The Next Great Idea

I recently read an interesting article by Nilofer Merchant where she discusses the perils of too much sitting (We're averaging 9.3 hours a day, compared to 7.7 hours of sleeping) and presents a great solution – Walking Meetings.

Indeed, walking meeting is a great idea with many immediate and longer-term benefits. It increases our attention and improves our ability to actually listen to our counterpart at the meeting. It also has the added benefit of exercise, which most people don’t get enough of.

I would like to suggest another great idea: Using Public Transportation.

By that I mean using any public transportation (bus, train), except for a taxi.

 

I've been taking the bus for some time now. It started when I left my last position as a CEO of a public SW company to become a full-time entrepreneur. At that time, I also had to return my leased car and was left without a car for a while. I now have a car, and yet still use public transportation as my regular means of transportation.

Here are the benefits you can expect to get from using public transport:

1. You get to walk, every day. On a weekly basis it adds up and for those who don't get a chance to work out regularly, it’s a sort of exercise.
2. You get time to think and reflect. In our busy and hectic life these days we rarely get the time to simply think and let our minds wander for a while. Sitting on a bus or train for 30 minutes or more offers a great opportunity to do just that.
3. You save money on fuel and parking, and reduce your carbon footprint. It’s a double bonus: You save money and the environment.
4. You get to meet real people that you might not meet otherwise. It's a great way to get some perspective on your life and what truly matters.

I know it’s not easy to give up the comfort and convenience of your car. However, you can start by taking small steps. Take the bus or train when it’s a direct route, or when you know parking will be a challenge. Once you get over that first barrier you’ll find that the benefits far exceed that minimal inconvenience.

 

You never know, we might just start the next big social movement.

3 Business Tips for Small Business Entrepreneurs

 

This post was originally written for my wife’s blog addressing aspiring cake decorators. However, after I wrote it, I realized that it’s very relevant for any small business entrepreneur. So, I adapted it to address that broader audience.

Some of my examples are taken from the world of cake decorators, however they are still very relevant to any small business owner. Also, in my tips I refer to businesses that create and sell products. However, the word “product” can be simply replaced with the word “service” to apply these same tips to businesses that provide a service.

My wife Veena is a very talented cake designer and decorator. Three years ago she decided to turn her passion and hobby into a small cake decorating business. Like every entrepreneur and small business owner, she had to overcome many challenges and obstacles before her small business started to take off.

As a start-up entrepreneur myself, with a passion for business strategy and marketing, I was happy to be able to assist her in overcoming some of her business hurdles.

Based on Veena’s experience, as well as my own previous experience, I would like to offer aspiring small business entrepreneurs three important tips.

1.   Why Buy Anything? Or, what need are you trying to serve?
This is the most important step for any new business or product. IMHO, a good business must address a real problem or a need that people have. According to a Harvard research, 95% of new products fail because no one really wants or needs them.

Therefore, before you start doing anything, make sure that you have a good answer to the above question, as well as these supporting questions: Who would want to buy your product? Why? What is their jobs-to-be-done?

This requires that you clearly identify who is your target customer. For example: are you targeting young mothers, or are you focusing more on brides? Once you’ve decided who is your customer you should get to know her well enough to understand why is she buying decorated cakes (or cakes in general)? What need (or job-to-be-done) does it fulfill?

2.   Why Buy Mine? Or, what’s my Unique Value Proposition? Not only should you understand what customer need does your product solve, but you also need to convince them that your product does it better or most cost effectively than others on the market.
To have a unique value proposition, your solution to the problem, or need that you’ve identified, must address it better than any competing or alternative solution. To verify that, you need to become familiar with your customer’s perceived alternatives and options, including your direct competitors (other cake decorators and bakeries).

To do that I recommend you meet and talk with your target customers. Learn the process they go through from the moment they decide that they need a cake, through their selection criteria, to the actual ordering and buying process. This could provide you with hints and ideas on how you can make their overall experience better, and provide them with a superior offering.

For example: are you planning to offer more creative designs, healthier cakes, lower prices, or simply better service?

