Loading ...I came across this interesting post on alternate ways social networks are monetizing. Of course there is Facebook and the big frenzy they are trying to jumpstart into what is essentially still a purposeless network (come on now). Are there mainstream monetizers for social networks? What about vertical social networks unlike LinkedIn for example? I wonder.
Author Archive for Sanjukt K. Saha
The world is madly chasing the convergence dream. I believe however the future lies in breaking some of that convergence into basic products - tinker level. The market possibilities are endless in the emerging world. Think of a GPS device that just gives you location and not mp3 and other bells and whistles. Think of a Rs 400 mobile phone with only 2 buttons - receive a paging and send a SOS. The possibilities are endless.
Are any of you working on ideas like these, rather than Web 2.0 conveniences?
KISS today: What do you guys think of the Idealab model?
…on either side of the table
It is 0200 here in Berlin now, so please forgive me for a ‘non VW’ post! I cannot but help wonder how much things have changed for our country over the last year. The story of emerging India is already dated. And so is the gloating over little successes and feel good arrival. Issues are complex, more real and complex than ever before, and Indians are going about them with this amazing quiet confidence. But are we communicating to the rest of the world well? Though things have moved on so much for all of us, we still depend on media which is either zoned on the snake charmer to Infosys story or even worse, on how India is different from China and catching up!
Give us a break. When I talk to my friends here in Europe, they do tell me about seeing smart ‘Incredible India’ banners on buses but they also tell me how little they really know about India in a real sense, deeper than the emerging and the rising et al.
The New Delhi Report at www.newdelhireport.com is a cutting edge commentary on Indian business and economy for an international audience. I have started this community blog (authors invited!) to attempt and sew together modern Indian viewpoints to communicate to an audience looking at India as more than just a destination. Let me invite you all to come and join me in this venture.
“Experience is a good school, but the fees are high.”
– Heinrich Heine
It is the lesson of the true cost of recruiting the wrong founding team in a startup. You fill a role out of desperation, or even worse, recruit a friend or family who will do for now but never was quite the right fit. There are moments of convenience and other times, rationalization, for hiring people you trust, forgetting to foresee roles and consequences. Hiring at the top of a pyramid, the bottom grows over the years even when founders leave. And then the recruit in turn takes the organization down the garden path, hiring more of the wrong people, perpetuating one error to final destruction. The good old adage for entrepreneur CEOs – hire the very best for your life depends on it – we have heard it all, many times. And again, to do it in reality, even the brave will falter.
How does an entrepreneur divide equity among co founders?
Should I divide the equity in my startup equally?
How do you do it?
Imagine a company where managers set their own salaries! Middle management utopia, who wouldn’t like to be here? But this is also a company where “if you put your salary too high, and people don’t put you on the list as someone they need for the next six months, you’re in more trouble than you would be at General Motors”.
Ricardo Semler is my idea of a great leader. In the context of modern entrepreneurship, the task of a CEO is to get customers, cut costs and convey value to shareholders. A leader CEO however is one who doesn’t get so obsessed with these ends that he glances over what still remain the fundamentals of any business – trust and relationships. Semler built an organisation on trust. Or did he?
I think what he did by initiating policies based on trust, and I will not go into them here, was to create more leaders. In fact, if every SEMCO employee is welcome to a board meeting (of course, she has to be one of the first two to arrive at the door!), Semler created an organization where everybody potentially can influence the direction the organization takes. That is what leadership is all about – creating more leaders.
In the late 1980s, three engineers at SEMCO proposed setting up a Nucleus of Technological Innovation (NTI) to develop new businesses and product lines which Semler endorsed. At the end of the first six months, NTI had identified 18 such opportunities. Following the success of this initiative, satellite units were encouraged throughout SEMCO. By the late 1980’s, these satellite units accounted for two thirds of its new products and two thirds of its employees.
A leader who fosters entrepreneurship within his organization turns motivation on its head.
What is motivation really? Is it any better than a KITA! Semler created volition in his organization. A place where you “forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest of it, and concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning”. That is leadership.
If you really look at various utopian goals in mankind’s history, from the pursuit of alchemy to communism and beyond, SEMCO is perhaps the only successful story: creating the ideal worker’s organization – it is almost a fable.
Have you come across more? How do you lead in your startups?