Sivaram V. T.

• Eliminate clutter and distractions; Have a right blend of text, visuals and white spaces
• Follow a consistent layout
• Imply more by showing less
• Top menu will get more attention

Recently I was skimming through a magazine which was an issue on e-retail start ups in India.

If you look at all of them, you can easily notice that their business models are built around social media and group buy. These two are popular phenomena that rule the e-commerce market.

Another observation is that they are very focused. They target a sect of people rather than targeting all in the internet buyers. I think that is the way to find a niche in a crowded  market. Nevertheless, Indian internet market has a huge potential to grow.

Often, you may have to convey your new idea to stakeholders to implement them. It is a tricky task as you have get them to visualize what you dreamed in your mind.

First go is to prepare a vision statement. You vision statement should vividly describe what your idea is and it must appeal to the stakeholders implicit or explicit interests. Imagine that you have just 2 mins time to express your idea.

• Build a set of core philosophies which all the employees of the organization can adopt
• Have a well thought innovation engine set up which includes everyone to generate ideas for anything from process to products
• Building right organization culture is a continuous process
• Reward and reinforce the expected behaviour
• Measure & track

Excerpt from DARE magazine 2011 / June edition.

• Start small and think big.
• It is never too late or too early
• It is never a group mission among friends or partners.

Got a chance to go through this wonderfully written article on Business story telling - 7 deadly sins

Here's what I understood from it

• Give proper context before getting into the story
• Illustrate the story than just articulating it
• Avoid Jargon
• Connect the protagonist of the story with real-life characters
• Story should be authentic
   

Four necessary leadership characteristics - character, commitment, competence and courage.

•     Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
•     Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
•     Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
•     Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
•     Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance of dissent
•     Matrix Management: Unfocused organizational structure that results in divided loyalties and lack of direction
•     Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision
•     Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure), let to stew, and finally canned.
•     Stovepipe or Silos: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
•     Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component

Ref: Wiki

• As adage goes - "Change alone is constant"
• Condition the people involved in change to accept the above fact
• Do change only if it is needed
• Educate people to accept change as an opportunity to revitalize themselves
• Educate them how they will be after change, show them the long term benefits
• Reward them for successful change

Taken from DARE magazine May 2011 release.

• Join mailing groups such as Headstart, Barcamp, Open cofee club
• Follow blogs like pluggd.in, vc circle, tech crunch, etc
• Join associations like TIE, CIT

•     Question yourself: what are you really good at
•     Find your passion: start doing what you really really are passionate about
•     Find your niche: realize your niche, your domain
•     Add value: start working for not earning money, but to really add value in the early stages of your career
•     CREATE A STRONG NETWORK: NETWORK: NETWORK: NETWORK: there is nothing more powerful than a strong and relevant network. A powerful network takes you places
•     Credibility is CREDIBILITY nothing else. Period: work while creating a strong credibility from the very beginning

Excerpt from an article from Delhi TIE group.

Group buy concept is becoming popular in India. Though it is relatively new, there are quite a number of players in the market.

This is one of them I liked

http://www.dealsandyou.com/

• Death march: Everyone knows that the project is going to be a disaster – except the CEO -- so the truth is hidden to prevent immediate cancellation of the project - (although the CEO often knows and does it anyway to maximise profit). However, the truth remains hidden and the project is artificially kept alive until the Day Zero finally comes ("Big Bang"). Alternative definition: Employees are pressured to work late nights and weekends on a project with an unreasonable deadline.
• Groupthink: During groupthink, members of the group avoid promoting viewpoints outside the comfort zone of consensus thinking
• Smoke and mirrors: Demonstrating how unimplemented -and difficult to implement- functions will appear
• Software bloat: Allowing successive versions of a system to demand ever more resources
• Waterfall model: An older method of software development that inadequately deals with unanticipated change

Courtesy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

I read an interesting article on Capital funding in the thesmarttechie magazine.

The author says that in India, technology start-ups are gonna prosper in the areas like mobility, product making and offering services through SaaS model.

Author also gives tips for entrepreneurs in creating a business in technology space.

• Building a strong trustworthy team
• Creating un-replicable value to clients that can sustain for longer time
• Securing angel funding at the optimal time to validate and improve the business model
• Building scalable business

When you are working as a leader in an organization, you go about doing your duties forgetting the opportunities for you to improve yourself.

In fact every situation presents you an opportunity to improve yourself. You have to be self aware to convert these duties into learning programs.

Interesting article from CEO of Eka software solutions.

Tips which helps you in tasting success in making a software product business.

• Understand the market & customer
• Understand competition
• Start the sales process right in the beginning of software life cycle
• Broaden your value proposition as you move on 
• Synergize with channels to get early sales impetus

Every one would like to have tips. Isn't it?

Check this tipswallet.com.
It is a portal where you can find tips on anything. That is the motto of the site.

I find it useful but it has got very few tips pages. I hope, once it grows, it will be an useful site.

You can even share your tips there. They allow 2 backlinks for every tips article you submit. Pretty nice.

For my recent web application testing, I tried IE 8.0, firefox 3.6, safari, chrome and opera browsers. I was pleasantly surprised about the speed at which opera 10.61 loads the web pages.

It is on windows machine and started loving to browse all over again.Look of the browser is so neat and impressive. But I couldn't get my favorite delicious for opera :(

Now, am forced to use both firefox and opera.

Guys, it is worth trying opera for windows machine. Am sure you would like it.
http://www.opera.com/download/

Recently, I had to work with a manager who follows traditional style of people management. I could sense that he failed utterly in his management. So, I thought to write few words on people management in a business environment.

People management is not an easy job. There are 2 schools of thoughts in people management.
1] Task oriented
2] Relationship oriented

I am not gonna argue on which is the better style but youth prefer the 2nd one and hate the 1st one. It also depends on the context and your sub-ordinates.

The manager I had to face came to me 3/4 times a day asking about the status of the work. He never missed to exaggerate the complexity of the problems. I felt very difficult to work with him & I spent some time in analyzing the reason behind it. Here goes few of them.

1] He didn't want to take the bottom-line responsibility.
2] He had never given me confidence to take up the challenging task but he talks about the complexity of the problem many times a day. This induced fear in me which made me little ineffective towards the work.
3] I was not empowered to produce better result; Authority was not rightly delegated.
4] He didn't trust my abilities.

Thought to post these points here at least for my reference.

Are you a manager? Give your people little breathing space and trust them; You will see the visible difference!

I have developed few business ideas & couldn't implement them because of personal reasons. I put them on hold. To my surprise, in a period of very short time, I could see them implemented by someone else.

I was thinking about it for some time and felt that we cannot really curb the competition. It is true that we cannot kill the competition. It is the time of entrepreneurship & everyone is competing to fill the holes in the system we have.

Then, how do we survive if another business' offering is same as ours? Think about the value you deliver. It is not the traditional product / service you offer but the value you deliver to your customers. Innovation lies there. It could be a subtle change but good enough to create a magic.

Sometime back I read this article in DARE site, How to zig when others zag. I found this interesting.