Enterprenueral Migrants

 

Europe's culture is deeply inhospitable to entrepreneurs and immigrants, with the eurozone crises there is a new element of faith in innovation and entrepreneurship while immigrants are still seen as a threat to European jobs.

With popular political statements such as:
"British Jobs for the British People"
"70% French Tax on the Wealthy Entrepreneur"

Although Finland and Switzerland are one of the most productive nations and Germany is just one of the very few countries to have a trade surplus with China, not a lot is attributed to innovation an entrepreneurship.

Here are some interesting facts:

• Over 19% of the recent U.S patents were issued to immigrants alone, or to immigrants collaborating with U.S.-born co-inventors. These patents generated more than 1,600 jobs.
• Over 40% of Fortune 500 companies operating in 2010 were founded by immigrants or their children, including Apple, IBM, Disney, Pfizer, Intel, AT&T, Dupont and McDonalds. The companies noted in this study had combined revenues of $4.2 trillion — more than the GDP of most countries.
• Over 23% (114) of the companies on the list were founded by children of immigrants; these include Citigroup, Walgreens, UPS, Office Depot, H.J. Heinz and others.

Half of the world's skilled migrants go to U.S and in the past two decades, they have created 25% of all American venture-backed companies.

"BRAINS" Act, an immigration bill to make an additional 55,000 green cards available each year to foreign-born graduates of American universities, if they have advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering or math (STEM) fields.

Blueseed has plans for a floating city 12miles from Silicon Valley where migrant entrepreneurs and workers can stay on international waters.

Over 500 start-ups with French founders in the San Francisco Bay area.
Over 50,000 Germans in Silicon Valley

last year and perhaps for some time to come China has the highest entrepreneurial migrants to U.S

So why bet on entrepreneurship when we know for a fact that.

• Just 30% of start-ups live past 10 years.
• Fewer than 10% grow.
• Only 3% grow substantially.

This means most entrepreneurs are destined to fail, so there's a high cost underlying successful enterprise.

In other words, poor leadership is causing much more entrepreneurial failure than success.

What can we learn from Immigrants and how can we be great Leaders?

Immigrants have three fundamental ideologies.
Unleash Your Passion
Look for Opportunities Everywhere
Work With a Generous Purpose Entrepreneurs start from that place we call Heart, inner passion and desire that is not easily malleable, but turning that passion into a business reality requires guts. It takes Guts to get past those worries, to persevere when the going gets tough, and to adapt when circumstances demand it.

Guts are about having the courage to initiate, endure, and evolve around an idea.

A great leader may outsource accounting skills, but he never outsources relationship skills.

"When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is... Try to have a nice family life, have fun, set aside a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you learn one simple fact, and that is - everything around you, were made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it." - Steve Jobs

Unleash your Passion and see you at the Top.

Mobile and Mobility

When Steve Jobs saw multi-touch technology, his first reaction was, "My God, this could be a phone." He didn't design the technology. He just recognized that a multi-touch screen could create an infinite number of user interfaces for an infinite number of applications. 

That realization inspired him to create the iPhone.

Mobile business will soon become big business, while mobile deals with the devices themselves, mobility focuses on the broader context of seamless work across various tools and applications. So, when crafting your strategy, think beyond just mobile and embrace the power of true mobility!

Overall, "mobile" and "mobility" are interrelated concepts that play significant roles in technology, commerce, healthcare, transportation, and various aspects of modern life, enabling greater flexibility, connectivity, and convenience for individuals and businesses alike.

At the end of 2011, there were one billion smartphone subscriptions activated worldwide from a total of over six billion phone subscription and the market was growing at 37% annually. Tablet computers are coming into market even faster than smartphones did and are predicted to overtake laptop sales.

1.As an entrepreneur how would you take advantage?

2.As a business, what is your appetite towards risk and innovation?

Africa now has twice as many mobile phones as America, In Africa SMS technology helps farmers pay bills and also helps the banks alert their customers of transactions. In America, it helps teenagers keep up with their friends. 

China has surpassed the US as the world's dominant smartphone market with over a billion subscribers and roughly 400 million mobile web users. India, Middle East and Europe also have widespread smartphone adoption.

For the Business, the questions are.

1- How do your leaders turn great invention like mobility into business innovation that will generate organic revenue growth?

2- How can you adapt management systems that are used to managing short-term performance to become capable of supporting innovation?

3- How can you scale new businesses within corporations that are organized to support only one mature, core business?

In the 1990s, Lou Gerstner, IBM's CEO coined a concept known as Emerging Business Opportunity (EBO) after he noticed that the company wasn't capitalizing on new technologies and markets as well as it could be.

