Category Archives: Personal

Zen Work or Distraction Junkie

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Great article on smart people working on computers and the ability to get distracted and spoil the whole day.

Your work-flow should look something like this:

(Task 1 – Task 2) – Break – (Task 2 – Task 3 – Task 4) – Break – (Another 60-120 minute block of tasks) – Break…

 

And not something completely chaotic, random and sad, like this:

Task 1 – Email – Task 1 – Facebook – Task 1 – Task 2 – Minibreak – Facebook – Task 2 – Email – reddit – Task 3 – Email – Break – Task 2 – Email – Task 3 – twitter – Hacker News – twitter – Task 1 – Task 3 – Break – Task 4

 

 

We are ripe for disruption in higher education

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From the Globe and Mail:

How would you like to go to MIT – for free? You can now. Starting this spring, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will be offering free online courses to anyone, anywhere in the world, through its new digital arm, MITx. These courses will be much more than lectures on videotape. Students will be able to interact with other students online and have access to online labs and self-assessment tools. And here’s the really revolutionary part: If you can show you’ve learned the material, for a small fee, MITx will give you a credential to prove it. No, it’s not a full-blown MIT degree. But employers will probably be impressed.

 

John Wood and Room to Read

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From Knowledge@Wharton:

Wood devotes much of his book to explaining how he has modeled Room to Read on key features of Microsoft’s corporate culture. Noting that most nonprofits lack a hardline approach to managing costs and leveraging outcomes, Wood offers Room to Read as an example of how a well-run NGO should raise money, market its work and maximize results.

He is especially intent on data-driven accountability. For Wood, a successful nonprofit must answer to donors, who deserve to know where their money goes. He is careful to publicize Room to Read’s results continuously: Even his email signature file documents how many schools have been built, how many libraries have been established, how many books have been donated, and how many girls have received long-term scholarships to allow them to stay in school.

Moreover, for Wood, accountability doesn’t just satisfy existing donors — it creates new ones. An iconoclast when it comes to development, Wood doesn’t bother with direct mail campaigns or other standard trappings of non-profit fundraising. Instead, he relies on the human touch, travelling to fundraising parties organized by regional volunteers and convincing prospects, through an irresistable combination of personal charisma and a compelling business model, that their money will go places if they give it to him. This approach works with both individual donors — he once raised $150,000 in less than two minutes at a fundraising party when donors began matching one another’s gifts — and with foundations. One of Room to Read’s most generous and consistent funders is the Draper Richards Foundation, an offshoot of a firm run by renowned venture capitalists Bill Draper and Robin Richards Donohoe. Impressed by how Wood’s strong business sense had informed his non-profit mission, DRF finances Room to the Read to the tune of six figures a year.

Wood’s insight is simple, but transformative: Corporate savvy is not opposed to humanitarian aims, but may be used to assist them. Just because a charitable organization does not seek to make a profit, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t bring in as much money as it can, and manage that money well. To do any less is to shortchange the organization’s mission. There is also a crucial correlative here for Wood: While donors deserve to know where their money goes, the organization should not accept money from sources that could try to dictate organization policy. For that reason, Wood told The New York Times, "We don’t seek government funding here in the U.S. We don’t want to get into a fight with the U.S. government over whether we are allowed to teach kids about condoms or AIDS."

Good Dad, Good Entrepreneur, Good Husband

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Brian captures the challenges extremely well and the importance of family over work. I value my work and it is quite important in my life however, Australia has taught me through its people, culture and work environment that family matters a lot.

At this point in my life, I feel strongly that my three most important jobs are being a good dad, a good entrepreneur, and a good husband. Over the past year, I’ve found that it’s incredibly difficult to excel at all three simultaneously. Perhaps, for people better than I, it’s an easy task. I’m not a member of that club.

Brian Snyder at Pando Daily

The Death of the Davos Man

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 The World Economic Forum is about to begin again in Davos, Switzerland but Davos Man, that quintessential pan-national, pro-market, global leader of finance and business is all but dead. First created by that great political analyst Samuel P. Huntington, Davos Man may be walking and talking in Davos next week, but he is stricken with a terminal irrelevance that infects both him and the conference that once celebrated his masterly success. 


The Great Recession of the past two years is revealing that globalization, the economic ideology of Davos Man, was never more than a gloss over nascent nationalism. In the end, it is the nation-state and the local taxpayer that is saving the banks and businesses run by Davos Man from total destruction. The Great Recession is also showing that Chicago-School efficient market theory is as false an economic belief system for the global economy as it is for national policy. While globalization has clearly improved the lives of millions of Chinese, we can now see that it has also led to the immiseration of millions of middle class and poor Americans. The theory that efficient markets within a free trade system would benefit ALL participants is now proven wrong.

