ENTREPRENEURSHIP: TODAY’S BUZZ WORD

In last summer-holidays, I was hanging around with my old friends. When we were on our usual excursion on bikes, we stopped at a roadside Dhaba. While waiting on table, we started bantering with a 14-year old boy waiter. The boy said that he needed the money to pay for computer lessons. His ultimate ambition was to run a computer company just like his hero, Bilgay, the richest man in the world. He may have got the name slightly wrong, but the sentiment was spot on.

Over the past couple of decades India has been transformed from a licence Raj into a land of uncaged entrepreneurs. Listen to me, says the leading character, an Indian, in one of the best novels of 2008, Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”, and “you will know everything there is to know about how entrepreneurship is born, nurtured, and developed in this, the glorious 21st century of man.”

Everybody knows about companies like Infosys, but there is more to Indian entrepreneurialism than software. Bollywood produces 1,000 films a year that are watched by 3.6 billion people (the figures for Hollywood are 700 and 2.6 billion). The Narayana Hrudayalaya hospital, founded by Devi Shetty on the outskirts of Bangalore, is turning heart surgery into a Wal-Mart-like business. Kingfisher beer is popular wherever spicy curries are eaten.

The revolution for the current generation is the entrepreneurial one. Entrepreneurs are doing remarkable jobs: applying more brainpower, in more countries and in more creative ways, to raising productivity and solving social problems. Many of us dream of taking a job in a multinational company like Google, Microsoft, Larsen & Turbo etc but few seek to be employers rather than employees. But all these people do not become successful. The most pertinent question is what make these people stand out of the crowd. Whether it is their business idea, or business plan, or execution is the matter of fascination.

Starting a company means a lot of hard work, and success is often unpredictable. First of all an entrepreneur must have an out of the box idea or execution system for already existing idea. An ideal business model has to be based on strong conviction, coupled with a realistic business plan. Idea must be an innovative solution to an existing problem. The first mover advantage brings a big opportunity and also several risks and challenges. Entrepreneurs operate in all kinds of ways. Some see a market opportunity and draw up a business plan to take advantage of it. Others are driven by an inner force to start a business.

Entrepreneurs have certain distinctive psychological traits owned by only a few people. Entrepreneurs are unusually, sometimes excessively, confident. They have high risk appetite. They are convinced that, against all the odds, they will be able to turn their dream into reality. This sometimes allows them to do something at which most people fail to do. Entrepreneurs are strongly attached to their companies. They habitually talk about their companies as “their babies”. This motivates them to give their all to their companies, whether they make money or not.

Entrepreneurs have an enthusiastic vision, the driving force of an enterprise. They take the initial responsibility to cause a vision to become a success. They have great leadership qualities. Entrepreneurs have the ability to motivate others to believe in their conviction. They can mobilize a group in a particular direction to get the desired results. The entrepreneur promotes the vision with enthusiastic passion. With persistence and determination, the entrepreneur develops strategies to change the vision into reality.

All these qualities are as difficult to internalize as they are easy to illustrate. First of all introspect and try to elicit whether you have that thing in you or not. Then try to create your niche based on your innovate idea. Probably all people have ideas but distinction lies in execution of the idea. The overall blueprint to realize the vision should be clear; however details may be incomplete, flexible, and evolving.

For most people the term “entrepreneur” simply means anybody who starts a business, be it a corner shop or a high-tech start up. Entrepreneur in a broader sense means somebody who offers an innovative solution to a problem (frequently unrecognised). Just think about it, some students in our college get twice the marks as compared to others by studying only half the time compared to them. Where the distinction lies? It lies in the method of studying of two people. To borrow a quote from Shiv Khera, “successful people do not do different things; they just do the things differently”.

All of us want to live an innovative and fulfilling life. So, live “entrepreneurly”.