The fundamentals lessons of EBO are:

Dedicated Leadership- Previously, younger, less-experienced leaders were put in charge of EBOs to avoid sterol type thinking. This didn't work well. Younger managers often lacked the networks needed to nurture an embryonic business within the larger company.

Critical Milestones- This is key in making sure the EBO is moving in the direction and at the rate the company needs. Milestones are not necessarily tied to financial metrics and are reviewed in monthly meetings.

Quick to Market- Speed is essential. If an EBO isn't meeting its milestones, it needs to be stopped, or morphed into something else that will. Get the idea to market quickly, experiment, learn, and either iterate or stop the venture.

For the Entrepreneurs, the questions are.

1- Are you thinking too small? just want to make enough money to provide for your family, buy a car, or earn your freedom.

2- Is this attitude driving you to create something less interesting? instead of building the next Google or Microsoft

When an entrepreneur eventually decides to start a business, too often, marketing is far down this list of priorities which deserves to be much higher: Making the company's first sale is very critical to the success of any business.

An interviews and survey were done with founders of 120 startup businesses in China, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, UK, and United States. The focus was: How, when, and why did you make your first sales, and looking back on that process, what do you wish you'd done differently?

The lessons are:

Start your Sales early- cut development time and get better understanding of key customer objections before sinking huge funds into product development.

Choose a Strategic buyer- based on the customers' ability to provide important usage data, references to a next set of customers, or credibility and reputation of the buyer.

Mobility extends beyond devices. It encompasses the context in which these devices operate.

Mobility is about unlimited accessibility—the ability to work seamlessly across any device, application, or tool, regardless of location. It’s the context that determines whether everything works together harmoniously. Consider metrics like cost savings, increased revenue, employee retention, and brand loyalty when evaluating mobility success. 

 Wish You Great Success

Tradition to Innovation

 

The U.S growth is slowing at 1.5% and so is job creation

The 17-nation eurozone’s unemployment rate reached the highest level
since the creation of the common currency 13 years ago, climbing to 11%
in April as employers slashed 110,000 jobs.

Greek unemployment rate has hit a record 21.7 percent.
A record 54% of young people are without work.
1.1 million people are out of a job in a population of just 10 million.

Spain is no better than Greek and U.K double dip recession is worse than expected

Globally, most governments are experiencing a slowdown.

However, the online economy is growing at an unprecedented rate, particularly the mobile platform

Top phone vendors worldwide: Samsung (29%) followed by Apple (23.1%) have impressive results.

"On June 29, 2007 the first iPhone was released. To date, more than 217 million iPhones
have been sold, and they're being used by construction workers to read blueprints, doctors
to diagnose patients, governments to improve services and parents to quiet their kids.

The App Store has also created a new mini-economy. Apple has paid out more than $5 billion to
developers and 18% of U.S. adults online have an iPhone

Samsung 2^nd quarter profits in 2012 nearly double previous year because of increased sales of smartphone.

Facebook with 900million users have tripled their mobile users in the same period. 

To benefit from this trend we should shift from traditional to innovative marketing.

1. Traditional marketing is based on experience, innovative marketing is based on psychology—the laws of human behavior that determine buying patterns.

2. Traditional marketing recommends that businesses increase their production and then diversify; innovative marketing recommends that you maintain your standard of excellence.

3. Traditional marketing encourages linear growth by adding new customers, innovative marketing encourages attracting new customers with excellent service.

4. Traditional marketing advocates destroying competition; innovative marketing urges collaboration.

5. Traditional marketing believes strongly in sales, innovative marketing believes strongly in relationships

6. Traditional marketing is slow to embrace technology; innovative marketing is dynamic and quick to embrace technology.

7. Traditional marketing identifies a few marketing weapons that are relatively costly; innovative marketing identifies several weapons that are free and relatively less costly.

8. Traditional marketing intimidates small-business owners; innovative marketing is a game changer for entrepreneurs.

Enjoy the Summer Olympics in London as you shift from tradition to innovation.

Walt Disney Business Ideas

Having good ideas doesn’t create guaranteed business success. At some point Experience becomes irrelevant, Accomplishments becomes everything.

Success is based on action.

Consider Walt Disney:
Walt dropped out of high school. He was kicked out of the army. He got fired from his first newspaper job for "not being creative enough." The real problem was that his creativity was stifled in those environment.

Occasionally something completely outside your control will cause you to fail. Most of the time, though, it's you. And that's okay. Every successful person has failed. Numerous times. Most of them have failed a lot more often than you. That's why they're successful now.
　
So, Walt struck out on his own. His early animations were a HUGE success with the public.

