific mistakes. No words are off limit here. No one is allowed to take the ‘words’ seriously, but the meaning/pain of the points raised should be understood and acted upon. The objective is to vent anger (if any) and not let it accumulate.
I hope the unease (if any) below the goody-goody environment would be uncovered and we have lesser things to say to each other when the real hell breaks loose. I am not sure of the success of such a session, but would really like to hear your views on how do you handle ‘Partner Relationship Management’.
After all, it can be the 2nd most defining relationship of your life!