Singapore – Too Hard for Companies to Fail

I came across Scott Anthony’s posting (Mar 24, 2011) at Harvard Business Review Blog (http://blogs.hbr.org/anthony/2011/03/the_failure_of_failure.html) and coincidentally it was the same topic that I got a chance to briefly discuss with an entrepreneurship professor in class.

Singapore unlike the USA has the government play a huge role in the ecosystem. I truly believe it is the culture of the people here that are creating barriers as well the mentality of Singaporeans. You either make it or you don’t and the belief that people would steal one’s idea if it’s shared.

One of the comments made, Calvin Cheng, he highlights to the author and states,

“It’s not about the idea. It’s about how the team can evolve or pivot different product ideas. If the angel-in-question believes in the people in the team, he should be smart enough to invest in them trusting that they are agile enough to pivot and evolve their idea as they grow and interact with their target market/personas.”

I reflected on what was said today. Determining whether a business idea is a good deal and whether one would invest in it. Angel investors are usually investing their own money in entrepreneurs. By just investing in an idea that seems overly risky is not something that anyone would want to make. There are no such things as guaranteed returns. All risks are calculated prior the decision action.

Perhaps the truth is companies don’t really fail because a lot of them don’t get started at all. They get pushed around so much in the planning phase that it never gets acted on. Those that are in Singapore, would you agree with Anthony’s article?

Turning Good Ideas Into Great Business

Speaker: Fredrik Haren
fredrick.haren@interesting.orh / anything@interesting.org
Date: 4/3/2010

Fredrik spoke a while back at a goLibrary event about his book “The Idea Book”. He talks about business creativity and gives a few tips about ideas.

1. Find the big problem then you will find the big idea.
All industries are creative. Creativity has never been taught in class so when you climb up the ladder in the working world, they people sitting in the offices don’t know how to teach it.

He then asks the audience what we would like to know. And he reminded me of how he was trying to make our experience from the seminar more “valuable”.

Looking at how he defined creativity, idea and innovation:
- Creativity is about the whole process.
- Idea is about having a spark, consciousness becoming conscious (just like a lightbulb being switched on).
- Innovation involves marking an idea happen.

Ideas are combining knowledge and information in a way to make something new. The mind looks for patterns to make sense of it all. Creativity though is seeing beyond the patterns.

idea = p(k+i)

Looking at examples

1) Cirque du Soleil – street performers + broadway

2) Blue Ocean Strategy (W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne)
Everybody does the same thing or the water will be bloody.

Important to take note that ideas don’t have to be nobel prize ideas. Just have to change it slightly.
How do we cultivate such behavior? Have small ideas and make it to a better idea (through iterations).

Use external capital to leverage the idea. What does this mean? For example, email direct to him so he can communicate to the audience. So the audience emails for a competition involving of winning a book where they had to send a photo. So at the end of the day, the company had multiple pictures for marketing purposes.

Copyright = copying right?
Creativity does not mean carbon copy. It means taking what other people are doing and making it yours.
Copy from the best.
Rick Warren wrote a book called The Purpose Driven Life What on Earth am I Here For.
Take away the fundamentals.

Question everything you do. What is the purpose of doing it? Questioning doesn’t mean everything has to be changed.

Last tip given is to run global. To grow and not only focus on one geographic area. Now a days it seems easier to go global because of the Internet’s accessibility.

How Does One View Leadership?

Recently I watched a TED video of Dave Meslin talking about leadership. He highlights the common aspects about leaders in movies and how they are often selected just as being “the chosen ones”.  He argues that this is the wrong message being communicated to the audiences and leadership is actually a collective effort, it’s imperfect: an ongoing process and it’s voluntary. He quotes that the ”important characteristic of leadership is that it comes within of a person, it’s about following your own dreams uninvited and working with others to make that dream come true”.

I totally agree with his perspective that leadership requires a vision, a mantra that resonates with people and these people will voluntarily be inspired and feel empowered to follow and achieve that vision with the leader. And I think about the leaders in the industry I worked for for over 3 years. I do not feel inspired to follow some of their thoughts rather I felt like a rebellious child for wanting to challenge their way of thinking and to question everything. But again I also believe in leadership there is this a gray area where they also have to play the role of managers to control the situation to ensure things get done.

So if you looked at leadership at where you worked, how do you view the leadership?

