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Enterpreneurship in Pakistan

Babar Bhatti talks about conferences for entrepreneurs in Pakistan.

I would like to share a new series of learning and networking opportunities for executives and entrepreneurs in Pakistan. In June, there are 2 seminars in Karachi, led by senior lecturers Ken Morse and William Aulet at MIT Entrepreneurship Center. First is “Pakistan CEO Summit” and the second is “Financing Your New Venture“. Organizers include OPEN, MDI, MIT Entrepreneurship Center and Computer Society of Pakistan.

I never thought much would be happening there, but it looks like there is.

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This is a sponsored post.

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Inventors and Innovators

This is why entrepreneurs won't let innovation die.

If creativity is the seed that inspires entrepreneurship, innovation is the process of entrepreneurship. Enterpreneurers are often thought to be "inspired" people, and perhaps they are, but more important, they often recognize changes and opportunities that can result from a dynamic world. Innovation is an important factor of entrepreneurship for every leader. It is defined as the process of doing new things. Therefore, it is often the active translation of a creative idea into a new product, service, or technology. Drukers writes that "innovation…is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth."

Read the whole article here.

Succeeding as an entrepreneur

Trevor Nel, of the social entrepreneur defines what it takes to succeed as an entrepreneur.

* Do it if you have passion about the project. You will not succeed if your heart is not in the venture.
* Have clarity of purpose: define what success will look like and quantify your goals. Write a business plan for the new venture.
* Make sure you have "sufficient" resources to succeed: money, time, psychic energy. If you are already wiped out from your job, you will have a hard time finding the extra energy and passion you will need to make the venture successful.
* You must have personal and organizational commitment and courage to succeed Is your organization ready to take this on? Is everyone on board with the plan?
* Articulate your organization's core values: does this venture fit in with the list? If not, don't do it.
* Be focused on the customer.
* You must have a willingness to plan: do not hesitate to ask for help.
* Be #1 or #2 in the marketplace, or don't do it at all. Like General Electric, you should plan on being the top player in the marketplace of services for your venture, or you should not bother to do it.
* Build the right team to carry it out.

Check out the other links too (link)

Why developing nations need entrepreneurs

Emeka writes about the growing problems in developing countries and why all such countries need entrepreneurs. (link)

The problem is that we mistake that importance of technical ability, and vastly underestimate the importance of entrepreneurial ability. Our schools are organized to produce technicians in all fields, and from age 16 a student must narrow down their course of formal study (for life in most cases) to four subject areas and General Paper.
The truth is that educating another lawyer, doctor or accountant is unlikely to contribute much to our GDP. Narrow technical abilities are admirable, but nowhere near as vital to countries in which the large mass of people cannot afford to use them.
What most developing countries need are not more professionals with masters degrees in contract law, but more entrepreneurs who are willing to hire ever increasing numbers of ordinary people.

Link

If you think about India, all of this is true of all places except for Gujrat. For they say that in any other part of the country, if your son is useless, he starts a business, but in Gujrat it is the smarter breed of Gujjus who get into business. And who says they don't have anything to show for it.

Issues with starting up in developing countries

Atif comes out with a beautiful article about the problems of starting up in a developing country. He seems to be back after three years, but looks like he's still in touch ;).

Here are the main points that he mentions :
1. Political stability
2. Government Oversight
3. Financing

(Link)

Here in India, things are almost similar to the countries that he is discussing about ie Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh. Ofcourse when I compare, Political stablitily is still not that much of an issue. Military comes in once in thirty years, which gives you enough time to plan.

Government is a problem. It takes three weeks to register a company in the US. In India it takes well over a month, no matter what they say. Everything is supposed to be online now, but it still takes a lot of time. And the reasons are aplenty. From websites not handling the load to issues with getting registered at the government office. More so, since the government started taxing pass through income, it seems things might get a little more difficult. However, there are a few government initiatives coming up, like this, I am not sure I know too many people who rely on it.

