cool Q

Import the column as text file to access and execute - SELECT table.col, count( column) FROM Table group by col;

What happened at Leh

What Happened at Lehman, in 30 Seconds or Less

A good posting from :
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2008/09/what_happened_at_lehman_in_30.html

Someone has written a "30-second version" of what happened to cause the mortgage crisis on Google finance, and it's probably the most lucid one we've seen so far. Although it might actually be more like a 40-second version, since those mortgage-backed securities are a bitch to get your head around no matter how you slice 'em.

People went to traditional banks and mortgage brokers and bought mortgages. All of these mortgages carry different amounts (e.g. $100,000 mortgage vs. a $500,000 mortgage) and different risk levels. The ones that are more likely to default have a higher interest rate, so the bank stands to gain more money...but at a greater risk of the home owner defaulting on the mortgage.

The problem with this is it is very difficult to balance your risk-reward ratio. So they created an investment vehicle called a mortgage-backed security (MBS). This is refered to as a "derivative" because it is based off of the mortgage. The way it works is the banks chopped up all these different mortgages into different securities that were worth different amounts and different risk levels. They then sold these to other banks and investments firms. The firms who bought these MBS then received a payment based off of the mortgages. For the banks selling MBS, it helped them pool risk and generate capital, and for the firms who bought the MBS, it provided a source of cash flow with what was thought to be a very safe,secure underlying commodity: real estate.

Since real estate was so "safe," these banks used huge amounts of leverage (borrowed money to buy the securities) because they didn't think they were that risky. Some firms, like Lehman, were leveraged 30:1, meaning that for every $30 they borrowed, they had $1 of underlying assets. That would be like you making $1000 a year but taking out a loan of $30,000.

While all this is going on, people are buying up adjustable interest rate mortgages (ARMs). They offer a cheap introductory rate, but then skyrocket. So all of a sudden, all these people discovered they couldn't make their monthly payments. The default rate shot through the roof. The firms that had purchased MBS did so based on certain calculations of default. In other words, X number of people could default on their mortgages, but they could still make a profit and
have a positive cash-flow. However, when the default rate shot up, this threw all of their calculations off.

Now the firms faced a real problem. They had HUGE amounts of debt on their balance sheets, and the assets that were supposed to balance that debt were becoming worth less and less because of the rising default rate and the drop in housing prices. These are the "write-downs" that you hear about. The firms had to pay interest on that debt, but they did not have the corresponding cash flow to be able to pay the debt. Lehman, for example, had $5.4B of debt obligations last quarter, but only had $2.3B in income.

When you can't pay your debt obligations, that's called being insolvent. Many people think that bankruptcy is caused by having more liabilities than assets, but that's not true. It's caused when you can't make good on your debts, so the repo man comes and claims your assets in order to make up for it. When that happens, you have to file for bankruptcy in order to make sure that people get paid in the correct order because otherwise different creditors are going to be suing you to make sure they get what you owe them.

So that's where we are now with Lehman. They couldn't pay their debts, so they had to file for bankruptcy.

Notes

Be SMART, CONSIDERATE, PROMPT, HONEST, HELPFUL, KIND, CREATIVE, DETERMINED, PATIENT

Management by Objectives introduced the SMART method for checking the validity of the objectives, which should be
'SMART':
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-related.

MBO by Peter Drucker:
What is this theory about?
MBO (Management By Objectives) relies on the defining of objectives for each employee and then to compare and to direct their performance against the objectives which have been set. It aims to increase the performance of the organization by matching organizational goals with the objectives of subordinates throughout the organization. Ideally, employees receive strong input to identify their objectives, time lines for completion, etc. MBO includes continuous tracking of the processes and providing feedback to reach the objectives.

Principles of Management by Objectives:
- Cascading of organizational goals and objectives,
- Specific objectives for each member,
- Participative decision making,
- Explicit time period, and
- Performance evaluation and provide feedback.

Successful Leader

To be a Successful Leader, You need to make other people Successful

Do Whay You Say You Will Do

Keep the Lines of Communication Open

If you treat people with Kindness they perform much better

Excerpt from "Leading with Kindness"

GetHuman

Get to Human from Phone Numbers

ADM - CMDB

ADM - Application Dependency Mapping - Remote Deployment, Hot Deployment, Application/ Site monitoring, Product/Project Launch Process, Enterprise Level Application Management

CMDB - Configuration Management Database

ITIL - IT Infrastructure Libraries

Configuraion Files, Device Level Management, Port Allocation Tables, Analyze and determine Application Dependencies

Security Aspects - Network, Corporate IAM (Identity Access Management), VPN, SecureID, Network Deployment

Network Management Tool to take care of certain level of business process and execute rule/state based transition.

Connect the dots between NMS, ADM, CMDB, ITIL, Security

Randy Pausch

In Memoriam:
Randy Pausch, Innovative Computer Scientist at Carnegie Mellon,

Launched Education Initiatives, Gained Worldwide Acclaim for Last Lecture
PITTSBURGH—Randy Pausch, renowned computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, died July 25 of complications from pancreatic cancer. He was 47.

Celebrated in his field for co-founding the pioneering Entertainment Technology Center and for creating the innovative educational software tool known as "Alice," Pausch earned his greatest worldwide fame for his inspirational "Last Lecture."

That life-affirming lecture, a call to his students and colleagues to go on without him and do great things, was delivered at Carnegie Mellon on Sept. 18, 2007, a few weeks after Pausch learned he had just months to live. Titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," the humorous and heartfelt talk was videotaped, and unexpectedly spread around the world via the Internet. Tens of millions of people have since viewed video footage of it.

Pausch, who had regularly won awards in the field of computer science, spent the final months of his life being lauded in arenas far beyond his specialty. ABC News declared him one of its three "Persons of the Year" for 2007. TIME magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world. On thousands of Web sites, people wrote essays about what they had learned from him. His book based on the lecture became a #1 bestseller internationally, translated into 30 languages

Key Capabilties for mitigating Competency Trap

Excerpt from the meeting at BQF Innovation Unit to discuss issues of Competency Traps

The session was led by Richard Granger of Arthur D Little. He presented a comprehensive review of the topic and then facilitated a workshop where delegates assessed their organisational competence in 7 key areas. Competency traps are skills, attributes and things we are proud of, that constrain our thinking. They break down into a Vision trap, a Routinisation trap and Technology traps. Richard advised that the best way to combat these hazards is to open the organisation up to external stimuli. This led into a discussion of many aspects of open innovation and we reviewed what P&G, Rolls-Royce and Philips Research were doing in these areas.

Seven key management capabilities were identified:

1. Innovation Sourcing Strategy
2. Ideas Management
3. Business Intelligence
4. Relationship Management
5. Project Management
6. Competence Management
7. Innovation Culture


By ~ Paul Sloane

Radically Simple IT - HBR

Radically Simple IT - HBR

By designing and deploying enterprise systems in a different way, Japan’s Shinsei Bank turned IT from a constraint into a launchpad for growth.

by David M. Upton and Bradley R. Staats

Enterprise IT projects—both custom and packaged “one size fits most” systems—continue to be a major headache for business leaders. The fundamental problem with these systems is that for the most part, they’re constructed using what programmer and open source champion Eric Raymond dubbed a cathedral approach. Like the great edifices that Europeans erected in the Middle Ages, enterprise IT projects are costly, take a great deal of time, and deliver value only when the project is completed. In the end, they yield systems that are inflexible and cement companies into functioning the way their businesses worked several years ago, when the project started. Despite recent improvements in the flexibility of packaged software, companies often find it exorbitantly expensive and difficult to modify their enterprise systems in order to exploit new business opportunities.

Instead of building systems that are legacy from the day they are turned on, managers can and should develop systems that can be improved—rapidly and continuously—well after they’ve gone live. Over the past decade, we’ve studied the design and implementation of enterprise IT systems and assisted numerous firms with the process. Through our work, we have identified an approach that not only reduces a company’s costs but supports the growth of existing businesses and the launch of new ones. We call it a “path based” approach, because rather than attempting to define all of the specifications for a system before the project is launched, companies focus on providing a path for the system to be developed over time. The approach’s premises are that it is difficult and costly to map out all requirements before a project starts because people often cannot specify everything they’ll need beforehand. Also, unanticipated needs almost always arise once a system is in operation. And persuading people to use and “own” the system after it is up and running is much easier said than done.

In our research, we discovered a standout among the companies applying the path-based method: Japan’s Shinsei Bank. It succeeded in developing and deploying an entirely new enterprise system in one year at a cost of $55 million: That’s one-quarter of the time and about 10% of the cost of installing a traditional packaged system. The new system not only served as a low-cost, efficient platform for running the existing business but also was flexible enough to support the company’s growth into new areas, including retail banking, consumer finance, and a joint venture to sell Indian mutual funds in Japan.

