How to Be Effective and Successful? Ten Guidelines for Entrepreneurship: Within and Without

London, UK - 1st October 2012, 14:55 GMT

Dear ATCA Open & Philanthropia Friends

[Please note that the views presented by individual contributors are not necessarily representative of the views of ATCA, which is neutral. ATCA conducts collective Socratic dialogue on global opportunities and threats.]

ATCA 5000 worked closely with the London Entrepreneurial Exchange recently to bring together nearly three hundred and fifty entrepreneurs and high quality sources of funding. As a result and by popular demand, we are now putting together a trans-national business angel investors club to invest in high growth entrepreneur-led businesses. Thanks to all those who took time out of their busy schedule from around the world to participate in this summit to create sustainable growth and employment via entrepreneurship. We appreciate your constructive and co-creative feedback.

As Ted Turner famously said, my son is now an 'entrepreneur'. That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job! What Turner did not mention is that entrepreneurs can collectively create hundreds of thousands of jobs and may be the only sustainable way to navigate out of the global financial crisis which began in August 2007 and has caused huge youth unemployment in high double digit percentages around the world.

In one-to-one conversations, the most often asked question was how to be effective and successful? The ATCA 5000 Research and Analysis Wing (A-RAW) and the mi2g Intelligence Unit (mIU) have attempted to answer that question both by looking back at highly successful personalities and conducting one-on-one interviews with top entrepreneurs mostly under Chatham House rule.

Successful Entrepreneurship: Within and Without

1. Love, Happiness and Excellence

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said that neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go into the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius! Identify the things we love to do, the things that give us satisfaction: that is where excellence and success lie! It is love which allows us to bring something new into creation. Once we identify what we love to do, in happiness we can ride on the coat-tails of that perpetual inspiration to find the spirit of our life's work! As Thomas J Watson said, if you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less-than-excellent work! [Ref ATCA 5000: What Makes People Happy? Ten Key Trends 3rd September 2012]

2. Fear and Greed

As Franklin Delano Roosevelt said the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. The flip side of fear is greed. Although we see greed and fear as separate, they are totally intertwined like the Caduceus snakes symbolising medicine. Once we remove fear and doubt from our way of thinking, we begin to address greed.

Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need [for more] without ever reaching satisfaction according to Eric Fromm. Once we have begun to recognise the obstacles posed by greed and fear, we are moving closer to the dimensions of love. We can then easily focus on keeping positive in every situation and we are likely to be surprised by how much our genuine effectiveness multiplies.

3. Humility and Character

We are undergoing multiple paradigm shifts and this requires a change in mindset both to be effective and successful. [Ref ATCA 5000: Symptoms and Signs of ‘The Shift’ 9th September 2012]

The preceding ages including the agricultural, industrial and informational have been overly reliant on the left-brain because they are driven primarily by logic. As Sir Rabindranath Tagore said, a mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it. The logic-driven ages have brought us to the dumb age in which we have cannibalised our environment and eco-system to make short term profits and ended up with an unbalanced financial system that has brought hitherto sovereign nations and individuals down on their knees by significantly increasing their debt. [Ref ATCA 5000: Creativity and Empathy: Complexity in the Conceptual Age? 11th September 2012]

As we enter the Conceptual Age, the left brain has to engage with the right brain, which is about all those soft skills that can help to spark a renaissance. [Ref ATCA 5000: Wisdom Renaissance: How to Embrace the Conceptual Age? Unite the Left Brain with the Right! 13th September 2012]

Being effective in attaining goals associated with our success is all about embracing humility, aligning ourselves with our core guiding principles, and anchoring ourselves to ethical values that remain universal and timeless forever and ever. [Ref ATCA 5000: What Do the Rise and Fall of Empires Suggest? 23rd August 2012]

4. Knowledge, Power and Imagination

Sir Francis Bacon said knowledge is power! We ought to gather as much information about anything and everything, which we love, as we possibly can. We need to study, understand, listen, learn and love so that we can develop all the requisite skill-sets! [Ref ATCA 5000: What Is Energy and What Role Do We Play Within It? 24th September 2012 and Holistic Quantum Relativity initiative]

Albert Einstein said that imagination is more important than knowledge. The more vividly and accurately we can imagine the success we love, the easier it is for the rest of ourselves and those with whom we are associated to follow through with us in delivering what we are passionate about.

5. Problem Solving, Persistence and Perspiration

Albert Einstein said any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... it takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction. Successful people encourage progress by being curious and solving problems by posing and answering a series of simple questions. No matter where we are or what we are doing, we ought to look around and try and think of the ways in which we can contribute.

As Calvin Coolidge said nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated failures. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. As Zig Ziglar said people often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing – that’s why we recommend it daily!

