Reacting to recent reports calling out Ola co-founder Bhavish Aggarwal’s “abrasive style of management”, the Bengaluru-based entrepreneur said that his company plays by different rules. “We’re a very ambitious company. We’re not here to build a ‘me too’ company, we’re not here to have a nice and easy time. My own personal style is aggressive. We have a culture of high quality and high execution,” Bhavish Aggarwal said at the launch of the new Ola S1 Air on Saturday.
"We play by different rules, we’re a different company. We’ve so many examples of people who’ve done well in our environment. The yardstick we would like others to judge us would be to see our impact,” he told reporters.
According to recent reports, Aggarwal’s “relentless pace and management style” has upset both employees and board members. The Bloomberg report said that Aggarwal had called teams at Ola "useless" and hurled Punjabi epithets at the staff. He also reportedly cut meetings short due to trivial issues like a missing page number, quality of the printing paper, crooked paper clip, or a redundant sentence in a memo.
In another incident, Aggarwal allegedly told an employee to run three laps around the Ola Futurefactory due to a shuttered entryway that was left open. Many experts and citizens have taken to social media platforms to criticize Ola’s work culture including the former Director of Product Management at NASSCOM Saurabh Saha and visiting professor of strategy at IIM-Sambhalpur Dr Nilesh Khare.
Saha and Khare have slammed Aggarwal for perpetuating a problematic style of management.
“If this is true then Ola might be one of the most toxic places to work. Somehow, it’ll take a decade or two before Indian startups get what culture means. Till then the employees would be at the receiving end of such brutalities. I don’t think we as Indians understand the importance of respect in the workplace. It’s become a breeding ground for disrespectful behaviour lately,” Saha wrote on LinkedIn.