The path-based principles that Shinsei applied in designing, building, and rolling out the system—forging together, not just aligning, business and IT strategies; employing the simplest possible technology; making the system truly modular; letting the system sell itself to users; and enabling users to influence future improvements—are a model for other companies. Some of these principles are variations on old themes while others turn the conventional wisdom on its head.
Born of Necessity

Shinsei came into being when Long-Term Credit Bank, founded by the Japanese government to assist in the rebuilding of the country’s industries after World War II, went bust in 1998 with nearly $40 billion in nonperforming loans. The firm was nationalized, then sold in 2000 to Ripplewood Holdings, a U.S. private equity fund, and renamed Shinsei, which means “new birth.” Ripplewood executives coaxed Masamoto Yashiro, the former chairman of Citibank Japan, out of retirement to lead Shinsei. In addition to deciding to revamp existing commercial-banking operations, Yashiro formulated a plan for revolutionizing retail banking in Japan by offering a value proposition that was unique in the country at that time: high-quality products and services provided on a convenient, easy-to-use, low-cost basis. The strategy called for Shinsei to offer services that were then uncommon in Japan, including ATMs available 24/7 free of charge, internet banking, online foreign-exchange trading, online bilingual banking, and quick service supported by real-time database reconciliation (meaning customers’ accounts were updated immediately after each transaction).

Yashiro felt that the bank needed to move quickly to seize the opportunity in retail banking. However, the firm’s existing IT systems were antiquated and could not even support the bank’s existing corporate business adequately. To address these issues, Yashiro hired his former colleague Dhananjaya “Jay” Dvivedi, who had led IT operations at Citibank Japan, to be chief information officer. Upon taking the job, Dvivedi quickly surrounded himself with a talented core team, most of whom had worked for him previously. Since the recovering bank had limited investment funds, Yashiro gave Dvivedi the mandate to revolutionize IT but with the understanding that his team needed to do it “fast” and “cheap.” Recognizing that they could not fully know what the retail operation would need, the two men agreed that the goal should be to build a system that could scale with growth and adapt to new opportunities that the dynamic business would create.

The conventional choices for building a major enterprise system were two: the “big bang” approach of replacing the current system with an entirely new system and processes all at once or the incremental method of improving or replacing the existing system one small piece at a time. Dvivedi and his team were leery of taking the big bang route, believing it was too risky given the bank’s cash constraints and knowing all too well the problems endemic to such projects. The incremental course, however, which would probably take three to five years, would be far too slow. So they decided to blaze a third path. They would put into place a new, modular infrastructure that at first would function in parallel with but eventually would supersede the current infrastructure. According to traditional IT thinking, this was madness. Much bridging software would have to be developed to span the old and the new, which would require an enormous effort.

But Dvivedi knew from his prior work and his conversations with other CIOs that technical problems were almost never the reason that new IT systems flopped. Human problems were. People typically resist adopting new systems, often because the cost (the effort) outweighs the benefits. To address this, Dvivedi used simple but innovative technology solutions to avoid the wrenching go-live experience. For example, by mimicking the old system’s look and feel at least for a while, Dvivedi and his team were able to speed adoption of the new system.

Mastering the Management System - HBR

Mastering the Management System - from HBR

Successful strategy execution has two basic rules: understand the management cycle that links strategy and operations, and know what tools to apply at each stage of the cycle.

by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

Not long after its successful IPO, the Conner Corporation (not its real name) began to lose its way. The company’s senior executives continued their practice of holding monthly one-day management meetings, but their focus drifted.

The meetings’ agenda called for a discussion of operational issues in the morning and strategic issues in the afternoon. But with the company under pressure to meet quarterly targets, operational items had started to crowd strategy out of the agenda. Inevitably, the review of actual monthly and forecast quarterly financial performance revealed revenues to be lower, and expenses to be higher, than targeted. The worried managers spent hours discussing how to close the gap through pricing initiatives, capacity downsizing, SG&A staff cuts, and sales campaigns. One executive noted, “We have no time for strategy. If we miss our quarterly numbers, we might cease to exist. For us, the long term is the short term.”

Like Conner, all too many companies—including some well-established public corporations—have learned how Gresham’s Law applies to their management meetings: Discussions about bad operations inevitably drive out discussions about good strategy implementation. When companies fall into this trap, they soon find themselves limping along, making or closely missing their numbers each quarter but never examining how to modify their strategy to generate better growth opportunities or how to break the pattern of short-term financial shortfalls. Analysts, investors, and board members start to question the imagination and commitment of the companies’ management.

In our experience, however, breakdowns in a company’s management system, not managers’ lack of ability or effort, are what cause a company’s underperformance. By management system, we’re referring to the integrated set of processes and tools that a company uses to develop its strategy, translate it into operational actions, and monitor and improve the effectiveness of both. The failure to balance the tensions between strategy and operations is pervasive: Various studies done in the past 25 years indicate that 60% to 80% of companies fall short of the success predicted from their new strategies.

By creating a closed-loop management system, companies can avoid such shortfalls. (See the exhibit “How the Closed-Loop Management System Links Strategy and Operations.”) The loop comprises five stages, beginning with strategy development, which involves applying tools, processes, and concepts such as mission, vision, and value statements; SWOT analysis; shareholder value management; competitive positioning; and core competencies to formulate a strategy statement. That statement is then translated into specific objectives and initiatives, using other tools and processes, including strategy maps and balanced scorecards. Strategy implementation, in turn, links strategy to operations with a third set of tools and processes, including quality and process management, reengineering, process dashboards, rolling forecasts, activity-based costing, resource capacity planning, and dynamic budgeting. As implementation progresses, managers continually review internal operational data and external data on competitors and the business environment. Finally, managers periodically assess the strategy, updating it when they learn that the assumptions underlying it are obsolete or faulty, which starts another loop around the system.
Sidebar IconHow the Closed-Loop Management System Links Strategy and Operations

A system such as this must be handled carefully. Often the breakdown occurs right at the beginning, with companies formulating grand strategies that they then fail to translate into goals and targets that their middle and lower managers understand and strive to achieve. Even when companies do formalize their strategic objectives, many still struggle because they do not link these objectives to tools that support the operational improvement processes that ultimately must deliver on the strategy’s objectives. Or, like Conner, they decide to mix discussions of operations and strategy at the same meeting, causing a breakdown in the strategic-learning feedback loop.

In the following pages we draw upon our extensive research and experience advising companies, as well as nonprofit and public sector entities, to describe the design and implementation of a system for strategic planning, operational execution, and feedback and learning. We present a range of tools that managers can apply at the different stages, most developed by other management experts and some of our own design. (See “A Management System Tool Kit” for further reading on the tools discussed.) We will show how these can all be integrated in a system that links the management of strategy and operations.
Sidebar IconA Management System Tool Kit
Stage 1: Develop the Strategy

The management cycle begins with articulating the company’s strategy. This usually takes place at an annual offsite meeting during which the management team either incrementally improves an existing strategy or, on occasion, introduces an entirely new one. (Our experience suggests that strategies generally have three to five years of useful life.) Developing an entirely new strategy may take two sets of meetings, each lasting two to three days. At the first, executives should reexamine the company’s fundamental business assumptions and its competitive environment. After some homework and research, the executives will hold the second set of meetings and decide on the new strategy. Typically, the CEO, other corporate officers, heads of business and regional units, and senior functional staff attend these strategy sessions. The agenda should explore the following questions:

The Experience Trap - HBS INSEAD

The Experience Trap - HBS INSEAD

As projects get more complicated, managers stop learning from their experience. It is important to understand how that happens and how to change it.

by Kishore Sengupta, Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid, and Luk N. Van Wassenhove

If you were looking for an experienced manager to head up a software development team, Alex would be at the top of your short list. A senior manager, Alex has spent most of his career running software projects. His first responsibility was developing scientific software for NASA, and since then, he has overseen ever more complex projects for commercial enterprises and government agencies.

Alex was typical of the several hundred project managers who participated in our research initiative on experience-based learning in complex environments. We invited him to test his skills by playing a computer-based game that entails managing a simulated software project from start to finish—making the plans, monitoring and guiding progress, and observing the consequences. We set goals for him: finish on time and within budget, and obtain the highest possible quality (as measured by the number of defects remaining).

Alex’s decisions and outcomes were representative of the group as a whole. He started with a small team of four engineers and focused mostly on development work. That tactic paid off in the short run. The team’s productivity was high and development progressed quickly. However, when the size of the project grew beyond initial estimates, problems cropped up. Because Alex still chose to keep the team small, the engineers had to work harder to stay on track. Consequently, they made many mistakes and experienced burnout and attrition. Alex then tried to hire more people, but this took time, as did assimilating the new hires. The project soon fell behind schedule, and at that point Alex’s lack of attention to quality assurance in the early phases started to show up in snowballing numbers of software errors. Fixing them required more time and attention. When the project was finally completed, it was late, over budget, and riddled with defects.

After the game, we asked Alex to reflect on the simulation. Did the project’s growth take him by surprise? Was he shocked that the number of defects was so high or that hiring became difficult to manage? Alex—like most of his fellow participants—replied that such surprises and shocks have, unfortunately, become regular occurrences in most of the projects in which he’s been involved.

Quality and personnel headaches are not what most companies expect when they put seasoned veterans like Alex in charge of important projects. At this stage of their careers, they should know how to efficiently address problems—if not prevent them altogether. What we discovered in our experiments, however, was that managers with experience did not produce high-caliber outcomes. In our research, we used the simulation game to examine the decision processes of managers in a variety of contexts. Our results strongly suggest that there was something wrong with the way Alex and the other project managers learned from their experiences during the game. They did not appear to take into account the consequences of their previous decisions as they made new decisions, and they didn’t change their approach when their actions produced poor results.