Financing is also a problem. Starting up right after college is a complete no no because nobody would fund you to startup. Even after three or four years things are not as easy. Everybody looks for a team with a combined work ex of close to twenty-twenty five years, before they even think about giving you the money. Sadly, there is not much which can be done, and I hope things do improve as time progresses.

Factors affecting Entrepreneurs

Sparkii, a new blogger on entrepreneurship, writes about Culture Norms and Personality Traits Influence on Entrepreneurship.

He explains why the entrepreneurs feel more responsibility when the business fails

During the start up stages, founding members are usually more passionate as they were the ones who nurtured the firm to its present status and would remain so on all activities concerning the firm. They tend to worry about future prospects and have a high locus of control believing that their life’s event could be controlled (Ang and Hong, 2000). Thus, when failures occur it would attribute it to their own actions.

Then he comes on to why and what makes an entrepreneur.

Possession of personality characteristics alone does not imply that any individual has what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Motivation also is needed to drive an individual to have the entrepreneurial spirit. Therefore, there are two components to an entrepreneurial spirit – the ability or personality component as well as the motivational component. (Ang and Hong, 2000)

This is where it starts getting interesting. He explains why Confucianism is also partly responsible for the lesser number of entrepreneurs in Singapore. And then moves on to how entrepreneurs still manage to succeed against all odds.

An entrepreneur who holds a steadfast belief that has brought him success would likely to continue holding on to the same views to eternity, such persistence could be detriment to the future of the firm (Lok, 2007); even as entrepreneurship is about being perseverance. The problem then is of change and the management of the usual resistance to it.
But then when is it a good time to change and know that it is for the better? Perhaps a lot of it depends on intuition which draws it strength from experience and even the random generation element. In Hertzmark (2001) empirical study of commodity traders, it was observed that consistently a group of traders were able to obtain returns inspite the lack of abilities. The returns are devoid of logic and predictability.

An interesting read. (Link)

eBay Entrepreneurship Conference

Open your online wealth states on his blog that the Attendee registration is now open for eBay's 6th Annual community conference in Boston on June 14-16. (Link)

eBay Live! aims at helping users improve their entrepreneurial skills through classes, roundtables, and panels, the company said. Guest speakers will include personal finance guru Suze Orman, marketing expert Seth Godin, and John Gardner, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul, the company said.This year's theme is "The Power of All of Us."

So keep your bags packed, Boston, here we come.

Liberal Entrepreneurship

Planting Liberally, takes about Liberal Entrepreneurship in the latest post. Like most of the other articles on the site, this one too provides a lot of food for thought.

He defines it thus

"Liberal entrepreneurship" is a term I am ripping off of the better known "social entrepreneurship". As defined by Wikipedia, a social entrepreneur is "someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change." By contrast, a liberal entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a problem which faces the progressive movement and builds an organization to solve it.

And then he talks about some basic approaches to increasing the flow of money into the progressive movement, and defines what he means by the term 'Liberal Entrepreneurship'. Here are the main points about increasing the flow of money

1. Rely on Big Donors
2. Support Entrepreneurs
3. Going for small dollar fund raising

Do read the complete article here. (Link)

The importance of being a failure

In their latest post, Singapore Entrepreneus argues that failure is the stepping stone to success. This one advice just might be the most often quoted piece of literature on entrepreneurship, yet the most widely used.

The argument used is creative, he uses economics, aids and pollution to explain why people in Singapore are scared of failing.

I can say it's with all of the other countries too.

A must read (Link)

Entrepreneurs in Indian Engineering Colleges

Matt McGann from MIT writes about a few about his collegues in engineering colleges who are starting up. He referes to a company called 'Dropbox', which I can say I have heard about before too. (Link)

How long would it take before it starts happening in engineering colleges in India. Right now, all that you hear about is ragging (which I should say I'm not really against, if people stay in the correct state of mind, which they usually do).

