Embrace the Entrepreneurial Spirit and Live the Rich Life (FT Press Delivers Elements)

This Element is an excerpt from Psych Yourself Rich: Get the Mindset and Discipline You Need to Build Your Financial Life () by Farnoosh .
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Who are you and what is your work in the world? We live in a noisy world. Clarity is the vehicle that allows us to cut through the noise. With clarity we know when to say yes and when to say no. We can see the direction we need to go. Clarity allows us to be true to that of God within. Summer Cushman is a Quaker minister, visual artist, viniyoga teacher, and yoga therapist. She teaches meditative yoga classes, works with people one-on-one, and teaches a yearlong immersion course based in the ancient texts of yoga both online and in-person. She publishes the Yoga Church Sunday Sermons—a free weekly sermon delivered to your inbox.

And will begin offering an annual Yoga Church retreat in In all her work, Summer is teaching the science of transformation with the ultimate goal of helping people identify the habits that lead to their suffering and—through the mechanism of awareness—learn to transform them. You well know the sense of coming to the very edge of new forms of ministry and innovation within your work or ministry.

Sometimes we sense the fire within our leading but choosing to step into this leading seems too strange and challenging. Sometimes our communities call to us, fired up with a sense of urgency, but we do not embrace the opportunity of that call. This workshop prepares you for these moments and will equip you to embrace these threshold moments and the process of refinement that occurs when you are walking in faith through the fire. Come prepared to share the fire in your leadership, bring a current fiery issue or leadership opportunity that you would like work with during the workshop.

We will use poetry, storytelling, journaling and expressive arts during this workshop. This workshop is in two parts; participants should register for both. She also offers services for organization design, community development, coalition building and strategic planning in the nonprofit and public sector. Over these past ten years she has led Circle of Trust, Friends Couple Enrichment and other retreats for faith communities. She has been leading workshops on Communal Discernment with Friends Meetings.

All entrepreneurial ventures, and even life, go through challenges and setbacks. In moments like those it can be difficult to maintain our motivation. This workshop explores how to walk through these low points without giving up. Participants will leave the workshop with tools to meet this challenge, and have space for fun while doing it. She's recently finished a four-year stint at Earlham College working with both the Quaker Fellows, and Bonner programs.

She has now moved into the creation of her ministry Divine Journey, a spiritual direction and tarot practice.

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When not working, she volunteers with various organizations, reads, and bakes. For Oscar, Wholesomely participating in building a community while simultaneously living in it can be difficult! Inviting community members to live with an awareness of the Divine Presence while working to address injustice can be challenging work. Such ministry can take various forms, even that of an entrepreneur. In this workshop, we will explore what it takes to succeed in community building in using agriculture as an entrepreneurial model. Theoneste reflects on the vital role of fire in our daily lives, whether from firewood, gas cookers, candles, etc.

Fire brings change, especially when it is a manifestation of the Divine presence in our lives. It resists injustice within us and around us, and heightens our awareness of a better way. Are we willing to be immersed in this Divine fire that makes us members of the global village of candles? He taught and served as registrar and assistant academic dean at Friends Theological College, Kaimosi for three years. He is married to Zipporah Adema Mileha and they are blessed with four children.

Theoneste Sentabire is from Rwanda, Africa. Peacemaking is his primary concern. Thus, he have been privileged to be part of the Entrepreneurial Certificate pilot program at ESR this year and got the support to start his own ministry called Blessed Family Ministry BFM which cherishes the culture of peace in his village back home. This experiential workshop will take participants through a bicycle ride around the EC campus, where they will have the opportunity to get attuned to the signs of Providence, listen to their message, get clear on the task they have for us, and act.

This workshop will be limited to 10 people due to bicycle availability and will require participants' ability and willingness to ride a bike. If you can make that distinction in your own mind, the rest is up to you. If you can handle the risk, you are free of worry and can immerse yourself… diving headfirst into your venture.

For me acknowledging the fact that I love when people take a selfie with me, I realise I have a sense of responsibility to give even more back to my community to have that luxury. I have said on many occasions the reason to start a new business should not be about making money!

You need to have a passion for the project and want to make a difference. At Virgin we enter into new markets to stir up the competition and offer a choice and transparency to the consumer. It has to come from a higher place. In my case, I knew that I had the ability, through these technologies that I understood well and could confidently implement, to make a real difference in the access ordinary people had to information.

And I knew that connecting people to information in the easiest, most convenient way would make a tremendous difference in the world. And money is just an afterthought. What drove me to it was this desire to make a difference in an area that badly needed it, and my recognition that I was the right person to step on and take on that challenge.

This is what excites me, seeing an idea develop from a sketch to a fully functioning machine. It drives the company forward. Both are entrepreneurship, but of different kinds, leading to different results. For clarity I am using two qualifying words for one. The difference between the two types entrepreneurship is very significant. One is selfish entrepreneurship, another is selfless entrepreneurship. It is the selfless entrepreneurship which will lead world to social, economic, and environmental sustainability, and create a new civilization of balance between present residents of the world and all future generations.