Our debriefings indicated that the challenges presented in the game were familiar to the participants. We asked them to rate the extent to which the game replicated their experiences on real-life projects on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 meant “completely.” The average score was 4.32, suggesting that our experiments did accurately reflect the realities of software projects. So, though the managers had encountered similar situations on their jobs in the past, they still struggled with them in the simulations. We came to the conclusion that they had not really learned from their real-life project work, either.

In the following pages we’ll identify three likely causes for this apparent breakdown in learning, and we’ll propose a number of steps that organizations can take to enable learning to kick in again.
Why Learning Breaks Down

When anyone makes a decision, he or she draws on a preexisting stock of knowledge called a mental model. It consists largely of assumptions about cause-and-effect relationships in the environment. As people observe what happens as a result of their decisions, they learn new facts and make new discoveries about environmental relationships. Discoveries that people feel can be generalized to other situations are fed back, or “appropriated,” into their mental models. On the face of it, the process seems quite scientific—people form a hypothesis about a relationship between a cause and an effect, act accordingly, and then interpret the results from their actions to confirm or revise the hypothesis. The problem is that the approach seems to be effective only in relatively simple environments, where cause-and-effect relationships are straightforward and easily discovered. In more complex environments, such as software projects, the learning cycle frequently breaks down. In the experiments we carried out with our study participants, we identified three types of real-world complications that were associated with the cycle’s breakdown.

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time

Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time - From HBR

The science of stamina has advanced to the point where individuals, teams, and whole organizations can, with some straightforward interventions, significantly increase their capacity to get things done.

by Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy

Steve Wanner is a highly respected 37-year-old partner at Ernst & Young, married with four young children. When we met him a year ago, he was working 12- to 14-hour days, felt perpetually exhausted, and found it difficult to fully engage with his family in the evenings, which left him feeling guilty and dissatisfied. He slept poorly, made no time to exercise, and seldom ate healthy meals, instead grabbing a bite to eat on the run or while working at his desk.

Wanner’s experience is not uncommon. Most of us respond to rising demands in the workplace by putting in longer hours, which inevitably take a toll on us physically, mentally, and emotionally. That leads to declining levels of engagement, increasing levels of distraction, high turnover rates, and soaring medical costs among employees. We at the Energy Project have worked with thousands of leaders and managers in the course of doing consulting and coaching at large organizations during the past five years. With remarkable consistency, these executives tell us they’re pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up and increasingly feel they are at a breaking point.

The core problem with working longer hours is that time is a finite resource. Energy is a different story. Defined in physics as the capacity to work, energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit. In each, energy can be systematically expanded and regularly renewed by establishing specific rituals—behaviors that are intentionally practiced and precisely scheduled, with the goal of making them unconscious and automatic as quickly as possible.

To effectively reenergize their workforces, organizations need to shift their emphasis from getting more out of people to investing more in them, so they are motivated—and able—to bring more of themselves to work every day. To recharge themselves, individuals need to recognize the costs of energy-depleting behaviors and then take responsibility for changing them, regardless of the circumstances they’re facing.

The rituals and behaviors Wanner established to better manage his energy transformed his life. He set an earlier bedtime and gave up drinking, which had disrupted his sleep. As a consequence, when he woke up he felt more rested and more motivated to exercise, which he now does almost every morning. In less than two months he lost 15 pounds. After working out he now sits down with his family for breakfast. Wanner still puts in long hours on the job, but he renews himself regularly along the way. He leaves his desk for lunch and usually takes a morning and an afternoon walk outside. When he arrives at home in the evening, he’s more relaxed and better able to connect with his wife and children.

Establishing simple rituals like these can lead to striking results across organizations. At Wachovia Bank, we took a group of employees through a pilot energy management program and then measured their performance against that of a control group. The participants outperformed the controls on a series of financial metrics, such as the value of loans they generated. They also reported substantial improvements in their customer relationships, their engagement with work, and their personal satisfaction. In this article, we’ll describe the Wachovia study in a little more detail. Then we’ll explain what executives and managers can do to increase and regularly renew work capacity—the approach used by the Energy Project, which builds on, deepens, and extends several core concepts developed byTony’s former partner Jim Loehr in his seminal work with athletes.
Linking Capacity and Performance at Wachovia

Most large organizations invest in developing employees’ skills, knowledge, and competence. Very few help build and sustain their capacity—their energy—which is typically taken for granted. In fact, greater capacity makes it possible to get more done in less time at a higher level of engagement and with more sustainability. Our experience at Wachovia bore this out.

Competency Trap : Stanford GSB

The Agony of Victory
Why a company's greatest peril is often its own success.
Business 2.0 Magazine
By Jeffrey Pfeffer, Business 2.0 Magazine columnist

(Business 2.0 Magazine) -- While dissecting the Democratic party's landslide victory in November, many pundits have criticized the Republicans for making strategic and operational mistakes leading up to the midterm elections.

There were plenty of both, I'm sure, but what I see when I look at what happened last fall is one of the most intractable problems to beset corporations, nonprofits, and even pro ball clubs: falling prey to what's known to management scholars as a "competency trap."

The concept is deceptively simple. Organizations try things. If what they do succeeds, they "learn" that what they have done breeds success. So they persist, becoming ever more focused in what they do, and ever more specialized in the skills they acquire.


How to succeed in 2007

But two things invariably happen to undermine success. Competitors soon learn how to do the same thing, and conditions change, so that what worked in the past no longer applies. Companies have trouble adapting because they often build competencies that don't advance new products, markets, or strategies.

Hence the phrase "competency trap."

Chrysler, for instance, virtually invented the minivan during the 1980s and made a fortune from it. Then came SUVs and hybrids and more recently the spike in gasoline prices.

America's car-buying tastes changed, but Chrysler's factories had been configured to produce a particular style of car, and innovation had, of necessity, been narrowly focused on improvements in minivans. In the meantime, other car companies got into minivans, increasing the competition.

Under pressure, Chrysler (Charts) merged with Daimler-Benz.

There are plenty of instances of competency traps playing out in professional sports. Bill Walsh is credited with inventing the "West Coast offense" made famous by Joe Montana and the San Francisco 49ers of the 1980s and '90s. But when defenses figured out how to respond, and imitation by other teams eroded the advantage of this particular strategy, the 49ers lost their dominance.

Avoiding getting trapped by our own skill and success is a difficult, almost impossible, task. That's because one common recommendation - to keep innovating and doing things differently - has its own set of problems.

It's costly, and it can be just as prone to failure. But three strategies can help avoid competency traps.

The first is to avoid excessive specialization. Toyota has never put all its eggs in one basket - it makes high-quality trucks, minivans, even hybrids. By building a broad range of competencies and knowledge, Toyota can react quickly to changes in market conditions.

The second is to develop peripheral vision, which entails following Andy Grove's advice that "only the paranoid survive." Markets don't change all at once. Pay attention to the facts, not to what you want to believe.

Finally, understanding that a company's greatest strength can become its greatest weakness when circumstances change can help build a mind-set of continuous learning and vigilance.

No company, team, or political party can be equally good at everything. But understanding how success breeds its own problems, and acting on that knowledge, can help mitigate the problem.

Business 2.0 columnist Jeffrey Pfeffer is the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business.

Great words of Bharathiar......

"Anna Sathiram Aayiram Naatal, Aalayam Padhinaayiram Naatal,
Andam yaavilum Punniyam Kodi
Aangor Yaezhaikku Yezhutharivithal"

Consulting Books and Movies

List of favorite books on consulting :

Thinkertoys (Michalko)
Million Dollar Consulting (Weiss)
Leading Change (Kotter)
The Mckinsey Mind (Rasiel)
Shenson on Consulting (Shenson)
The Knowledge Society (Drucker)
The Trusted Advisor (Maister)
The Consultant's Calling (Bellman)
The Achievers (Bell)
How to Become a Successful Consultant in Your Own Field (Bermont)
How to build a successful consulting practice (Phillips)
The Emyth Revisited: Why Small Businesses Don't Work and What To Do About It (Gerber)
Managing the Professional Services Firm (Maister)

Million Dollar Consulting got the most mentions as the complete book consultants use both to start their practice as well as to serve as an ongoing reference book.


How about using some classic movies as the basis of discussion? Some movies have rich characters, plot and storylines that would make for fertile discussion among members of a management team. Here are a few:

Twelve Angry Men (1957) is a story of a jury deciding an apparent open and shut murder case. The character development and evolving story line reflects common interactions in management team negotiations.

The Caine Mutiny (1954) addresses weakness of command, ethical dilemmas, communication between ranks, and executive decisionmaking. And you though running a company was easy?

The Godfather (1972) is all about what is business and what is personal, transfer of control, and about the impact of traditions on operation of an enterprise.

12 O'Clock High (1949) is a look into leadership, betrayal, morale, discipline, and perseverance under duress. Strip away the war setting and you will find many elements of how teams behave under stressful settings and how they cope.

The Office - Not a movie but a weekly TV show with fertile representation of all too familiar personalities in many business settings. A smorgasbord of how not to manage.