3.   What is your business model? Or, how do you intend to create, deliver, and capture your unique value?
To be able to answer these questions you first need to decide what type of small business you want to build. Startup guru Steve Blank defines six types of startup companies. We can further narrow it down to three:

Lifestyle Startups: Work to Live their Passion
A lifestyle entrepreneur is living the life they love, works for no one but themselves, while pursuing their personal passion. Examples include: surfers and divers who own small surf or dive shop or teach surfing and diving lessons to pay the bills so they can surf and dive some more. Another example is a freelance SW developer or web designer.


Small Business Startups: Work to Feed the Family
Today, the overwhelming number of entrepreneurs and startups in the United States are still small businesses. There are 5.7 million small businesses in the U.S. They make up 99.7% of all companies and employ 50% of all non-governmental workers.
Small businesses are grocery stores, hairdressers, consultants, travel agents, Internet commerce storefronts, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, etc. They are anyone who runs his/her own business.

Scalable Startups: Born to Be Big
Scalable startups are what Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their venture investors aspire to build. Google, Skype, Facebook, Twitter are just the latest examples. From day one, the founders believe that their vision can change the world. Unlike small business entrepreneurs, their interest is not in earning a living but rather in creating equity in a company that eventually will become publicly traded or acquired, generating a multi-million-dollar payoff.

Once you’ve decided on what type of business you want to have it’s important to also define your long-term goals. For example, if you’ve decided to build a small business startup, what annual income would you eventually like to see from this business? Do you plan on remaining a small business for the foreseeable future? It makes a huge difference if your goal is to own the best café in your neighborhood, or start a café chain that will cover the entire city or region.

Next I would highly recommend using the business model planning framework of Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, called Business Model Generation. I found it to be very useful and a great reference.


I hope you found these tips to be helpful. I wish you all the best on your exciting, challenging and rewarding journey.

10 Great Quotes for Life

 

 

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite quotes, which inspire and guide me through life.

1.       Try not to become a man of success but rather to become a man of value. – Albert Einstein.

2.       It's not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what's required. – Sir Winston Churchill.

3.       Don’t let your successes go to your head; don’t let your failures get to your heart.

4.       Be the change you seek to make in the world. – Gandhi.

5.       Do or do not, there is no try. – The Yoda.

6.       Confront the brutal facts but don’t lose faith that you will prevail at the end. – Admiral Stockdale.

7.       Seek first to understand, then to be understood. – Dr. Stephen Covey.

8.       Don't ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive. – Harold Whitman.

9.       "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat. – Theodore Roosevelt, Paris 1910.

10.    Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. – Steve Jobs.

And one more as a bonus:

11.    Live, Love, Leave a Legacy. – Dr. Stephen Covey.

I hope you find these quotes as inspiring and helpful as I do. I would appreciate your feedback, and your favorite quotes.

How to Give an Effective Feedback

 

One of our key roles as leaders is to develop our people and help them maximize their potential. This is both our responsibility to them, as well as to our organization.

By developing and improving our employees’ performance we enable them to succeed in their respective roles, and contribute more value to the organization. Furthermore, this raises the performance of the company as a whole, leading to greater achievements and better financial results.

One of the most useful tools in our leadership toolbox is the personal feedback. However, it's seldom used correctly and effectively. No one enjoys delivering “negative messages”. Many managers feel uncomfortable in what they perceive as a stressful interaction with their employees. So they either avoid it all together, or settle for a formal annual performance review. Neither is a good approach.

The foundation of an effective feedback is a sincere care for the person you’re giving it to. You need to care about her success and about her as a person. Your people will appreciate your sincere interest in them and their success and will be more receptive to your messages.

So how should you give your employees effective feedback?

Here are a few suggestions from my own experience:

 

·       Make it respectful – For your message to be heard and received the receiver needs to feel comfortable and respected. Use a private setting, an office, a quiet spot (even outdoors) or even a quiet café. Don’t give your feedback in front of other people or in a noisy, public environment.

·       Make it timely – For the feedback to be effective and lessons to be learned make is as close as possible to the action or event itself. It could be soon after, or within days. Don’t wait until the end of the year or even month. This also means you should provide feedback often, even once a week.

·       Be selective – A normal person can only absorb up to three main messages at a time. Pick only one or two items to discuss in each feedback session. This is yet another reason why feedbacks should be given often.