I consider myself in that class, I went through a huge number of challenges, and stuck it out. The main approach they take is to secure funding, without giving-up the comfort… through smart funding. I was willing to make sacrifices, I was willing to rough it out and struggle. I had to rough it out to get to success… but today, young entrepreneurs are driven by the excitement of creating a company of their own. In Bangalore, which is becoming the start-up capital of the world , you are seeing a huge number of tech start-ups.

I know that only a few of them will be really successful, and many will fall by the wayside, but these guys are not taking huge risks because they know that if their businesses fail, they can just take up employment. These companies get funded by VCs, who are driven by ideas, and so the entrepreneurs are not leaving their comfort zones.

Entrepreneurs who leave their comfort zones are the ones who will make it big, those are the entrepreneurs who really believe in their idea. Narayana Murthy] At the highest level, entrepreneurs are driven by a passion to make a difference to society. After this, there is the desire- shared by all entrepreneurs- to create wealth for themselves, their colleagues and family. Ultimately, entrepreneurship boils down to the desire to become more relevant to society. It is the desire to make the environment better for people; that is how you get recognised, respected, and how- ultimately- you have the opportunity to make money.

The drive of entrepreneurship is about earning the respect of society by becoming relevant to that society. In my experience, entrepreneurs driven by money will give up when the money dries up, and the entrepreneurs who are driven by leading people usually run out of money because they overhire. This is a better product, or a better service, or a better way of doing things… we want to make it available to everybody!

The act of taking an idea and making it available to everybody, with scale and impact is a huge motivator for entrepreneurs. We thought the world would be better if everyone was online, and we set-out to do that. It took a decade before we got traction, but we were driven by the idea that living in a more digital and interconnected world would be a good thing for society. Our motivation was partly about building our business, but partly about building this new medium- the internet. That same kind of drive we had, is what we see in entrepreneurs we get involved with.

Many entrepreneurs are also perfectionists — they strive for excellence and have a higher standard of achievement than the rest of the world. Elumelu] Ask any entrepreneur and most, if not all, will tell you that they are driven by passion. This passion could be for a single, innovative idea, or it could be a passion to do something that changes the world. But without passion, it would be impossible to stay the course of this most challenging of vocations, and rewards at the end of the journey make all the struggle worthwhile.

Small business and entrepreneurship is a driver for job creation and economic benefit. One thing I can tell you is that what drives entrepreneurs, what they look like and what makes them tick is all over the map. They see the world a certain way, and they want it to be that way. I was an early investor in the first-round of Uber, and when I first met Ryan Graves employee 1 at Uber , he had a very clear vision of what was wrong with transportation and how they wanted to change the way people wanted to move around cities.

There is an internal fire that burns inside and drives them to lead a more difficult and uncertain life than the rest. There is also the assurance that you have a new process to resolve an existing problem or a new product that can change lives. An entrepreneur is by definition a nonconformist, always in need to change things. When you tap into this vein with the right energy and team, it will more often than not lead to financial gain. This is an important psychological factor.

Michael Otto] In Europe, entrepreneurs are less driven by getting rich. The emphasis is on the desire to put an idea into practice. Successful company founders quickly come to terms with setbacks and failures, and see these more as incentives to keep going. In my own case, as I joined a company that had already been established, I was particularly driven to further expand the company from a nationally important mail order company to an international company group.

Besides diversification and internationalisation, most importantly we took the first steps towards the digital transformation back in the s. If I care enough about something? In life, you can always make more money and get more of everything- but one thing you can never get back is the time you give. People measure success in different ways, but whether you look at Bill Gates or Mother Teresa … the thing they have in common is their ability to go out and make a positive impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Success is not about how much money you have in the bank, but rather — how many lives have you been able to impact positively.

As humans, we are giving. Compassion and empathy are hard-wired into who we are — but for many people, they think that writing a cheque and calling it philanthropy satisfies that part of us. The bigger the problem, the bigger the impact you can have. You may become rich, engage in philanthropy and help a million people but the only way you can help a billion people is by building a profitable business.

Making money has almost become a taboo! People get so cagey; they may want to provide fresh water to billions of people but choose to make it non-profit because of the taboo of making money doing it. You solved a problem. This whole concept of a social entrepreneur has done a disservice to society. How do you keep driving forward and doing things? What can we do next? Philanthropy… We have college track, a robotics programme, a computer science programme, and I keep thinking about what next?

What else can we put in to take this forward? What partners are we missing? Or do we even need partners? In the world of music, Apple would be Michael Jackson. I found out about Apple TV, and decided to pitch them an idea instead of going to traditional networks. If we climbed Mount Everest together…. I love a creative challenge, to learn a new craft, a new business, a new way of doing things.

The inspiration is always there. Creatively, nature always inspires me. I want to help my customer inside and out. You have to be ready to embrace change, and to be ready for it not just in terms of your business, but psychologically ready for the kind of change—excited by, and attracted to, change itself.