Have managers watch these movies for discussion and comparison to their current individual and group behavior. Better yet, have the team watch them together on your next management retreat and discuss merits of the characters and team behavior.

Indian Prof at KSM and HBS

Ranjay Gulati is a Visiting Professor at Harvard Business School and the Michael L. Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He is an expert on strategic and organizational issues in firms. His work has focused on intra and inter-firm partnerships with a focus on the patterns of network of ties that emerge over time. He has looked at a number of issues surrounding interfirm alliances including who has ties with whom, governance of those exchange relationships, and determinants of performance. His most recent book is Managing Network Resources: Alliances, Affiliations, and other Relational Assets. He is the past-President of the Business Policy and Strategy Division at the Academy of Management and has served as an advisor to start-ups and major corporations. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard Business School, a masters degree in Management from M.I.T.'s Sloan School of Management, and two bachelor's degrees, in Computer Science and Economics, from Washington State University and St. Stephens College, New Delhi, respectively. He has been a Harvard MacArthur Fellow and a Sloan Foundation Fellow.

Consulting
Ranjay Gulati is a recognized specialist on strategic and organizational issues in firms and has also done significant work on the creation and management of intra and inter-firm partnerships, including strategic alliances and mergers. He has also focused on issues related to achieving short term and long term organic growth as well as through mergers, acquisitions, and alliances. Most recently, he has worked with a number of firms on transitioning from product to market/solution centric models. He has consulted with wide array of firms on these topics on both short and long term assignments.

Executive Lectures
Ranjay has received several awards for his outstanding teaching. In 1998-1999 he received the Chairs' Core Teaching Award at the Kellogg School of Management and in 2003 was elected the Professor of the year by the executive MBA students in the Kellogg-HKUST program. Through executive seminars and open lectures, Ranjay creates a forum for the development and implementation of business strategies for the challenging market conditions we face today. Each lecture is customized to fit the audience and their circumstances. Some of the topics that Ranjay regularly lectures on include:

Building Market Driven Organizations

Spurred by visions of the future and haunted by intense competition, companies are rushing to realize the goal of creating a customer-focused organization. Despite the increasing need for a customer-focused strategy in a competitive business environment there are few paradigms of how companies can change their strategy and organization to become customer focused. This session presents a roadmap of the stages through which companies evolve as they embark on this journey towards greater market focus. Through a series of cases about firms in a range of industries that have successfully embarked on some of these changes, we will develop a comprehensive blueprint for the market driven organization. Topics will include:

• What is a market driven strategy?
• Is a market driven strategy right for you?
• Obstacles to formulating and implementing a market driven strategy
• The road to building a market driven organization

From Products to Solutions: When, Why, and How?

A new mantra for many organizations today is to become a solution-centered organization. For some firms it is about enhancing the service content associated with their products and for others it is about extending their reach from selling products to selling experiences. While there is much talk of moving away from the old product-centric form to a new solution-centric organization, there is limited understanding of what this precisely means and how to go about it. In this session w will discuss the multiple facets of effective solutions. Using several recent case studies, we will examine some of the key enablers that allow firms to architect, sell, and implement solutions. Topics will include:

• What is a solution?
• Key facets of an effective solution
• Pricing and selling solutions
• Building solution driven organizations

Relational Capital: Managing Relationships as Resources

Firms are now operating in an ever more interconnected world of business in which they have to connect with other organizations up and down the value chain. However, most firms have yet to measure and manage these key strategic relationships. This session will present the concept of “relational capital” – the idea that firms need to think of their relationships as key assets that must be managed effectively. The session will discuss how to manage relationships with customers, suppliers, alliance partners and across internal business units for competitive advantage. Topics will include:

• The imperatives of relationships
• Redefining external relationships: alliances, suppliers, and customers
• Transforming internal relationships: cross business unit, mergers and acquisitions
• Building interpersonal connections: enhancing trust and creating win-win partnerships

Increasing the odds: Building Strategic Alliances that Work!

Strategic partnerships have become central to success in the present economy, and yet there is evidence that more than half of them fail. By reviewing some of the best and worst practices, you will identify and discuss critical factors for the formation and management of successful alliances. Topics will include:

• The imperatives of forming alliances
• A classification of different types of alliances and the challenges with each form
• Why alliances fail?
• How to build alliances that work
• How to partner with competitors and win
• Creating trust in win-win alliances
• Managing a network of partnerships

Designing Next Generation Organizations

In the present context, firms are witnessing dramatic shifts in the competitive landscape with intensified competition and increasing commoditization of offerings. Consequently, firms are struggling with finding ways to organize themselves to be both product leaders while also getting closer to their customers. They must simultaneously be cost leaders while also being on the cutting edge of innovation. How do organizations deal with these seemingly competing sets of demands? In this session we consider some of the latest organizational strategies that industry leaders are pursuing. The topics discussed will include:

• The architecture of the new organization
• Linking your strategy with your organization
• Core business processes in the new organization
• The role of new leaders in these organizations

Leading and Managing Organizational Change

The vast majority of both major and minor change initiatives in enterprises fail. In this session we examine some of the typical pitfalls that firms face when they embark on change initiatives. We look at new models of successful change and consider both the role of leaders and also of followers in initiating and managing the successful transformation inside organizations. The topics discussed will include:

• How to define a change strategy inside your organization
• A roadmap for executing a change strategy that works
• Balancing top-down with bottom-up initiatives
• Key pitfalls in leading change efforts inside your organization

Strategic Thinking for Turbulent Markets

To achieve success in today’s volatile economy requires leveraging more than just traditional assets. Intangible assets in the form of customer relationship management, branding, organizational design and property rights have become important off balance sheet pillars of competitive advantage. In this session, we learn to think more creatively about leveraging your tangible and intangible assets as you develop strategies for building a sustainable competitive advantage. We will analyze companies in the present context, discuss case studies, and identify how and where you should make changes to the way you think about strategy and resource decisions. The topics discussed will include:

• Identify and explore the essential foundations for building competitive advantage
• Examine some of the newest organizational structures and strategies to continually modify those that work best in a dynamic environment
• Investigate how leading firms in a range of industries use creative strategies to build and sustain profitable market positions
• Cultivate an understanding of how to build competitive advantage through case studies

Transformational Leadership

What are some successful pathways to driving deep change within your organizations? This lecture will provide a comprehensive model for how to develop and guide change within organizations. It will also provide a detailed assessment of the attributes of successful leaders and some thoughts on how to develop such a leadership pipeline within your organization. The focus is not just on senior leadership but also on those in the middle. It will provide a personal leadership roadmap for those seeking to develop those skills in themselves. The topics discussed will include:

• Leadership as dynamic relationship between leading and following
• How to operate as a leader without much formal power
• Mobilizing and driving change from the middle
• Attributes and skill set of a real change leader

Executing on the Promise of Customer Focus

Companies looking to grow in commoditizing markets like to say that they offer customer solutions—products and services bundled into packages that are hard to copy and can command a premium price. But few companies can actually deliver on that promise. Most companies are organized into product-focused business units that allow them to develop deep knowledge and expertise, but that obscure a holistic picture of customers and their needs. Building on my recent research into the challenges of top- and bottom-line growth, I have found that creating customer solutions can be a powerful way to stimulate growth—but only if companies are able to transcend their organizational silos to marshal all of their resources, including new technologies, toward delivering customer-focused solutions. For marketers, making this shift will involve a rethinking of their roles, the development of new skills, and in some cases, and creative agreements with external partners to both keep costs in line and enhance the appeal of solutions.
Using case examples of b-2-b and b-2-c companies, this lecture vividly demonstrates how marketers can creatively develop higher value customer solutions. Topics discussed will include:

• Strategic dilemmas in commodity markets
• Rationale for the rise of customer solutions
• Market impediments to solutions as a key differentiator
• Internal siloes as roadblocks to customer centric solutions

Silo-busting: Transcending Barriers to Build High Growth Organizations

Those firms seeking to make customer centric solutions into something more than just a catchy corporate slogan, have to confront their internal siloes that are typically anchored around products or geography. They face the dilemma of whether to swap out their old siloes with new customer oriented ones or retain the old siloes but then seek out ways to transcend those existing siloes so that they operate in a more synchronous way. This lecture will not only elaborate on when firms should bust old siloes and when they should transcend them, but it will provide a detailed discussion of the tactics to manage such efforts. Managers will learn about to build internal bridges across siloes and gain insights into how to become those effective bridge builders. Some of the topics covered will include:

• When to bust and when to bridge existing siloes
• Strategies for connecting internal siloes to ensure synchronicity
• Individual strategies for managerial survival on the intersection of siloes
• How to become a bridge builder across siloes

Paths of Disparity ....

That way to the privilege of a school, this way to livelihood burdens. Two sets of children present a study in contrast on a Chennai thoroughfare. - Courtesy - The Hindu

Excerpt from AlwaysOn stanford summit ....

some good facts some bad facts is normal in new business ....

Innovation is change, making change happen, making breakthrough happen

Old business - things don't change ....

fundamental change in silicon valley

power of ideas powered by entrepreneurial energy and entrepreneurial passion

sometime the energy is distorted if its been done for monetary benefits ....

