What entrepreneurs can learn from the regrets of the dying

Posted in General, People & Culture

There is something very interesting for entrepreneurs to learn from Ms. Bronnie Ware, a woman who worked for years with the dying and wrote a list of the top 5 regrets people say aloud on their deathbed.

top5regrets

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Go chase your dreams!

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
How about working smartly and still having time for family.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Most of us are entrapped with this regret to some extent. Whatever you do but just don’t settle for mediocre existence.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
Build relationships. Both for professional and personal well being. Most successful and happy people live on strong relationships.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
As most entrepreneur will say – Enjoy the journey. It is really up to you.

I guess the leanings are for everyone. The lesser regrets you have in your life, the more enjoyable it is.

Can you really measure people’s performance in your organization?

Posted in Ideas, People & Culture

Can you really measure people’s performance in your organization? If you are people manager, a quick answer would probably be “yes”.

Rethink about it!

If your answer is still “yes”, there are high chances that you are either managing a very small group and most likely working in a start up. In such situations, market measurement of your company or group is quick and high – you either succeed or fail and hence attribution to performance is easy. The second reason being, everyone is constantly performing. Or maybe  you are a sports organization!

If you have worked in large organizations and gone through multiple assessment cycles, you know how difficult the job is. Most managers are not sure if they exactly know both the performance and potential of their employees. It’s no wonder large organizations have huge budget to train their managers on people performance and managing peak performance. There are several tools and techniques that managers use, including 360 reviews and gut feelings. But are employees happy? Are they performing to their peak potential? Is it an issue about manager’s capability or tools/processes that are available to measure performance?

perf_Reviews

And the bigger question really is, how does this impact your organization’s performance? Just imagine what a small improvement in employee performance can do for the company.

Now I see few opportunities here – If you can’t measure, you can’t improve. There is a big opportunity in creating tools for performance measurement. Tools that work. Tools that can include the process around the performance measurements.

One of the things, I have noticed is that generally people have good sense on how someone else is performing if they are around that person. Managers can miss “how” part of completed task but peers have a good idea on how someone completed a task. 360 works to some extent but it fails during comparative analysis or depends on reviewer’s personality.

Is there a way to capture this sense and build a tool?

The second opportunity lies with the fact that a small improvement in employees performance can improve organization’s performance. But most managers at best can connect it implicitly. What are those parameters that can be influenced and measured? Remember, can’t measure leads to can’t improve!

Is there a way to associate employee’s performance to company performance in a more direct, action-oriented way?

Small business marketing – what opportunities lies ahead?

Posted in Hot, Ideas, Marketing & SoMe

A recent survey conducted by Constant Contact polled 917 decision makers and reports that the primary concerns of running a small business have largely remained unchanged in five years.

small business

The report also describes about increased usage of marketing tools and challenges around finding new customers and retaining them. For example, there is almost equal split between businesses who find it easier, same or harder to find new customers.

One would have expected that adoption of new tools around email marketing and social media marketing (SoMe) will actually bring down these concerns. Or at least make it easier to address these concerns. However, customers are increasingly paying less attention to marketing and the competition is always increasing. On a positive side, customers are actually spending more money despite higher expectations.

I see this report as a huge opportunity for anyone focusing on small businesses. The core concerns of doing a business will always remain the same – new customers,  retain existing customers. The opportunity lies in finding ways to make it easier for these businesses to find new customers. What can you do as an online marketer to solve issues with customer paying lesser attention to marketing? Is it because the marketing efforts are not reaching the right audience? Is it because wrong tools are being used? How can you reduce time and money to do marketing? How can marketing for these business be done with a philosophy of “making hard things easy”?

You can find a better visualization of the report from MarketingProfs infographics.

Please share your thoughts and what challenges and opportunities you see as you go through the data.

How would such a report look like five years from now?

 

Anatomy of an Open Source license explained – No legal terms used!

Posted in Conference, Open Source

During my recent gig as a panelist at NASSCOM open source development conference, I was not surprised to find out that over 80% of the participants (total attendance ~90) struggle to understand the core logic behind an open source license. It is not they can’t but it is just too legal (complicated)!

license

I used four questions below to explain the anatomy of building an open source license. And this can be used to understand the philosophy and appropriate usage of a license.

1. Do you want to give up control of the code and distribution?

Yes – No license needed. Anyone can use the code “freely”, really!
No – Go for a license with following questions.

2. Do you want your code to be used only by other open-source programs?

Yes – Use license (like GPLv3) that ask any program to make itself open source if they are using your code.
No – Anyone can use it, fewer restrictions will be imposed by license. Commercial usage is easy.

3. Do you want to earn money if someone use it in a commercial offering (make money)?

Yes – Have a dual license – free license for free programs, commercial license for commercial programs.
No – Use a commercial friendly license like BSD

4. Do you want to enforce code modifications by others to be provided to everyone else (bug fixes and enhancements)?

Yes – Use license like Mozilla Public License (MPL)
No – Use license like BSD, Apache License

I promised not to use any legal terms and hence have simplified many of the finer points that you may encounter when considering a license. I strongly recommend you to consider a legal opinion if you are using open source for any commercial purpose.

Why buying a camera or a printer or even a laptop is still difficult?

Posted in General

In this age of internet where information is available at your fingertips, you would expect making a buying decision like buying a camera or a printer or even a notebook would be easy from a large choice that exist today?

EPSON scanner image

Sadly, it isn’t. At least not for me when I was recently on a similar decision path. There are many instances when I see my friends on social media just asking for a direct help and advice, in case someone has already made a decision and they can just follow the advice. Hours of search and research and reading reviews leads to nothing but a feeling of exasperation. It feels as if you will always miss out on something or miss a great deal (that is round the corner) that you have not think about and as a result feel bad about making a decision.

The more I think, I feel the market has become highly commoditized where differentiation is becoming difficult even by the so called experts and website. Understanding differentiation based on product features ain’t easy – and knowing which product features to base your decision on is very complex and complicated.

The only true differentiation that most people can understand is “Price”. Not surprising to see price being a crucial factor in such a complicated decision making process.

Details about a billion phone numbers can be accessed by anyone!

Posted in General

A colleague pointed out about a crowdsourced phone directory app Truecaller that allows you to find name against a given phone number in any country. Some of us gathered near the colleague’s workstation and it was fun to input your and your friends number to see what (interesting) names are returned by the app.

truecaller

This is how it works. Once you install the app on your phone, it takes your address book and stores it with itself. All users address book is then combined to return you the result.

But soon we all realized how this can seriously intrude your privacy without your knowledge and permission to share your number.

robert-deniro-im-watching-you-2

You can actually pay a small fees and request for contact information by name anywhere in the world!

In principle, building a telephone directory is not a bad idea. I also like the way crowding model is used to build information set that can help, for example, to identify calls from unknown numbers. However the app adds your name and number without your but someone else’s permission. Kinda scary.

What do you guys think?

I will be on a panel at NASSCOM open source development conference

Posted in Conference, Open Source

NASSCOM is hosting a day conference on open source development methodology at Noida on 6th June. I am part of panel discussion alongside Dr. Gopal Krishna Nayak, Director, IIIT Bhubaneswar and Rahul Dev, Patent Lawyer from Tech Corp Legal LLP.

If you’re registered to attend, I look forward to meeting you there in person. If not, you can register for the event here http://www.nasscom.org/open-source-development-methodology. Here’s the full schedule of events

nasscom