Women Unwise

Tried and tested ways of goading your man to say to another woman: “My wife does not understand me!”

1) “Honey, not tonight. I have a headache.” – Age-old classic that can dampen even the most ‘uplifted spirit’, shall we say! He’s done it all – brushed his teeth, lit up aromatic candles, cooked your favorite meal, even put on the most romantic music in the house. You lead him up the garden path, get into your stroppy black thing that would make Anne Summers baulk,  belch your way through the meal, even do dirty dancing with him and just when it’s time for action, you utter these immortal words! Wow, woman, what perfect sense of timing!!!

2) “I’m not your mother” – Use the following in this order and watch the marriage fall apart like a deck of cards – “You expect me to wake up early morning and cook for you?”; “You don’t even say thank you for my effort”; “You have the cheek to say i don’t make parathion like your mother?  HELLLLOOO!! Don’t you get it I’M NOT YOUR MOTHER!!! AND DIG THIS, I DON’T EVER WANT TO BE LIKE HER”!!! Seriously, which husband can resist such a lavish display of filial affection!!

3) “I am not the most important thing in your life anymore” – But you are. You’re his cook; his maid; his vibrator, sometimes even his dirty socks. Before marriage, you loved being all these things to him. This was your way of worming into his life and making yourself indispensable. But now you don’t. And you expect him to understand.  He won’t. Whoever told you husbands have lateral thinking???

4) “You’re not the man I fell in love with” – Actually he is. He’s exactly that man – loud, messy, unkempt, fatty, belch, a tad smelly and a lot insensitive. It didn’t matter when you guys were dating, you were so sure you could change all of that and make him a true blue toy-boy once the sat phrase happened! But hell, it’s your failure that you were not half the woman you thought you were. But will you admit it? Duh?? NO way, so this banshee wail is your classic (un) mating song!!.

5) “Why can’t you be like my father / your best friend / my brother-in-law / my best friend? They are such lovely husbands.” – My god woman, surely Shakespeare should have learn script writing from you! What motivating lines!! If getting a ‘rise’ out of your husband was what you intended, you sure did, only thing, another woman benefited from it!!

6) “Even after all these years, you have no clue what I want” Poor jerk, how will he when you don’t?  Last time you demanded foreplay but a month later when he followed the script, you wanted to him to cut to the chase. Somewhere in his pea-sized brain there was this stored nugget of information from long ago that you liked ice-cream, so one evening, he decided to buy  you Death by Chocolate. And misguided soul that he is, he actually expected you to “do nice-nice” to him, maybe with the chocolate? But who said you were predictable? Smothered him you certainly did, just not where he was expecting it ! Poor sod, how could he have known that the phrase “damn you do and damn you don’t” was coined just for people of his ilk???

This article first appeared here http://www.marriage-wise.com/blog/women-5-ways-to-throw-your-marriage-down-the-drain. It was a guest blog written for a friend, in response to his article – Men: 5 ways to throw your marriage down the drain!

Why should big dogs bite ?

This is an open letter to all the big guys from the industry. My pranams to all of you.

Whenever we talk of creating a conducive habitat for entrepreneurs, typically the stake holders that we include are investor, government, and civil society. Rarely do we include the large and established players in the business, like yourselves. How come you are exempt from this key responsibility? Shouldn’t you be my role model? Aren’t you ideally in a position to be the best mentors for newbie entrepreneurs like me? I’m making out a case on two counts.

Firstly, let’s say I am a new entrepreneur and have an enterprise facing product. My customers are the big guns like you in the industry, both Indian and multi-national. I know I have a brilliant product and I am sure it will enhance the intrinsic value of your products. My product demo has been successful, and I’m sure we are getting the contract. My euphoria lasts only till I see the terms of the contract. Unreasonable SLA’s, impossible non-compete clauses, outrageous pricing and a completely one-sided, no-holds-barred contract. 

As a thinking human being, I should actually shred it into pieces and throw it in the dust bin. But as an entrepreneur, I do the most irrational thing, I go ahead and sign this preposterous agreement.

Why did I do it? I did it knowing that if I didn’t, I would lose you, my customer. And you have so much brand equity in the market that I simply can’t not have you.

As we start servicing the agreement, I realize that the biggest killer in the contract is not just the price but the payment terms. It says clearly that it is 180 days after delivery. So to make sure I keep my end of the bargain, I borrow on my credit card, cajole other vendors to give me credit, and generally drain myself and my fledgling company dry so that I can deliver the product on time. On day 180, when I’m waiting anxiously for my cheque, comes my first moment of disenchantment. The signatory has gone missing in Africa, the invoice has got misplaced, the person who was to have processed the invoice has left the company, there are audit objections as approvals were not taken before placing the order, and the nastiest of them all, that you are not happy with my product. But up until yesterday, you told me that you were delighted with my product, says poor hapless me!

