Thus far, Indian companies had been copying product and business ideas from the west, but they’re now copying management styles as well.
India’s Ola Electric appears to have copied Elon Musk’s plan of asking employees to send an email with 3-5 bullet points detailing what they had worked on the previous week. Musk had first used this strategy at Twitter after its take over, and more recently, had asked all US government employees to send a similar email. Ola has now introduced its own spin on the initiative, and dubbed it “Kya Chal Raha Hai”.
“We’re starting ‘Kya Chai Raha Hai?’—a simple way to share your weekly updates directly with me and your managers, starting today,” Ola Electric CEO Bhavish Aggarwal wrote in an email to employees. “Please send a brief update to your manager and Kyachalrahahai @olagroup.in (email will be active in an hour or so) with 3-5 bullet points about what you got done last week. Keep it simple and to the point. Use the email subject: ‘Weekly updates’. The deadline for this is today end of day. Going forward, we will expect the email before Sunday end of day. Everyone has to send this, no exceptions,” he added.
The initiative is exactly what Musk had asked of US government employees, down to the weekly cadence and the 3-5 bullet points. Like with the US government, Ola’s initiative comes at a time when there’s restructuring going on at the company — just yesterday, it had been reported that Ola was letting go of more than 1,000 full-time and contract employees. The move had come after the company had lost its leadership position in India’s electric two-wheeler space, and seen its stock tumble as much as 70 percent below its all-time high.
The “what did you get done this week” first came into prominence when Elon Musk was looking to take over Twitter, and was texting then-Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. Musk had implied that Twitter was too slow and bureaucratic, and in a text message that was later leaked, had asked Agrawal “What did you get done this week?”. This line had been picked up by the tech community as a means to keep themselves accountable for their productivity, and many tech executives on X had said that they’d begun employing the mantra with themselves and their teams to determine if they were being productive enough. Musk had also sent a similar email to X employees, before laying off nearly 80 percent of them.
Bhavish Aggarwal, though, does seem to be inspired by Elon Musk in several ways. Both run an electric vehicles company — Musk has Tesla, while Aggarwal has Ola Electric. Both also have an AI arm — Musk has xAI, while Aggarwal has started Krutrim. Both seem to be outspoken on X, and don’t back down from a scrap on the social media platform. Bhavish, though, has a long way to go before he can be compared to Musk, who is the richest man in the world and possibly the greatest entrepreneur of all time.
And it’s perhaps for the best that Indian companies — especially those that are having at hard time — are copying Musk’s management style. Musk has built several sector-defining companies, and achieved many feats which were previously thought impossible. And if his wisdom could be used to help Indian companies become more productive and efficient, it could end up helping India’s startup ecosystem as a whole.