There is a lot of infrastructure available now ....... compared to past ...

Its much easier to fail and start now ....

mercenaries who are here just for money cause the distortion to the entrepreneurial energy ...

silicon valley is about ups and downs ..... the real important thing is that
"what is important? and whether the impact can be done to the world for a good cause ?"

innovation and entrepreneurship are the important social tools that can change the world .............

different people are driven by different motivations .... and different people are driven by different motivations at different stages of life

Entrepreneurship should be driven by passion and should NOT be just for money ..........

The above mentioned is an excerpt from AlwaysOn stanford summit by Vinodh Koshla

who runs Internet

WHO RUNS THE INTERNET?
Who controls this web, this cloud, this network of networks? Well, no one, really. The Internet seems to be both institutional and anti-institutional at the same time, massive and intimate, organized and chaotic. In a sense the Internet is an international cooperative endeavor, with its member networks kicking in money, hardware, maintenance, and technical expertise.

The U.S. government has had a big influence on the federally funded parts of the Internet. The National Science Foundation (NSF), as mentioned, initiated the NSFNET in the mid 1980s, a nationwide backbone in the United States that connected many mid-level networks, which in turn connected universities and other organizations.

Credit Risk ...

Crockford, Neil (1986).
An Introduction to Risk Management (2nd ed.).
Woodhead-Faulkner. 0-85941-332-2.

Charles, Tapiero (2004).
Risk and Financial Management: Mathematical and Computational Methods.
John Wiley & Son. ISBN 0-470-84908-8.

Lam, James (2003).
Enterprise Risk Management: From Incentives to Controls.
John Wiley. ISBN-13 978-0471430001.

van Deventer, Donald R., Kenji Imai and Mark Mesler (2004).
Advanced Financial Risk Management: Tools and Techniques for Integrated Credit Risk and Interest Rate Risk Management.
John Wiley. ISBN-13: 978-0470821268.

Bluhm, Christian, Ludger Overbeck, and Christoph Wagner (2002).
An Introduction to Credit Risk Modeling.
Chapman & Hall/CRC. ISBN 978-1584883265.

de Servigny, Arnaud and Olivier Renault (2004).
The Standard & Poor's Guide to Measuring and Managing Credit Risk.
McGraw-Hill. ISBN 978-0071417556.

Darrell Duffie and Kenneth J. Singleton (2003).
Credit Risk: Pricing, Measurement, and Management.
Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691090467.

Excellent Books ..........

The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everythingbook By: Stephen M. R. Covey

Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson. Patterson provides readers with tools for talking when the stakes are high.

Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick M. Lencioni. Specific, practical guidance is supplied to leaders, managers and facilitators in this breakthrough guide.

Vital Friends by Tom Rath. Employees who have a best friend in the office are more productive, more likely to engage positively with customers, share new ideas and stay longer in a job.

The Emotional Intelligence Quick Book by Travis Bradberry, Jean Greaves and Patrick M. Lencioni. Emotional intelligence is now widely accepted, not only within the psychological arena, but within the business world.

Power of an Hour by Dave Lakhani. What if by devoting just one hour a week, you could make big improvements in your professional life?

Innovation in Corporate World

Faced with the prospects of slow growth, commoditization and global competition, companies like General Electric Co., Microsoft Corp. and Ford Motor Co. have now emphasized innovation as critical to their future success. But what exactly is innovation? Although the subject has risen to the top of the CEO agenda, many companies have a mistakenly narrow view of it. They might see innovation as synonymous with new product development or traditional research and development. But such myopia can lead to the systematic erosion of competitive advantage. As a result, companies in a given industry can come to resemble one another over time. In actuality, business innovation is far broader in scope than product or technological innovation. In fact, a company can innovate along any of 12 different dimensions with respect to its (1) offerings, (2) platform, (3) solutions, (4) customers, (5) customer experience, (6) value capture, (7) processes, (8) organization, (9) supply chain, (10) presence, (11) networking, and (12) brand. Nissan Motor Co., for example, has innovated along the platform dimension, using essentially the same small engine block to power a variety of models, including an upscale midsize sedan, a large sedan, luxury sedans, a minivan and a sports coupe. Enterprise Rent-A-Car has innovated along the customers and presence dimensions, placing car rental locations in the neighborhoods where people live and work rather than at airports. Together the 12 dimensions of innovation can be displayed in a new framework called the “innovation radar,” which companies can use to manage the increasingly complex business systems through which they add value.

Mohanbir Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology and the director of the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois. Robert C. Wolcott is a fellow and adjunct professor and Inigo Arroniz is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Research in Technology & Innovation.

Good Collection .........

Men of Mathematics - E.T. Bell
The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan - Robert Kanigel
Masters of Doom : How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner
Fermat's Last Theorem - Simon Singh
The Story of a Number - Eli Maor
A Mathematician's Apology - G. H. Hardy
Chaos: Making a New Science - James Gleick
'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' (Adventures of a Curious Character) - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton, Edward Hutchings and Albert R. Hibbs
What Do You Care What Other People Think?: Further Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard P. Feynman, Ralph Leighton
Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb - William Poundstone
Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten Track: The Letters Of Richard P. Feynman - Timothy Ferris
Genius : The Life and Science of Richard Feynman - James Gleick
Trigonometric Delights - Eli Maor
The Hilbert Challenge - Jeremy Gray
No Ordinary Genius: The Illustrated Richard Feynman - Richard P. Feynman
Strange Beauty: Murray Gell-Mann and the Revolution in Twentieth-Century Physics - George Johnson
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman - Richard P. Feynman and Jeffrey Robbins
Feynman Lectures on Computation
Six Easy Pieces, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman
Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid - Douglas Hofstadter
Feynman's Lost Lecture: The Motion of Planets Around the Sun - David L. Goodstein, Judith R. Goodstein and Richard Phillips Feynman
Strange Brains and Genius : The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen - Clifford A. Pickover -
The Music of the Primes: Searching to Solve the Greatest Mystery in Mathematics - Marcus du Sautoy
To Infinity and Beyond: A Cultural History of the Infinite - Eli Maor
Interactions : A Journey Through the Mind of a Particle Physicist - Sheldon Glashow and Ben Bova
Tuva or Bust! Richard Feynman's Last Journey - Ralph Leighton -
Selfish Routing and the Price of Anarchy - Tim Roughgarden
Universities and Their Leadership - Bowen and Shapiro
The Evolution of Cooperation - Robert Axelrod
The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins
Einstein: The Life and Times - Ronald Clark
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos - Steven Strogatz
The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University - Frank Rhodes
Emergence: From Chaos to Order - John H. Holland
Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History - Stephen Hawking
Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason - Charles Freeman
Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World - Stephen O'Shea
A Short History of Byzantium - John Julius Norwich
Byzantium: The Early Centuries - John Julius Norwich
Byzantium: The Apogee - John Julius Norwhich
Byzantium: The Decline and Fall - John Julius Norwhich
For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery - Rodney Stark
The Physics of Superheroes - James Kakalios
One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism - Rodney Stark
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond
Behavioural Game Theory: Experiments in strategic interactions - Colin Camerer
A Beautiful Mind - Slyvia Nassar
Complete Yes Prime Minister - Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay
Choice and Consequence - Thomas C. Schelling
Readings in Political Economy - Kaushik Basu
The Book of the Courtier - Baldesar Castiglione
Rationality and Freedom - Amartya Sen
Fate Is the Hunter - Ernest K. Gann
Great Feuds in Mathematics - Hellman
Constantine and the Conversion of Europe - Jones
Becoming Charlemagne - Jeff Sypeck
Moral Minds - Marc Hauser
A Man Without a Country - Kurt Vonnegut
Cambridge Companion to the Age of Constantine - Lenski
The Story of Philosophy - Will Durant
An Introduction to Political Philosophy - Wolff
The God Delusion - Richard Dawkins
Letter to a Christian Nation - Sam Harris
Lord Chesterfield's Letters - Lord Chesterfield
American Prometheus - The Triumph and Tragedy of Robert J. Oppenheimer - Bird and Sherwin
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
The Moral Consequences of Economic Freedom - Friedman
A History of Civilizations - Braudel
Among the Believers - Naipaul
God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist - Victor Stenger
Bookless in Baghdad - Shashi Tharoor
The Argumentative Indian - Amartya Sen
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Chairman of the Board: A Practical Guide - Brian Lechem
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseni
Big Bang - Simon Singh
The Undercover Economist - Tim Hartford
Right Hand Left Hand - Chris McManus
The Battle for God - Karen Armstrong
Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel - Rebecca Goldstein
Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics - Gino Segre
God Against the Gods: The History of the War Between Monotheism and Polytheism- Jonathan Kirsch
The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher - Julian Baginni
The Therapy of Desire - Martha Nussbaum
Boeing versus Airbus - John Newhouse

Company, Brand and Name

George Eastman, founder of Kodak :
Gave some classic advice about Company, Brand and Name. "A trademark should be short, vigorous, incapable of being misspelled," said Eastman. "It must mean nothing. If the name has no dictionary definition, it must be associated only with your product." Although good advice, this works only if you are able to put some resources behind establishing and supporting a name over time. Most consultants don't consider a rebranding effort worth the cost.