I think an entrepreneur needs to have finely tuned sensitivity to what change is coming. They have an intense desire to do everything they do to the best of their ability. They are not afraid of losing. They take risks, but informed, calculated risks, neither heedless nor needless. They should embrace failure and learn from their mistakes. I created 5, prototypes of the first Dyson bagless vacuum cleaner and only the last one was right! Not being afraid to fail is something I think all successful entrepreneurs have in common.

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When it comes to leadership I always wanted to have a team that shared my drive, but also could disagree with me. That was the case when I started with just 5 people and it is still the case for the 5, people we now have at Dyson. At Dyson we continue to challenge convention and lead the way in disruptive technology. Take our Dyson Tap for example. It combines our Airblade technology, which completely dries hands in just 12 seconds, with a tap to create a compact solution for washrooms around the world.

He is remembered for what he has done for the world, not what he has done for himself. Success of an enterprise should not be measured by the stock market success. It is a narrowly defined indicator. Our successors should be grateful to us remembering that we left them a good and safe planet and healthy structure of a balanced society. When I think of true entrepreneurship, I think of pioneering spirit. Anyone who imitates or cut-and-pastes a business model is a businessman and not an entrepreneur.

For example, Uber in my view is an entrepreneurial company and the follow-ons are imitators. Uber has de-risked the entire industry; their followers are not taking the same risk. Uber went in first, de-risked the format, made it succeed and showed the business model could work. The others are imitators, not entrepreneurs…. When I started Biocon in India, in when nobody had thought of biotechnology, that was the wow factor. Picking out opportunities ahead of others is always something that is very exciting, and some of these will always have that wow factor. I have looked at picking out new technologies that have led me to become a leader; we have path-breaking ideas that give me that wow-factor.

Narayana Murthy] The first attribute of an entrepreneur is courage…. Great entrepreneurs have courage to dream the impossible, to walk the un-trodden paths, to go against the vast majority of nay-sayers and to make huge sacrifices in the hope that tomorrow will bring better days. The second attribute of an entrepreneur is optimism and hope.

When you want to take risks and when you want to walk down the road less travelled or un-travelled, you have to be positive and optimistic. Great entrepreneurs are people with tremendous passion. Without passion you cannot go on a journey that requires such huge personal sacrifices, looks bleak, risky and impossible in the beginning.

Great entrepreneurs are essentially leaders. Because, leadership is about raising the aspirations of people, and empowering them to convert what seems impossible to the realm of possibility; making it a better world for everyone. Entrepreneurs are very open-minded. They have to be! Unless you are open to new ideas and open to face the risks from these ideas, you cannot transform the world.

When asked about anything, the only answer is something that leads to the business. A great business is something else. A great business has an enormous market, and a focused approach to build a wedge into that enormous market. A great business connects with the end user, and has margins that increase over time because the product is mission critical to the user. When I see Complex Media just raised 21 million dollars , it gives me hope and shows that the scene is attractive and active.

Great entrepreneurs also surround themselves with a great team. You need to have people around you that have the same vision as you. You can have a big team, but everyone has to be on the same level, with the same vision. What they all have in common is underlying passion, extraordinary perseverance, the ability to find creative solutions in the face of obstacles, and a real commitment to continuous learning and improvement. People need to believe in your vision and have confidence in your ability to see it through. There are many great ideas that never materialize.

You also have to be willing to embrace risk—calculated risks, because not every risk is worth taking. A great business is always innovating. An entrepreneurial environment is ever-changing and not everyone is suited to this. Entrepreneurship is a team-sport! The entrepreneur is important, but the team around the entrepreneur are critical- they are the ones who will take that idea, and execute against it. Perseverance is critical too. All great entrepreneurs can see the next big things clearly, and can be quite contrarian. On the whole entrepreneurs are extremely focused on the details.

Elumelu] Great men, regardless of their chosen profession, have shared characteristics: They are driven to succeed, and often this requires a brazenness or boldness that most will identify as risk-taking behaviour, but is often calculated. Great entrepreneurs do things differently. They exhibit traits that set them apart from the general population and, though not all were born leaders, I believe their achievements make them leaders among their peers.

Keeping your word and fully delivering on your obligations are held in very high regard in the business world. The ability to take on responsibility not just for yourself, but for others; to be accountable for the consequences of your decisions and actions. A person who chooses business as his profession takes on certain risks, so psychologically one needs to be very resilient in the face of challenges. Statistically, fewer than ten percent of people have the psychological make-up to behave this way. Many prefer to have less in life but with greater certainty.

Not everyone is capable of it, and few are inclined to do it. Finally, a business person should have a certain gift for doing business. There are no good musicians who do not have a good ear, no artists without a great imagination, no writers without an excellent command of the language. The same goes for our trade.

It is not enough to know how to use a calculator or build sound financial models. You need to have vision. You should look at a business process as if it were a living thing; you need to sense its music. You know, a good chess player does not need to spend a great deal of time calculating — sometimes one look at the chessboard is enough to know if a combination is good or bad.