5 Key Takeaways from My Internship

For my presentation during the last week, I thought long and hard of selecting only 5 key take aways from what I have learnt from my internship on a personal level. The following were what I shared with the other scholars:

1) Taking the initiative.

The attitude of an individual is very important in enabling a person to discover new things. Being proactive, being engaged allows positive energy and a person’s commitment to act. One will never know whether they would like something if they never tried it out themselves. It is the “Yes” attitude and the possibility of finding something that you may love along the way makes a fruitful journey.

2) Make it easy for people to adopt.

Working with a mobile emerging technologies team allowed me to learn that when you make something confusing or there are too many steps in participating in a campaign, the experience will be flawed due to frustrations. You want to make t easy for people to adopt. Go through the experience yourself and figure out if you would go through the process. Don’t expect people to do it if you yourself won’t do it.

3) To keep learning.

Learning is the foundation of a person. Read widely, get the exposure, share and teach. This foundation of values and achievements ensures that when a tsunami wave comes, the money can be lost but you sure in hell won’t get swept away. Why? Because your foundation of what you have will give you the opportunities to reinvent yourself.

4) To have humility.

Humility is something I have been taught from day 1 at my jobs as I started off at the bottom of the ladder: “Remember where you came from” is what my boss always reminds me. During the internship I really got to experience the humility of the reasons of why we should work so hard for and the importance of having respect for your place in the world, to appreciate where you came from. And as a person becomes more successful and have to make harder decisions, you may offend people while you build yourself up. But always remember that once you are on the top of the world, you won’t be there long. When you fall and you made so many enemies, no one will be there to help you. There is a saying about entrepreneurship that you need to have your head in the clouds but you need to keep your feet on the ground. Humility allows you to have your feet on the ground.

5) Last but not least, collaboration.

A person’s success is never an individual success, it’s teamwork. There is always an enduring support network behind an entrepreneur, individual – their family, friends, colleagues, and others. The collaborative efforts is what makes it meaningful and to acknowledge that makes the journey much more happier event.

Entrepreneurs and Growth / Managing a Growing Venture

I have observed that some organisations as they grow, they constantly create more policies and regulations in order to manage new business processes for their business needs. There are companies with a bureaucratic structure and suggesting ideas for the company’s growth can be really frustrating because it requires going through the traditional hierarchical process for approval. Sometimes just having one disapproving management member would be sufficient to end up killing the idea. An organisation that uptakes the approach for its growth through policies and rules can be very effective in certain aspects but it also builds barriers that restricts them to be able to move as fast as their competitors in the industry.

From the learnings, I learnt that sometimes we can just focus on doing what we are good at. It is not necessary to do everything and complete the whole process. Having the option to focus on a particular aspect of the ecosystem allows complementing the other players. As an entrepreneur’s business grows, they have to be able to be flexible in making changes and adapt themselves to address needs.

From John Hamm’s article “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale” (2002), he does not agree that entrepreneurs who start businesses are incapable of getting their businesses to grow and sustain. Hamm highlights four key characteristics – loyalty, task orientation, single mindedness and isolation that have helped entrepreneurs initiate their startups but have not deemed useful in business management of growth. I agree with the author’s perspective and in my opinion I find that the behavior could be a psychological factor – that people tend to go back to methods that they feel comfortable with and that worked for them previously in making them successful.

From my reflections, I find that anorganisation’s culture plays a huge part in contributing to a company’s growth and success too. Having core values incorporated from the beginning and acknowledging and trusting the people that work for you also contributes in building a company that will be much more stronger in the long term.

Idea Cycle

Reading the article at Squidoo on the top 10 reasons why startups fail, http://www.squidoo.com/starup_failures, it seems like it’s such a simple thing to conquer to ensure success of a startup. However, it’s never as simple as it looks.

The message that I seemed to be getting nowadays is that having ideas and having to make the service / product is easy in comparison of growing a company and sustaining it. I agree with this comment and Paul Graham writes a great article on his perspective on “ideas”:
http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html.