From my batch in college, not more than 4 out of a 180 have started up. And this is after two and a half years. While we were in college there was no way we could even think about something like this. Maybe time has come for a change.

Spirituality in Western Entrepreneurship

Andy writes on his blog Public Policy News and Research about the demise and Reawakening of Spirituality in Western Entrepreneurship

Understanding spirituality may serve as a foundation for developing new approaches to managerial action, organizational learning, social change and leadership. This article explores this phenomenon by hermeneutically tracing the demise and reawakening of spiritual entrepreneurship in Western life over the past 200 years. Spiritual aspects of entrepreneurial organizations are also framed via the lens of critical management theory as reflected in literature spanning four social epochs: federalist reality, the Industrial Revolution, disciplinary society, and the post-industrial milieu. The resulting themes highlight the interconnectedness and reciprocal influences between social reality and spiritual leadership in Western entrepreneurial enterprises. Drawn from the author's doctoral research (Jue 2004), the article suggests a need for reintegrating spiritual leadership among post-modern organizations and entrepreneurial firms in the achievement of more sustainable futures.

Link

Farmers turn entrepreneurs

The Economic Times brings out an interesting article about farmers in Punjab turning entrepreneurs. The Punjabis have always been famous for having the business gene, and now we have even more examples.

An example is Jaswinder Singh Sangha — a potato grower from Jalandhar — who has become the authorised franchisee of the Subway outlet in the city. Another member of his extended family (also in the potato business) has recently set up a unit in Jalandhar which makes French fries and supplies it to several top food chains including McDonald’s.

Link

Entrepreneurs and Corporates

MindPetals brings out the song of entrepreneurship as against corporates. He writes

It’s fun. It can be scary. It’s stressful. It’s amazing. It’s all of these things and that’s why we love it. It’s our ever-changing and growing song and we sing it everyday of our lives.

Do check out the song at his website.

(Link)

Using Ajax : Downloading songs from Myspace

Here is one hell of a trick to flick songs off myspace, and guess what does it use, yes, Ajax. All you need to do is to copy and paste the the band's homepage url and paste it in the form on the page, and you're done.

Try it out here.(Link)

If anybody knows how this is done, do let me know.

Bush loves Cheney

This is via Vantage Point

Why does George Bush needs Dick Cheney on his team?
Because without a Dick, a Bush is just a pussy.

Muhahaha (Evil laughter)

Baramati

The best part about being unemployed is that you have loads of time and zero money to spend. So when any of your friends need company, being the good friend that you are, you can just agree to go along.

Last weekend, it was Bombay with Bund and Kunal. This weekend, it is going to be Baramati with Rahul and Bund. Anyways, if your drinks are paid for; is there anything that you would ever need?

I have completely no idea about the direction this trip is going to take. It could be the one that I will tell my kids about, or this could be an outright bummer. Though expectations like always are high, since our plan is tried and tested. The idea is to leave at four in the morning, and finish all the beer which has been stacked up before we get there at seven. We leave all the rest to drunken creativeness. Cheers.

Why I never made it to the football team

Stephan J Dubner and Steven D Levitt, of Freakonomics have written an article in the New York Times about the birth month-Soccor Anomaly which explains why I never made it to the football team.

The Anomaly can be stated thus:

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months.

The rest of the article goes on to say that genes and environment or rather talent is not a very big factor in the elite class in any field, with which I don't quite agree. But I concur with his explanation of the anomaly for more than just divine logic. His explanation goes like this:

Since youth sports are organized by age bracket, teams inevitably have a cutoff birth date. In the European youth soccer leagues, the cutoff date is Dec. 31. So when a coach is assessing two players in the same age bracket, one who happened to have been born in January and the other in December, the player born in January is likely to be bigger, stronger, more mature. Guess which player the coach is more likely to pick? He may be mistaking maturity for ability, but he is making his selection nonetheless. And once chosen, those January-born players are the ones who, year after year, receive the training, the deliberate practice and the feedback — to say nothing of the accompanying self-esteem — that will turn them into elites.

