Getting employees to adopt both an entrepeneur’s bias for action and a venture capitalist’s talent for hard-nosed analysis is a challenge. But no one said excellence was easy.

All corporations have the challenge of trying to infuse an entrepreneurial spirit into their workforce. As the theory goes, when employees act like entrepreneurs, they put themselves in the mind-set of business owners with a bias for action, which results in good decisions and good outcomes.

To get employees to act like entrepreneurs, then, companies have often taken a structural approach. For example, Google and Microsoft organize into small units of 50 to 100 employees to maintain a sense of entrepreneurial spirit and eliminate bureaucracy. The trade-off is that small groups can create silos across units, leading to duplication of efforts and squelching synergy. But if a company chooses to organize to achieve maxim efficiency and scale, it risks creating behemoth departments that crush the natural entrepreneurial spirit that lies within its employees.

Read full article from Businessweek

Negatives breeds negatives. So is it worth think negative…? Not really.
So i didn’t want to think negatively even though i couldn’t find a window to see light. With a mind to seek out some light in this product concept, i started brooding over it again. The entire concept still didn’t appealed to me much. You might be annoyed by now by reading ‘concept’ To reduce that, I can tell you this much – it is a tightly integrated system (some kind of ERP) with lots of security (cutting edge tech.) features.

A particular feature caught my attention. It is feature where we can access mass market. This feature was not a highlight of the entire product or it was positioned very vaguely. It was good thread. I started developing that and ended up in a much more promising idea than the entire product holds. (at least to me, I should say).

My lessons goes here:
Always look forward to fill a gap in demand and supply. Try to open new channels of buying. Through such channels if you can address a mass market, without much customer retention expenses, then you might be hitting a jackpot…! .

Think like a VC - means never ever swayed by a product idea, just because its your ‘child’. Detach yourself from it. Don’t think that the mass market will behave like the way you wish to. But this doesn’t means you should think only negatively. Think positively without any bias.
Kick and punch the idea in every possible ways you can. But if the idea still holds a spark within it, just grab it. Its going to shine. The best way to analyze your idea is to have a talk with your prospective customers, partners in the value chain.

Perceptual bias is something which all of us carry in our thoughts. Discuss with your friends/mentors (whom you can TRUST) about the idea and eliminate any existing bias. Also at the same time make it clear who is your target market. Also don’t drop your idea by talking to wrong prospects.

• Is there anyone who doesn’t like freedom?
• Is there anyone who loves being a salve and love mechanical life?

If the answer is no then why not entrepreneurship? Is it because of :

• Fear of failure – Learning from experience and serve ur customers loyally must be your objective. If making money or going behind fame becomes ur objective then chances are high that u deviate from ur goal. Remember people pay u for what u serve. Learn from ur experience u’ll be successful.
• Lack of funding – plan ur biz properly and focus on what u can do with what u have now, don’t make plans in air and ‘NEVER wait for anyone to help u, just go and do’. I’m telling this from my experience. Believe me waiting for help won’t do anything good for u, once u start you’ll get help on the way that’s nature law.
• No Mentor – When u have life as the teacher why do u need another mentor. Believe in urself and believe in ur idea everything will go fine.
• Lack of idea – you can see tons of problems around u, find a solution and sell it.
• Hindrance from parents and society – If u doesn’t live UR life as u wish then who else is going to live? Parents are ur first client if u can’t convince them with ur idea then it’s difficult to market ur product. So take it as a challenge. Regarding the society, street dogs always keep barking, enjoy the tune and once ur biz goes well give them some putrid pieces of meat.

When to start? Right time never comes and life is too short to wait for right time so start it as soon as possible “NEVER wait for anything”. Where to start? Place where u won’t get bored sitting 20hrs at a stretch is the best place to start ur biz. Start the work from ur room atleast conceptualizing a biz u can do from ur room

“When everything seems to be going against you , remember airplane takes off against the wind not with it” ~Henry Ford

Sequoia Capital, the VC firm which gave seed funding to CISCO, Apple Inc. etc. had sent the following  message to the companies in their portfolio. This seems to be a lesson applicable to all.

1. The Good Times are Over!
2. Cut spending. Cut fat. Preserve capital.
3. Focus on quality.
4. Reduce risk.
5. Make sure you have one year’s worth of cash.
6.  If you have a product, reduce expenses around it and boost sales. If the product is ready, cut the number of engineers.
7.  Be brutal when it comes to marketing — anything that isn’t working, cut it.
8. Don’t burn through your cash, for cash is king.
9. Cut base salaries on sales people and leverage them with upside.
   10.  Most importantly, be true to yourself.

The last one is really hard, i guess
So it is better to be objective with your own business ideas.
Be realistic.

May 2, 2007 presentation by Carly Fiorina for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program Educators Corner in the School of Engineering at Stanford University.© Stanford University, Visit Stanford University on YouTube

Carly Fiorina, former CEO of HP (1999-2005) talks about the dynamics of change and fear in this lecture to Stanford University students offered in May, 2007. She notes that entrepreneurship is about risk-taking, and this is always associated with tackling innovation. Fiorina concludes that asserting change involves gathering enough energy and force to overcome the power of the status quo.

A Village School in India

 

It’s not surprising that well-travelled professionals living in global cities, such as New Delhi, New York, Paris, Rio, and Shanghai, have more in common with one another, in lifestyle and values, than they do with rural citizens in their respective nations. In general, villagers, particularly in the emerging world, have benefitted less from globalization than urbanites have. Seventy percent of India’s citizens, for instance, live in rural isolation, largely disconnected from the benefits of their nation’s fast-paced economic growth.

These are globalization’s forgotten frontiers, where more must be done to connect urban markets with rural ones in order to speed their development. How this happens will vary from nation to nation. In China, for instance, the government actively spurred the village economy, largely through agricultural-reform measures implemented during the 1980s. By contrast, India’s government has only a limited ability to bring about real change in the country’s villages. Private entrepreneurs might well be more effective.

Recently, I trudged through the mire of a government-run food auction yard, or mandi, in Bangalore, the global economy’s offshoring capital. Piles of supposedly fresh produce lay everywhere, rotting in the sun and competing with mangy dogs and scampering mice for my attention. Huddles of impecunious farmers, wearing the traditional dhoti, looked on with resignation. A government agent, pen tucked behind ear, offered a pittance for the produce on display.

The farmers’ day had started before dawn. Chugging along on narrow so-called highways, they came to the auction yard in ramshackle public buses, bullock carts, trucks, and even tractors. Their produce unloaded, they accepted whatever they got. After snatching a few hours’ sleep in a shady corner, they retraced their steps home.

Read the full article on The McKinsey Quarterly,

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