Flipside to "Ten reasons to date an Entrepreneur"

Conversely!

In recent times, besides Kolavari di, the biggest viral rage on FB has been Caroline Watson’s blog post called ‘10 reasons to date an entrepreneur’. I like what you have written Caroline, but I thought I should have some fun looking at the flipside as well. What happens if these virtues become vices? The numbered lines are quoting Watson, the unnumbered ones are my irreverential take!

1 – Their sense of possibility.  To date someone who accepts no limitations means that there is no end to how much they are capable of loving you.

What happens if this becomes not how much they are capable of loving you but how many people they are capable of loving?!

2 – They see things in ways that others don’t and understand the power of thought and faith to offer an entirely fresh and inspiring view of a challenging situation.

I see myself and everyone sees me as an extroverted social animal, capable of taking charge in any situation. What happens if he sees me as someone so self-contained that I need no one, not even him? That I like to be surrounded but won’t lean on anyone? Will I still call it a fresh and inspiring view?

3 – They know the true meaning of commitment and persistence to an idea – a love – far bigger than themselves.

It is his meaning of commitment and persistence to an idea. What if that makes him inflexible, insensitive and oblivious to my meaning?

4 – They attract and draw into their world new people, experiences and opportunities that make every day of being with them a continual adventure.

What if I don’t like the roller coaster ride for breakfast, lunch and dinner? What if his very sense of adventure makes me nauseous and crave for the placid, the stable, the sedate and the sedentary? 

5 – Their vision for the world extends to a vision of long-term relationships and family life no less important than their cause, but as equal to and intrinsic to working together to contribute to the betterment of humanity.

When I promised to love him and keep him, it was for myself. When did I ever say I will share him with the rest of the world? I did not bargain for him to be canonized!

6 – They have seen failure and know that it is never what defines a man or a woman.  It is their ability to get back up, with integrity, humility and service to a higher cause that builds the character and loyalty necessary for life-long commitment.

An admirable trait for sure, but what if he refuses to see the writing on the wall every time he is repeating the mistakes ? Seriously can I applaud him that he dusts himself and gets up each time when my mind is screaming that he is an idiot and has made it a habit of falling ?

7 – They are passionate souls with tonnes of energy and a great love and lust for life…..and we know how important that is for the more, erm, intimate areas of a relationship…..!

Aah, how Mills and Boonish, I’m already week in my knees with unbridled passion ! What if all this great love, lust and energy has a tendency to lose its fizz, erm a little prematurely ?

8 – They know the value of partnership in getting things done, the power of teamwork necessary to build something of mutual value.

How noble of them, but what happens when they discard old partnerships just so they can trade the tried and tested for the new hottie?

9 – They know how sometimes you just have to hang in there, work really hard and keep trusting the original love for the vision/person and what drew you to it/them in the first place……and it will turn out with way more blessings than you can imagine.

You waited for the grass to grow. You nurtured the grass,  so  it could  grow into a veritable savannah. But what happens if it is so obsessively fenced that the cows are dying?

10 – They are visionaries who understand the power of love over fear.

What if fear is good, it keeps you on the straight and the narrow?

By

Prof. Nandini Vaidyanathan

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why do we become entrepreneurs ?

Reprinted with permission from Entrepreneur magazine, December 2010 issue

Why do we become entrepreneurs ?

I was recently invited by TED as speaker. I met the most amazing people who are doing game-changing stuff. I spoke on Why do we become Entrepreneurs and this was the text of my speech. Of course I used some very interesting visuals that were developed by my team to go with it.. The videos will be streamed shortly.

 

Why do we become entrepreneurs? This question fascinates me. Why do we let ourselves be drawn by this Circe, this enchantress, who tempts us, beguiles us, captivates us ? Whether we actually end up seducing her or not depends on our wherewithal, but attracted we certainly are.