·       Make it specific – Be sure you can support your feedback with specific examples that clearly illustrate your point and help the receiver understand what you mean, and what needs to be improved. Be specific and objective in describing the situation that you’re referring to, the employee’s behavior, and its impact or results.

·       Make it constructive – Focus your message on how the employee’s performance can be improved, what actions are needed to be taken, and what will you do to help them achieve the desired results. When discussing the cause of the feedback focus on uncovering the root cause of the issue so that the lesson could be learned and a corrective action plan developed.

·       Offer ways and opportunities to apply your feedback – Always end your feedback session with an action plan that the employee can apply to make the necessary improvement. Your responsibility is to provide the opportunities to do so, and offer any guidance and suggestions on how they can put your feedback to use.

 

An effective feedback should also be tightly linked to the employee’s specific career development goals. For example, for a SW engineer, improving her communication skills is important if she wishes to develop into a leader herself.

By practicing the delivery of constructive feedback often, and following-up with your people to learn how effective and useful it was for them, you will develop this important tool and skill, which will make you a more effective leader.

Only the Paranoid Survive. However…

 

Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, has famously coined the term: "Only the Paranoid Survive". He applied it to several aspects of his professional and personal life experiences.

In the business setting, he meant that a company that wishes to have long-term, sustainable success should never rest on its laurels. He argued that a company should constantly transform itself in order to maintain its market leadership position, and business growth. This means to allow people to test new technologies, new products, new sales channels, and new customers, to be ready for unexpected shifts in business or technology.

It also meant that a company should always be vigilant about its market environment and be alert to spot potential threats and risks. It should always strive to identify its competitors early and crush them before they establish themselves and present a real threat.

For many years Intel has practiced this philosophy successfully in the PC market.

However, I always believed that this paranoid mentality, if misinterpreted, can also become a detriment and a barrier to a company’s own growth. In particular, if companies become overly paranoid to the point of complete lack of trust towards their business partners, suppliers and customers.

This is a harmful attitude for any company, and especially, start-up companies. Start-ups in their early stages are vulnerable and often rely on partners and allies to develop their product, build their market presence and grow their business.

Indeed, companies should adopt a fighter pilot’s mentality when it comes to dealing with threats. Constantly and effectively scan their environment (their own industry and related industries) for possible threats, and respond fast and decisively to eliminate such threats once detected.

And yet, in today’s fast changing and competitive world, no one company can make it on its own. It must rely on its people, partners, suppliers, and even its user community to continuously provide value to its customers.

At the end of the day, any company, no matter what size, has a limited set of core competencies. Things it can do extremely well, and better than any other company. This concept has been first introduced by Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad in their classic HBR article "The Core Competence of the Corporation", and later by Jim Collins in his book "Good to Great". This is very true and even critical for start-up companies who are typically limited in cash and resources.

Case in point, even the mighty and wealthy Apple failed in its attempt to develop its own map application. Perhaps it would have served its customers better by partnering with an already successful map application provider, such as Waze.

Another example is Microsoft. Despite its many years of dominance in the PC OS space, to this point in time it has been far less successful in developing an equally dominant mobile OS. And you can easily find similar examples in any industry you examine.

To succeed a company must focus on its unique value, on those things it can do better than others, and that also generate the most value for its target customers. However, at the same time, it needs to partner with other companies in order to complete and complement its offering with their added value.

A good example is Google, who develops its Android mobile OS, and partners with handset OEMs, including Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others, to deliver a complete mobile phone solution to its customers. Today, Android-based smartphones are by far outselling their rivals; including Apple’s iOS-based iPhones.

This type of partnership requires trust and mutual respect, along with shared business goals. In my humble opinion, it’s a must for companies who wish to compete and succeed in today’s and tomorrow’s world.

What do you think?

The Single Best Advice I Can Give You

 

Anyone who has ever ran a business, and in particular a start-up business, knows that you can never predict what new surprises, changes, and crises a new day will bring. You can only be certain that your day will not go exactly as planned.

Therefore, as a leader, or entrepreneur you need to be prepared to respond well to unplanned events, be ready to make good decisions, and lead your team effectively through uncertainty and sometimes adversity.

So what can you do to perform well on these challenging days?

My short and simple advice is: make sure your get enough sleep.

