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David Yang - about non-invasiveness, crises and scorched earth

Recently I moderated the ABBYY conference “A Month on a Distance”. We spoke with David Yan, serial entrepreneur, founder of ABBYY, and a dozen other companies in the field of technology and artificial intelligence.
What is happening in the world? How do companies react to the current situation? What steps need to be taken so that the crisis does not hit the business so hard, and what should we all expect in the future? I publish the text version of our conversation on Habré, and audio can be listened to in my podcast “Aired!”

This is the third post in a series of articles based on episodes of my podcast. The first material on professional burnout can be read here , and the article on the creation of artificial organisms is here .

About the mood of people and investments


Me: How are things in the Valley: what are the moods of people?

David: I do not see strong changes. I just noticed that a lot of people now go in for sports: they walk, run or train at home. I communicate with a large number of investors and entrepreneurs. Of course, there are more people who have problems than those who somehow developed their business on this wave.

Me: What do you think, which companies have won in the current situation? We all know the example of Zoom, which took off somewhere in the sky-high heights.

D: I said back in February that I had to invest in Zoom, but I was too lazy, to be honest. I was 100% sure I needed to invest in Zoom, Microsoft and Slack.
I recently spoke with one of WalkMe ’s investors ., which helps employees with onboarding, and c Wix , which makes sites. They, too, are growing.

Me: With sites it’s clear: a person always wanted to “sew” on the side a little, but then there was a self-isolation, and decided to make a site. Why does onboarding fly? Explain to employees through it how to use a VPN?

D: I have a hunch that just employee experience is a big new topic. Recently there was a webinar at which the well-known HR analyst Josh Berzin spoke . He said that the 2008 crisis helped overcome the financial directors of companies, and HR crisis will help to cope with the crisis of 2020. Now it really all depends on the team, the integration of employees.

About non-invasive communication


Me: It seems that the first stage of the crisis has already passed, when everyone was setting up the services in an amazing way: some are VPN, some are Zoom, some are corporate messengers. What do you think, what next steps should be taken so that the crisis does not hit the company so hard?

D: I wrote an article about it in Forbes “How to manage a remote team: 9 tips from David Jan”. One of them concerns corporate instant messengers. Do you think everyone uses them? I am mainly engaged in my project Yva, and we communicate with hundreds of organizations that are moving to a remote location. So, many communicate in Telegram and WhatsApp. Such messengers are not suitable for managing a remote team for many reasons, from the lack of the necessary device channels and ending with security. But what if the person who organized the important channel to discuss the product or sales principles leaves the company? What will happen to the channel? Corporate messengers are absolutely fundamental. It is important that these are services such as, for example, MS Teams or Zoom.

Why messengers, not mail? Mail is a medium for transmitting information, not for collaboration. According to business etiquette, you need to reply to the letter within 24 hours. If you discuss the problem with colleagues at such a pace, you will not go far. Need an element of communication. There is telephone communication, but it is bad that it is invasive. When you call, you interrupt a person’s work. In addition, it is basically a one-on-one conversation. In messengers, on the one hand, you can communicate and receive replies to messages with a characteristic speed of several minutes. On the other hand, this is public information: now you can fumble, mention it, involve people in communication, and they can read the thread.

Why did Zoom take off so much? He mimicked under real physical communication. There is a concept of a room - a place of visual and audio communication. With the transition to remote work, such public rooms as a coffee shop, bar, and games room appear. You can go there with colleagues, chat on professional or other topics.

Me: You mentioned non-invasive communication. When switching to a remote location, we organized the so-called TEDFriday in ABBYY: every Friday we watch a TED Talk that one of our colleagues suggested. Our American office employee recently suggested discussing TED Why the work doesn't happen at work. The main problem is M&M, that is, managers & meetings, because a manager is a person who distracts people from work. He approaches the employee, yanks him, asks what he is doing. And the man is busy with business! He works. Remote work partially solves this problem thanks to instant messengers.

D: One of the advantages of switching to remote work is the right means of communication, which allows you to make work and reporting more connected. I follow a similar phenomenon in learning. More than 10 years ago we created Ayb School, and for two months now she has been working exclusively remotely. And it turned out that schoolchildren began to study better. How can it be? It turns out that now that the student is doing classwork, the teacher can look into any notebook and give advice or something to each of the 20 students in a completely non-invasive way. Independence of work has increased. Surprisingly: we thought that the transition to distance learning is evil, but it turned out that this is far from the case.

Me: Provided that you have qualified teachers. Ayb is still in a unique position: your teachers are at the forefront of education. There is another example: Russian universities report brilliantlyhow they moved to a remote place, and they themselves say that they did this thanks to volunteer students who went to professors and explained to them how Zoom works.

D: This is a transitional moment. I admit that when teachers become familiar with the principles of remote work, the effectiveness of remote teaching will increase. I'm not talking about the fact that all education, and all work should go to a distance. Still, people should experience a surge of oxytocin, which stands out at the time of handshakes, hugs, and physical communication.