NRN's - Infosys Business View

How Infosys began

It was a wintry morning in January 1981 when seven of us sat in my apartment, and created Infosys. We had lots of hope, confidence, commitment, energy, enthusiasm, hard work, passion and a sense of sacrifice.

We were short of one thing, money. We managed to put together just $250 in seed capital.

We never dreamt about size, revenues and profits. Our dream, right from day one, was to build a corporation that was, above all things, respected.

From the beginning, our team was unique in our commitment to a strong value system. We believed in putting the interest of the company ahead of our own interest. We believed in legal and ethical business.

We believed in respect and long-term gratification. And each of us brought complementary strengths to the company.

'Entrepreneurship is a marathon'

To me, entrepreneurship is a marathon. I believe that the key to a successful corporation is longevity – my heroes are companies like IBM, Levers, and GE. These firms have shown growth in earnings quarter after quarter, for a long time.

Infosys itself has seen consistent growth in revenue and profitability for over 49 quarters, since it got listed in India. We have institutionalized performance and accountability in our systems and processes, and through the empowerment of our employees. Let me talk about some of the generic lessons we have learnt.

The name of the game is: predictability of revenues; sustainability of the prediction; profitability; and a good de-risking model. Measurement is key to improvement.

Value system

A sound value system is what differentiates long-term players from others. Putting the corporation's interest ahead of personal interest will advance personal goals in the long term.

No single person is indispensable. It is important that you give challenging engagements to deserving people, whether they are young or new in the organization. Youth and empowerment are the keys to scalability and longevity.

Every situation is what you make it to be. Confidence is half the battle, and leadership is making the impossible look possible. Speed, imagination and excellence in execution are the only three context-invariant and time-invariant attributes for success.

Trust of employees, investors

The trust of employees is the most important ingredient for successful leadership. To gain the trust of people, there is no more powerful leadership style than leadership by example. The world respects performance and action, not rhetoric.

It is better to obsolete our own innovations, rather than allowing our competitors to do it. A healthy sense of paranoia and respect for competition is an absolute must for success. It prevents complacency, and ensures that the organization is learning continuously. The ultimate test for customer satisfaction is making our customer look good in front of his / her customer.

I have realized that if you want to look smarter, you must surround yourself with people smarter than you. Everybody needs incentives to perform. Money is not the only motivator; respect, dignity, fairness and inclusiveness are essential to get the best out of employees. Every employee must feel an inch taller when talking about the company.

Being transaction-oriented in every decision avoids groupism. An emphasis on meritocracy and data-orientation enhances the confidence of employees in the fairness of the corporation. We believe in the adage, In God we trust, everybody else brings data to the table.

To retain the trust of your investors, it is better to under promise and over-deliver. Investors understand that every business will have ups and downs, and want us to level with them at all times. They want us give them bad news pro-actively and as early as possible. Therefore, When in doubt, disclose.

We have realized that we should never take any decision with the stock price in mind. The day we do this, we will ruin the company. Finally, we have realized that we can shortchange investors if we want to make Rs 1 crore (Rs 10 million), but if we want to make Rs 1,000 crore (Rs 10 billion), we have to play the game straight and honest.

We have realized that longevity requires that we follow every law of the land, even if we do not agree with it. We should work hard to change laws that hurt the progress of the corporation.

Unless we make a difference to the society and earn their trust, we cannot be long-term players. Therefore, in everything we do, we must ask ourselves whether we are adding value to the society around us, regardless of where we are -- US or India.

'What I want Infosys to achieve in 25 years'

What do I want to see this company achieve in the next 25 years? I want this to be a place where people of different races, nationalities and religious beliefs work together, in an environment of intense competition but utmost courtesy and dignity, to add greater and greater value to our customers, day after day. Just like we have received respect in India, I want Infosys to be the most respected company in every country that it operates.

But, to achieve these dreams, we have to be in existence over the next 250 years. I know we can do this for the following reasons:

* We have an extraordinary leader in Nandan (Nandan Nilekani, Infosys CEO), a man of great vision, values and dynamism. He is ably supported by the best management team and professionals in the industry.
* We have a depth of leaders within the organisation, with over 500 leaders being part of our leadership training and mentoring programme.
* The de-risking strategy at Infosys ensures that there is a backup for every position, and that decision-making is participatory across the company. In other words, it is not one person, but a team that looks at every decision. Thus, at Infosys, it is the leadership of ideas and meritocracy that drives every decision.
* Every decision is supported by a strong portfolio of systems, processes and technology.
* The value system of the company is time and context invariant.
* We will continue to have the mindset of a small company even as we grow and scale.
* Finally, and most importantly, I see youth, the feel-good factor and confidence around me.

This is why I am confident Infosys will continue to serve the society as a long-term player.

Thank you.
By - N R Narayana Murthy

Financial Analysis

Investors are always looking for a better way to pick securities. Two types of data analysis have emerged to assist investors in making better investment decisions. In this section, we will introduce you to fundamental and technical analysis.


Fundamental analysis is a method used to evaluate the worth of a security by studying the financial data of the issuer. It scrutinizes the issuer's income and expenses, assets and liabilities, management, and position in its industry. In other words, it focuses on the "basics" of the business.

If you want to use fundamentals to help you make an investment decision, you would rely heavily on an offering prospectus, annual and quarterly reports as well as any current news items relating to the issuer whose securities you are considering.

Technical analysis is a method used to evaluate the worth of a security by studying market statistics. Unlike fundamental analysis, technical analysis disregards an issuer's financial statements. Instead, it relies upon market trends to ascertain investor sentiment to predict how a security will perform.

If you want to use technical analysis to help you make an investment decision, you will refer to financial charts, tables and ratios found in the financial press. You will look for market trends and averages to help you decide whether the "time is right" to make an investment

Which Type of Analysis Is Better for You?

Fundamentalists and technicians have been at odds with one another since the advent of investing. There is no clear answer as to which is right. Sometimes it appears that the technicians make better picks. Other times it seems the fundamentalists are making the right call. One thing is certain, when one group of analysts is wrong the other will surely emerge saying, "We told you so." So, which is right for you? There are many potential answers to that question. Three variants of popular answers are:

If you are a "long-term" investor looking for companies with solid foundation, growth and income potential, the fundamentals may sway you.

If you are a "short-term" investor (trader) looking for companies who are "on the verge" of being discovered, fundamentals will be useful to you.

If you are a "long-term" investor who is not as concerned about one company's basics because you will diversify to minimize risk, or you are a "short-term" investor waiting for investor sentiment to change, then technical analysis will be helpful to you.

Today, many investors find both fundamental and technical analysis helpful in painting a more complete and colorful picture on the investment canvas. Whether you use an asset allocation, buy and hold, or market timing strategy, you will find useful information from both the fundamentalists and technicians. The technicians can tell you about the broad market and its trends. The fundamentalists tell you whether an issue has the "basics" necessary to meet your investment objectives.

Courtesy - AmeriTrade

BPM, BPR, BPO

Business Process Management : A Management discipline that provides governance in a business process environment, with the goal of improving agility and operational performance. Business Process Management is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an Organization's activities and processes.

Business Process Redesign: A systematic, disciplined business process improvement approach that critically examines, rethinks, redesigns and implements the redesigned processes of an organization. BPR's goal is to acheive dramatic improvements in performance in areas important to customers and other stakeholders.

Business Process Optimization: The continuous management of performance and incremental business process improvement efforts by measuring Key Performance Indicators and redesigning the suboptimal processes for better performance.

Pitching for a Start-Up

Fixing a Pitch - written by Bill Reichert, From Garage Technology Ventures.

Endless articles, books, and blogs have been written on the topic of business plan presentations and pitching to investors. In spite of this wealth of advice, almost every entrepreneur gets it wrong. Why? Because most guides to pitching your company miss the central point: The purpose of your pitch is to sell, not to teach. Your job is to excite, not to educate.

Pitching is about understanding what your customer (the investor) is most interested in, and developing a dialog that enables you to connect with the head, the heart, and the gut of the investor. If you want advice about pitching, you can ask a venture capitalist, but you probably won’t get a very good answer. Most VCs are analytic types, and so they will give you a laundry list of topics you should cover. They won’t tell you what really “floats their boat,” mainly because they can’t articulate it in useful terms. “I know it when I see it,” is about the best answer you’ll get.

What is the investor most interested in? Contrary to popular belief, the venture capitalist sitting at the other end of the table glaring inscrutably at the presenting entrepreneur is not thinking, “Is this company going to make a lot of money?” That is the simple question that most entrepreneurs think they are answering, but they are missing the crux of the venture capital process. What the investor is really thinking is, “Is this company the best next investment for me and my fund?” That is a much more complex issue, but that is what the entrepreneur has to pitch.

So, the pitch has to accomplish three things:

* Provide a good, clear, easy-to-repeat story—the story of an exciting new startup.
* Fit with other investments the individual venture capitalist has made and the investments the firm is chartered to make.
* Beat out the other investments the firm is currently considering.

These latter two issues are beyond the scope of this modest guide. So for now, let’s just concentrate on telling a good story.