Over these past five years I’ve mentored more than 500 entrepreneurs.  And I’ve heard all kinds of excuses as to why they became entrepreneurs. Please note, like Lawrence of Arabia, I’m making a distinction here between excuse and reason. Excuses have been many, some commonplace ones like : I like being my own boss or I like making loads of money. Some uncommon ones such as : I want to define my identity or I want to create meaning in society.  Some bizarre ones like that’s the only way I can avoid getting married or I can ask for dowry without feeling guilty. Some passionate ones like : not being an entrepreneur is not an option at all. Some touching ones like this 67 year old woman who came to me four years ago, and said I’m barely literate, I’m the wife of a very big industrialist and I want to be an entrepreneur because before I die, I want to see respect for me in the eyes of my husband and two sons.

All excuses that converge into one and one reason only, that we want to leave a footprint behind and in leaving a footprint behind, we are seeking immortality.

In the past we sought immortality through our sons. The Sanskrit word putra, which means son, comes from the word puth, which means hell, so putra means one who saves you from hell. In other words, one who makes you immortal. In the annual death ceremony, the son makes offerings not just to his father but to eight generations of his forefathers.  This certainly was a clever way to be immortal.

Times and climes have changed. Now we seek immortality by becoming entrepreneurs. Again, look at this beautiful Sanskrit word, Antarprerna. it means inspiration from within. That’s who we are, entrepreneurs, inspired from within, magical thinkers, like Prometheus who stole fire from the fire gods. And look at this sheer coincidence, both words look similar but their pronunciation is similar too, entrepreneur/antarprerna!

If entrepreneurs are inspired from within, does it mean they are born and cannot be made? I refuse to believe anything as profoundly impacting as this can be left to the caprice of a DNA. Can leaders  be made or are they all born? I think both. Some are born others are made. So too with entrepreneurs. How do you make them? By giving them knowledge, by up-skilling them and in doing both you are vesting in them the confidence to develop the right attitude. It’s like swimming right, you’re afraid of water till you learn about the pool, till you learn how to move your arms and legs, how to kick, how to hold your breath, how to stay afloat. Once you’ve learnt all of this, fear goes away and a water baby is born.

Why do we become entrepreneurs when we know that the lows are so abysmally low? Even at the risk of sounding facetious, I’d say it is because the highs are so intoxicatingly high that anything else is less and unacceptable. I mentor women in Afghanistan and Ethiopia in building micro enterprises and to say that life has been unkind to them is an understatement. In becoming entrepreneurs, they have now discovered the language of empowerment and the way they see it, nothing will make them give it up. The women in Afghanistan became entrepreneurs  when their husbands went to war over a decade ago. They haven’t seen them since. So one day I asked them : what happens if your husbands come back now and the answer was: Oh,  we will shoot them! Not because they don’t want their men back but because they don’t want their old life back.

The first time I went to Afghanistan, it was for audit purposes, my client had disbursed micro finance and although the payments had started coming in, he was worried that the money hadn’t gone where it was meant to. After a couple of visits, it dawned on me that if I did not mentor these women,  they may return the loan, but one or the other would happen. They would either lapse below the poverty line or remain livelihood entrepreneurs forever. I’m proud to say many of these women today have transformed their businesses from livelihood to opportunity based enterprises.

Why then aren’t more and more of us in India becoming entrepreneurs? I’ve figured it is because we don’t know how. It’s a strange paradox, the education system in India is such that it decimates creativity and independent thinking. To survive, you have to conform, and conforming means doing mindless, endless streams of activity by rote. And then suddenly when you’re done with your engineering or MBA and decide to become an entrepreneur, everyone tells you :  Aaah, you have to be creative!  So many challenges now, you have to be creative when they have killed your creativity, you have never worked in an organization but you’re expected to build one, you’ve just come out of school and you’ve not only no money but a hefty student loan, and you’re supposed to bootstrap your company, and you simply have no clue how to go about it. All you have is an idea in your head, passion in your heart and song on your lips, so what do you do?You find yourself a mentor. 

Who’s a mentor? To me it’s someone who can bridge the inexperience gap, who can open doors, who can hand-hold you, with responsibility, with accountability. There are times when my mentees call just to hear my voice. There are times when they call just so I can hear their voice. Nothing earth-shattering but just the comfort of knowing that there is someone whom you can go to, whose experience you can benefit from, whose insights you can make use of, someone who is on the same side as you, shares your vision, your passion, someone who will not say : your company, someone who will say, our company. And most important, someone who’s so well-connected that you get access to pretty much everything and everyone.

