Myths of Entrepreneurship

Rajagopal writes :

MYTH: I don’t need to work harder than now.
REALITY: You’ll definitely need to work harder. Its your reputation and finance at stake in the venture.

MYTH: I’ll be my own boss.
REALITY: A resounding NO! Every one of your client is your “boss”. In the early stages of the venture you can’t afford to choose your clients. So you end up managing multiple ‘bosses’ with varying demands.

MYTH: I can pay myself what I’m worth.
REALITY: The market will decide that for you. If there is no business value in your startup, you can’t continue paying yourself or your employees.

MYTH: I will be selective in whom I deal with.
REALITY: Well….to some extent you can. But building a long-standing business means you will need to put up with unreasonable demands by clients and you will need to sacrifice short-term comforts
for long-term goals.

MYTH: I can do what I want and like to do.
REALITY: You need to be a jack of all trades. You can’t pick and choose your tasks. You will need to have the savvy to recruit people better than you, to do what you either don’t know how to do or you hate doing.

MYTH: I’ll be free!
REALITY: The grass is always green on the other side. Freedom is a relative term. I equate freedom with ‘peace of mind’. One doesn’t necessarily need to be an entrepreneur to have peace of mind.

MYTH: If I’m good, the world will recognize me and my efforts and will reward me.
REALITY: By being an entrepreneur you are just in the ‘boxing’ arena. Whether you will be a success or not in your endeavor is dependent on multiple interacting variables; viz., market, economy, luck, industry trends, technology, demographics, competitors….. There is no formula for success in anything in life, much less in entrepreneurship.

Elitism

Tom Peter’s –Talent Fatal Flaw :

At one time it was the executive parking lot that was coveted, and over time, many organizations moved to open parking. A story appeared in the New York Times last week about Bob Nardelli, former CEO of Home Depot, and how he used to provide daily catered lunches for the company’s officers on the executive floor, free, while the talent, aka “worker bees,” ate in the cafeteria. This separation of leadership from the people who do the work is a fatal flaw for an organization. It sends the wrong message—it reeks of elitism.

India the Superpower? Think again

Fortune writes :

Sorry: India is not a superpower, and in fact, that is probably the
wrong ambition for it, anyway. Why? Let me answer in the form of some
statistics.

• 47 percent of Indian children under the age of five are either malnourished or stunted.
• The adult literacy rate is 61 percent (behind Rwanda and barely ahead of Sudan). Even this is probably overstated, as people are deemed literate who can do little more than sign their name.
• Only 10 percent of the entire Indian labor force works in the formal economy; of these fewer than half are in the private sector.
• The enrollment of six-to-15-year-olds in school has actually declined in the last year. About 40 million children who are supposed to be in school are not.
• About a fifth of the population is chronically hungry; about half of the world’s hungry live in India.
• More than a quarter of the India population lives on less than a dollar a day.
• India has more people with HIV than any other country.

(Sources: UNDP, Unicef, World Food Program; Edward Luce)

You get the idea.

HBR – Breakthrough Ideas for 2007

HBR Article

Good Thought

Seth Godin’s – Just One more thing ?

If you had an hour with your team or your boss or a prospect, how many things would you tell them?

Do you have a laundry list of ten or twenty or fifty ideas you want
to share? Six things you want them to do? A dozen changes that are
important?

One reason that blog posts have become such a powerful way to spread
ideas is that a typical blog post is about just one thing. One.

Why not give that a try? Use your time, all your time, to sell just one thing. Go deep. Sell. Then stop.

Start-up Vs Corporate

Compromise ?

How to be remarkable !!!

Guardian Article :

1. Understand the urgency of the situation. Half-measures simply won’t do. The only way to grow is to abandon your strategy of doing what you did yesterday, but better. Commit.

2. Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.

3. Being noticed is not the sameas being remarkable. Running down the street naked will get you noticed, but it won’t accomplish much. It’s easy to pull off a stunt, but not useful.

4. Extremism in the pursuit of remarkability is no sin. In fact, it’s practically a requirement. People in first place, those considered the best in the world, these are the folks that get what they want. Rock stars have groupies because they’re stars, not because they’re good looking.

5. Remarkability lies in the edges. The biggest, fastest, slowest,richest, easiest, most difficult. It doesn’t always matter which edge,more that you’re at (or beyond) the edge.

6. Not everyone appreciates your efforts to be remarkable. In fact, most people don’t. So what? Most people are ostriches, heads in the sand, unable to help you anyway. Your goal isn’t to please everyone. Your goal is to please those that actually speak up, spread the word, buy new things or hire
the talented.

7. If it’s in a manual, if it’s theaccepted wisdom, if you can find it in a Dummies book, then guess what? It’s boring, not remarkable. Part of what it takes to do something remarkable is to do something first and best. Roger Bannister wasremarkable. The next guy, the guy who broke Bannister’s record wasn’t. He was just faster … but it doesn’t matter.

8. It’s not really as frightening as it seems. They keep the masses in line by threatening them (us) with all manner of horrible outcomes if we dare to step out of line. But who loses their jobs at the mass layoffs? Who has trouble finding a new gig? Not the remarkable minority, that’s for sure.

9. If you put it on a T-shirt, would people wearit? No use being remarkable at something that people don’t care about. Not ALL people, mind you, just a few. A few people insanely focused on what you do is far far better than thousands of people who might be mildly interested, right?

10. What’s fashionable soon becomes unfashionable. While you might be remarkable for a time, if you
don’t reinvest and reinvent, you won’t be for long. Instead of resting on your laurels, you must commit to being remarkable again quite soon.

Rise of Indian Managerial power

Till now Indian image has been that of intelligent IT & Call Centre workers. India, a backoffice for execution of not so important tasks at cheap rates.

Swami Aiyar, in his article India as managerial number one, argues that Indians after proving themselves in IT are showing their mettle in Managerial capabilities.

It is now seen as a global managerial power, one that can take over multinationals across the world and improve their performance. So, global financiers are tripping over one other to fund foreign acquisitions by Indian companies.

This new Indian image owes much to Lakshmi Mittal’s success in acquiring and turning round steel plants in many continents, becoming global number one in steel. His key managers are mostly Indians.

Their success has established Indian managerial capabilities in steel as being superior to American and European ones.

Justice Atlast

The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein has  finally paid the price for the untold atrocities he committed against his own people. A brutal and vicious dictator, he had no qualms about using chemical weapons against Shias and Kurds or in ordering summary executions of his opponents.

Today, the day marks an important event in history, the day when justice was done.

Execution of Saddam Hussein, shows that one need to pay for his Karma.