Don't give up! If the first attempt doesn't work, don't quit. Thomas Alva Edison said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. When asked about his 10,000 failed attempts to develop a storage battery, Edison responded, I have not failed; I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work! However, there is a case to be made for working smart rather than working dumb and not repeating mistakes.

6. Studying Success

Study successful people. Look around: Who has the success that we envision for ourselves? What are they doing that we are not doing? How do they approach life which is different from our approach? We have to become their apprentice in spirit. We ought to ask them for advice. Spend time around them, if we can. Learn from them via osmosis. By surrounding ourselves with successful people in those areas that we are passionate about, we can learn from their mistakes without making our own. When we are surrounded with people who are highly-driven, it can be extremely inspirational.

7. Accepting Failure

As John F Kennedy famously said, success has a thousand fathers, failure is an orphan. Understand that behind every success there are many, many failures and in order to be successful one has to learn to appreciate the value of failure. Sir Winston Churchill said success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm!

8. Be Courageous, Bold and Set Schedules

As Henry Kravis said a real entrepreneur is somebody who has no safety net underneath them. Take calculated risks. Let us step out of our comfort zones and let us not wait for opportunities to fall in our lap. Carpe diem! Seize the day! Yet, let us not be reckless. Success requires that we study our risks and make sure that the odds are in our favour before we take a leap by being bold! As Jack Welch said, if you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete!

Set a time-line by when we want to achieve our objectives! If we don't know by when we will achieve our objectives then we will never know when we will have achieved them!

9. Staying Focused

Sometimes it seems that this world is fraught with so many distractions that it is impossible for us to achieve our objectives. That is why we need to stay tightly focussed on achieving our goals. Whatever we are attracted to may not be useful or productive and we ought to be able to set the discipline to devote the least possible time to our most attractive distractions.

10. Defining Success

What is the meaning of success? We can't have success if we don't know what it means to us. Everyone views and defines success differently. We all need to set clear goals and be realistic in defining our success. How will we know that we are successful if we never set any goals? Our standards and parameters for success should be broadly quantifiable, or else we could spend our entire life chasing after a vague goal and all the success we achieve is never enough. When there are quantifiable goals in regard to our success, that can give us a sense of satisfaction, completion and closure making our journey towards being successful much more rewarding than it would be otherwise.

[STOPS]

What are your thoughts, observations and views? We are hosting an Expert roundtable on this issue at ATCA 24/7 on Yammer.

[ENDS]

Expert Roundtables

Expert roundtables are the newly launched ATCA 24/7 Q&A private exclusive club service. They seek to become the killer application in strategic intelligence by delivering an unprecedented competitive advantage to our distinguished members. They can only be accessed online at https://www.yammer.com/atca

Q1: How to become a privileged member of ATCA 24/7 to participate in the expert roundtables?

A1: i. If you are a distinguished member of ATCA 5000, ATCA Open, The Philanthropia or HQR affiliated groups you may be allowed to become a privileged member of this new and exclusive private club.

ii. If you are pre-invited, visit the private intelligence network -- PIN -- by going to https://www.yammer.com/atca [Note: In https:// 's' is for security and encryption]

iii. If you don't have membership of the PIN yet, email the mi2g Intelligence Unit at intelligence.unit at mi2g dot com for an exclusive invitation.

Q2: How to participate in the expert roundtables and get domain-specific strategic intelligence questions answered?

A2: Access the ATCA 24/7 Private Intelligence Network -- PIN -- online and ask or answer a strategic intelligence question, no matter how complex. Receive expert answers within 24 hours or get pointers from:

i. ATCA 5000 experts who are online;
ii. ATCA Research and Analysis Wing; and
iii. mi2g Intelligence Unit.

Q3: Why is the ATCA 24/7 Q&A Exclusive Club special?

A3: ATCA 24/7 has now created an exclusive private intelligence watering hole and expert roundtable at the highest level where interesting and sophisticated questions are being asked from around the world, and intelligent answers are being provided, almost always by experts who have deep domain-specific knowledge. Come and check out the exclusive club, take it for a strategic test drive, which sign-of-intelligent life are you waiting for?

To learn more about "The Expert Roundtable: ATCA 24/7 Q&A Club" email: intelligence.unit at mi2g.com and if you are already a member visit https://www.yammer.com/atca

We welcome your thoughts, observations and views. To reflect further on this subject and others, please respond within Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn's ATCA Open and related discussion platform of HQR. Should you wish to connect directly with real time Twitter feeds, please click as appropriate:

. ATCA Open

. @G140

. mi2g Intelligence Unit

. Open HQR

. DK Matai

Best wishes