Be daring, be driven & be down to earth – Work Hard, Work Smart, and Work for the Brand

And now to some even more fundamental things. We believe that there is no substitute to hard work. Especially in a new market, when we need to run many-many laps before even being close to the talented people who have grown in this market. We would like to quote the then founder chairman, of the now disintegrated, Daewoo group - Kim Woo – Choong, from his hugely under rated and unacknowledged book ‘Every Street is paved with Gold’. One of us read it in the December of 1998. Choong mentioned that, “For every single soul under the sun, there are just 24 hrs. So how can one possibly get ahead of others?” Well, he said “if one man works for 8 hrs and the other works for 16, the second man is gaining one additional day over the first one. Do this for a week and you have gained a week, do this for a month and you have gained one whole month, do this for a year and you have created two years out of one and do this for a lifetime and you have created an additional life.” At the cost of sounding like a workaholic, we would say this extra work is the price that we need to be prepared to pay for entering a new market later than our contemporaries and competitors.
However we must also acknowledge that hard work is only a part of the approach to work. Thinking smartly, prioritizing ruthlessly, and challenging our every move and asking ourselves “is this the most efficient/effective way to do what we are doing” helps in looking at things very objectively. It has also helped us in critiquing our own work constructively.
Last but not the least, to echo the ‘Ogilvy way’ – we all are working for the brands. This point links to some of the things that we mentioned under the subhead on ‘Fight’.
We constantly ask ourselves how the brand is better off with us working on it. For us the brand is a sum total of the business growth, the consumer interest, the client relationship and the team morale.

We acknowledge that scoring very well on all the above parameters might not be possible in the first six months or even a year for that matter. However having these on our radar as the guiding principles in a new market and culture has helped us in doing our work better.

As we mentioned earlier, we also believe that most of the things that we have pointed out above, do not qualify as new knowledge. Perhaps it can even be argued that these points are not unique to the situation of working better in a new country because they simply are ways of working better in any market. Also, if one stepped back and looked at some of the points above, one can also spot many conflicting views. But that is the way real work life is – full of conflicting situations, personalities, moments, opinions, ideas. Universal formulae, as we have observed, are usually in the realm of pure Sciences, or back rationalizations of real life work situations.
Also, as we had mentioned earlier, the objective is not to make these experiences sound like theorems of success. The objective was to share our learnings & working styles which helped us do better in a new market or as one of us would but it – ‘survive the first six months’. We sincerely hope they can be of some remote use to the readers who read all the way to the end.