10 pieces of advice that I wish someone had given to me before I launched my first venture

1. Focus. Focus. Focus.

Many first-time entrepreneurs feel the need to jump at every “opportunity” they come across. Opportunities are often wolves in sheep’s clothing. Avoid getting side-tracked. Juggling multiple ventures will spread you thin and limit both your effectiveness and productivity. Do one thing perfectly, not 10 things poorly. If you feel the need to jump onto another project, that might mean something about your original concept.

2. Know what you do. Do what you know.

Don’t start a business simply because it seems sexy or boasts large hypothetical profit margins and returns. Do what you love. Businesses built around your strengths and talents will have a greater chance of success. It’s not only important to create a profitable business, it’s also important that you’re happy managing and growing it day in and day out. If your heart isn’t in it, you will not be successful.

3. Say it in 30 seconds or don’t say it at all.

From a chance encounter with an investor to a curious customer, always be ready to pitch your business. State your mission, service and goals in a clear and concise manner. Fit the pitch to the person. Less is always more.

4. Know what you know, what you don’t know and who knows what you don’t.

No one knows everything, so don’t come off as a know-it-all. Surround yourself with advisors and mentors who will nurture you to become a better leader and businessman. Find successful, knowledgeable individuals with whom you share common interests and mutual business goals that see value in working with you for the long-term.

5. Act like a startup.

Forget about fancy offices, fast cars and fat expense accounts. Your wallet is your company’s life-blood. Practice and perfect the art of being frugal. Watch every dollar and triple-check every expense. Maintain a low overhead and manage your cash flow effectively.

6. Learn under fire.

No business book or business plan can predict the future or fully prepare you to become a successful entrepreneur. There is no such thing as the perfect plan. There is no perfect road or one less traveled. Never jump right into a new business without any thought or planning, but don’t spend months or years waiting to execute. You will become a well-rounded entrepreneur when tested under fire. The most important thing you can do is learn from your mistakes--and never make the same mistake twice.

7. No one will give you money.

There, I said it. No one will invest in you. If you need large sums of capital to launch your venture, go back to the drawing board. Find a starting point instead of an end point. Scale down pricey plans and grandiose expenditures. Simplify the idea until it's manageable as an early stage venture. Find ways to prove your business model on a shoestring budget. Demonstrate your worth before seeking investment. If your concept is successful, your chances of raising capital from investors will dramatically improve.

8. Be healthy.

No, I'm not your mother. However, I promise that you will be much more productive when you take better care of yourself. Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle, not a 9-to-5 profession. Working to the point of exhaustion will burn you out and make you less productive. Don't make excuses. Eat right, exercise and find time for yourself.

9. Don’t fall victim to your own B.S.

Don’t talk the talk unless you can walk the walk. Impress with action not conversation. Endorse your business enthusiastically, yet tastefully. Avoid exaggerating truths and touting far reaching goals as certainties. In short, put up or shut up.

10. Know when to call it quits.

Contrary to popular belief, a smart captain does not go down with the ship. Don’t go on a fool’s errand for the sake of ego. Know when it’s time to walk away. If your idea doesn’t pan out, reflect on what went wrong and the mistakes that were made. Assess what you would have done differently. Determine how you will utilize these hard-learned lessons to better yourself and your future entrepreneurial endeavors. Failure is inevitable, but a true entrepreneur will prevail over adversity.

10 Ways to Increase Your Concentration

10 Ways to Increase Your Concentration

First understand clearly what concentration is: “Concentration is taking your mind off many things and putting it on one thing at a time.”

Decide carefully what you want to concentrate on, for in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways, you become that which you focus on — that is, you take on the attributes of your chosen subject of concentration. Have you ever noticed how couples who have been married for many years start to look like each other, or how people often come to resemble their pets, their cars, their hobbies, or their work projects?

Generally speaking, everyone has had experiences in total concentration. Go to a good adventure film at a movie theater. In the middle of it, stop watching the movie (this might be hard, but do it anyway) and look around at the people in the theater. What are they doing? They are absolutely still, eyes barely blinking, and their breath is slower. It would take a really major distraction to break their attention stream. These physiological signs may give you a hint about ways to increase your own concentration abilities.

Some of the enemies of concentration skills are constant sensory input, multi-tasking, trying to do many things all a the same time, loud noises, and flashing light patterns. The human nervous system is a marvelous thing, but it is not built to function in the face of these things on a full-time basis. Attention deficit patterns come, at least to some extent, from the activities or situations which make concentration difficult to impossible. Then a habit of non-attention or inability to concentrate deeply is established and difficult to overcome.

Make it a point to put your full concentration on whatever you are doing. Don’t let anything distract you. It really helps to be in a quiet place, but you can learn to block out noise if necessary.

