The Secret

The Secret, is a very interesting book. I am not saying that I agree to all what it is saying, but quite intriguing nonetheless. You could also watch the movie, at http://www.thesecret.tv/ 

Watch the first 20 minutes here.

The Post American World

The Post American World, is quite thought provoking book. This book comes highly recommended, if you do not have the patience to read through the book, or can't get hold of one, you would still have the option of watching a very interesting talk. Enjoy !!

The World is Flat

However, in the book - The World is Flat, Freidman doesn't talk so nicely about Pakistan towards the end, I would still recommend this book to everyone.

I also quite liked his talk on YouTube,

 

in which he talks about the top 10 flatterners. I am saving myself all the hard work of typing the top 10 flatners, and copying the text from the Wikipedia articles on The World is flat.

 

Ten flatteners

Friedman defines ten "flatteners" that he sees as leveling the global playing field:

• #1: Collapse of Berlin Wall--11/'89: The event not only symbolized the end of the Cold war, it allowed people from other side of the wall to join the economic mainstream. (11/09/1989)
• #2: Netscape: Netscape and the Web broadened the audience for the Internet from its roots as a communications medium used primarily by 'early adopters and geeks' to something that made the Internet accessible to everyone from five-year-olds to ninety-five-year olds. (8/9/1995). The digitization that took place meant that everyday occurrences such as words, files, films, music and pictures could be accessed and manipulated on a computer screen by all people across the world.
• #3: Workflow software: The ability of machines to talk to other machines with no humans involved. Friedman believes these first three forces have become a "crude foundation of a whole new global platform for collaboration."
• #4: Open sourcing: Communities uploading and collaborating on online projects. Examples include open source software, blogs, and Wikipedia. Friedman considers the phenomenon "the most disruptive force of all."
• #5: Outsourcing: Friedman argues that outsourcing has allowed companies to split service and manufacturing activities into components which can be subcontracted and performed in the most efficient, cost-effective way.
• #6: Offshoring: The internal relocation of a company's manufacturing or other processes to a foreign land in order to take advantage of less costly operations there. China's entrance in the WTO allowed for greater competition in the playing field. Now countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Brazil must compete against China and each other to have businesses offshore to them.
• #7: Supply chaining: Friedman compares the modern retail supply chain to a river, and points to Wal-Mart as the best example of a company using technology to streamline item sales, distribution, and shipping.
• #8: Insourcing: Friedman uses UPS as a prime example for insourcing, in which the company's employees perform services--beyond shipping--for another company. For example, UPS repairs Toshiba computers on behalf of Toshiba. The work is done at the UPS hub, by UPS employees.
• #9: In-forming: Google and other search engines are the prime example. "Never before in the history of the planet have so many people-on their own-had the ability to find so much information about so many things and about so many other people", writes Friedman. The growth of search engines is tremendous; for example take Google, in which Friedman states that it is "now processing roughly one billion searches per day, up from 150 million just three years ago".
• #10: "The Steroids": Personal digital devices like mobile phones, iPods, personal digital assistants, instant messaging, and voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP).

The Human Potential

I just watched Malcolm Gladwell's video  Capitalizing on Human Potential ,

 

 

which talks about the barriers many people face in achieving their full potential—it's about attitude, economics, and logistics rather than talent or genes—and to look at how we can continue to lift those barriers through meaningful work.

Full text, taken from the BNET website  is:

Malcolm Gladwell: I wanted to talk about a very simple, but I think powerful idea to help us think about how to help others and also about the kind of work that you do and it's a concept called capitalization and it was as far as I know invented by a very brilliant scientist named James Flynn and it's used to describe human potential. It's used to describe the idea of what percentage of people of human potential in a given community is successfully capitalized. In other words what percentage of people who are capable of achieving something actually end up achieving that thing. Why is this discussion of capitalization so important? We'll I think there's a number of reasons, but the first is I think that when we look at individuals or groups who achieve something, we have a tendency to interpret their achievement in terms of their talents, in terms of their innatability and we don't think about their achievements in terms of their capitalization. We don't think about the effect of economics or stupidity or attitudes on achievement. We tend to think about things just in terms of this of innatability. But in fact, using the capitalization mindset is a far better way of understanding why great achievements happen. You know I'm a runner and for years as a kid I was poised like all runners. Completely with marvel and obsess over the extraordinary success of Kenyan distance runners. The Kenyans completely dominate distance running and have done so for twenty years to a level that's absolutely unbelievable. In a given year there might be fifteen of the top twenty five times in the 10,000-meters might be all Kenyans, tiny little country in East Africa. And the easy common explanation for that is to say, well they must have some kind innate advantage over the rest of us. It must be some genetic thing going on with Kenyans that makes them run faster than the rest of us, right? That's what we all say, we don't think twice about it. What about capitalization, though. I read an article recently from a -- which quoted Alberto Salazar, the great American marathoner who pointed out that in the country of Kenya, a place with a population about the size of California, there are a million -- one million 12 to 17 year old boys who run between 10 to 12 miles a week -- a day rather. That is an extraordinary number. An absolutely incredible number. And what that says is that Kenya has done an extraordinary job of transmitting this very beautiful notion to their population, which is that if were are willing as a community to go out there and work and run day in, day out, we can achieve extraordinary things. Nothing to do with innatability, nothing to do with some special gene, it has to do with getting a million kids to wake up every morning at six o'clock and go and run 10 or 12 miles. Now what's our capitalization when it comes to distance running. Well, we know that our capitalization when it comes to football, something that we are obsessed with maybe as low as 16%, right? What does that suggest our cap rate is for distance running, is it 1%, is it point five percent? Are there more than ten thousand kids of that in our country who get up every morning and run 10 to 12 miles a day? When you understand the idea of capitalization you have an insight into why that extraordinary achievement happens. Now there's a reason I brought up this discussion of capitalization today in this room because I thought it would be a concept that was very familiar to all of you. Because think about those three barriers to capitalization again: Logistical, economic and attitude, you know, right? I think that they're very familiar to all of you and they are because they are ideas that lie behind the work that much of you do. What's the business model of Salesforce.com? It's a capitalization model. It says that we can use the Internet to bring -- to allow people to lift barriers, economic and logistical barriers to allow people in various parts of the world to engage in meaningful work, right? It says that we can use this wonderful thing called the Internet to build a tool that allows somebody in the farthest corner of Southern India to engage in work as meaningful as someone in San Jose. All of you are in the capitalization business. You have been working with this beautiful model that shows us how we can unleash human potential.

Business Innovation Matters

I just stumbled upon a presentation, Business Innovation Matters, and really liked it, and thought you might as well find it interesting.

Here's the link, Enjoy !!!

Business Model Innovation Matters

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: osterwalder alex)

 

And that's not it, you would find other very interesting presentation on the similar themes.

The Six Thinking Hats - Edward de Bono

I finally read the book, “The Six Thinking Hats” by Edward de Bono. I cannot say this book has only left cursory Impressions on me. The impact, I believe, is much more deeper.

The premise of the six thinking hats proposes a fundamental shift in how we think about our common and uncommon problems and issues, and how we work out their solution. It is a great improvement in human thinking skills.

For the most part, we either stick to either thinking about the positive side of an argument, or stay focused on the negative aspect of it, or at times, a mix of both. As de Bono writes in his book, the main difficulty of thinking is confusion, when we try to process emotions, information, facts, upsides, down sides, all at the same time. What six thinking hats provides you is a method to isolate all of these important factors, only to be taken one at a time, but all things considered at the end of thinking exercise.

We all know what six thinking hats is about, I think, there’s no need to repeat those. To get more information about what six thinking hats is about; please refer to the mind tools website here: Six Thinking Hats – Introduction and Examples or read the book, The six thinking hats.

The method is easy to follow, in that, it allows humans to assume roles of certain type of thinking, and relate to different colors in thinking, than having to remember difficult psychological terms.

What’s more important to note that, how it simplifies seemingly complex decisions, and how effective this tool can be, when used properly for decision-making considering all the important factors.

I personally feel, this method is helping me to improve how I think about certain issues and problems, and how do I worked out and approach their solutions. It’s one of the major improvements I had gone through, and out of all of the creativity module literature, this piece struck me most, and that’s why I wanted to talk about it.

References:

de Bono, Edward (2001), The Six Thinking Hats

Creativity at the heart of Creative People

Creative people lie at the heart of creativity. Creative people are the main reason a company could hope for and thrive at creativity. I couldn’t agree more with Sutton (2001), who in his article, “The Weird Rules of Creativity” mentions that the very process of creativity starts with hiring creative people.