Am] Great entrepreneurs have networks, they have the ability to bring the people together that will help them see their idea through and make it real. Usain Bolt is not just fast. There was something that took him out of his little-square and got him to network, to bring people around him so he could create bigger circles. My mentor is Jimmy Iovine ; he started off as a producer, became an executive, and was one of the founders of Interscope — which he sold twice- and then he co-founded Beats.

Now he works at Apple. From an early age I knew I had to rely on myself, look after myself, to not be afraid of anything. It gave me huge confidence and unshakable belief. It is that belief that overcomes obstacles and paves the way to success. This has to be done however with absolute integrity, morality, honesty and truthfulness.

Just as a very small example… none of my employees were ever allowed to take a present at Christmas from any suppliers or customers, nor were they allowed to give any. Instead of creating favour as a result of gifts, we created something good. I had to lead this from the top. I led the company with an approach of complete honesty. So many people make false claims. They promise jam tomorrow, and while a very small number deliver huge rewards, the vast majority fail.

They are on a mission to correct a personal problem or personal pain. They are incredibly hard working, brutally intellectually honest, and insanely curious. They are outsiders to the industry they disrupt. Our partner Michael Moritz also wrote the following to describe great entrepreneurs: The fighters and the true believers. These are the founders with whom we partner. From idea to IPO and beyond, we want to be great business partners to the founders we back. We measure our success by helping our founders build enduring franchises and category kings and by being the first call by our founders when they need bespoke and prescient advice.

On our website, our ethos mentions: Our team mirrors the founders with whom we partner: Many come from humble backgrounds. Many formed or built companies of their own before joining Sequoia. Each shares the mindset of an entrepreneur, and knows what it means to walk that path. Michael Otto] From my own experience I can say that thoroughly entrepreneurial characters generally have a visionary element to them.

Additionally I believe that a great leader is also characterised by his commitment to society and environment. Employee engagement means you have to get under the skin of every employee, becoming a chief meaning officer, giving your team purpose, getting everyone on the same page. As for customer satisfaction, everyone must understand in their bones that only satisfied customers create growth and long-term business success.

If you get the first two right, the third, cash flow, will come naturally.

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If you say something is important, you have to mean it. You have to put time, investment, rewards, and resources behind it.


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In our school JWMI we currently have 1, students online with an average age of 38, all of whom work within companies. Many traditional MBA programmes are in essence, a graceful way to change jobs. Most discussion about leadership is about styles and characteristics, but the most important thing is having a clear sense — and a right sense — of where you want to go. Dangerous leaders can be charismatic and effective at mobilizing people, but take them down a wrong path.

So the questions for strong leaders who are trying to do the right thing are: Do you know where you want to go? Number two, you need to have the tools that allow you to build followership. Preaching about one style or another is probably not all that effective. What are the differences in leading a high growth young business versus a public company? Over the time I was at Microsoft, it went from basically a start up, getting an idea and a plan coherent enough to get lift off, and then once you have lift off revving the engine and revving up the hamster wheel.

In a bigger company you get good at spinning the wheel, but when you decide to do something new, that takes one of two forms. In that second case, you need to do what I call getting in the weight room, build new muscles so you may be ready to pounce, see opportunities that are not yet in front of you, build skills in new areas. Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new.

They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing. That said, some ideas are just really good ideas. Airbnb is a good idea, Uber is good idea, Snapchat just takes off… people love it. The data behind the app, and what we do with the data? I made a check-in service called Dodgeball before Foursquare, it was moderately successful and we sold it to Google.

When we started Foursquare, we knew we needed more people to use it- so we put game dynamics into it. We knew early on, however, that the big play was in the data and what you could do with the data. I had just left one of the most competitive markets in the world- the Cola Wars. In a decade, Pepsi had gone from being outsold Someone wins, someone loses…. Here was Steve Jobs and Bill Gates- two young guys, under the age of 30, talking about their noble cause of empowering knowledge workers with tools for the mind, making them incredibly productive, and helping them to change the way things were done in our world; creating entirely new industries in the process.

There are very few people who genuinely have the leadership capacity to build businesses like this.

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In this decade it would be people like Elon Musk , Larry Page , Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg — people who are changing the future by creating new industries. In , just 10 years ago, Eastman Kodak made the decision to double-down on their silver halide film processing business. They were in a brutal, competitive battle with Wal-Mart who had entered the single-use film camera market, and were outselling Kodak in their particular channel. Kodak decided to become more aggressive with their pricing, and doubled-down on silver halide film.

Kodak had been living in linear-time, something which is intuitive to most of us, where we think in days, weeks, months, years…. The world had already started to shift when people like Steve Jobs started to take-advantage of the fact that you could connect the dots, and take a mobile device running on a 3G network, and use that to send photographs. When Evan Spiegel created Snapchat , he saw photography in an entirely different way from Kodak; he was from a different generation. Evan saw that smartphones could take photos to use for communications, not for archiving into an album.

He turned Snapchat into something young people loved! This derivative industry has led to its own multi-billion dollar companies. The ability to understand derivative effects of major new industries that are being created by these exceptionally brilliant handful of leaders is very important for entrepreneurs.

