Richard Branson: Five Secrets to Business Success

Just read this and felt compelled to share.
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217284

No. 1: Enjoy What You Are Doing.
Because starting a business is a huge amount of hard work, requiring a great deal of time, you had better enjoy it. When I started Virgin from a basement flat in West London, I did not set out to build a business empire. I set out to create something I enjoyed that would pay the bills.
There was no great plan or strategy. The name itself was thought up on the hoof. One night some friends and I were chatting over a few drinks and decided to call our group Virgin, as we were all new to business. The name stuck and had a certain ring to it.

For me, building a business is all about doing something to be proud of, bringing talented people together and creating something that’s going to make a real difference to other people’s lives.

A businesswoman or a businessman is not unlike an artist. What you have when you start a company is a blank canvas; you have to fill it. Just as a good artist has to get every single detail right on that canvas, a businessman or businesswoman has to get every single little thing right when first setting up in business in order to succeed. However, unlike a work of art, the business is never finished. It constantly evolves.

If a businessperson sets out to make a real difference to other people’s lives, and achieves that, he or she will be able to pay the bills and have a successful business to boot.


No. 2: Create Something That Stands Out.
Whether you have a product, a service or a brand, it is not easy to start a company and to survive and thrive in the modern world. In fact, you’ve got to do something radically different to make a mark today.

Look at the most successful businesses of the past 20 years. Microsoft, Google or Apple, for example, shook up a sector by doing something that hadn’t ever been done and by continually innovating. They are now among the dominant forces.


No. 3: Create Something That Everybody Who Works for You is Really Proud of.
Businesses generally consist of a group of people, and they are your biggest assets.

No. 4: Be a Good Leader.
As a leader you have to be a really good listener. You need to know your own mind but there is no point in imposing your views on others without some debate. No one has a monopoly on good ideas or good advice.

Get out there, listen to people, draw people out and learn from them. As a leader you’ve also got to be extremely good at praising people. Never openly criticize people; never lose your temper, and always lavish praise on your colleagues for a job well done.

People flourish if they’re praised. Usually they don’t need to be told when they’ve done wrong because most of the time they know it. If somebody is not working out, don’t automatically throw him or her out of the company. A company should genuinely be a family. So see if there’s another job within the company that suits them better. On most occasions you’ll find something for every single kind of personality.

No. 5: Be Visible.
A good leader does not get stuck behind a desk. I’ve never worked in an office – I’ve always worked from home – but I get out and about, meeting people. It seems I am traveling all the time but I always have a notebook in my back pocket to jot down questions, concerns or good ideas.

If I’m on a Virgin Atlantic plane, I make certain to get out and meet all the staff and many of the passengers. If you meet a group of Virgin Atlantic crew members, you are going to have at least 10 suggestions or ideas. If I don’t write them down, I may remember only one the next day. By writing them down, I remember all 10. Get out and shake hands with all the passengers on the plane, and again, there are going to be people who had a problem or have a suggestion. Write it down, make sure that you get their names, get their e-mail addresses, and make sure the next day that you respond to them.

Of course, I try to make sure that we appoint managing directors who have the same philosophy. That way we can run a large group of companies in the same way a small business owner runs a family business – keeping it responsive and friendly.

When you’re building a business from scratch, the key word for many years is “survival.” It’s tough to survive. In the beginning you haven’t got the time or energy to worry about saving the world. You’ve just got to fight to make sure you can look after your bank manager and be able to pay the bills. Literally, your full concentration has to be on surviving.

Obviously, if you don’t survive, just remember that most businesses fail and the best lessons are usually learned from failure. You must not get too dispirited. Just get back up and try again.

© 2010 Richard Branson

Simple Business Planning FrameWork

Being able to define and communicate the strategy and tactics against this framework is a basic start to alignment across the functional business value chain be it inside a large corporation division or a single business focused smaller company.

Convergence Part 1: Consumerprise

Consumerprise definition:
An industry and technology point of view (POV) that describes the transient nature of the convergence of histroically two seperate market segments and users.  Specifically the convergence of Enteprise and Consumer requirements.  Example:  The demand for high bandwidth, high quality graphic representation used to live only in the high end business, unlike today where multi-media, immediate access is a basic requirement for many consumers.  Now the consumer is driving the technological requirements only before driven by corporate requirements.