Tell a Good Story

Most of the articles on pitching are generally right about the topics, even if they miss the nuance (sell, don’t explain). But don’t take any template as graven in stone. Your story may require a moderate, or even a dramatic, variation on the list of presentation slides (listed below). You may need to explain the solution before you can explain the market; or if you are in a crowded space, you may need to explain why you are different than everyone else early on in the conversation; or you may want to drop some very impressive brand-name customers before you explain your product or your market. The one thing you may not do is expand the number of slides to twenty (or thirty or fifty)! Other than that, let the specifics of your situation dictate the flow of your slides.

Nevertheless, it is useful to have a guide. With the caveats above in mind, here is a basic outline for your pitch:

* Cover Slide: Company name, location, tagline, presenter’s name and title. If there are multiple team members participating in the pitch, put names on the next slide instead. Key objective: Everyone in the room should know the basic value proposition of the company, including the target market, before the next slide is shown. All the words should not be on this slide, but reinforce and extend the tagline orally so that that everyone has a foundation for what is to come.

* Intro Slide: Team. The three or four key players in the company. For some reason, everyone puts the team slide at the end, but investors want to know this at the beginning, and it is common courtesy to make sure everyone is introduced. But make this short, crisp and relevant. This is not the time to share everyone’s life story, or detail the resumes of all six members of the advisory board. Focus on a significant, relevant accomplishment for each person that identifies that person as a winner. In ten to fifteen seconds, you should be able to say three or four sentences about your CTO that says everything the investors want to know about him or her at that moment. Key objective: Investors should be confident that there is a good credible core group of talent that believe in the company and can execute the next set of milestones. One of those milestones may be filling out the team, and so it is important to convey that the initial team knows how to attract great talent, as well as having great domain skills. If there is a gap in the team, address it explicitly, before investors have to ask about it.

* Slide 1: Company Overview. The best way to give an overview of your company is to state concisely your core value proposition: What unique benefit will you provide to what set of customers to address what particular need? Then you can add three or four additional dot points to clarify your target markets, your unique technology/solution, and your status (launch date, current customers, revenue rate, pipeline, funding needed). Key objective: Flesh out the foundation you established at the beginning. At this point, no one should have any question about what it is that your company does, or plans to do. The only questions that should remain are the details of how you are going to do it. Another key objective you should have achieved by this point in your presentation is to make sure that if there are some compelling brand names associated with your company (customers, partners, investors, advisors), your audience knows about them. Feel free to drop names early and often—starting with your first email introduction to the investor. Brand name relationships build your credibility, but do not overstate them if they are tenuous.

* Slide 2: Problem/Opportunity. You need to make it clear that there is a big, important problem (current or emerging) that you are going to solve, or opportunity you are going to exploit, and that you understand the market dynamics surrounding the opportunity—why does this situation exist and persist, and why is it only now that it can be addressed? Show that you really understand the very particular market segment you are targeting, and frame your market analysis according to the specific problem and solution you are laying out. In some cases, however, the problem you are attacking is so obvious and clear that you can drop this slide altogether. You do not have to tell investors that there are a lot of cell phones out there or that teenagers like to socialize. Save yourself, and them, the pain of the obvious.

* Slide 2.1: Problem/Opportunity Size. Even if your market opportunity is not obvious, you can assert the size of your opportunity on slide 2. Sometimes you may need a slide to clarify the factors that define the size and scope of the opportunity, particularly if you are going after multiple market segments. There may be a unique market dynamic or emerging trend that requires explanation. Do not use this slide to quote the Gartner Group or Frost & Sullivan; show that you really understand where your prospective customers are from the ground up.

* Slide 3. Solution. What specifically are you offering to whom? Software, hardware, services, a combination? Use common terms to state concretely what you have, or what you do, that solves the problem you’ve identified. Avoid acronyms and don’t try to use these precious few words to create and trademark a bunch of terms that won’t mean anything to most people, and don’t use this as an opportunity to showcase your insider status and facility with the idiomatic lingo of the industry. If you can demonstrate your solution (briefly) in a meeting, this is the place to do it.

* Slide 3.1. Delivering the Solution. You might need an extra slide to show how your solution fits in the value chain or ecosystem of your target market. Do you complement commonly used technologies, or do you displace them? Do you change the way certain business processes get executed, or do you just do them the same way, but faster, better and cheaper? Do you disrupt the current value chain, or do you fit into established channels? Who exactly is the buyer, and is that person different than the user?


* Slide 4. Benefits/Value. State clearly and quantify to the extent possible the three or four key benefits you provide, and who specifically realizes these benefits. Do some constituents benefit more than others, or earlier than others? These dynamics should inform your go-to-market strategy, and your product/service roadmap, which you will discuss later.

* Slide 5. Secret Sauce/Intellectual Property. Depending on your solution, you might need a separate slide to convince investors that no one else can easily duplicate or surpass your solution (assuming that’s actually true.) If you are in a business sector in which intellectual property is important, this is where you drill down into your secret sauce and proprietary technology. Again, boil this down to simple elements and terms, devoid of jargon. Do not walk the audience through a guided tour of your detailed product architecture. Instead, highlight the elements of your technology that give you unique potential for leverage and scale as you grow. If you do slides 4 and 5 well, it will be easy to make the case for your...


* Slide 6. Competitive Advantage. Okay, so how are you better than everyone else, including the status quo? Most entrepreneurs misunderstand the critical objective of this slide, which is not to enumerate all the deficiencies of the competition (as much fun as that may be.) Just because you have really cool technology, secret sauce, and intellectual property does not mean you will win. Other factors like domain expertise, high-level connections, and special relationships with customers, vendors, and other companies also play a part. Your key objective is to convince the investor that lots of folks will buy your product or service, even though they have several alternatives (one of which may be to do nothing), for very good reasons.

The best way to convince an investor is to have referenceable customers or prospects who will articulate in their own words why they bought or will buy your offering over the alternatives. Use this slide to summarize the three or four key reasons why customers prefer your solution to other solutions and to the status quo. Many entrepreneurs have been coached to use a four-square matrix that shows that they are in the upper right-hand quadrant, but this has become a joke in the venture community. Check-boxes are better, if they are not abused. Make sure your check-box criteria reflect the market’s requirements, not just your product’s features.

* Slide 6.1. Competitive Advantage Matrix. Depending on how important the analysis of competitive players is in your market segment, you may need a matrix to provide a detailed list of competitors by category. Preferably, you develop this as a “pocket slide” to be used for Q & A, if necessary. It is important, however, that you do your homework on the competition, and that you don’t misrepresent their strengths or their weaknesses.

* Slide 7. Go to Market Strategy. The single most compelling slide in any pitch is a pipeline of customers and strategic partners that have already expressed some interest in your solution—if they haven’t already joined your beta program. Too often this slide is, instead, a bland laundry list of standard sales and marketing tactics. You should focus on articulating the non-obvious, potentially disruptive elements of your strategy, or you can frame your comments in terms of the critical hurdles you need to get over, and how you are going to jump them. If you don’t have a pipeline, and there is nothing unique or innovative about your strategy, then drop this slide and make the elements of your sales model clear in the discussion of your business model (next slide).

* Slide 8: Business Model. How do you make money? Usually by selling something for a certain price to certain customers. But there are lots of variations on the standard theme. Explain your pricing, your costs, and why you are going to be especially profitable. Make sure you understand the key assumptions underlying your planned success and be prepared to defend them. What if you can’t sustain the price? What if it takes twice as long to make each sale? What if your costs don’t decline over time? Some investors will want to test the depth of your understanding of your business model. Be ready to articulate the sensitivity of your business to variations in your assumptions.

* Slide 9. Financial Projections. The two previous slides above should come together neatly in your five-year financial projections. [Bill and I disagree here. I think a five-year projection is impossible.] You should show the two or three key metrics that drive revenues, expenses and growth (such as customers, unit sales, new products, expansion sales, new markets), as well as the revenue, expense, profit, cash balance, and headcount lines. The most important thing to convey on this slide is that you really understand the economics and evolution of a growing, dynamic company, and that your vision is grounded in an understanding of practical reality. Your financials should tell your story in numbers as clearly as you are telling your story in words. Investors are not focused on the precision of your numbers; they’re focused on the coherence and integrity of your business plan.

* Slide 10. Financing Requirements/Milestones. It should be clear from your financials what your capital requirements will be. On this slide you should outline how you plan to take in funding—how big each round will be, and the timing of each—and map the funding against your key near-term and medium-term milestones. You should also include your key achievements to date. These milestones should tie to the key metrics in your financial projections, and they should provide a clear, crisp picture of your product introduction and market expansion roadmap. In essence, this is your operating plan for the funds you are raising. Do not spend time presenting a “use of funds” table. Investors want to see measures of accomplishment, not measures of activity. And they want to know that you are asking for the right amount of money to get the company to a meaningful milestone.

* Summary Slide. This slide is almost always wasted. Most entrepreneurs just put up three or four dot points about how wonderful their investment opportunity is. Generally the words are the same words that investors hear from scores of other entrepreneurs, such as, “We have a huge opportunity, and we will be the winners!” Your key objective on this slide is to solidify the core value proposition of your company in words that are memorable and unique to your company. If the venture investor in the room has to give a short description of your company to his partners, these are the words you want used. This is a good place to reinforce your tagline, or mantra—the short phrase that captures the essence of your message to investors. The best solution to creating your summary slide is to imagine that this is the only slide you will ever be able to present. If you had to do your whole pitch in one slide (with 30 point font), this is that slide.