These derivative effect opportunities for entrepreneurs are going to increase because of the exponential growth of these 5 or 6 major technologies which are compounding in growth at an accelerated rate. To grow, a business needs to be filled with the very best people- but for young businesses in their infancy or startup phase, attracting these people can be extremely hard. The people you attract to your business are part of its evolution; as you become more successful, you are able to get better people, which in turn makes you more successful, and so on. For some businesses, those that have a very unique selling proposition, like a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the commercial aspect of running the business is made a lot easier by having a desirable proposition right from the start.

To achieve the very best price, while remaining profitable and giving people great value does, in itself, present challenges. You have to negotiate the best deals you can with manufacturers… you have to have very slick internal operations to keep your cost of sales and operation down… but you have to still pay your people really motivational salaries and bonuses!

This last piece is important. You cannot run a business without great people, who are incentivised to be great; and so, you must protect them, and pay them appropriately. There were times when we were recruiting thousands of people in a year, and the stress and pressure that places on everything and everyone is immense. Growth puts your management systems, operational systems and accommodation under pressure. How do you start a business with one or two people like I did and grow to a hundred? One of the many challenges, for example, is accommodation.

Where is it going to come from? And then when you go from a hundred to a thousand, where do you put all those people!? Then there are all the other challenges like management systems, HR, IT systems, culture, cash flow and so many more. These are all huge dilemmas for growing businesses.

Just keeping the infrastructure of your business scaling and running efficiently is a formidable challenge. I scaled the business from just me, to 10, people some 20 years later. Scaling and keeping control of that business was practically impossible- I failed many times, but managed to succeed overall through sheer determination, hard-work and having very, very good people.

As my business was growing, I looked at the failures more than the successes which are easy to take for granted. As a business owner, I was probably criticised for being somewhat failure-focussed. I used to say to all my people that yes- we can celebrate our successes, and we have to succeed, but the failures are what will sink the business or hold it back. Successful companies that scale stand out because of their people! You have to have incredibly talented people leading the company, and within it. Noble cause businesses like Apple, Facebook and Tesla are doing more than just making money.

Some of this came through the acquisition of businesses like WhatsApp and Instagram, but a lot came through organic growth. Facebook is a story of exceptional leadership. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg perfectly compliment each other, and the business has been able to attract truly exceptional talent- not just people who code but people who know how to run and scale businesses.

As more and more people buy smartphones for example, you can imagine the number of sensors on these devices is increasing. Thirdly, they computing power on these devices is approaching a marginal cost of zero as you have massive computing power in the cloud, on demand. When you have massive bandwidth, massive computing power and complex sensors, you can start to do things that were never possible before.

For example, why is it that we cannot easily tell whether someone has a bacterial or viral infection, this should be a trivially easy thing for us to do! Space is also hugely exciting at the moment. A small group of individuals are doing things that previously could only have been achieved by superpowers.

My venture Moon-Express is planning to land on the Moon next year, and just think about that — it means a small group of people have suddenly become the fourth superpower.


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Under 10 million dollars. The biggest cost of leaving Earth is the weight of the fuel. What if we can create fuel-depots in Earth orbit, on the Moon and elsewhere. What I can do for businesses is remarkable, I have a huge team that supports social media, I can open doors for entrepreneurs that have been shut to them for years, I bring a lot of value to the businesses I work on and I want that reflected in what I put in. The first thing for me is, how can I help that person? How can I make a difference? The first thing I worry about is this: I have a great team working on this alongside employees and interns in marketing, due diligence, accounting and every aspect of the deal.

We work really hard before we pull the trigger, and when we pull the trigger, we go full bore behind it. What matters is that interests are aligned- if they are? The question is this: Can I add value? And do they want me to add that value? All of the things we do are unique. Recently for example, one of our deals was Plated, was sold to Albertson.

We were very actively promoting that company, and meeting with the CEOs of their competitors. Because the great thing about being a shark is everybody returns your call. People sit there crying in front of me. The real world is much tougher than Shark Tank. When I was younger I spent lots of time running around outside, climbing trees and getting into adventures. My early experiences with nature really helped shape my personality and thirst for exploration. I have a very busy mind and being outdoors and surrounded by nature gives me time to think, put things into perspective and it encourages me creatively.

When I was at a stage in my life where I had the time, I started travelling to the North- initially to the Faro Islands, and then onwards to Iceland and Greenland. During one of my trips to France, I met someone who was organising trips to the North Pole, and after that- there was no looking back.

How do you stay productive and manage your mental-health and wellbeing as an entrepreneur? Setting goals is also something I find helpful. I always have one with me to journal my thoughts and set goals as soon as they come to me. By writing things down, I find them easier to process into action. The key to productivity and mental health of course is to enjoy what you do and remember why you do it. A work-life balance is so important and balancing doing and being has been a lifelong lesson for me, but something I finally feel comfortable with.

