First, I want to wish you all a very happy new year. May your life and lives of your loved ones be filled with joy and health.

Most importantly, may your capacity expand to make a difference in your life, in the lives of those that matter to you and in the world.

Now, what can you do to expand your capacity in 2008?

Here are some thoughts:

The very first thing to do is to make an assessment of your current capacity to make a difference in your life and in the world. Without knowing where you are, it is hard to create a plan to get to where you want to go. Your current capacity will be directly proportional to the combination of the following:

* Your personal brand - How much of “who you are” to the world really matters?

* Your network of relationships - how many influencers can you influence?

* Your skills and knowledge - Are the current skills and knowledge you have “relevant” to the marketplace?

* Your track record - Are your accomplishments in the recent past significant enough?

* Your teachers and mentors - Whose help are you taking to BECOME better?

* Your wealth - Whether you like it or not, your current wealth will make a big impact on what you do and how you think. Are you happy with where you are in this department?

* Your thinking - Is your thinking sophisticated enough to “out-think” a significant number of people?

* Your attitude - Is it taking you places or is it only providing you excuses for not going places?

Now, add your own ingredients to the recipe of your capacity. With that, you should know where you stand. Whether you are happy with your current capacity or not, you can always “expand” it in 2008.

The next thing is to see what you can do in 2008 to tweak the above parameters (including your own items) so that by the end of 2008, you have made a significant positive difference to your capacity.

It may change your focus on several things. For example on

* what you read and learn

* who you are with

* how you are organized

* whether you will continue with your current job or look for a new one

* where you will invest and how much

There is no template that will work for everyone. You are unique and your plan will be unique. Create a plan that you are comfortable with being accountable for and make it happen

You owe it to yourself and your family and to this world.

Here is to a fantastic 2008!

First, the crisis:

Despite rapid economic growth and progressive interventions by government agencies, widening socio-economic divides present an alarming health crisis for the majority of India’s people. In the shadow of India’s urban upper classes (who have access to health conditions that rival the best of any developed country), the vast majority of India is subject to a grossly inadequate public health system. Consequently, India’s masses unnecessarily suffer from easily treatable and avoidable illnesses such as malaria, typhoid, jaundice, asthma, tuberculosis, and diarrhea. Here are some statistics to illustrate:

• Most villagers in rural India have not seen a doctor in 10 years
• 41% of practicing “doctors” do not have any kind of medical degree
• On routine doctor visits, less than 3% of patients are sufficiently tested
• 68% of patients receive unnecessary injections, most often containing vitamins, or saline.
• Every year, 100 million people suffer from treatable gastrointestinal conditions such as diarrhea, amoebosis, typhoid, infectious hepatitis, cholera, etc. More than 80% of these illnesses are water-borne.
• Malnutrition affects 85% of Indian children and kills more than 150,000 every year.
• Some studies suggest that 70% of families spend more than 50% of their annual income on health; 93% of this amount is spent on treatment of avoidable ailments and emergency care

Second, the competition:

What:The Piramal Prize a $25K Social Entrepreneurship Competition  focused on democratizing health care in India

Goal: The competition seeks to encourage and support bold entrepreneurial ideas which can profoundly impact access to higher standards of health for India’s rural and marginalized urban communities. The award recognizes high-impact, scalable business models that innovative solutions directly or indirectly addressing India’s healthcare crisis.

Entries may include (but are not limited to):

·          innovations in service delivery

·          technology applications

·          health-related products

·          mechanisms to address public health necessities (i.e. potable water)

Why enter the competition?

·          Contestants will have access to mentorship by prominent business and health leaders and the support of an online community to fully develop their ideas.

·          Finalists will spend a weekend in Ahmedabad presenting to a panel of distinguished judges and showcasing their ideas to leading finance firms.

·          Winners will receive over $25,000 in seed funding and access to further venture capital support to launch their ideas.

·          Winners will be given incubation support at the internationally recognized Indian Institute of Management – Ahmedabad (IIM-A).

Deadline:  Initial entries are due April 1^st, 2008.

Contact:  The competition is sponsored by Piramal Foundation, a NGO pursuing social enterprise development in India.  If you have any questions or need any more information, please contact Naman Shah (naman@piramal.org.in)  or visit (http://www.piramalprize.org ).