But Walt didn’t know how to manage money … and his business went bankrupt within two years.

In his second business attempt, he got the money management figured out by hiring someone else to handle that.

But this time he failed to secure legal rights to his creations. A business partner stole his cartoons…and his team of animators. Ouch!

Poor Walt was broke again.

Walt Disney didn't invent the cartoon. But he did ask, "Why are cartoons always only three minutes long?" He realized that with the right story, you could engage an audience with animation for just as long as you could with live actors

The point is if you can think, you can innovate. If you can ask "why?" you can change the world. Let other people do the hard work of figuring out how to make cars greener.

You can be the one who asks "Why?" You can hire people to figure out the how

Walt Disney’s third attempt to start an animation studio finally found success. But it didn’t come easy. Walt’s big dream was to create the first ever full-length animated motion picture.

Hollywood insiders ridiculed the idea as "Disney’s Folly." They said it would be the end of Disney Studios. They were almost right.

Disney started making Snow White in 1934, during the height of the Great Depression.

His studio ran out of money in 1937 and had to halt production with the film 90% finished.

But Walt refused to give up.

Think about the type of people you want to work with. Think about the types of customers you would enjoy serving. Think about the friends you want to have.

Then change what you do so you can start attracting those people. Hardworking people want to work with hardworking people. Kind people like to associate with kind people

First he mortgaged his home. Then he cobbled together a rough cut of the movie. Finally he gathered together a group of investors.

He gave them a private viewing of his unfinished masterpiece in a last-ditch effort to save the film. The persistence paid off. Walt secured his loans, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at Christmas time of 1937.

The public adored the movie and Disney made over $8 million in its initial release. That’s the equivalent of $122 million USD in today’s money.

The movie had only cost Disney $1.08 million to produce. Walt paid off all his loans, gave his animators a great bonus and expanded his studio. The rest is history.

Embrace every failure: Own it, learn from it, and take full responsibility for making sure that next time, things will turn out differently. Successful people are naturally drawn to successful people.

I Wish You Great Success

Croudfund your Business

Eurozone crises, UK double dip recession.......

•According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more women working than men.
•20.1 million women have bachelor’s degrees vs. 18.7 million men
•Unemployment for men: 9.3% compared to 7.6% for women.
•78% of the layoffs in recent years were men.
•More married women have unemployed husbands than ever before, a record 21%.
•Stay-at-home dads have doubled in recent years, making 1 out of 5 stay-at-home parents a father.

Not a pleasant reading for the Men and not a homerun for the Women.

The Right Management ran an online survey between April 16 and May 15. Only 19% said they were satisfied with their jobs, 44% said they were “unsatisfied.” nearly two-thirds of respondents, said they were not happy at work.

Need I say more, it is time to put our destiny in our own hands and run a business. The same economic fate befalls us all; male and female, young and old.

It is now cool for an MBA graduates to say I am working on a start up business as corporate life seemed to offer neither more safety nor more status among peers.

Funding and cashflow is often a major obstacle for startup businesses, the traditional sources of loans for early stage start-ups have largely dried up. Crowdfunding is starting to become a substantial source of much-needed capital. Crowdfunding will increasingly play a critical role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem — with or without the participation of the more established investment vehicles.

You can review the industry data on crowdfunding at crowdsourcing.org.

The April 2012 report estimates that 452 crowdfunding platforms (CFPs) raised nearly $1.5 billion in 2011, and the funding volume is on track to double to $2.8 billion in 2012.

Digital goods like softwares, games, films, and literature are the start-ups that can quickly attract these funds. More than 80% of campaigns in this category have raised over $25,000

Also

Check out Pinterest; the site is still evolving but It has already recorded over 10 million online users.
Next time you are on facebook please click on some of the adverts, facebook needs all the friends clicking to stay profitable.

Entrepreneurial ventures are still high risk but it is a risk we can accept as business ownership offer the best way to tackle economic and social problems. We still need talented graduates to reinvent our ailing enterprises as much as we need gifted entrepreneurs to build new ones.

See you on Forbes Rich List

Be The Next Business Genius

 

Are you Conceptual or Experimental?

According to Marc Freedman Conceptual geniuses tend to do their best work while young, producing breakthrough ideas early in their careers. But experimental geniuses, by contrast, need a long period of time to reach their peak, moving forward by trial and error, slowly accumulating the elements that will be integrated into their fully realized work.

Penniless, recently divorced, and raising a child on her own, she wrote her 1st book on an old manual typewriter. 12 publishers rejected it! one year later a company agreed to publish it but insisted she get work elsewhere as there was no money in children’s books. J.K Rowling, the author of the hugely successful Harry Potter series later said, "You might never fail on the scale I did, but it is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all—in which case, you fail by default."