Now I don't need to tell you that I was born in December.

link (via)

Target Soccer

Vermaji Uncut

Vermaji is one of the best scribblers in the blogger world ji, and I read his scribbles daily morning with nashta ji. But the best ji, are his series, like the one on cows, and the one on purplocity. So I thought ji, I would dedicate this post to sadde Amitji, and his series ji cause I simply love them.

Amit Verma on 'Cows' (yes right COWS)
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31 , 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64

Amit Verma on 'Purplocity/Verniness'
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.

Amit Verma on 'Lalu Prasad Yadav'
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

Amit Verma on 'Astrology'
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14

Amit Verma on 'Where do your taxes go'
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

Amit Verma on 'Orkut'
1, 2

Multi-tasking

There is this ultimate multi-tasking game I found via Random Good Stuff. The maximum I clocked was a 4.5 second. Really difficult to get more. Do give it a try.

Link

Howto Turn Google into Napster

They killed Napster, but the spirit won't ever die. If you want to search for free music on the internet, the easiest way to go about it is to use the searching algorithm you use day in and day out, yes, Google.

For example, if you're searching for Nirvana, try this

This is a listing of all nirvana songs that Google Uncle can find for us. Yoohoo.

Okay so spell goes -inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:"index of" +"last modified" +"parent directory" +description +size +(wma|mp3) "Nirvana".

So there, that is how you use Google to find Nirvana. umm.

Incase you have all of nirvana, but are looking for some other band, just use your head.

In case you're wondering that I'm way too smart, let me tell you, I stole it from Life Hacker. The best thing since napster.

People are always thinking about it

As if we didn't know (link)

The Ultimate Guide to Sudoku

Yesterday was an amazing sudoku day. I spent a lot of time on www.websudoku.com, and I came up with amazing results (well atleast by my standards). I completed the easy level with a best timing of 4 minutes 11 seconds. But the best part was that I managed to complete one of the games at the "Evil" level. It took me almost 45 minutes to complete it, but it was a satisfying victory none the less.

I would like to clarify here that though you would have heard that people complete the puzzle in like a minute flat, but let me tell you, anybody who completes it in less than four minutes is a bloody freak. So 4:11 is the best non-freak timing that you can get.

Anyways, sudoku has taken over the world, probably like the craze of the rubik's cube, which hit the world when my dad was about my age. Here is what Google Trend shows us about sudoku and the rubik's cube. (link)

Solving a sudoku puzzle takes no more maths than eating an ice cream. If this is your first time, the here is a list of the strategies you could try using.

1. The first step is to look at each digit and try to complete it across the board.

2. Now after you've filled up all the places you could, you try to fill out all the numbers in each of the nine boxes.

3. After you can go no further, complete all numbers in each row and column (each has 9 digits).

4. In both of the above steps, if there are two digits left, it's not much of a problem. But if say there are 3 or 4 or even 5 digits left. The easiest way to go about it is to find out the remaining numbers, eg. 1,3,5,6. Now look at each empty slot and if you can find three of the four numbers in that row or column, then you know what number to put there.

5. After you've hit a dead end with all of the above, try each slot and see what all numbers can fit into each slot. Many times, you would find that even though a number can be placed in a lot of slots in a group, in one particular slot only one number can be placed eg. in the right top corner only number 3 can be placed.

6. If you've exhausted all possible alternatives, this is the last way to deal with it (atleast as far as I know), if you find a number can be placed in two places in a box, substitute the number in one of the places and try to find out what other numbers can thus be solved. But one thing you need to remember is that even if all the numbers fit correctly, you have not found the correct solution, you can be sure only if you find something wrong. Then you replace the first number you have substituted with the second number, which would definitely be correct now.

That is all I think. Now just start up, and if you manage to better my score, let me know. Happy sudokuing :)