Disclaimer: I am involved in this company currently in the capacity of a mentor to the founders.

On one end, we have companies Ning and Broadband Mechanics that help you to create a social network of your own. So if you want to create a social network based on a particular type of music, it should be a snap.

On the other end, we have several audio streaming sites that stream music. You can create playlists, rate and rank songs and do a host of other things.

Nobody so far had combined the above, until now.

Dhingana has created a platform that helps people connect “musically” with each other

Dhingana pushed one of the biggest update to their site till date recently. With the release of Dhingana 2.0, Dhingana.com becomes the first full fledged Indian Social Network around Music. This new release makes it really easy to share and discover Indian music with your friends and family.

• Create your own Musical profile page and share it with the musical community.
  With Dhingana 2.0 every user will now have his own musical profile page which displays his musical history (songs played, albums listed, his/her public playlists) in addition to his/her personal information. Users can create their own musical friends network and send messages to them using mDings!
• Share your musical tastes and your SmartLists with your friends and family using mGreetings.
• Create, Save and Share lists of your favorite songs with the community - experience SmartLists
• Discover what your friends are listening to.. get in musical sync with your friends

My favorite feature are:

- Public SmartLists - Ability to create a list of my favorite songs and make it public. Users can then rate them - digg style.

- Musical History - Displaying my musical history on my profile page - This adds music discovery feature to Dhingana. I can listen to what my friends are listening to. In the process I share my musical taste and discover new music through my friends.

Currently Dhingana is operating in private beta and registrations are by invite only. However, Dhingana Team was kind enough to extend 200 invitations for our readers. You can grab an invite to register with Dhingana here:

http://www.dhingana.com/invite/lifebeyondcode

Once you register with Dhingana, you can connect with me musically by adding me as your friend

Have a great musical holiday!

==

PS: If you are interested in licensing the Dhingana platform to create a musical social networking platform for another language, please send me an email (explore [at] foresightplus [dot] com) and I will connect you with folks at Dhingana.com

There is a slight (but significant) difference between
a. you having a lot of business connections AND
b. your company having a lot of business connections and you are just representing the company

In the second case, people talk to you because you represent THAT company. However, if you leave your current position and go to somewhere else, those relationships will continue with the new person that takes over your position. At this time, if they don’t really “miss” you, then it is guaranteed that you never had those business connections, your position just warranted having those relationships.

Not seeing the above difference can be costly. If you don’t see this or such things then you are at the risk of “not knowing your position” in the marketplace.

This is a common trap for very smart salespeople who have made a ton of connections. Most of these connections were the result of them working for their current or previous company. Their customers treat them well and are very nice to them but mostly because of the brand that the salesperson represents. Unfortunately, not all of these people have built a powerful identity of their own.

The risk typically is directly proportional to the brand power of your employer. It is hard to know whether people are talking to you nicely because of you or the brand power of your employer. If you make a mistake there and start a company based on this false assumption, you will pay a big price later.

Let me outline a possible scenario:

1. You start a company based on the fact that you have a big network when in essence the network really belonged to your employer.

2. You are smart enough to start the company in an area that is beyond the focus of your employer

3. You ask for meetings from your old contacts and they gladly oblige. What you may not realize is that these meetings are “courtesy” meetings. They people who gave you those meetings have no intention of doing business with you. Remember that these people did business with your employer (which was way bigger than a tiny startup)

4. The meetings (coffee, lunch, formal, informal) meetings seem to go very well. They ask you a lot of questions about your plans (mostly out of curiosity) and finally request you to keep them posted.

5. After six months of marathon meetings and no business, you decide to close the shop.

In summary, before you start your entrepreneurial venture, please look at your business connections and determine whether they are the result of your company’s brand power or your personal brand power or both.

==

PS: Free eBooks, audio and video resources at my facebook page - Rajesh Setty

You are reasonably well-connected in the industry and every now and then you get to hear some “inside” information. Most of the time, you don’t think about it much and get along with your life. Last time though, when THAT inside information becomes public, it becomes a really BIG thing. You think about it and you feel like banging your head - you knew it way before everyone did.

