Research done by various management institutions has clearly confirmed that drafting a proper business plan helps any startup outperform those that haven’t. However, studies have also shown that this is not the first thing that newly-minted entrepreneurs must opt for. A proper corporate strategy helps any firm in coordinating amongst customers, competitors, logistics, operations, sales and marketing. But this said strategy must be flexible enough to incorporate newer competencies picked up along the way. This allows timely responsiveness to opportunities presented. Pivoting of a business is a common trend when entrepreneurs realize that the customer base is not what was initially thought of. That is why, business plans drafted at the start, rarely turn out to be accurate. The research found out that the best time to draft a proper business plan was between six and twelve months from inception. This increased the possibility of the business succeeding by as much as eight percent.

Source:https://hbr.org/2018/05/when-should-entrepreneurs-write-their-business-plans?utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter_daily&utm_campaign=dailyalert_activesubs&utm_content=signinnudge&referral=00563&deliveryName=DM5939

Uploaded Date:01 June 2018

Entrepreneurs of every ilk need that moment of inspiration to unlock business innovations. Bill Gates and Reed Hastings both went through personal tribulations before coming up with what they found were solutions to the jigsaw. One way to find such inspiration, is to frequently meet up with others, as networking helps establish valuable partnerships. Innovations do not occur in safe environments, but rather when there is the freedom to experiment and even fail. A periodic change in physical settings can also help stimulate the brain for more creative pursuits. Entrepreneurs too focused on achieving operational excellence, will rarely think out-of-the-box. So, occasionally one needs to let the mind wander and get distracted by seemingly trivial matters. Most importantly, one needs to constantly keep learning across disciplines.

Source:https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2018/02/02/every-entrepreneur-needs-inspiration-heres-how-to-find-it/#4228b92f2b56

Uploaded Date:01 March 2018

Contrary to popular perception, the greatest threat to success is the fear of one’s own success. This is the case with entrepreneurs across the board. The best of entrepreneurs are the ones who have the belief that they can shape the universe around themselves. As a famous quote from the film Invictus alludes to, it is that the greatest fear is not one’s inadequacy but one’s inability to recognize the enormous powers. Authentic talent management refers to identifying one’s own abilities before controlling any team.

Source:http://innovationexcellence.com/blog/2018/02/04/the-single-greatest-threat-to-your-success/

Uploaded Date:19 February 2018

Alberto Savoia founded and sold Velogic for a hundred million US dollars before taking over as Google’s engineering director where he developed AdWords. These successes led him to attempt entrepreneurship for a second time, so he created Agitar which was into “unit test automation”. Agitar did well for a while but IBM’s open source tool in the same field killed them off along with others in that space. Like Savoia, a lot of entrepreneurs faced failures along with intermittent successes in the halcyon days of the 1990s and 2000s. In fact, there is an entire lexicon termed as “Google Graveyard” or “Microsoft Morgue” cataloguing the numerous failures such as the former’s Wave. Management ideas at present seem to emanate from the US West Coast dominated by tech firms, so it is fitting that people such as Alberto Savoia, Steve Blank and Eric Ries, self-proclaimed failures lecture at Executive MBA courses on how best to learn from such setbacks. While the business and tech press have historically concentrated on the big fish such as Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, the likes of Blank and Ries can provide lessons to learn. They say that today the business cycle moves so rapidly, detailed plans cannot be reliably created. So, prototyping which takes months, needs to be cut down to pretotyping which is a combination of the words- pre and prototyping- and takes just days or even hours. In his new role at Google, Savoia leads business innovation and is a ‘failure analyst’. At his mentoring sessions, pretotyping has become a crucial link.

Source:https://www.forbes.com/sites/berlinschoolofcreativeleadership/2017/10/25/how-and-why-one-man-became-a-failure-guru-inside-google/#755c8adc1a19

Uploaded Date:30 November 2017