GREAT
ENTREPRENEURS OF OUR TIME
Entrepreneur are great achievers in our
society, people who have the courage, determination and belief in themselves to
pursue a dream, overcome obstacles, and nurture their ideas to fruition.
These
people have revolutionized business, opened opportunities for others and
changed the way we think and live. Their impact is felt for generations after
they die. The lessons deduced from their ingenuity, spirit and determination
are invaluable. Courtesy of fortune and other sources, we bring you these
timeless lessons, as applicable to life and business today.
THE
INFLUENTIAL GEEK, BILL GATES
Company:
Microsoft
Advice:
find very smart people and
create small teams.
Bill
gate is one of the very few extraordinary entrepreneurs who have had the
opportunity to change the world twice in one lifetime. First, as the world’s
most influential geek, he helped usher in the personal computer revolution. Now
he is tackling the challenges philanthropist.
If
there is a similarity between how he led Microsoft and how he is leading the
bill & Melinda gate foundation as its co-chair, it is a focus on hiring
very smart people and putting them to work in small teams to solve big issues.
“There is no way of getting around that, “he he said. “In terms of IQ, you’ve
got to be very elitist in picking the people who deserve to write software.”
Once
asked what his best business decision was, Gates replied without hesitation
that it came down to picking people. “Deciding to go into business with Paul
Allen is probably at the top of the list, and subsequently hiring a friend,
Steve Ballmer (Gates successor as CEO at Microsoft). It is important to have
someone who you totally trust, who is totally committed, who shares your
vision, yet who has a little bit different set of skills and who also acts
something of a check on you.”
Gates
said about Ballmer: “some of the ideas you run by him, you know he is going to
stay, ‘hey, wait a minute. Have you thought about this or that? “The benefit of
speaking off somebody who got that kind of brilliance is that it not only makes
business more fun, it really leads a lot to success.”
THE
PRO-ACTIVE JEFF BEZOS
Company: Amazon
Advice: Take regular mini-retreats.
After
ignoring his boss advice and quitting his job in New York, Jeff Bezos drove
across the country to Seattle, drawn by the city’s large population of software
developers. Once he launched Amazon in 1994, it took the e-commerce company
more than six years to reports is first quarterly profit. He was in no hurry
then and he I in no hurry now to boost profits at the expense of building “an
important and lasting company”. Bezos has long resisted entreaties from an
often frustrated Wall Street to manage his company for profit instead of
revenue growth and customer service. Leading a closely watched, high-growth Company
can be frenetic. One of the biggest problems: finding the time to be pro-active
rather than reactive. But Bezos, at the end of each quarter, solves this by
just going away. His solo retreats have been put good effect, resulting in
several new ideas and products, including Amazon’s fulfillment centre for
third-party sellers. As he has explained it “I just look myself up. There are
no distractions from the office. No phone ringing. It is just because with a
little bit of isolation I find I start to get more creative. I do spend a lot
of time web-surfing during those two or three days and just looking at what
hobbyists and hackers are doing. What are the sorts of things that are on the
cutting edge?”
Bezos,
will then write up two-or three-page memos, sometimes to himself, other times
to his executive team. “What I find is, by the time that process is done, I am
never really sure if I invented something o not, because it starts here and
ends up there. That is what you want if you have a bunch of smart people.
Somebody say, ‘Well, that will never work, because you forgot x, y and z.’ and
then you step back and recognize that is true and then it morphs and builds.”
THE
INNOVATION MACHINES, LARRY PAGE AND SERGEY BRIN
Company: Google
Advice: spare no expense on innovation.
Just like Paul
McCartney, who says he literally dreamed the melody to yesterday, one the most
covered songs in the history of recorded music, Larry Page recalls the night in
1996 when he was 23 years old and had vividly dreamed about downloading the
entire web onto computers. “I grabbed a pen and started writing,” says the
Google co-founder. “I spent the middle of that night scribbling out the details
and convincing myself it would work.”
It certainly did. For the first time ever, in the final
three months of 2011, Google exceeded $10bn in quarterly revenue. Every day
people around the world now use Google for an astounding 2.5 billion searches.
But in all the wonderful statistics one could cite about the worldwide presence
of the company on the web, one statistics even more telling: Page and co-founder Sergey Brin, Have spent $11.8bn
on research and development in the past three years.
That money fuels an innovation machine second to none,
one that has move Google well beyond its dominating lead in the search engine
business. Staying innovation while scaling into behemoth organization is often
the most difficult passage for any growing company. For page, who became CEO in
2011 and Brin, it come down to what they call the 70-20-10 rule.
“About
70 per cent try to work on the core efforts of the company,” explains Brin, “20
per cent goes to adjacent areas and expansion, and for the 10 per cent, and
anything goes. As we have expanded our breadth of offerings, it is actually harder
and harder to find the 10 per cent out there. But I think that is important to
let people be really creative and think outside the box.”
THE
SOCIAL NETWORKER, MARK ZUCKERBERG
Company: Facebook
Advice: Embrace paranoia
By
the time Mark Zuckerberg celebrated his 28th birthday in May, 2012,
Facebook had gone public and become the biggest IPO of all time. The
long-anticipated event will create hundreds of Millionaires, result in a
valuation of an internet company that will approach $100bn and make the geek
who dropped out of Harvard University his generation’s Bill Gates.
Yet
it has been only eight years since the social-networking site was launched from
zuckerberg’s dorm room at Harvard. It would be easy to chalk a good bit of his
success to luck and timing, but that would be a serious mistake.What has helped
make Facebook the world’s dominant social network is an obsessive entrepreneurial
genius who has taken a page from other of Silicon Valley’s legendary denizen, Intel’s
Andy Grove, who famously stated and lived by the dictum that only the paranoid
survive.
Zuckerberg
is the Valley’s most paranoid entrepreneur these days, taking nothing for
granted. It is why he has pushed out a constant flo of innovation changes to
Facebook’s platform, making it easier for developers to create applications for
the community and ensuring that each new repeated process keeps it ahead of the
competition. It is the single most important explanation for why facebook has
yet to face any formidable rival in its space, including last year’s challenge
from heavyweight Google.
THE
QUINTESSENTIAL STEVE JOBS
Company:
Apple
Advice: Say no
to Focus groups and Market research
Through he could be abusive and mean spirited to people
who threw themselves into their work on his behalf, Steve jobs proved to be
this generation’s quintessential entrepreneurs. While alive, he was a
visionary, inspiring, brilliant and mercurial. Perhaps the most astonishing fact
about Jobs was his view that market research and focus groups only limited your
ability to innovate. Asked how much research was done to guide Apple when he
introduced the iPad, Jobs famously quipped, “None. It isn’t the consumer job to
know what they want. It is hard for consumer to tell you what they want when
they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”
Instead, it was Jobs’ own intuition, his radar-like feel
for emerging technologies and how they could be brought together to create, in
his words, “insanely great” products, that ultimately made the difference. For
Jobs, who died in 2011 at 56, intuition was no mere gut call. It was, as he put
it in his often-quoted commencement speech at Stanford, about “connecting the
dots,” glimpsing the relationship among wildling disparate life experience and
changes in technology.
It is a safe bet to assume that none of Apple’s
blockbuster products, from the Macintosh to the iPad and iTunes, from the
iPhone to the iPad, would have come about if Jobs had relied heavily on
consumer research.
Fittingly enough, on the day Jobs Launched the Macintosh,
a reporter from popular science asked him what types of studies Apple has
conducted to ensure there was a market for the computer. I a nearly offended
tone, Jobs Retorted, “Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before
he invented the telephone?”
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