By Bruce Nussbaum via GigaOm

Exploring the role of Entrepreneurship in the Social Sector

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The troika of books that I am reading now for the startup stuff is Lean Start up by Eric Ries, The 4 steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank and Business Model Generation lead by Alex Osterwalder.

I have started out with the business model innovation stuff and best of all I am using the iPad app to create the business model for Family by Family. Like I said, I am entering the digital era and moving out from pre-digital.

As I was reading the Lean StartUp, Eric starts with defining entrepreneurship as “The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” This definitely makes sense and does not restrict first to tech only startups but to go beyond start ups. As he explains his work at Intuit, large and mature organisations and the managers who work there are extremely in the same situation as a start up, especially if they have read the Innovators Dilemma.

Eric clarifies,

“Anyone who is creating a new product or business under conditions of extreme uncertainty is an entrepreneur whether he or she knows it or not and whether working in a government agency, a venture-backed company, a nonprofit, or a decidedly for-profit company with financial investors”

When I write about business in this blog, I always mean entrepreneurship. In the about pages, I talked about business by providing the definition of the entrepreneur that Drucker used. I discuss startups, write about them, read about them, started a couple and failed in them and am totally energized to work in one now. However, what I have done from the almost my early working days is trying to “to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty”.

My first job was to sell the services of my organisation which was to design webpages on the internet. Year – 1998. Place – Hyderabad, India. This was before Hyderabad was a powerhouse with Google India HQ, the Indian School of Business etc. Ofcourse, this was when internet connections where 56kbps and the go to browser was Netscape. The challenge was so great that we had to actually ship a computer to a customer’s office to show a mock up web page on a 5 1/2 in floppy in monochrome colour. Don’t laugh!

My next area of work was in financial services and investment banking outsourcing for investment banks like Goldman Sachs in ADP Wilco. The most exciting part for me was when we were setting up a new project. After 4 years, I left to work for Deeshaa. A real social enterprise trying to make a difference in rural India. And it continued into the government here, two failed startups, and now in Families SA and TACSI I have always worked and thrived in areas when I was creating new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

Reading this I had the epiphany about my entrepreneurship journey as I saw my last 13 years of working life and decided that will be the tag line for this blog, the headline in LinkedIn and clearly what I am doing now and will continue to do for the foreseeable future.

Should your start up hire MBAs?

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A good take on the value of MBAs (like me) to a start up by Sheel from FeeFighters. Check out the entire post.

Why qualities could an MBA possibly possess to make them valuable to your startup? MBA’s are…

1)Driven / Ambitious – This is not to say that others aren’t… but MBAs are generally a particularly driven bunch. Some people think the opposite, but I think it actually takes balls to quit your existing job, take a couple of years off, move to a new city (usually) and go into debt for a piece of paper.

2)Extroverted / Outgoing – Yes, there are lots of counter-examples… but on the whole, the MBA folks are going to be more outgoing than the techies… and like it or not, you need some extroverts in your company. There are a bunch of d-bags at bschool too, though.

3)Well Networked – On the bizdev/sales/fundraising/marketing side of things, knowing people helps, and aside from possessing #2 above, we generally have fantastic networks to tap into, and aren’t afraid of tapping into them. One advantage is that we have networks not just in the startup bubble that we live in, but also the “normal” world that we need to partner with and/or eventually take over/dominate.

4)More Polished – MBA’s are really sometimes just finishing school for nerds. They teach you how to speak, negotiate, and write emails. If you were terrible at those things before, you won’t be amazing after, but you probably will have improved.

5)Highly Analytical – We have a different approach than some other people. In bschool, you’re constantly analyzing cases to see how other companies have succeeded or failed and making a recommendation based on all that you’ve learned. Some say it doesn’t apply to startups, but I’d beg to differ. I’m constantly thinking of cases I studied in school when making decisions at FeeFighters.

How to lead a creative life?

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From Fast Company. Check out the articles and a good one on Scorcese.

The director has achieved the trifecta of a fulfilling, creative life: enough money to do only what truly interests him, enough freedom to attack those projects in a way that is satisfying, and enough appreciation from his peers to tame–just slightly, just ever so slightly–the neurotic beast of self-doubt. After 22 movies, five commercials, 13 documentaries, a handful of music videos, three children, five wives, and 25 studios; after insolvency and misery, after box-office failures and years of going unappreciated; after the one Oscar and all the others he should have won, Marty Scorsese has earned the right that every creative person dreams of: the right never to be bored. And what all this adds up to in his case, what this really means to this particular man, is that he has earned the right to continue to fret every little detail in the world well into the next decade and for as long as he cares to make movies

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