To get through these tough and often stressful days you need to have your A game; be at your best performance, both physically and mentally. You need to be alert and present, maintain your composure and focus, display confidence, and make good decisions.

According to research done by Dr. Charles A. Czeisler, the Baldino Professor of Sleep Medicine at Harvard Medical School, many executives don’t get sufficient amount of sleep. If they average four hours of sleep a night for four or five days, they develop the same level of cognitive impairment as if they’d been awake for 24 hours—equivalent to legal drunkenness. This greatly lengthens reaction time, impedes judgment, and interferes with problem solving.

The general effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive performance is well-known: Stay awake longer than 18 consecutive hours, and your reaction speed, short-term and long-term memory, ability to focus, decision-making capacity, math processing, cognitive speed, and spatial orientation all start to suffer. Cut sleep back to five or six hours a night for several days in a row, and the accumulated sleep deficit magnifies these negative effects.

What makes matters even worst is that leaders set the example for their entire organization. If you work long hours, stay up late writing e-mails, have late night conference calls, and work on your weekends and vacations, you implicitly cause your people to do the same. They naturally assume that it’s expected of them too, and part of the company culture.

This vicious cycle creates a whole organization of sleep deprived, ineffective people. That’s definitely not the formula for building high-performance teams and long-term success.

Instead, leaders should set the right example and improve their own performance by getting sufficient amount of sleep; at least seven hours a day. You will feel ten times better, physically and mentally, and your company will perform a whole lot better as well. Moreover, you’ll be doing a great service to your people and their families.

Good night and sleep well!

The Lifeline of the Entrepreneur

One of the most important and frequent elements in an entrepreneur’s life are introductions. We use introductions almost from day one of our venture, and all throughout its lifecycle. Introductions to potential co-founders; Introductions to investors; Introductions to partners and customers, and the list goes on. It’s the lifeline of the entrepreneur.

Therefore, it’s important that we learn to ask for and use introductions correctly and effectively. Here are a few tips from my own experience:

•     Don’t be afraid to ask. If you’re like me, you might not feel comfortable asking for introductions. We are concerned about a negative response, or don’t wish to inconvenience our friends or colleagues. You need to get over it. Develop a courteous and respectful approach in which to ask for these important favors. Give your friend an easy "out" to decline your request for any or no reason (for example, you might want to say/write: If for any reason you don't feel comfortable making an introduction on my behalf, I completely understand). Once the favor has been granted, and an introduction was made, be sure to thank the other person profusely for their time and help.

•     Always be networking (ABN). Never turn down an offer from someone who wants to introduce you to one of her contacts. You never know from which introduction or new contact will come your next major breakthrough, such as new business opportunity, investment, or a new customer. Treat all introductions and contacts as if they could be the most valuable one yet. Bring this mindset and approach to your meeting.

•     Always come prepared. Always. Prepare yourself well for the first introduction meeting or call. Learn as much as possible about your contact, and think about some possible scenarios in which you can engage. Prepare your key messages, asks, and expected outcomes. Think about your contacts objectives and how you can best address them as well. Like any relationship, there needs to be a win-win outcome, and a mutual interest to develop this introduction into some form of engagement (partnership, cooperation, investment, business transaction, etc.). Being prepared for your meeting will also leave a very positive first impression on your counterpart.

•     Follow-up. Always follow-up an introduction meeting. No matter what was the outcome of your meeting. Thank the person you met with for her time, and if there are any action items or next steps, summarize them. I also suggest following-up with that new contact on a regular basis in order to maintain and build that relationship. Even if presently there are no immediate actions to take, or opportunities to pursue, things might change in the future and this person could be of great value to you.

•     Return the Favor. In general, I believe it’s best to give more than you receive. It makes you feel good, as well as increases the chances of you getting that favor when you need it. Therefore, always maintain a positive balance in the “emotional bank account” of any relationship you have, as the late Dr. Stephen Covey preached. It means that you should be gracious towards your friends, colleagues, and others, with your time, assistance, and introductions. Always treat others as you would like to be treated yourself.

And lastly, please don’t forget where you started from, and how you felt when you were an entrepreneur and relied on introductions for your lifeline. As the old saying goes: be kind to people on your way up because you will meet them again on your way down.