Next time around you think that you should act fast. May be there is an arbitrage opportunity and you can make use of it. May be you can just create a company and take advantage of the timing of this information.

Before you do something radical, think about this again.

Here are some points to consider:

1. Ideas are not everything: You are smart enough to come up with your own ideas and there is not a need to rely upon an idea to be prompted by some “inside information”. Ideas are plenty and as we talked before ideas are only a small part of what it takes to build an enterprise.

2. Inside information may not be exclusive to you: The fact that you got that “inside information” is the proof that it might have been “leaked” to more than you. There is no guarantee that it was exclusively given to you.

3. There is no way to verify the information: Unfortunately (or fortunately) you can’t talk to the PR department of the company to verify this “inside” information….

4. Risks are unknown: One way is to take a calculated risk and the other way is to gamble. Using “inside information” to take a major step in your life is akin to gambling. You be the judge.

5. Ethics are (highly) questionable: Last but not the least, ethics of doing something like this is questionable. Why would you want to risk your identity for something like this?

PS: Free eBooks, audio and video resources at my facebook page - Rajesh Setty 

You are the star of any party or get together and people really love you. You are the life of any group. You are popular among all class of friends and you are comfortable with that attention.

Some of your friends have suggested to you that you are not taking “full advantage” of the popularity that you enjoy. You should really be starting something on your own they say.

While you didn’t have any plans of starting your own venture, hearing this idea from your friends over a period of time makes you think again. After a while, you start seriously contemplating starting a company.

Let us analyze this situation a bit.

Ability to gain rapport with all kinds of people is a great asset to have but that is not everything that is required to start a company. It is great that people love around you love you. The next step is to know why they love you.

On a lighter note, this is what a friend of mine says “People love to see a clown in a circus but they won’t go to the circus to see a clown alone”.

It is just not the love but the kind of love that becomes important.

Think about it:

* You love to eat what a particular chef prepares at a restaurant and you are lavish in your praise for his work. However, if the chef comes to you and asks you to back him up to start a new restaurant on his own, you are not sure. You like him as a chef but he has not proven to you as a business person.

* You love a project manager from one of your vendors. He has been working onsite for a while so you get to see him almost daily. You openly tell him about how much you love his work. When he comes to you one day and asks you to back him up to start his own company, you are not sure. You like him as a project manager but he has not proven to you as a business person.

In summary, if you are popular, please enjoy the attention. However, if you are planning to use that as a basis to decide on becoming an entrepreneur, please think again.

I was reading an interview of Adi Godrej in the Indian Express North American Edition. Adi Godrej, the Industrialist,  is one of the business icons in India. One of the questions and the response particularly caught my attention. Here it is:

Nadine: If you were to be re-incarnated, What would you like to be?

Adi Godrej: I do not believe in re-incarnation. Had I to choose though, I would not mind coming back as myself. I have really enjoyed my life. Still, for now, I need to listen more, delegate much more, and discover more ideas and realities of the world.

Fascinating!

Think about the question and the answer for a moment. Two questions for you:

1. Suppose this question was asked to you, what would be your response?

2. If your response is not close to the above response, what are you going to do in the next year and for the rest of your life so that one day YOU can come up with a response like that?

Happy holidays again!

You have been told time and again that you are VERY important to your organization. You have received awards for your service and every year you get a raise way higher than your peers. So the company actually backs you by words and deeds. You are happy with all the attention you are getting and the company is happy that you are happy.

However, recently you started looking at this more “logically” and realize that the company makes a LOT MORE than what you are actually receiving. You may really be short-changed you think.  Rather than working hard for your company you could have worked hard for yourself and made ALL the money for yourself.

Thinking about this some more you realize that you pretty much operate autonomously today with little support from your company on all projects. So when you start on your own, you will not miss much.

Finally, you make a decision to become an entrepreneur.

But wait!

Before you take the next step, please know that there is a flaw in the above logic. While it may seem like the company is not supporting much, in reality, it does support you a lot. Here are some things that the company brings today (these become invisible over a period of time) and you may be taking them for granted:

1. Your company brand: Do you have the same power without being associated with your current company? May be or may be not.