So here we have a good general outline for pitching your company. But remember, it’s about selling your investment proposition, not about covering points. Don’t get fixated on using this or any other template. You should know the issues about your company that investors are most concerned about. Those are the issues you need to concentrate on. Make sure you address all the predictable “burning questions” as early as you can in your presentation, even if it means violating the sequence above.

Tips On Effective Pitching

How do you turn a pitch from a monolog to a sale? Make sure every point you make connects with your audience. Keep your text very, very short. Really. Please. Use charts and pictures if you can. And engage your prospect. Ask questions. “Do you think this market opportunity is interesting?” “Have you seen anyone else addressing this problem?” “Do you think CIOs would be interested in a solution like this?” You may get some tough responses, but you will know a lot more about what is going on in the investor’s mind, and you will be engaging them in your story—instead of letting them play with their Blackberries under the table.

Some additional tips to improve the effectiveness of your pitch:

* Make sure that everyone in the room is introduced. Rarely do entrepreneurs ask the investors in the room to introduce themselves. While it is appropriate to be familiar with each investor’s bio (assuming it is on the web), it’s fair to ask something like, “What investments have you been looking at recently?” And if there are some other faces in the room, you should absolutely have them introduce themselves and provide a little background.

* Don’t use a feel-good, visionary “mission statement” on your overview slide. Mission statements have also become a joke in the venture industry. It’s like saying, “Our projections are conservative.” Focus on making sure your statement of your company’s value proposition is crisp, clear, and unique.

* Prepare good use cases. Sometimes, no matter how simple and clear the description of a product, what the investor really needs is a concrete example of how people will actually use it. In some cases there will be multiple different use cases. You may need to outline these to get your point across.

* Drop names, early and often. If you really have some brand names involved in your company—as customers, as partners, as members of the team—don’t keep them a secret for the first nine slides; make sure the investor knows about them early in the presentation. Be prepared for the investor to contact every single name you drop—whether it’s a person or a company. If you are going to drop names, they had better be real.

* Make sure you can tell the entire story in ten to fifteen minutes. Even if you have time, your total presentation should be no longer than twenty minutes. You want to have time to engage the investors and discuss their questions or concerns. If you think you have additional critical points that have to be made, prepare “pocket slides” that you can put up if the topic arises.

* Do the math. Average entrepreneur pitch: thirty-eight slides. Average VC attention span/cranial capacity: ten slides.

* Learn how to control the flow of the meeting, without seeming inflexible or anxious. Watch and listen. Body language and questions will tell you if you are okay deferring a point or if you need to address it immediately. If you let your audience take over the flow, you will probably wind up creating a confusing, incomplete impression of your company. But if you don’t address the “burning questions” early and effectively, the investors won’t hear anything else you say.

* Don’t lie. You would think this goes without saying, but in their enthusiasm for their creations, entrepreneurs tend to slip across the line all too often. Please do not interpret our exhortation to “sell” as an endorsement of hype, exaggeration, misrepresentation, spin, or lying. The best salespeople are credible and trustworthy. It is more important that investors trust you than that they understand every nuance your business.

* You don’t have to be “conservative,” but you do have to be realistic. Most entrepreneurs fail to be realistic about how long things take in the real world (versus the spreadsheet world). Whether it’s the time to complete product development, or the time to close the next ten sales, entrepreneurs are pathologically optimistic. As with your financials, find examples of comparable challenges addressed by other companies, and use that data in your model.

* Don’t put so much text on a page that the investor has to read it. Everything should be short, content-rich bullets in a font large enough to read without squinting. The words are simply reinforcement of the points you are making. Pictures, graphs, and charts should be uncluttered and make clear, compelling points. If they have to be deconstructed and explained piece by piece, you will lose focus and momentum.

* Don’t use your presentation stack as a standalone document. It is perfectly okay if it is not readable when you are not around. That’s the job of your executive summary or your business plan. If you are looking for a guide to writing an executive summary, you can find our version online: “The Art of the Executive Summary.”

A good pitch is rare because it is so hard to execute on everything else that has to be done to build a successful company. But the ability to pitch is a key indicator for investors—if the entrepreneur doesn’t know how to sell, how can he or she build a great company?

8 Mistakes Start-ups Make

8 Mistakes Start-ups Make
By David R. Butcher

As the global economy expands, there is reason to believe that small businesses may have some competitive advantage. That is, if entrepreneurs don't fall prey to these common start-up pitfalls.

Start Underfunded
Cash flow is critical to a startup business. It is also the most common reason new businesses don't last.

Think about how you're going to finance your startup business initially: bank loans, venture capitalists, angel investors, SBA government grants, your own savings — all are options, so figure out which is best for your situation. About 53 percent of new small businesses begin in the home with less than $10,000, according to the National Federation of Independent Business. Many start with leased or used capital and equipment. About 3 percent are franchises.

Also consider easing into the business by doing it part-time until you know it will make enough money to support you.

For tips and lots of other information related to cash flow, check out the Startup Financing and Guides to Raising Money sections of Entrepreneur.com.

(See today's How to Find Good Money.)

Do It Alone
Small-business employees can make or break the business. Unfortunately, a common problem new business owners have is managing their employees effectively; not only do they make hiring mistakes, but they also struggle to retain good employees.

No one has the skills (never mind the time) to do everything themselves. "You need to understand what it is that you bring to the table and what you need to surround yourself with," Evan Carmichael writes at YoungEntrepreneur.com.

From day one, think hard about the candidates who can be brought on board to help you meet your vision. "By getting people around you who complement your skills, you will be able to achieve your goals and have a lot more fun along the way," Carmichael writes.

And if you want to keep good employees, be sure you have a system in place that rewards their efforts.

(See today's Making the Right Hire.)

Don't Plan/Research Properly
Have a plan of attack, with clear, concise and written goals. If you don't have an idea of the overall picture of the end result, the fruits of your labor shrink significantly.

But don't just understand your own goals — understand your market and competitors. Market research can prove invaluable in both determining your business' potential and improving on your competition's offering. You can gather information from industry associations, Web searches, periodicals, federal and state agencies, and so forth.

Moreover, don't fail to recognize increased competition, especially during a downturn. In a recession, competition increases because more businesses are chasing less total demand. How much are other companies providing the same or similar products/services for? Can you add something to it to make yours different and hence a better price?

The aim here is basically two parts: to gain a general sense of the type of customer your product or service will serve; and to understand what your competition is doing so you can do it better.

That said, be willing to make adjustments. One of the frequent downfalls of startups is that founders are overly focused on their original game plan or otherwise inflexible. "Learn to listen to stuff you don't want to hear," advises one expert (via Information Week).

Undervalue the Customer
"Talk to potential customers, see what they are interested in, identify who has money and what their pains are and then create your product/service around them," Carmichael writes.

Once the product or service is made available — based on customer input — small businesses often fail to take into account the importance of outstanding customer service. Many factors are responsible for success, but perhaps the easiest way to expand your business is to provide customers with customer service that surpasses industry standards.

Failing to work hard at retaining key customers is hazardous to any business, especially to those just starting out.

A Weak Call to Action
A business' first-year goal should be client acquisition, says Inc.com.

Yet while specific marketing problems are unique to each business, common problems facing small businesses are typically a shortage of funds for adequate advertising and promotion, plus a lack of time for developing creative marketing strategies. Today, entrepreneurs simply cannot expect to compete as a small business without choosing from a growing arsenal of online marketing tools, the least of which is creating a simple, effective Web site.

Also, keep in mind that marketing for small businesses is not a one-time event; it is an on-going process. For more on this, check out Microsoft's Small Business Center.

Lose Momentum
About two-thirds of new employer establishments survive the first two years, according to a 2005 study (via the U.S. Small Business Administration's Office of Advocacy).

Building a successful business takes time. Many entrepreneurs struggle to make it to the end of the first year — money is running out, the business is taking up a lot more time than expected, the minimal sales are dispiriting, etc.

For entrepreneurs just starting out with their business, the beginning stages may require doing some work that isn't exactly what they want to do. But it helps pay the bills. Work your way through the negativity, the downturns, the doubt — and keep at it, striving for progress everyday.

Don't Get Involved
Build a relationship — not only with customers but also with mentors and peers in your community. Network like crazy.

Two notable ways to get involved are: 1) finding a mentor, someone who has achieved success in your industry and who is willing to take time to help you out; and 2) getting involved in the small business community. Connecting with other like-minded entrepreneurs and finding out what they're up to opens up new business opportunities, partners, investment, ideas, advice and other resources. There are many events where would-be entrepreneurs can get beyond these basics. For example, Information Week suggests Startup Camp in San Francisco.

Do It Only for the Money
Sure, most companies are for-profit enterprises, but making money may not happen immediately. According to a Kauffman Foundation study last month, more than a third of businesses (37 percent) had no revenue in their first year of operation.

When first starting out, many business owners and self-employed individuals think the more sales they have, the bigger and better their business will be. Running a successful business requires focus on the whole business, not just parts of it.

Earlier: Biz Startup Basics