That’s why we founded our company CARMa, which is an acronym for Creating Access to Resources and Markets, so we can connect entrepreneurs to their natural habitat, thereby change their karma.  I’ve figured when there are more mentors in India, the head count of entrepreneurs will automatically go up.

Why did I become an entrepreneur? Let me tell you a story. There was this village school in Orissa that had introduced English language for the first ever time in class 5. The teacher was taking no chances so she had prepped her students for the final examination.. The question was: write an essay on the cow. So the teacher wrote the essay for them and asked them to learn it by heart. By some quirk, on d-day the question was : write an  essay on the tree!  Everyone was seen struggling with it. One creative kid decided to beat the system. He drew a cow and a tree, tied the cow to the tree and wrote : this is a cow. It is tied to the tree and my essay will be on the cow that was tied to the tree!

That’s me, my whole theory of entanglement is that everything in my life is to do with entrepreneurship. I spent twenty years in the corporate sector, pretty much on all inhabited continents and came back home five years ago. That’s when one of the biz schools invited me to teach and I thought, a little cockily if I might add, given the diversity of my experience, I should be able to teach pretty much anything. That’s when someone asked : why don’t you teach entrepreneurship, we never get anyone to teach that! And I said : why not. Even as I said it, believe you me, it was just another word in the dictionary. Little did I suspect that one day it would consume my whole being.

 

Why do we become entrepreneurs? So we can embark on this incredible journey of learning and discovering, not just of the world around us but of ourselves, of who we are, of strengths we’d never acknowledged, of weaknesses we never knew we had.

Why do we become entrepreneurs? So that when the white coats come to take us away, we can look them in the eye and say, hey! we’re the good guys, may our tribe increase!

Who is a mentor ? Reprinted with permission from Entrepreneur magazine

Ram (name changed) is your quintessential inventor-entrepreneur. Even to this day, he designs all his products and sells them. For 20 odd years, he built and managed his company successfully which had  now begun to experience entropy.

I was assigned as Mentor to Ram by the organization which facilitates investment access to entrepreneurs. For me this whole experience was exhilarating as managing Ram was a bigger challenge than managing his and his company's make-over.

When you have an entrepreneur who is egoistic, possessive and passionate, how do you mentor him? How do you tell him where he has gone wrong?

This was my biggest learning. That you don’t need to tell him where he has gone wrong.

So what do you do? What I learnt to do was get Ram to focus only on the future. We rarely spoke of the past, the good, the bad, the ugly and the indifferent. We almost managed to treat his company as a start-up without legacy issues.

As a result, Ram put together a very vibrant business plan, raised capital, and completely transformed himself from a being an inward-looking entrepreneur to a builder of a professional, catalytic, energizing, management team.

My take-away from this whole experience was some very interesting insights into the do's and don’ts of a mentor :

• Identify with your mentee and his company. You have to impress upon the mentee that both of you are on the same side. So I learnt to say” “our company”. I never said “your company”.
• Don’t do post-mortem. Don’t indulge in finger-pointing saying you did wrong up until now, because the sub-text here is up until now you were an idiot, now that you have me I will wave my magic wand and all your problems will disappear! NO !
• Your mentee is likely to be very opinionated, especially if he has had a successful track record. You don’t add to the mess by being opinionated. Your personal opinions and thoughts have no place in the mentorship equation. Your advice has to be purely situational, contextual, not the baggage that you may have come with. Because if you don’t, your mentee will have to battle your baggage in addition to his own!
• Mentors cannot have fragile egos. Mentors cannot tell the mentee : if you don’t do what I ask you to do, I will stop mentoring you. I had a mentee who would patiently listen to me, would never argue when I gave him my advice, and would go and do exactly the opposite. I learnt from him never to say “I told you so”!
• Mentors need not know everything. Neither they nor their mentees should think they do. Both mentor and mentee are work-in- progress. It should be a journey of like-minded pilgrims, not Buddha and his disciples!!
• It is very important to assure your mentee that you have no personal agenda, neither monetary nor psychological. It is this that inspires trust, and trust is a non-negotiable imperative on which the mentor-mentee relationship is built.