To make matters worse, I am also told, very patronisingly I must say, that if i want to succeed as an entrepreneur, i have to be prepared for such delays!

Why should I? Why can’t you big guys be supportive of entrepreneurs like me and not make it your mandate to push me to a corner? Why can’t you have separate policies that are friendly to people like me? Why can’t this be your new diversity policy, maybe even your new CSR? Mind you I’m not asking for any favours. I’m only asking you to be reasonable because we are part of the same habitat where we are all interconnected and if you annihilate me today, you are going to die tomorrow.

My second case is that as a big guy in the industry, why don’t you be my mentor? Instead of either dismissing me as competition or ignoring my existence, why don’t you take me under your wing and nurture me? Not only will my chance of success improve dramatically but you are my best hedge against risks! I don’t want you to give me money, I want you to share your experience and learning with me so that I do all the right things to build a great enterprise. Won’t you be happy if I succeed? And won’t it be in your interest that I succeed? Can’t we all happily co-exist?

To misquote John Donne, no entrepreneur is an island, entire of itself. Every man is part of the main, a piece of the continent. Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Yours humbly,

A rookie entrepreneur 

The Second Life!

I’m often asked why there aren’t as many women entrepreneurs as there should be. Over the years my answer has varied. Sometimes I say, it is because we play it safe. At other times I have said, it is because we don’t have enough faith in ourselves. But having mentored a number of women (as a percentage it is still miniscule), I have arrived at both a new explanation and a new solution. Before marriage, parents frown upon the idea of their daughter becoming an entrepreneur

(I mean a serious one), because god knows where her prospective husband is likely to be located and if she invests time, effort and money into building her business, who will run it when she goes away? So parents tell her that she should hold her horses till she gets married.

Then marriage happens. It takes her a while to settle into the groove and if in the meantime she discusses her entrepreneurial ambition with her husband, he, his parents and her parents will all tell her, have a baby first, then do it.

The baby comes. Five years go by, the baby is now in school, her ambition resurfaces. Let’s finish off with the second baby, says the husband. And   then you can do whatever you want, uninterrupted. She falls for it yet again. The second baby comes, five more years go by.

This is a time ideally for women to become serious business owners, but I think many of us don’t because of one nagging fear. We have pretty much lost a decade, the business environment around us has changed dramatically and we are not familiar with it. How can we bring ourselves up to speed and compete with youngsters?

If only there was a refresher business course that would help women like us on our feet, there would be more women entrepreneurs.

I have identified three market segments here. All women in their late thirties, early forties,who want to bounce back and would like a course that will help them reconnect to the business environment that has since changed dramatically.

One is the woman who says, I have lost a decade but I want to go back to the corporate and play catch-up..

The second category is the woman who says, I don’t want to go back to the corporate, I want to be an entrepreneur. Not a baker or a candle-stick maker but I want to build a Facebook.

The third category is the woman who says, I neither want to go back to the corporate nor become an entrepreneur. My husband is MD of an MNC, so when I go out with him to office parties, I want to be able to participate in the conversation and not be a wallflower.

Bingo, three categories of focused women, educated, enterprising and well heeled. Big opportunity beckoning for an online-offline course. Anyone listening?

How to propose to your prospective customers!

Seriously guys it is no different from the way you do it with your prospective bride,- on bent knees, candlelight,  ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapton playing in the background, a beaming moon playing peekaboo from behind the clouds, waves crashing, the diamond ring sparkling as you slide it on her finger! The whole nine yards!

I keep saying this, as an entrepreneur, it is not enough if you are hungry. You need to make your market hungry too. Your existing customers should be on tenterhooks, waiting for your new offering, because they know you delight them with your innovation. Your prospects should be restless, waiting for your product, because buying your product is aspirational for them. If as an entrepreneur you don’t do this, you will only build a ‘me too’ company like many others have. No way an Apple.

Let me share what happened to us recently, when we wanted to buy a learning solution platform.  We reached out to those entrepreneurs who were big names in this domain as well as those who were recommended to us by friends. We reached out by mailing them, giving a brief description of what we wanted and asked them to meet us at the earliest.

In an ideal world, what should we expect? That there will be a queue outside our door of service providers, clambering over each other to make sure they bag us. Right? Wrong!