Alongside the meetings, appointments and emails, find time to be inspired, take in the beauty of the world and laugh with your loved ones. Why let it even get negative if you can avoid it? My basic philosophy has always been to accentuate the positive and delete the negative. On a personal basis, that means integrating yoga, meditation, massage into my daily life.

Recognizing that nutrition and food matter. That if you treat your mind, body and spirit well, you have a better chance at reaching your potential, however you define and dream it. Many people can find uncertainty in just one area of their lives as a problem, but for me — I thrive in that world, even when many areas of my life are uncertain.

Entrepreneurs learn to switch-off to a degree, but that stress has to go somewhere. There are many times you wake-up in the middle of the night with thoughts running around, and you need to be able to manage that. I go to the gym regularly, and try to do as much socialising and motor cycle riding as I can, anything to take my mind off things. Why does our modern hyper-connected workplace feel more lonely, and more isolated than ever?

To give you some context, only a handful of businesses since had achieved the scale necessary for this to be a problem; The Hudson Bay Company, East India Company and their peers. Apart from them, most businesses were a single merchant, with maybe one or two people, — who broke down complex tasks into small pieces. That approach then informed the way that larger companies such as General Electric and Ford broke complexity down into simple, repetitive tasks for their production line.

Complexity is underestimated,even by the people who are in the thick of it. Our meetings are very fast paced and people are constantly interrupting each other. Slack enables this by giving transparency: Technologies like Slack can be an instrument for leadership, to help achieve shared vision and goals. The spreadsheet was such a massive step forward for finance, accounting and sciences.

Computers have an infinite amount of patience, can do many things simultaneously, have perfect memories unlike humans , and can compare massive sets of data in a way that is just not cognitively possible us to do. At school, I was just at the cusp of the change where it became not just recommended but mandatory that you bring a calculator into the math class. We started doing math that was more complicated. We still had to learn addition and subtraction and long division, but as we developed a more sophisticated understanding, we realised we could control these tools that saved us a lot of repetitive work.

They often happen decade by decade. The workplace of the future is hard to predict specifically, but one thing we can predict is that we will increasingly rely on human intelligence and creativity as opposed to human capacity to perform repetitive tasks. It helps to have a cofounder or two. Have a group of founders you are able to share and learn from each other.

Raise money from investors you trust, so you can share your struggles with them. Be wary of support groups that are just purely optimistic cheerleaders. You have to be resilient to succeed in business. You have to, face yourself in the mirror in the morning and get ready to face the day ahead. Our employee satisfaction was so high was that nobody ever got surprised.

In a company, people have to know where they stand. You need that mastermind network around you- those are the individuals who can prop you up, because being an entrepreneur is a journey with so many highs and lows. Listen to friends and family — they often have great ideas and can offer invaluable advice.

I always carry a small notebook to jot down thoughts, ideas and conversations I have with people when travelling or working. The idea to start an airline came when I was stranded in the Caribbean and decided to charter a flight out — I sold seats to the other stranded passengers to pay for the charter. In the next 10 years, we will all head into unknown territory as we face a vast increase in our demand for energy, yet remain worryingly over-dependent on oil. If entrepreneurs go into the field of renewable energy for the right reasons, along the way they are likely to create some very exciting new technologies and successful new businesses.

But entrepreneurial ideas can come from anywhere. They can come from recognizing where the pain points, the bottlenecks, and the inefficiencies are. They can come from late-night conversations with friends, or from random eureka moments. But for me and for Baidu, one source of entrepreneurial ideas has been the need to serve the underserved population. Serving the underserved is a real impetus for innovation. It actually poses technology challenges. A great example of this is speech input for mobile phones. Some entrepreneurs generate their ideas when they are pursuing something entirely different.

The Hotmail team was going to be a listing service for the internet before they decided to do web based email and viral marketing came from me! The Skype team started out at Kazaa doing file sharing with music before they decided to go after global telecommunications. Some entrepreneurs just get frustrated with the company that they are working for because they believe the company should be going in another direction. Some entrepreneurs are really good engineers pursuing a fun hobby. I know that was true with Yahoo. The very second you no longer amaze the world, it all tumbles down. It is quite probable that in the future this will contribute to volatility.

In private equity, we mostly rely on companies that generate revenue. We have a good team at Interros coming up with different scenarios for concluding interesting deals. As an example — the acquisition of a pharmaceutical company. It is a promising industry, and it is a business that creates something useful, namely medicines and vaccines. I like to work on business ventures that bring something useful to people.

At the same time, we look for high-margin industries. You need look no further than the Fortune companies….

Very large companies have died and been replaced by innovators; that used to take a lot longer…. Companies used to survive , years or more…. Talk to any consumer that feels ripped off by any process, and that area of our lives will change and be disrupted. The easy one I can point to is the real-estate industry. That will change… That will become based on merit, effort and technology will help tremendously. Anywhere we feel frustration, constriction or see unfair markets — we are likely to see significant change.