Consumerprise - Consumerprise - the definition of converging market requirements from two historically separate market segments. Enterprise markets have historically been a main driver of IT infrastructure requirements including high availability, performance, scalability and so on. All of which to support the business of large organizations. With the arrival of massive user adoption of applications that run over the web (web 2.0, web 3.0) and the amount of user generated data, the requirements of the IT infrastructure to support the demands of not only terabytes of information AND the millions if not billions of users accessing the content.. This has flipped the IT requirements now driven from end user application adoption.

Convergence of requirements from the consumer and the enterprise user is evident especially in cloud infrastructure. The difference is the "must have" versus "would be nice to have" requirement. For example key infrastructure elements required for CLOUD COMPUTING are - Self-healing, SLA-driven, Multi-tenancy, Service-oriented, Virtualized, Linearly Scalable. AND for Storage in a Cloud key requirements are External storage virtualization, Virtual volumes & wide striping, QOS, Intelligent Tiered Storage, Thin provisioning, Read-only snapshots, Internal storage virtualization, Logical Partitions, Heterogeneous data protection. NOTE THE MAJORITY OF THESE REQUIREMENTS ARE ALREADY IN SOME CASES AVAILABLE OR EVOLVING IN THE ENTERPRISE.

Context & Relevancy : Part 1

It is natural to discuss a product in terms of its features and functionality, especially in the high-tech industry where we often get caught up in the excitement of the technology itself and capability. Unfortunately many often do not build emphasis on where the product is positioned i.e. for whom, what problem is it solving and what it really does for the consumer of the technology.
When a product is marketed we also try to go head-on with our competition on speeds and feeds vs. delivering in context of the real world value to the customer.
One strategy to build competitive advantage is to continually stand back and ask "are we delivering in context, are we communicating relevance"? If so, we can and will achieve differentiation. The diagram above gives examples of context and relevancy e.g. is our product being sold and communicated in the customers specific market need, moreover are we leveraging our own portfolio to achieve differentiation? A winning strategy for many vendors is to show the intrinsic value of the product in context of other products and from the same company. So.. checking context of where, whom, why and asking if we are relevant, CAN achieve differentiation and a competitive advantage that is hard to attack as there is no longer a single point to attack as we surround our competitors with value from multiple angles and facets.

Short Term vs. Long Term vision - A Green Intent, Not!

This is from a colleague of mine, Arturo Gamboa who writes here, an example of efforts not taking into account the outcomes and ramifications of a seemingly good intent. Certainly made me chuckle.

Lack of vision can really screw up things. Here is an example of a slow-motion train wreck.

Recent news indicates that the price of vegetable oil for human consumption had doubled in price and this is having consequences to the price of food worldwide. Why is this happening?

This was due because of the alternative energy initiatives pushed by the current US administration to use biofuels to complement the use of hydrocarbons to support the US and world-energy needs. Since the US is encouraging biofuels at home at abroad, the price of plant commodities that can be used to generate biofuels has skyrocketed. Take corn for example, where the increase in price helps the mid-west farmers and reduces the federal expenditures on farm subsidies. This also helps countries with agricultural economies (most of them poor) creating new sources of revenue. A win-win situation, right?

Let’s take a longer view look. One of the consequences of the diversion of corn to the Energy industry is the increase we are experiencing in price of foodstuffs since the food industry is highly dependency on corn for human (corn syrup) and animal consumption which raises has risen the price of animal products and processed foods (look at the pervasive use of corn syrup)

Since the percent of disposable income spent by an average household in food is low in the US, the increase in food prices has not created alarm with consumers (at least not yet). However if one looks at those countries where the biofuel revolution is shifting agriculture production from food to energy, the percent of income spent on food is large and the increases in food prices will have a deleterious effect on the population. In effect, creating a paradox of countries with improved economies (short-term) with populations suffering hunger and disease (long-term) that may negate the increased revenues.

Why should the US care? All is well short-term (temporally and geographically)

One could look at an altruistic perspective but from the pragmatic point of view the US should look at history and see how countries suffering hunger can be easily destabilized and be fertile ground for terrorism affecting national policies and budgets in the long-term. In addition the growing need for biofuels by the industrialized countries will foster mono-cultivation and use of forest land for biofuels. This if gone unchecked will create a severe ecological imbalance (again no problem short-term for the US), but in the end ecology has no boundaries and our children will all suffer the consequences of short-term decisions.

Focusing on more of the same on Energy policy leads to short-term advantages with large downside long-term. It is necessary to think out-of-the-box to alternatives that will lead to a more sustainable model which delivers a win-win situation for all players in the short and long term. Author: Arturo Gamboa.