There is no such thing as a great idea in business
Published on: Monday, October 05, 2020
By: The Sun
Azran Osman-Rani (pic), CEO and co-founder of digital health startup Naluri, tells that it’s about relentless execution and constantly improving the product
How has your life experience made you the leader you are today?
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One consistent theme over the last 25 years of my professional career has been – nothing goes according to plan.
We spend far too much time and effort to get planning and budgeting right and attempt to run our businesses based on a preset plan, and we immediately get derailed by inevitable unforeseeable challenges – from financial/economic crises like 1997-1998, 2001, 2008 and 2020, natural disasters, changes in governments and policies, and now, a global pandemic.
I’ve learned that instead of placing too much emphasis on business planning and budgeting, I need to focus more on building a team and culture that can adapt to changes quicker, pivot and improvise faster than our competition, and use external changes as a way to create new products and services.
There is also a danger that as leaders when we face unknown challenges, our impulse is to be decisive but we tend to act based on our past experiences which can be a bias that limits our curiosity to look at our competitive landscape differently.
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We need a team that can challenge each other openly while communicating constantly with our team members.
What traits do you look for in your talent or how do you decide who is right for a job?
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Two key traits are curiosity and purposefulness. Curiosity can be assessed by how well candidates reflect back on their past experiences and distil lessons, even from failures, and from demonstrated willingness to take on new assignments, projects or jobs that go out of their comfort zone.
Purposefulness can be assessed by their unspoken values. Why do they make decisions, what factors do they consider.
Specifically, are they really attuned to a clear purpose of helping to make other people’s lives better – whether their customers or team members – rather than just being selfinterested.
How do you think the industry you are in will evolve in the future?
At Naluri, we see a radical change in the delivery of healthcare from traditional services or even telemedicine/doctor booking platforms, because of these inherent limitations:
Healthcare today is reactive and transactional.
You wait until someone is sick and expect them to reach out for help. And then consultations are one-off (example book a session).
But 70 per cent of health issues today are chronic conditions (like diabetes, heart diseases, mental health) that require ongoing support and cannot be solved with a single consultation, treatment, or prescription.
We also need to be more proactive in identifying people with early risk factors and provide preventive wellness services before their health conditions deteriorate to sickness.
Healthcare today is siloed and specialist based. A patient sees individual specialist doctors.
Yet, chronic conditions require an integrated approach. Even beyond what a general practitioner can support.
We specifically need to integrate mental health support, diet and nutrition guidance, and lifestyle coaching to those dealing with diabetes, heart diseases, and cancer – and yet do it in a more convenient and coordinated manner.
Healthcare today is activity-based.
Payors (insurers and employers) pay for each consultation, but there’s no measurement of whether that leads to actual quantifiable health improvement.
Even digital health apps track activities like steps or calories but those do not necessarily lead to meaningful clinical improvements.
We are reshaping the delivery of healthcare for chronic conditions using digital technologies to address these three limitations, to make care much more accessible, more affordable, and yet more personalised and convenient and deliver quantifiable clinical outcomes.
What advice can you offer those looking to start their career/own business?
Choose a big problem that exists in society today, as I illustrated with healthcare earlier.
Fall in love with the problem so that you become very obsessed with solving it in a way that is very different from other players in the industry. But do not fall in love with your idea, your product, or your solution.
Too many new entrepreneurs think they have a great idea, but in business, there is no such thing as a great idea. It’s about relentless execution and constantly improving the product, to the point where it becomes very different from the original idea in less than a year.
That requires humility to throw away our original ideas and constantly rebuild after paying attention to customer feedback.
We all know about the industrial revolution, are we in for a technological revolution? Your thoughts.
This is one and the same. The industrial revolution is a technological revolution. We are fundamentally transforming jobs – and this requires current practitioners to be willing to let go of their past professional practices and embrace new technology-driven approaches, and for universities to change their curriculum to prepare graduates from a completely new way of working.
In our case, we are changing the traditional healthcare delivery model, particularly for allied health services such as psychological and counselling support, diet and nutrition advisory, physiotherapy and fitness coaching etc - from a traditional one-on-one model which limits the number of clients or patients that a single patient can support, to a digitallydelivered coaching programme that can reach 10 times more people but requires professionals to learn about digital analysis.
How has mentorship made a difference in your professional life?
I’ve been blessed to have several coaches and mentors who help to guide me throughout my career. I’ve learned that I won’t change by simply learning about a new piece of knowledge or information.Stay up-to-date by following Daily Express’s Telegram channel.
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