Even as I write this, it occurs to me that mentoring is a lot like parenting. It's built on trust, and by trust I don’t simply mean dependency but also honesty.

You should know what line neither of you can cross. You should learn to balance your opinion and your mentee's opinion with the exigencies of the situation. You should learn to step back, watch him make mistakes and remain nonchalant even as he gets ready to dust, pick himself up and continue onward. You should be prepared to learn alongside him, as there are times when there is a role-reversal. And most important, both of you should know all the time that his well-being is sacrosanct to you.

My biggest learning? Parenting and mentoring have made me a better person.

where have i been ???:(

my god, i missed these pages, i'm blogging after ages, not good at all. so i thought i should make up, as many of you know, since March i have been doing a regular column for the magazine entrepreneur. so i thought i'll post the articles that have already been published here so even those of you who don't read the magazine (you should you know, its very good) will get to read the article.

so here goes, this was the first article printed in the March issue, reprinted here with permission from the Entrepreneur magazine.

When the devil wears Prada : what it means to be a ‘woman’ entrepreneur

By

Prof. Nandini Vaidyanathan

Why is it necessary to qualify the word ‘entrepreneur’ in gender terms? Does the fact that men are from Mars and women are from Venus justify or warrant it? Are women entrepreneurs really so different from their male counterparts?

The answer is layered. It is necessary to qualify not only because women bring different skill-sets to the table but also because society looks at women entrepreneurs differently.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction (Picasso):

The first lesson in being a woman entrepreneur is that society does not take her seriously. A young mentee of mine recently had her company stall in an exhibition and she found that all the visitors to her stall either pretended as if she was part of the furniture or asked her if they could speak to her boss. Reason: the product was a hi-tech education software and no one believed there could be a woman entrepreneur behind it!

Therefore, the first mind-set that she needs to destroy is that women become entrepreneurs for time pass only, and that it is not a serious do-or-die career option for them.

Try? There is no try. There is only do or not do (Yoda, Jedi warrior):

The second lesson is that even though men don’t take her entrepreneurial aspirations seriously, in the event she fails, she is doomed forever. A mentee of mine was under tremendous pressure to raise capital for her company, without much success. In an attempt to de-stress her I told her that we had tried all possible avenues and she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. Her reaction was : ‘trying is not enough, we have to do it, if we don’t, my failure will become the pivot of every argument with my husband’.

Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. Try looking for fashion in an airport or history in a hardware store (Robert Wieder):

The third lesson is that it is alright for men to build a business around an idea which may be a ‘me too’ in the market, but the woman entrepreneur’s idea has to be necessarily a prime mover. Ironically, a woman is expected to think different even if the idea is as ancient as time, bring a whole new perspective, and look for opportunities in the least likely places.

A bell is a cup until it is struck (Wire):

In India, women constitute 48% of the population, yet their contribution to GDP is negligible. Historically, if a woman became an entrepreneur, it was because circumstances forced it on her. Today with education and empowerment, women are becoming entrepreneurs out of choice, yet, the male-dominant social order believes that women have lowly management skills, lack motivation and drive to earn and therefore do not take business seriously.

It is interesting that these perceptions contradict empirical evidence which show that women are better at multi-tasking, have ‘web-thinking’ abilities, in the sense that they have tremendous networking and leveraging capability (Helen Fisher), have high EQ- all of which are key ingredients for building a successful business.

Entrepreneurship defines the identity of men and women as no job can. But the one reason to gender-qualify it is that for men, identity comes with the territory; for women, it has to be ascribed by men.

interview on world entrepreneurship day in yourstory.in

http://yourstory.in/expert-talk/guest-column/3787-world-entrepreneurship-day-special-prof-nandini-says-entrepreneurship-landscape-will-change-phenomenally-in-the-next-five-to-ten-years-in-india#comments

look at the first comment from a reader, its a pity even in this day and age, people think entrepreneurship cannot be taught :(

a big thanks !

hey all you guys who left  your comments on my Tata Jagriti blog, a big thank you, and dont miss watching it every weekend on CNBC at 5.30 pm. it started last week and the Hyderabad panel  on which i had the privilege of meeting the yatris is being aired on 13th and 14th feb, catch the whole series, i promise you it will be worth it, cheers