A great company needs to have an excellent product or service at its core; needs strong management to execute the plan and a good brand to give it the edge over its competitors. People are at the heart of all Virgin businesses. Often entrepreneurs can create a good product and a brand but need to bring in management to help expand and create a truly great company. Success comes not from IQ but from values, passions, willingness to learn, motivation to improve, and dedication. Focus is not at all easy. There are countless temptations along the way, and often an entrepreneur will waver and be tempted to pivot to another opportunity.

For Baidu, in our crucial years, we resisted the siren song of things like wireless value-added services and games, which many of our Chinese peers were seduced by. It may have meant good short-term revenues, but it took them off mission while we continued to stay very focused on search. Every company is going to experience the ups and downs, and be plagued by all manner of troubles and problems. But if you hew to your ideals and believe in your future, that can go a long way toward getting you through the difficult stretches. I would also add that a strong core company culture is really important.

Reliability means that every Baidu employee brings a spirit of professionalism and we expect and deliver nothing short of excellence. Narayana Murthy] The first attribute of a great business is longevity; that is why I have tremendous respect for companies that have been in business for a long time such as IBM, GE, Unilever and Philips. Commercial longevity is about successfully navigating through peaks and troughs. Longevity is about dusting your knees when you fall down and continuing your journey. It is also the ability to make a difference to society on a sustained basis. Great businesses also share the ability to earn the goodwill of society which, after all, is the most important stakeholder in any corporation.

Because, society contributes customers, investors, employees, bureaucrats, and politicians…. Society creates the culture in which a corporation operates, and without the goodwill of society, you will not have goodwill from your customers, employees, investors, bureaucrats and politicians! Great businesses always try very hard, through all parts of their operations, to earn more sustainable goodwill from wider society. Great companies have smart revenue and expense forecasting algorithms, which obtain data from the trenches, apply good mathematics, statistics, and, therefore, make realistic forecasts for the next quarter.

Once you have made forecasts, your sales people will have go into the field, convince their prospects, and make the sale! Once the sale is made, your manufacturing people will have to manufacture the required products with the right quality, on time, and within budget. Once the manufacturing people produce what is required, and have delivered it successfully to the customer, the finance people will have to raise invoices on time and collect money on time.

Great corporations try to create as much annuity business as possible. If you have annuity business, your selling becomes easier. Your sales effort for a given revenue becomes less. Great corporations make money hand over fist. Because, they focus on providing value to the customer. Their main concern is not the end sale-price, but the value they bring to their customer. They worry about value-leverage… That is, the ratio of value delivered to the price charged. Price is what you pay and value is what you get. A great corporation is always concerned with providing better and better value for a given price.

The value-leverage in the first case is 2, and in the second case 2. So, it is a win-win. As long as corporations focus on value-leverage, they will be more and more profitable. A great corporation identifies the risks to their business in every dimension of its operation. Some of these risks will be micro and some will be macro. Such corporations take timely action to reduce those risks. At Infosys, we have identified a large number of of risk parameters.

We review some of them weekly, some monthly, and some quarterly. We take timely action to mitigate such risks. Great corporations create a sense of ownership, pride, passion and commitment in the minds of every employee. Our objective at Infosys is to ensure that our employees who leave our offices mentally and physically tired at 6pm, return the following-morning, physically and mentally energised to add even more value to our customers.

Great corporations create pride of ownership in the minds of their customers. For example, when you carry an iPhone 6, you are very proud to show off the fact that you own it. Because, Apple has created a sense of pride of ownership in your mind through their focus on innovation, quality and value for money.

Great corporations create this sense of ownership, pride and passion in every stake-holder. Elumelu] I run my businesses according to the principles of Africapitalism, which calls for businesses to commit to development through investing in long-term ventures that increase economic prosperity as well as social wealth. This means that a successful business is one that creates value for its stakeholders but also makes a long-term, sustainable contribution to the communities that it supports and that support it.

It is never instantly obvious who will fail and who will succeed, it can sometimes be two years or more whether a business will be hugely successful- and companies go through a number of changes and stages. As the company grows, they then have to learn how to scale through their customers, and longer-term they need to understand their financial structures, and how you take a business from tens of people to hundreds, or thousands of people- potentially globally.

A direct reason to be passionate? There is no crystal-ball about what will work. If we look at Uber, there are lots of stories about investors that knew it was going to work, but it was just one of companies where I liked the business and liked the founders, and where I invested. But be very careful with the pitfall of over-expansion; and make sure you have the right team to tackle new ventures; 5 As a businessman, the responsibility for the business is yours, not your subordinates. I have done all I can here.

There is nothing else I can bring to this venture, this project is done and should be sold off. Let me compare it to a book: In other words, to exit the project, either by taking the company to the equity market through an IPO, or by selling it to an investor in the industry who will be able to bring something of his own to the project.

The ability to define the appropriate moment to exit a project is one of the most important contributors to success. Of course it is very important to have the right people on board and a good business case. Essentially I believe that only those companies which are aware of their responsibility towards the environment, their employees and business partners will achieve long-term economic success. Business should serve the good of mankind — not the other way round. I am enthusiastic about companies that clearly structure their business activities in line with these principles.

