"If not you, who? If not now, when?"

A memorable entrepreneurship capstone ended yesterday with a stirring call to arms by our instructor Prof Bill Stitt. His message was that, as the "chosen ones" - those who by some stroke of providence have mental abilities, education and opportunities - it is our responsibility to give back and to make this world a better place for those less fortunate . And entrepreneurship is a wonderful vehicle for that. Passionate words spoken by a superb teacher and entrepreneur.

Vivek Paul and Wipro

Interesting article on Vivek Paul and the Wipro saga

On "peer" teams...

B-school has been full of team assignments. It is considered an integral part of preparation for real life but I've noticed a crucial difference. B-school teams are leaderless teams - a team of peers, with no single individual having executive authority. In the real world, teams are lead by a project leader who can (and will!) talk to you if you're not pulling your weight. The lines of authority are very clear. In school, especially in a part-time program like the one I'm in, it doesn't work that way. Each member of the team must be motivated to learn and do their piece. Though a team leader emerges, it is mostly because he or she is willing to take more responsibility for the team assignments. If someone on the team decides to take it easy, the team can do precious little about it. Sure, there's peer pressure, but it only goes so far. The work doesn't get done or gets done so sloppily that someone else on the team ends up redoing it anyway. I've run across some interesting examples of shoddy work. Recently, one of my team did a direct cut and paste from a company's annual report into a report that were writing. For once in my life, I was speechless! All you can do is tell yourself that the semester is almost over and remind yourself to be more careful about team selection next time around.

Interesting articles...

I've been reading a number of interesting articles for a couple of summer classes at school - a global strategy class and a product innovation class.

First to Market, First to Fail argues that being first to market with a product or technology is insufficient. Technology leadership must be followed up with a vision to make the technology truly appealing to the masses, persistence to keep at getting the product right, financial and time commitments to do so, relentless innovation and leveraging related assets appropriately.

In Distance Still Matters, Pankaj Ghemawat introduces the CAGE framework to use as a tool for analyzing foreign market entry. He states that traditional country portfolio analysis considers only the opportunity in a foreign market and ignores the cost and risks of doing business there. He states that distance, in its many dimesions - Cultural, Administrative, Geographic, and Economic (CAGE) - needs to be considered when analyzing foreign market entry.

In a follow up article, The Forgotten Strategy, Ghemawat argues that companies are so obsessed with minimizing the differences between countries that they pay too little attention to exploiting differences. Arbitrage opportunities based on CAGE - Cultural, Administrative, Geographic, Economic - elements is a good way to exploit differences. Ultimately, a good strategy balances both aspects - exploits differences between countries and minimizes them - to sustain cobmpetitive advantage.

Four Reigns....

I read a book for pleasure for the first time in months!

"Four Reigns" by Kukrit Pramoj is a tale of Thailand. Set in the first half of the 20th century, it follows the lives of minor nobility - their triumphs, families, politics, marriages, squabbles - and provides a thorougly engaging look at life in Thailand during the four reigns - King Rama V to King Rama VIII. Highly recommended.

Now on my list:
Orhan Pamuk's "Istanbul", and Parts 2 and 3 of the Cairo Trilogy. I read Part 1 a couple of years ago and enjoyed it.

On testing theories

I passed my stressing the system argument by my boss (a technology executive par excellence) , and here's what he said. "All you're giving me are excuses for why something cannot be done. You are the master of your destiny. If you cannot control your environment, that's your problem to solve. If you can't change the system, then it's time to move on". Harsh, but I think he's right. People spend too much time explaining why something can't be done instead of just hunkering down and doing it. Time to put one's money where one's mouth is.

Stressing the system

So, what stresses the system in an enterprise software start up?

Sales guys - The age old issue of the sales guys selling products that the company doesn't really have. To be fair to them, they're under tremendous pressure to deliver; moreover, they often don't have the background to understand what they're signing up the implementation team for. Ignorance, is indeed, bliss.

Customers - Buyers have a great deal of power in this market. Think about the negotiating power that a Fortune 500 or even a Fortune 1000 company brings to the table while negotiating with a $10-50m a year startup that is desperate for reference customers. Customer demand (and get) fixed price deals, extra features, unreasonable deadlines, and that's just for starters.

Venture capitalists - VC's have a curious passive agressive way of dealing with a portfolio company. In one breath, they talk about long term strategy. In the next, they talk about immediate returns. So, what's it going to be? And the longer that VC's wait, the more antsy and unrealistic they become. Whatever happend to grace under pressure?

Cost pressures - The truism that you don't get something for nothing seems to escape smart people as they get into upper management; Strategic management is replaced by managing by spreadsheet and the results are disastrous. Everybody is surprised that when you part with peanuts, you get monkeys.

People - Inspite of outsourcing and the supposed shedding of mediocre talent in the US, it is extremely difficult to find good people - be it software developers, project managers, business analysts, product managers. Getting product out the door is hard enough with a strong team; it is unbearable with a mediocre team.

"We fight the fire while we're feeding the flames" as Neil Peart says...

Strategy execution

While in class this weekend, it occured to me that the software startups I have worked for have had well-formulated, viable business strategies but that the strategy execution was horrific. Why? Arrogance? upper management naivete? underestimating the task at hand? overestimating the people who have to execute? wrong performance measures? wrong incentives? drinking your own kool aid? dominated by the short run? I suspect it's a gestalt - the whole cannot be explained as a summation of its parts - and so, it is an interesting exercise to delve into the execution of strategy in software startups and understand how and where the system is stressed and, therefore, tends to break down . Armchair explanations are dime-a-dozen, as are hoary cliches; what I hope to do is to objectively map what I've seen in the real world to theoretical concepts and framework and see what gives.