2. Your company’s support system: Be it operations or human resources when you need them they are there.

3. Your company’s existing relationships: While you may be thinking that you are doing your job autonomously, there are other people within your company who have relationships with your customers. Everything matters

4. Your company’s history: When you launch your company, there is no history for it. But your current company has a history and if it is good, it matters!

5. Personal brands for key people in your company: Currently the personal brands of key people within your company makes a difference (individually and collectively). When you launch your own company, initially all you have is your personal brand.

In summary, there are many more things to consider before you conclude how much your company is making from your services. You should also consider that all these “invisible” things are not available to you in your own new venture immediately.

The scenario here is simple. You are a “bit” frustrated about your job and the future that it holds. You start talking to some of your friends and believe it or not, they are a “bit” frustrated about the same thing too. With these discussions, soon the frustration among all of you increases gradually as everyone is feeding some more “frustration” to everyone else. Until one fine day you or someone in the group proposes that rather than struggling with the job and being unhappy, you all should join hands and start a new company.

There is an overwhelming support from everyone else.

So, you begin your journey of entrepreneurship. Or you think you begin the journey anyway.

Over the last few years, I have met many such groups who are building a company in “stealth mode” and most often what has happened is that the groups get together in the evenings and weekends to build a “product” as a good product is the “foundation” of a company. When I dig deeper, I see some or all the following characteristics of the group

1. No real leadership: They are all equal, they say

2. No discussion of ownership: Again, sometimes they say that everyone is equal (which surprises me a lot) and sometimes they say that they will figure it out later. If pressed hard on the topic, the details can be scary as every team member thinks that they were the most “valuable” player in the group and obviously should get a lion’s share of the company.

3. No $$ investment: Everyone is putting in sweat equity. There is no money invested from anyone. So if the company goes down, all they have lost is the “time” that they put in. When I probe further on that they say that “time is like money”. That is true, only if they would have done something more “valuable” with the same time if they had not engaged in this activity.

4. Risk aversion: Everyone thinks someone else will jump into this full-time. When the time is right (meaning - when there is no risk anymore) they want to jump in.

5. No discussion on titles: Sometimes I have seen multiple people wanting to be the leaders and sometimes I have seen everyone wanting a CXO title. It is surprising and scary at the same time as most often, there are no individual qualifications (or accomplishments) to warrant those titles.

I can go on but the most important suspect in the above game is that the “configuration” to start a company is purely based on “friendship” and not on the merits of the individual team members.

Merry Christmas to all of you.

Imagine a scenario. You work for a large company managing the vendor relationship for a project that your company has outsourced. You are happy with the performance of the vendor. Over the years not only have you learn the business side of things, you have also learnt a lot of things about executing on projects from a vendor perspective. In fact, you have advised the vendor on several things and they almost consider you as their champion within your company.

There comes a day when there is a new project and you are contemplating whether to hand over that project to the same vendor or get a new vendor. Suddenly, it occurs to you that you could structure a deal where YOU could be that vendor. You can resign from your position and start a company and execute this project. You start exploring this idea with your Boss and after a few discussions, he agrees to your proposal and off you become an entrepreneur.

The above seems like a fairy tale but it is a possibility. It also seems like there is “zero risk” in the above proposition. Why? Because the big problem that someone faces when they start a company is to get your first customer. You are covered there. So, unless you mess-up big time, it should be a smooth ride from then onwards.

In reality, many things can go wrong. Here are some of them:

1. Unrealistic expectations: When you start off in a territory that you are VERY familiar (you were an employee there before) everything seems easy. Right out of the gate you are cashflow positive on a monthly basis. This rarely happens in a new venture. The risk here is that you may start “expecting” that things will continue to be easy.

2. Not able to build the sales muscle: What is also interesting is that you have a project that was pre-sold. You didn’t experience “what it takes” to sell a new project with a “new” customer.

3. Risk of complacency: When things go smoother than expected, there is a risk of getting complacent leading to problems further down the road

4. Risk of structural mis-alignment: When you start off executing on a project in a known territory, you also face the risk of building a company structure suited for executing a project. This structure may not be what you need to build a company.

In summary, it is easy to start a company with this setup but hard to maintain and grow. There are always exceptions and you don’t want to base your strategy on succeeding via statistical likelihoods.