But the question is, what is creativity and who are these creative people? And could we, if ever, measure creativity and the creative potential of a creative person?

In his talk (Video Link),

Sutton attempts to answer the question, what is Creativity?

Creativity, he says, is largely doing new things with old things, blending new things with old ways of doing things. While making his point, he mentions how the play-dohs were invented, and also how Apple’s iPod was invented. Apple’s iPod if you do not already know is made up of off-the-shelf components. The housing the components sit in, and the software application was the real innovation and the creativity of Apple. Sutton recommends, thinking of creativity as Important and Export business, that’s how it happens fast, where you combine ideas from different places and build a creative product.

The question then becomes, how are these people who could thrive at mixing and matching old ideas with new ideas, and building a creative products. How do we identify such people? Sutton (2001) recommends weird ways of identifying and promoting weird behaviors and attitudes to foster creativity in an organization.

Sutton (2001) suggests and explains the following weird rules of creativity. He says, hire slow learner. Hire people who would make their coworkers uncomfortable, might as well hire someone whose skills you don’t even need. Now, who does that? These sure are weird rules.

The second step, Sutton (2001) recommends is “Managing for Spark”, where he suggests that in order to foster creativity, you might want to keep and promote people who do what is right, not what they anticipate what their superiors want. Second thing Sutton (2001) recommends is that you should re-assign people who have settled in productive grooves in their jobs. Third thing he recommends is that, you should start rewarding failure, not just success; reserve punishment only for inaction.

These are all the steps I couldn’t agree more. I would still want to add my two cents to all of this. I would agree and add to the statement that, the creative process begins at hiring. There should be creative hiring process for creative people - challenging them to exploit their creative potential building their creative product, under constraints, having to deal with difficult co-workers.

Any creative endeavour, some would argue, follows a creative process (read: non-routine work procedure) to build a creative people. A process, however chaotic, is required. We would have to create an environment and organizational structure, which supports the creative process. We might want to keep our creative division separate from mainstream and routine based business operations.

At the end, I would say, creativity and effectiveness comes about through hiring the right people, and providing them with the right tools  and suitable environment.

References:

Sutton, R. (2001). The Weird Rules of Creativity. Harvard Business Review, September 2001 http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=1187

Who the entrepreneurs are? - A personal perspective

However I desperately want to believe that Entrepreneurs can be made, in reality they’re seldom made. For I am not an entrepreneur born, I am one in the making.

Knowledge of the entrepreneurial process - how to start a venture, to manage it, to grow it is all important, but a true entrepreneur is he or she who has the courage to go out in the real world and do it. Who dreams what others cannot, who sees what others cannot, who does what others cannot. Who leads in the most uncertain of times, in times when he or she is not sure of the outcome him or herself? Who goes on and pursues his dreams, in spite of the contrary popular opinion. Who falls, who fails.

I am an entrepreneur without a plan.

The spirited beginning

I once wrote blogs and lots of them but then left them for good. The dominant theme of what I wrote about was life, and how it treated me. When it got a little better, it only seemed fitting that I cease the practice. Yes it did serve one purpose at least, it took from me all that was bothering me to a blog post and made me feel a little better but It just took so much emotional energy to write about yourself, your struggles, your setbacks, and the injustices surrounding you (or so I believed) that I concluded I should not expend anymore on an activity so futile in spirit and purpose. But then again that was just a fleeting thought in a weak moment of life. Uncharacteristically, I somewhat stick to my resolve, haven’t been able to start and run a blog ever since. That was back in 2005.

I cannot believe I am being made to make my come back to the blogosphere. We’ve been instructed by our course responsible for Innovation and Business Creation to start an entrepreneurship blog, where we register and record our thoughts on entrepreneurship as we go alone learning entrepreneurship. I guess, this would be an interesting change. I would have a somewhat useful theme to talk about, and it would also serve to satisfy all the occasional urges I get to write.

One thing I plan on doing is, writing about entrepreneurship in general, and the classes we’re taking at JIBS about entrepreneurship in particular. I would also want to review some of the books I am reading these days as part of my independent study plan.

I hope, this would be a fun ride, thank you Leona for instructing us to starting this blog. And for other visitors, if you ever stumble on this blog, you’re more than welcome to my inconsistent, incoherent ramblings.