The race for digital transformation


Me: Now everyone is forced to catch up with digital transformation. Companies thought it would be a marathon, but it turned out to be a sprint. What global changes will such digitalization lead to? How will this affect us in the long run?

D: By jumping in two months, the world crossed a path several years long. What is digital transformation? A company is some gigantic decisive model. She is given some kind of digital input, she inside performs some kind of action and generates a digital output. Divisions and individuals within the company work the same way. Now virtually every company has become digital to some extent. Of course, I’m not talking about complex production processes, but to a greater extent about their back-offices.

Moreover, even at the lowest level, the decisive part of actions is still determined by man. That is, an employee receives a message in Slack and does something: sends a message, creates a document. First, many of these processes can be automated using Robotic process automation ( RPA ). Secondly, this data, of course, allows you to implement Process Intelligence (PI), that is, analysis of business processes. You can understand at what point the document appeared, when a decision was made on it, where in your company there is a bottleneck and so on. We calculated: in a year, a small company generates more than 1 billion of these kinds of data points.

This kind of analysis is not possible without special tools. Accordingly, there are PI tools such as ABBYY Timelineor other similar systems that, having analyzed all digital interactions, can identify business processes, detect duplicate ones and find conditionally speaking “hot spots” in them: a very long decision-making or some difficulties. This allows us to further optimize and automate business processes, which saves millions of dollars.

Different crises - different challenges


Me: And speaking of this crisis, how does it differ from the previous ones? Besides the fact that this is a crisis that HR directors will help us cope with?

D:My friends and I - Kostya Anisimovich, Sergey Andreev, Vadim Tereshchenko, Aram Pakhchanyan - started creating ABBYY in 1989 before perestroika. At some point, we went to the exhibition at VDNH. The equipment to the stand was carried by one of our friends at its “nine”. Only he had a car. Time passes, he is late, although this has never happened. An exhibition is already opening. Then he comes, brings everything that is needed, and says: “Can you imagine what it was: I’m driving along the road and suddenly I see a crowd of people walking towards me with sticks, pipes and are going to break my car. I’m doing a police U-turn and through some courtyards I reach VDNKh. ” This happened near the Ostankino tower at the very moment when it was captured. Nearby was an exhibition. There is a war going on, there is a business going on.

Then, of course, there were a lot of things. 1998, when everything fell into tram tram. For us, the most important thing was to keep the team. We could not pay salaries physically; we did not want to fire people. Then we came up with the following scheme: we halve the salary of all employees, but put this piece on an internal deposit and pay it back when we can. And we really paid all the money in a couple of years.

This crisis, probably, is different in that it hit the different areas in different ways. Somewhere opportunities arose, for example, the boom of remote work. Everything related to the shared economy, on which they relied before the crisis, is becoming less popular. In the Valley, they doubt that after the crisis, someone will want to use shared machines, scooters, dresses. There were a lot of projects there: for example, teenage girls exchanged wardrobes with each other.

Or, say, the iiko company, which we founded with my partners and with the help of which 30 thousand restaurants in 30 countries are automated. It is clear that, together with the restaurant business, everything related to its automation has greatly failed. We are thinking how we can survive this period.

How to overcome the crisis with minimal losses?


Me: Considering your experience and a series of experienced economic crises, tell me that on a personal level you will now advise the head of the company or business unit: what needs to be done to the person who is responsible for people in such a turbulent situation? What would you recommend him to pay attention to overcome this crisis with minimal losses?

D:Each business has a specificity. If you answer your question in a general way, then the company has external and internal contours. External - this is all customers and suppliers, and you need to build relationships with them. Where can you help your customers? Where did you have offline customer traffic, and how quickly can you translate it online? We can give an example with restaurants: those who at one time worked neatly with the concept of customer ownership won. They moved the offline database online, and now work with it, make delivery, and so on. I am talking, for example, about our Plazius system, which has now become SberFood.
In the inner circuit, two things are important. First, you need to digitize business processes, that is, “see” them. Secondly, you need to "see" your people. If you have a website, then you measure every click, study customer experience using Google Analytics. In the internal circuit, there was no such thing as Google Analytics before. But now you need to measure everything that you can measure: customer experience, process experience, employee experience, process intelligence. These things unite any business.

About future


Me: And the last question: are you generally optimistic?

D: One must perceive life as it is. Yes, in some businesses we had to cut costs, somewhere - to cut people. Unfortunately, every CEO in the world today has a difficult choice how to find that ethical line, where you need to save jobs for one part of the company, where sometimes to donate part of the jobs. This is a very difficult choice, but, nevertheless, it must be done. Accordingly, save those places that you can save.

Understanding the seriousness of the situation, I personally relate to this, let's say, in a militant way: we will overcome the crisis. Everything that can be saved, save and take advantage of the situation after. It is known that on a scorched earth, trees grow faster. Deferred demand will still work, and at some point strong growth will begin. It will be necessary to prepare and fully retain strength in order to seize this moment.
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