Americans between the ages of 55 and 64 had the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity of any age group. In midlife, when jobs are hard to find the grey-haired applicants are usually not welcome. Recent research shows that one in four Americans between the ages of 44 and 70 are interested in starting their own businesses or running a nonprofit organizations within the next 5years that is a whooping 25 million people in the race. Guess what!!! there is room for everyone in business but not so with Jobs.

How would you rate Mark Zuckerberg against Warren Buffet: conceptual or experimental?

Buffet was the only son of three children born to the four term congressman Howard Buffett of Nebraska. As a kid he went from door to door selling chewing gum, coca-cola and weekly magazines. He worked in his grandfather grocery store and sold golf balls and stamp while in high school.

At age of 11, he bought shares for himself and his sister. while in high school he invested in his fathers company and bought a farm worked by a tenent farmer. By the time he finished college, Buffett had accumulated more than $90,000 in savings. Buffet attended Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1949

Warren Buffett was an investment salesman at Buffett Falks from 1954 -56, at Graham Newsman Corporation from 1956-69 as a security analyst, at Berkshire Hathaway from 1970. He became a millionaire in 1962 and merge all his companies into Berkshire Hathaway. He is worth about $39 billion

What about Mark Zuckerberg?

Zuckerberg will likely be worth around $25 billion when Facebook goes public in 2012. In 2010, advertisers spent about $1.8billion on facebook alone. Mark Zuckerberg's base salary will receive a dramatic pay cut to just one dollar when he goes public. Zuckerberg's pay cut would reduce his income tax burden to zero.

Zuckerberg's salary cut is being compared to similar moves by other tech titans. Google's Eric Schmidt and Larry Page who are paid just $1 annual salaries. Steve Jobs took just $1 in salary from 1997 until his death last year. Other members of the one-percent/one-dollar club include Oracle's Larry Ellison and Hewlett-Packard's Meg Whitman.

Zuckerberg was born in 1984 and in febuary 2004 he started facebook from his Harvard Dorm at just 20years of age.

During Zuckerberg's high school years, under the company name Intelligent Media Group, he built a music player called the Synapse Media Player that used artificial intelligence to learn the user's listening habits, which was posted to Slashdot and received a rating of 3 out of 5 from PC Magazine. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse and recruit Zuckerberg, but he chose instead to enroll at Harvard University in September 2002.

What about YOU?
Are You Concetual or Experimental?

Research shows that most people made their wealth from, banking, retail, property and creativity.

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not, unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not, the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent"


See You at the Top

Developing MicroMutinationals

Let us consider two recent issues around Human Resources and new employees.

1. Submit your Facebook password.

2. Remove your resume from Linknd.

• As a new employee what would you do?

• As HR would you make such demands?

In my opinion HR needs to evolve into a consultant to the business with clear understanding of business growth while matching and recruiting personnel to meet those needs. Otherwise, HR should face the axe in most establishment.

Micro Multinationals is a term used by Google economist Hal Varian, meaning small companies operating globally. I guess it is a good season to be an entrepreneur.

With mobility, internet access and cloud computing even the smallest companies can now afford the communications and infrastructural requirements that would be an envy of any blue-chip company few years ago.

As mature economies continue to stagnate the biggest risk may be over reliance on domestic demands. Businesses and small companies need to look particularly at emerging markets (BRIC) and fast growth markets (Poland, South Africa, South Korea, Mexico and Indonesia)

The rising middle class promises sustained business growth and an opportunity to tap into a large consumer base; It may not be an easy leap for new entrants because business models for emerging markets are yet to be developed but keep the following in mind:
Go where your customers are going - Global wealth is moving from west to east.

Use familiar territory as springboard - For instance if starting business in Asia, it might be a good idea to launch from Hong Kong

Reverse Innovation - Your approach to product development is critical, where products developed for emerging markets can be adapted to domestic needs.

Leverage local Partners - Partnering with local knowledge and talents can boost competitive advantage.

Perform Due Diligence - There are institutional voids in emerging markets, such voids can be both an opportunity and a risk, its a good idea to watch where the big players are expanding.
According to PWC, here are a few challenges you may face, finding the right business partner 68%, cross cultural management 63%, finding adequate local talent 56%, security risks 49%, local regulatory requirements 48%, corruption 46%, local tax policy 42%, poor infrastructure 39%, supply chain 38%, contract dispute 36%, protecting intellectual property 32%.

With the challenges covered, what is the risk/ reward ratio?

Like the biblical lepers at the gate "if we stay here, we will die, if we go, we could die or we could live."

My Advice - Go

I Wish You Great Success