Business success depends on people. Individuals that you have to rely on to run your business, execute on your business strategy and tactics. 

People are motivated by opportunities to grow, recognition and acceptance.

You need to analyze the needs, desires and aspirations of individuals, which is the key to understand how to motivate and reward individuals.  As a leader you need to differentiate and understand what individuals want, say they want and actually want. you should be able to establish that intellectual and emotional engagement that makes people feel represented and understood.

The key to better understanding your team is to meet in person whenever possible, in the age of online professional and social connections, email , instant messaging and video conferencing the best approach is still to get as much face time as possible to discuss the career aspirations, motivations and for review and feedback sessions.

Ask the right questions, understand the cultural differences while interacting.

You need to make sure to invest time in personal and professional growth of the individual. Reaching out proactively to remove roadblocks to success, setting very clear succinct goals and simplify and synthesize communication helps to build the rapport with your team.

Making sure that the goals are SMART (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time bound) helps the individual to be more successful and provides an opportunity for a feedback loop.

- Ashish

Most of the entrepreneurs I meet is very passionate about what they do. Passion is one of the most important characteristic of an entrepreneur. Passion about your product, technology make you confident, articulate and sets you up for success. But it is hunger that will make sure that you succeed.

Hunger is a state that makes you desperate to win. If you are hungry to achieve something it becomes very easy to wake up in the morning and have a purpose, the purpose to be creative, challenge the status quo, take risks and win.

You have to be careful though to not let hunger drive a negative behavior, as negativity will impair vision and will not yield good results, the challenge is to be positive and hungry.

As entrepreneurs you are a different breed, you thrive on ambiguity. Positive hunger will help you guide thru the path to win, hunger also will give you solace when things fail.

Be hungry to win, take risk, challenge status quo and change the world with your innovative solutions to problems.

- Ashish

In my years with Microsoft I have heard many times that we have become a score-card  focus company.

I came from startup world where I knew each and everything that my little company(ies) were doing in fact we all employees did.  We knew what our strategy was, how are we going to market and how our daily work contributed to the bigger picture of company's vision. It was simpler in small company, but as we started growing and employee count grew, divisions were created and empowered to execute their business in their way knowing everything  thing, communicating the plans and strategy became difficult. We knew a lot though it started to become a challenge sometimes.

With a big company how do you keep yourself up to date on what is going on, how do you translate your vision and strategy and communicate it to the employees in a simple way. It is challenging for an executive and a manager to understand what other divisions are doing, where are the synergies and how their business plan and strategy align with the bigger picture, vision of the company and the direction the company is heading. It is also equally challenging for employees and other individual contributors to validate their daily work, operations and effort towards the companies vision.

A company’s vision is an ambitious statement, there are strategies that are formulated to move the company in the direction of the vision but how do an employee know what they are doing every day contributes towards that vision.

Stating that we will become # 1 or # 2 in out market is easy but how does the strategy, tactics and efforts of employees translate towards that vision is hard and even harder to communicate.

Scorecard is a great tool that a business can deploy to translate the vision into an actionable day to day activities and operationalize the strategy.

A balanced scorecard is a strategic performance management tool and is a great asset to translate your companies vision. So a company’s vision of becoming # 1 in the market can be easily translated into activities that an employee will do, can be documented and measured.

A Division’s, Team’s and individual’s target will be defined and put into the score card and measured, an employee can see the gap in his score card his divisions score card and map it to the initiatives an operationalize.  Score card items will be rolled up from individuals to teams to divisions to subsidiary’s to companies which eventually will translate into the strategy and vision.

A score card helps in translating  company's  vision to operational plans. A Score card communicates the goals, strategies that the business is pursuing to achieve the goals,  score card also makes the business more transparent, an employee can easily link her efforts to the strategy and mission. The managers can build a consensus  around targets, initiatives and strategy to pursue for achieving the vision. A balance score card communicates to all stakeholders what a company is trying to achieve and also educates all on what is the common purpose and how it aligns to their actions. It also communicates who is responsible to deliver which part of the business machinery to make the strategy operational and vision real. 

Score card also helps in creating a good business plan that focuses on execution of the strategy and also becomes a tool for learning and feedback. A score card keeps the target, attainment and gap so you can review the score card every 6 months and tweak the tactics, strategy and operational plan to achieve the vision and grow the business.

Score card is a great instrument to align, translate, communicate, educate plan and feedback for your business goals and vision.

As an entrepreneur you should look into a balanced score-card approach to control and measure your business as well. It helps you to build transparence into execution, helps to tell your story and also makes you accountable for your and your small’s teams daily activities.  

In my 15 years of career in software industry I have worked for middle level managers to president and founders of company.  Working for mid-level managers is vastly different from working for executives in an organization.