The author states how the creation of a startup is not the matter of implementing some fabulous initial idea that will make you a million dollars because once you think this way, coming up with an idea is hard. Paul Graham makes a very good point that startups end up nothing like the initial idea. This connects to point 2 – No Viable Market from the Squidoo article where if one thinks “build it and they will come”, the entrepreneur is planning to fail. One has to do research and validate the idea in how it will do in the market, and it is highly possible that the idea the entrepreneur came up with initially will have to be tweaked in order to be of value to the customers. Once the idea is launched and implemented, then comes the hard part: scalability and sustainability.

So in trying to understand the whole situation of the  matter and put everything into context, my belief of the cycle that one goes through is: you have the idea, you have the tweaking of the idea, you need to find a way to cross the chasm of reaching the late adopters in order to scale and then sustainability would be the innovation part (more ideas), which would would be the next S curve that one needs to adopt in order to capture more people and grow the business and then back to square one.

Wouldn’t this be classified as a vicious cycle and highly possible the wrong way of trying to visualize and make sense of it? Probably yes and it is probably incorrect looking at it this way. If you could sum it up, how would you see it?

Things I have Learnt at Work that is Similar to Entrepreneurship

It’s been week 1 at work and I found certain things that are similar to what I had learnt in Entrepreneurship:

1. Know your audience (clients)
   Know who you are speaking to. What is their objectives?
   Important to communicate with a purpose.
2. Clean up your online world
   Manage online profiles and clean it up to be relevant about you at your workplace. Clients and prospective people will google you.
3. Research
   You will never know as much as your clients’ businesses as they do of themselves. Always learn as much as possible at the inception of a project, the business space, their goals, their competition and their history.
   Ask a lot of questions
   Shut up and listen
4. Read widely
   Read widely – books, magazines, blogs, attend conferences. Understand technology, design and culture related content. Know and study what has already been done and see the trends. Understand it and not duplicate it.
5. Build relationships
   Build personal relationships with everyone you work with and not just clients. Network with people.

Looks like I will be doing a lot of editing and cleaning up for point number 2… I am really hoping that I will adopt some cleaning on this.

Things I Have Learned about Entrepreneurship

Having the opportunity to come to the US for entrepreneurship has really changed my perspective of what entrepreneurship is about. I am very thankful to be given this chance from NTC, NTU Singapore. I found myself really having to sit down and reflecting on myself, on what was it that I wanted to achieve at the end of the day.

Given the opportunity to hear some of the best people to talk to us and share with us on the approach towards entrepreneurship and understanding their viewpoints on entrepreneurship, it has made me more aware that the traditional way approach that we learned in conducting business from the business school is only just showing us the door way. And the huge difference is actually really taking the initiative and acting on it.

I will be however posting up some of my thoughts of what I have learnt at a later date.

A Little Too Late…

In my opinion, if you are 25 and above and you just started thinking about your finances now then it is a little too late. People should think about their finances when they are 14 or even younger. I am 26 years old and I have parents that do not understand about investments. Savings was about keeping a set amount of money and putting it in the bank. This is actually not really good since the interest you earn is so minuscule that it doesn’t consider inflation costs. It was by having colleagues tell me that I should be buying long term investments every 5 years scares me… since it is so foreign. It also reminds me that I am getting older and I really need to plan for my future or as they say “my egg nest”.

The most common phrase told about financials is that, “a dollar today is not the same as a dollar in 10 years”. They are actually trying to tell you that what you can buy for a dollar today, you may not get it at that price after 10 years. Which made me understand why people kept saying, “cash is king”. Seriously I tend to phase out when people tell me about investments and there is something about having people try to sell me an idea that really puts me off.

Recently I watched a youTube Ted Talk by Cameron Herold stating that we in society should raise kids to be entrepreneurs. He brings up the topic that schools groom students to go for good jobs such as being lawyers, accountants, pilot, engineers, basically to work in corporations but school does not teach students to become entrepreneurs. Who are the people setting up the corporations?

Entrepreneurship Speaker Series

The government in Singapore is pushing for entrepreneurship and I have had the opportunity to listen to 2 seminars offered by the University Entrepreneurship Speaker Series (UESS) from Nanyang Technopreneurship Center at Nanyang Technological University. Both sessions I have placed my personal thoughts on my knowledge blog.

1) Open Innovation and Entrepreneurship

2) Deriving Values from a Venture Capital Investments 

It was definately a great experience to be able to go and listen to people speak about this topic. For those in Singapore interested in Entrepreneurship, go to this link here at Singapore Entrepreneurs.