Understand the essential connection between concentration and energy. Deep concentration is a matter of increasing or directing your life-force or conscious, cosmic energy. The more of this kind of energy you have, the better. Scattered energy doesn’t help. It must be calm, focused energy. Learn to be calmly concentrated and be concentratedly calm.

Learn and practice some physical and mental energization techniques. This is an important first step toward the ability to concentrate deeply.

Take breaks. Go outside and breathe deeply or take a brisk walk. Make yourself do this often and you’ll be able to return to your task recharged and ready to focus more creatively.

Meditation is the most powerful of all concentration enhancement techniques. Learn a few simple meditation techniques and practice them at least five minutes daily.

A first step in the concentration aspect of meditation is to focus on watching your breath — not controlling it in any way, but just observing it. This helps to train yourself in taking your mind off of many things, and putting it on one thing at a time — in this case the breath. As you observe your breath, it will calm down, your brain will calm down also (this is a scientifically well-documented, mind-breath connective function), and you automatically move into a dynamic, peaceful (but not sleepy) state of being. Your mind becomes recharged and creatively receptive.

Take a few minutes and learn a simple meditation technique. You’ll be amazed at how this effects your concentration during your regular daily life.

Help your clients conduct effective interviews

Help your clients conduct effective interviews

Helping hiring managers to conduct more effective interviews reduces the risk that they'll "blow" a great placement opportunity, says recruitment trainer Ross Clennett.

One of the most frustrating things about being a recruiter, he says, is when a hiring manager's poor interview skills result in rejection of a great candidate, or cause a candidate to opt out of the selection process.

Clennett says recruiters can avoid these outcomes and stop wasting their time, skill and effort by taking five steps that will help hiring managers interview candidates more effectively:

On the candidate resume summary (or front page) you prepare, specifically state the evidence you have collected that demonstrates that the candidate's skills, competencies and motivations match those required for the job.

"The best evidence is gained from referees, skills testing or answers to properly formulated behavioural interview questions," Clennett says.

Doing this keeps the client focused on the real drivers of job performance (i.e. skills, competencies and motivations) not the imagined drivers (e.g. qualifications, gender, age and years of experience), he says.


Give the client a list of recommended specific behavioural interview questions that address the skills, competencies and motivations required for the job.

Many clients are under-prepared for interviews or lack interview training, Clennett says, and as a result, they ask interview questions that are:
not evidence-based, for example, "What are your strengths/weaknesses?"

irrelevant - "What football team do you follow?"

illegal - "Are you planning to start a family?"

an attempt to play amateur psychologist - "Tell me about your relationship with your mother and father?" or

just plain dumb - "If you were an animal, what animal would you be and why?"

"Your list of questions could save the day," he says.


Ensure the client understands the importance of 'selling' the job, and the company, to the candidate. "This is normally most effectively done when the client shares their own story of why they joined the organisation, what they have gained job-wise and/or personally from their employment and what opportunities they see for themselves into the future," Clennett says.

He points out that company websites, prominent employer branding, market salaries, excellent benefits and smart offices are all helpful in creating a positive impression with a candidate, but, "real stories from real employees, communicated powerfully during an interview, surpass them all for having a lasting impact with candidates."


Ensure the client is aware of the one or two most important factors (both positive and negative) that will affect each candidate's consideration of the job, so they can emphasise the positive, and address the negative. "What considerations are the major positives (e.g. global opportunities, internal mentoring program) or negatives (e.g. long hours, recent slide in share price) for this candidate?"

This is important because each candidate is different and has different motivations, Clennett says. "If the client only focuses on what they believe to be the major factors in the candidate's consideration then they risk wasting valuable interview time discussing irrelevancies."


When the client says, "'I really liked the candidate", or, "the candidate interviewed really well", make sure you respond by saying (words to the effect of) "Tell me about your assessment of how well the candidate can do the job and is motivated to do the job?"

"No matter how much a client 'likes' a candidate they won't like them for long if, after starting, the candidate can't do the job or is not motivated to do the job. Also, there is no research (to my knowledge) that demonstrates that interview performance (i.e. the candidate was affable, attractive, articulate and ambitious) is a reliable indicator of performance on the job," Clennett says.
Your overall aim, Clennett says, should be to keep the client's focus in interviews firmly on the candidate's skills, competencies and motivations as a match (or not) for the job. "Keep the client's focus off the candidate's personality and other factors unrelated to performance.

"Remember, if the client hires a poor performer, they will always blame the recruiter for referring a poor candidate rather than take responsibility themselves for making a poor hiring decision.

"A key part of your job is to help your clients conduct effective interviews - interviews that lead to smart hiring decisions and a win-win situation for all."

by : Clennett's

"Have Breakfast … or… Be Breakfast!"