In a world which is sadly complacent, this is what happened :

One service provider decided that meeting customer face to face was passé, very old world. So he sent his demo CD by courier, and our proposal, without even meeting us to understand our requirement in its entirety, to our drop box. My personal intervention saying we were in a hurry and could someone please meet us so that we can take it forward, went ignored.

Finally I threatened that I was dropping this service provider (how can we drop someone who had refused to be picked up in the first place!), and my colleague somehow convinced them to come to our office for a meeting. A full blown discussion happened, we explained exactly what we wanted and what we did not want in explicit terms and we asked for a proposal by the end of the day. When the proposal came (about 48 minutes late, but given our past experience, we did not mind it at all), it had all the elements that we had clearly stated that we did not want, the payment terms were everything that we had said that we will not entertain, and even the time frame did not respect our deadline.

What were we supposed to do? Write a sharp mail saying you guys are deaf or what? Or trash it and move on?

The second service provider came back with a proposal laid out in a fancy format (it was so obvious that this was templatized to meet overseas prospects’ requirements). Just when we thought these guys have got it right, came the bombshell. According to their proposal, the technology was going to cost us much more than our content!! And, here’s the interesting twist in the tale- it was supposed to be open source!

Again, what am I supposed to do? The answer was obvious, do away with platforms, go cloud yourself! 

Which is exactly what we did.

If I was to react just as a prospect, I will simply say, these guys don’t care enough to acquire their customer. But if I put on my mentor hat, I feel miserable. I know that both these guys are start-ups, and there is no way they can afford to be complacent. Yet the hunger to close the deal was missing in both. In fact with one of them, I even offered a percentage of revenue share higher than what they had asked for till they gained confidence in our product, in lieu of a monstrous upfront payment. Yet, they didn’t push themselves to getting the order signed.

When I was discussing this sad state of affairs with a friend of mine, he added an interesting perspective. He said with Indian IT companies, their hunger is only for overseas customers. They will drop prices sometimes below their costs, enter into an SLA with ridiculous and one-sided terms with their clients, much to their own detriment, suffer angst and anxiety abundantly, but will not respect and treat well a domestic customer who’s knocking on their door with cash in hand. Imperial hangover of the corporate kind, eh?

When are entrepreneurs in India going to realise that one, the Indian customer is ready and willing to be seduced and two, that he needs to be wooed too?

*Reprinted from Entrepreneur India. 

Chatterpillar

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The second life!

I’m often asked why there aren’t as many women entrepreneurs as there should be. Over the years my answer has varied. Sometimes I say, it is because we play it safe. At other times I have said, it is because we don’t have enough faith in ourselves. But having mentored a number of women (as a percentage it is still miniscule), I have arrived at both a new explanation and a new solution.

Before marriage, parents frown upon the idea of their daughter becoming an entrepreneur (I mean a serious one), because god knows where her prospective husband is likely to be located and if she invests time, effort and money into building her business, who will run it when she goes away? So parents tell her that she should hold her horses till she gets married.

Then marriage happens. It takes her a while to settle into the groove and if in the meantime she discusses her entrepreneurial ambition with her husband, he,  his parents and her parents will all tell her, have a baby first, then do it.

The baby comes. Five years go by, the baby is now in school, her ambition resurfaces. Let’s finish off with the second baby, says the husband. And then you can do whatever you want, uninterrupted. She falls for it yet again. The second baby comes, five more years go by.

This is a time ideally for women to become serious business owners, but I think many of us don’t because of one nagging fear. We have pretty much lost a decade, the business environment around us has changed dramatically and we are not familiar with it. How can we bring ourselves up to speed and compete with youngsters?  

If only there was a refresher business course that would help women like us on our feet, there would be more women entrepreneurs.

I have identified three market segments here. All women in their late thirties, early forties, who want to bounce back and would like a course that will help them reconnect to the business environment that has since changed dramatically.

One is the woman who says, I have lost a decade but I want to go back to the corporate and play catch-up..

The second category is the woman who says, I don’t want to go back to the corporate, I want to be an entrepreneur. Not a baker or a candle-stick maker but I want to build a Facebook.

The third category is the woman who says, I neither want to go back to the corporate nor become an entrepreneur. My husband is MD of an MNC, so when I go out with him to office parties, I want to be able to participate in the conversation and not be a wallflower.

Bingo, three categories of focused women, educated, enterprising and well heeled. Big opportunity beckoning for an online-offline course. Anyone listening?  

Lessons in entrepreneurship

Lessons in entrepreneurship | Entrepreneurindia.in