Which sector they are active in and how much profit they make at the end of the day are of secondary importance to me. They need to add value for all stakeholders. Its about the belief in a product and the desire to be part of a brand. There is an extreme beauty to a diamond.

The emotion that these stones bring is infused throughout everything we do. Imagine the mineral wealth on planet Earth, and then realise that Earth is just a tiny blue dot in our whole galaxy… which is just one galaxy in a universe, which could be part of many universes. Everything we think is rare on Earth, is abundant in space. If you go back several-centuries, travel was only for the rich. Flying anywhere on Earth is accessible. In the future, people could take weekend trips to the Moon!

Finally we could go on Honey moon. Now, what do entrepreneurs do when faced with monopolies? They go fight them head-on! What if we change the paradigm…? What if we make diamonds a commodity…? If you go back in time, people thought it was impossible to run a mile in under 4 minutes. And you know what? Roger Bannister showed you could run a mile in under 4 minutes, and 13 people did that the following year. Once you show people something can be done, the only thing that limits them from then on is their imagination.

Take a look at the iPhone for example. When it first came out, people thought you could never have a phone without a keyboard, it was a ludicrous idea… and now look where we are. What people do when you give them capability is beyond imagination. Our job is to show what is possible, inspire people, and inspire entrepreneurs to build applications on top of that. Space and the internet have a lot in parallel.

If you go back and look at the early-internet, there were three sets of companies created. Firstly, there were companies who laid-down the fibre and built the connectivity. Secondly there were people who provided the last-mile solutions, more commonly known as Internet Service Providers. Thirdly, there were companies who built applications on top of this infrastructure. In my world, not knowing something makes someone the most dangerous person when it comes to disruption. Every company I have ever started has been in an industry that I knew nothing about.

For example, people ask me how I can possibly get into the healthcare market when I know nothing about it! Our brains are great pattern-matchers. You can never make it 10 times better. That kind of giant-leap comes from thinking in abstract terms, and those are the solutions which are often laughed-at, then dismissed, and then seem obvious. Michael Otto] Family businesses differ from publicly listed companies in that the latter prioritise generating shareholder value, while the former usually build a long-term, value-orientated business strategy and a highly individual company culture.

An advantage the ability to make decisions fast. As a family entrepreneur I am strongly committed to values such as integrity, credibility and reliability, commitment to society, environmental protection and fairness — not only towards our customers but also towards our business partners and employees. These values characterise our company. Besides this, in the Otto Group we value top-management continuity very highly — either by a member of the family or a by a good management.

You cannot force that deep passion, it is a special moment when you first see it in someone close to you, it brings you together and you realise then how strong a family business can be. Michael Otto] We are represented in three completely different business sectors — Retail, Logistics and Financial Services — which means that fundamental, cross-sector challenges mandate the internationalisation and digital transformation of our businesses, along with their very different demands.

Besides this, our company culture is characterised by the high degree of independence and self-responsibility that our individual subsidiaries enjoy. The two most important things to stimulate entrepreneurship are a peer-based environment where there are other examples of entrepreneurship, and access to capital. Silicon Valley has experienced an incredible level of success over the past years. There has been a strong tradition of entrepreneurship, a willingness to try things and fail, and generations of entrepreneurs who understand that supporting the generation after them is important.

The valley has also had incredible access to capital to support that risk-taking…. Half of that went on taxes, but I put the other half towards investing in other companies and start-ups. It can quickly create a big audience of people who support entrepreneurs with their attitude and their dollars. In Silicon Valley, we have the luxury that expertise and dollars come from the same pocket. I have to say, one of the secret-weapons of the best entrepreneurial ecosystems is a sustained culture of mentorship and giving first, and giving back to the community.

Conversely, many sub-standard ideas have received a large amount of attention precisely because someone forced us to. A new idea, particularly around a new technology, is usually going to be quite primitive in its first form compared to what it later looks like.

2018 ESR Leadership Conference

Look at the first cars or the first airplanes— the speed of the first flight at Kitty Hawk was about seven MPH. One man traveled less than a mile and made history. Almost 60 years to the day, the first flight of the Boeing carried people at MPH for 14 hours. It would have been impossible for the crowd at Kitty Hawk watching this rickety plane to imagine that within a single human lifespan, flight would be changed entirely. Often an idea will find its fullest expression long after the original iteration, and perhaps not for the same reasons.

These intangible qualities are precisely why entrepreneurs and inventors absolutely need passionate advocates. They are able to look beyond abstract ideas or early prototypes to see what an idea could become. They envision the world needs something that the rest of the world may not realize it needed before. Dyson is always looking to invent new and exciting technologies. Take our latest V6 cordless range. I have always believed in engineering technology from the inside out. Every piece of technology at Dyson must be functional first and foremost. Our new Dyson Eye robot vacuum cleaner is a case in point.

I wanted to create a robot that was an efficient vacuum cleaner, not something that was a gimmick that just bounced off walls and cleaned randomly. Rather, we wait until it is perfect.