Mid-level managers are entrusted with execution, create and deliver tactical plans. 

Ask any manager for their time and they are always running short on time.  They always find it difficult to manage expectations and/or asks from their leaders, and also guidance seek by their directs.

They are always juggling priorities.

The root of the issue is empowerment. 

Middle managers are not empowered or sometimes they perceive that they are not empowered to act on their best judgment to handle a particular situation and priority.

Rather than doing what they need to do, middle managers end up doing what everyone else wants them to do.

Managers who go beyond their day to day job, look at the long term strategic initiatives of the business and align it with their own career aspirations  are not only successful mid-level managers but eventually become leaders in the organization.

Managers need to know how to manager demand and expectation by effectively managing up and down. 

Effective managers proactively control tasks and expectations which then allows them to focus on strategic goals instead of firefighting every day. Sometimes it really is easy to firefight than to focus, set boundaries and prioritize. 

A leader doesn't thrive by proving their importance to others by saying YES to everything but rather succeed with an an ability to say NO sometimes. 

Managing demand and prioritizing the business's long term strategic objectives and personal career growth makes a good manager a great leader.

Managers who also develop and liberate resources  succeed.

A mid-level manager need to delegate more so she can focus more on long term execution of business goals. 

If you are a people manager then your main objective should be to develop people and get work done though them. A manager cannot be insecure and not delegate. A manager is successful if her directs exceed in delivering business goals and also grow professionally into their career.

A good manager also knows how to explore and exploit alternatives and opportunities for themselves and for their directs. 

So a Great Manager

Looks beyond their day to day fire drills,

Deal effectively with demands,

Create and execute long term strategic and tactical plan in accordance to company vision and strategy and her own career aspiration,

Entrust the execution to her directs,

Delegate effectively and 

Find opportunities for her subordinates to grow in their career.

ashish jaiman

Are you Self Aware?  Do you know what your strengths, weaknesses, values, core purpose and core goals are?
 

Self-awareness is  about you understanding who you are, what are your values and core purpose.  You as a leader should understand what impact you and your action have on you and others. 
Self-awareness inculcates confidence. 

Self-awareness also makes you an open and inclusive leader, who is always open to feedback, constructive criticism. 

Self-awareness helps you to become a better leader.

Self-regulation is an extension of self-awareness. Self-regulation is about controlling disruptive emotions and impulses that will impact you and others around you negatively. Self-regulation helps you to build your trustworthiness, integrity.

Both self-regulation and self-awareness makes you comfortable with yourself, have others around you  also feel inclusive and confortable to open and speak their mind. 

It helps you to be a leader that is trusted by people.

Each of us should work hard to achieve the above competencies, helps all us to become a better leader.

- ashish jaiman

Publishing business was based(mostly) on the advertising dollars. The business model was simple, you sell advertising space to a business that would advertise and pay you for that space. The space could be physical, print or media. You owned the space and you went after advertising dollars.  

For print and media you needed to create interesting content for users to catch their eye balls (articles, pictures, shows etc) and you threw in advertising around that content and made money.   

For small local business, who can't afford the advertising space, moved their marketing/advertising dollars to coupons, they would publish discount coupon and target customers to come to their store.

So in essence small businesses spend their advertising or marketing dollars to coupons. 

Internet portals (MSN, Yahoo) went for the same publishing business model and sold banner ads on their site to make money. Google reinvented the business model and went after the same marketing dollar that the businesses were putting in print, offline and banner ads on web portals and innovated by selling key words.

Another interesting phenomenon search providers brought was democratization of advertising dollar spend.  A small business was now able to buy (very cheap) advertising on search providers site (space) and target ads to customers. A small business like a local pizza shop or a hair salon now could bid on key words and advertise on search portals to target searching population. 

With search innovation local vendors moved most of their advertising dollars from coupons to online specifically search. Search engines were able to take advertising dollars away from print and coupon business models to online and are making billions. 

The challenge search engine have  is giving more value to the advertising dollars or in other words, targeting the right customers and convert the CPM (impressions) to CPC (clicks) or CPA (actions) by showing right advertisement to the right audience.  Search engines can profile searchers but they can only go so far. Using cookies or having a searcher give you information volunteering is challenging.

The challenge is to build the right interest graph for users  to charge more from businesses for your space. 

Enter Social Media or Facebook. On Facebook a user voluntarily provides their information, their interests . Facebook encourages you to showoff interests, likes, your friend's interests and so on. You create content on Facebook that will show your interests as well.

Platforms like FourSquare, Gowalla encourages you to share your location and interests. The whole idea is a user’s share their interests, affiliations and content, which social media companies use to build an interest graph. The interest graph then can be used to target you with the right advertisement and in return can charge more for their advertising space. This is a threat to the search advertising dollar.