"Have Breakfast … or… Be Breakfast!" Who sells the largest number of cameras in India ? Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not cameras but cell phones . Reason being cameras bundled with cell phones are outselling stand alone cameras. Now, what prevents the cell phone from replacing the camera outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are taking note. Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India ? You think it is HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by selling music albums (that run for hours). Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service provider with the largest subscriber base in India . That sort of competitor is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from truth. Nokia confessed that they all but missed the smart phone bus. They admit that Apple's I phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails? The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my competitor?" Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says "What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as "digital." In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not. In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India ? Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and tele presence services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in 2008. ( India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no. Remember, if there is one place where Newton 's law of gravity is applicable besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to one-third of its original level in India . PC's price dropped from hundreds of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then tele presence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP! India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The filmy gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie.. Cricket became film's competitor. On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films out of the market. Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are nowhere to be seen. One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker. They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do we use today for waking up in the morning? Cell phone! An entire industry of clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your competitor is hiding! On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon Valley ). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary! The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums it up rather neatly. —Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore . He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore .

Our attitude to English!

We have to embrace English like never before. Not England, but English. This point may sound contradictory to my previous one, but I am not talking about confining English to the classes, but really taking it to the grassroot level. English and Hindi can co-exist. Hindi is the mother and English is the wife. It is possible to love them both. In small towns, districts and even villages – we need to spread English. India already has a headstart as so many Indians speak English and we don’t have to get expat teachers like China does. But we must not confuse patriotism with the skills one needs to compete in the real world. If you are making an effort to start a school where none existed, why not give the people what will help them most. I can teach a villager geometry and physics in Hindi, but frankly when he goes to look for a job he is going to find that education useless. English will get him a job. Yes, I know some may say what will happen to Hindi and our traditional cultures. I want to ask these people to pull their kids out of English medium schools and then talk. If you go to small towns, English teaching classes are the biggest draw. There is massive demand for something that will improve people’s lives. I have no special soft spot for this language, but the fact is it works in the world of today. And if more English helps spread prosperity evenly across the country, trust me we will preserve our culture a lot better than a nation that can barely feed its people.

[taken from HT Leadership summit)

A step from Comfort Zone to Possibility Zone.

Let’s try to find out the ways to step into Possibility Zone-

-If we see the task as a big mountain; we think it’s too hard. Rather looking the task as a big mountain focus on doing the job in small chunks and the way you can do your best.

-Try finishing 1 percent of the thing at a time and you will find after 30 days it’s done by 30%. Small steps lead to big journeys.

-Stop thinking overall task you have in hands. It haunts sometimes.

-Forget about anything else when you do that 1 percent.

-Enjoy the amazing magical sense of achievement which you get every time you move your mountain. Celebrate it but keep running as the work is not over yet.

-Promise yourself that you will do it at least for 21 days. It’s proven that if we do a task for 21 days; it becomes our habit. Let’s make a habit of success.

-Make a public pledge. That means put a positive pressure by telling your friends and family about your goal. It helps us in doing the work in flow else we as human; procrastinate the things many times.

-And last but not the least- D.I.N- Do It NOW!

I invite you to step into the Possibility Zone today and make the best of your life; and needs to remember- it’s (Life) just once.

Hot Tips for Life's Goals..

(1) Think about your life and what you would like to be different. Specify

exactly what you would like to change. If you are feeling happier in 6-12

months time, what will you be doing then that is different to what you are

doing now?

(2) Write down exactly what you would like to achieve. Be as specific as

possible. People who set specific goals are much more likely to succeed

than those who set vague goals.

(3) Record your goals in positive terms. Instead of stating your goal as “To

stop sleeping in”, rephrase it by saying: “My goal is to get up by 8.00 am

every morning”.

(4) Make sure your goals are realistic and achievable. If you set goals that are

unrealistic then you might just find you’re more likely to fail and to be

disappointed. To ensure you’re realistic you may need to consider your

financial situation, time availability, emotional resources or other

circumstances in life.

(5) Divide you goal list up into “short-term” goals and “long-term” goals. Be

realistic about how long it might take to achieve your goals. Often, a

number of short-term goals need to be completed in order to achieve

longer term goals. You can think of these as the rungs you need to climb

to reach the top of a ladder. Where possible, set specific dates for

completion of each goal.

(6) Break down each goal into steps. For example, if the goal is to find a new

job, consider what steps you would have to take to achieve this. You

might have to prepare a resume (or update an old one), speak with an

employment consultant, look in the newspaper, and so on. Once again, set

a date for the completion of each step.

(7) When you achieve each step or the goal itself, acknowledge it by

rewarding yourself. It is important to recognize your achievements. Each

step you take is an achievement, and indicates that you are on your way to

achieving your goals.