It is the same advertising dollar of the business that shifted from print media to search providers and now moving to social media.  In social media they can get better return on their advertising investment. 

Group/Social buying platforms like GroupOn, Living Social and the likes are now going after the same advertising dollars and creatively brining the coupons idea to online.  Small business and big ones too are now moving some of their advertising dollars to provide deep discounts to their customers using group buying platforms.  

So everyone is after the advertising dollar, every couple of years new business models to go after the same advertising dollar are being innovated. From print to search to social and now group buying. Business are getting creative in creating business models.  

So as an entrepreneur if you can build interest graphs, you have a business model that can target advertising dollar.  You may have to innovate or package that interest graph creatively to target the same advertising dollar. Think about shifting the advertising dollar to your business to be the next big thing.

- ashish jaiman

Whenever there is a talk about corporate strategy it starts with how we can beat or compete effectively with a competitor. The focus is about winning against a competitor, which is also known as Red Ocean Strategy.
Red Ocean Strategy is about "competitive advantage".
With this mindset the corporations focuses too much on a competitor and how to unseat them, one up them. Executives and managers take their eyes off the ball from innovation and creating new markets.

Blue Ocean strategy (BOS) takes a fundamental different approach, BOS is about creating new markets and having no competitors or even making competitors irrelevant.
BOS is about creating new demand for your product or innovating to capture new markets. BOS doesn't focus on value/cost tradeoff, you are not thinking about competing on price but thinking about creating value for a new set of users/customers.

1.       Nintendo created a new market of gamers with Wii. Video gaming was about serious games who loved the complexity in games and took pride in multitasking and great hand/eye coordination. Wii with the handheld controller created a new market,  young kids to elderly, home makers to life maximizers who now could play console games.

2.       Amazon known as an ecommerce company, big online retailer went big on "cloud computing". Created a new market of IT departments and IT vendors to offload their IT needs by creating a cloud computing platform. Amazon today is the most dominant cloud computing vendor in the industry.

There is a different mindset and approach  that corporations have to take for Blue Ocean Strategy. They have to take a step back from having competitors on their mind all the time,  and look for opportunities to create and capture new markets.

BOS is not about technology innovation (though it may seem like it - from my examples), it is about how you deliver and package your business to a new set of audience. 
It is about a creative business model serving a new market.

As an entrepreneur even if you are creating a service or solving a problem that others may have a solution for,  always be creative on your business model,  keep an eye on a new market and package  your solution innovatively to deliver the solution to a new market. 

Yammer is a good example of finding a new market (enterprise) for a social computing platform.

-          ashish jaiman

The consumer business gang of 4 that Eric Schmidt mentioned @ AllThingsD doesn’t include Microsoft.
This seemed like a un-educated, may be arrogant comment from an ex(ed)-CEO who has spent most of his professional life fighting the battle to win against Microsoft (if you read the comments across the web most of the commenters disagree with Eric on his gang of 4 comment).

In the same talk Eric nodded when on stage the presenter said 80% of the commerce is done locally and he still think Amazon is a very relevant player in consumer business ( I do not disagree with him ) but those are two conflicting message and a nod from Eric.

Going back to my point -

A consumer software vendor (Microsoft)

1) which have the most used instant messaging tool (Live Messenger)

2) Native and social search integration (Bing) with the most used social media (Facebook)

3) North of 30% of search market share (Yahoo and Bing)

4) Most used voip/chat/screensharing tool (Skype 600 million consumers)

is not a relevant consumer software vendor looks like more of a bitter call from him.

It is cool that Eric can own the facebook blunder, I hope he also will have the courage to own this comment @ next AllThingD.

- ashish jaiman

Entrepreneurs are a different breed, so I have heard.

What are the traits that makes an entrepreneurs different from the rest of us

I think it is hunger to do something, hunger to create value for not only for themselves but for the society in large.  Entrepreneurs seek to be more purposeful, create value rather than taking endeavors which are just cool.  People who are impatient, move very quickly from failures and trying new approach to achieve success.  Entrepreneurs are innovative, result oriented.

People who strive in ambiguity, never shy of taking risks and are not afraid of failures. People which are more practical in their approach to tackle a problem. People who listens, and are not afraid to share ideas, brainstorm different approaches and find solutions with collaboration.

So are you an entrepreneur, you don't have to start a business to be an entrepreneur, you can be very entrepreneurial putting your personal brand together.

Think about what you want to be known about, and how will you communicate the value you offer?

Your Value should not be constrained by your job that you have today but what you aspire to be, think about what you want to be in next 1-3-5 years, create a plan and commit to it.

Treat your brand should be like your start-up, write yourself an elevator pitch that communicates the value that you offer, what you wish to be known for. 

Be consistent.

- ashish jaiman