This week, I spent 70% of my time in different meetings - in-house, business, social and professional. My friends ask me how can I manage my time to attend all meetings. Actually I don’t attend all meetings. I know, I can not. I always choose the meetings to attend. I have some criteria attending meetings. If I get invitations for meetings without agenda and I am not even briefed about the meeting, I am not much interested.

In meetings you may have two roles - host or participant. Either you are host or the participant, in meetings you have to be innovative and capable to promptly analyze the issues. Otherwise, meetings will slowly kill your valuable time. I can’t sit and just kill my time in long and pointless meetings. I think people should be concise and precise because people always have many other better things they could be doing with their time otherwise. I hate the meetings even with the agenda, when the agenda is long and people speak in length just trying to make their presence noticed. Meetings, like all other serious matters, require a certain sense of urgency and always move forward drawing the decisions and understandings.

I hate the meetings when people just sit around tired, drinking coffee after coffee and trying to keep going on one issue and always spending quite a lot time around that. Either you are host or the participant, you should try to be precise and try to put your decisive opinion forward. Don’t try to confuse the participants. Just don’t drag the meeting longer. Give the
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“The difference between failure and success is doing a thing nearly right and doing a thing exactly right”
- Edward Simmons

Giving focus on details builds the foundation for the excellence and that leads to successful work habits. Its very important that you put the excellence into what you do. Success is inevitable if you are innovative, you care your customers, and you make sure that all staffs in your firm participate in achieving the goals set.

In any kind of business, as in our everyday life, only excellence can make the difference. What is excellence? How do you measure the excellence?
Excellence is the completeness that you don’t leave off the last mile; you deliver the service to your customers efficiently and effectively, you always strive to push the envelop and your customers are happy and loyal; your deliverables are accurate and appropriately scheduled, and you are fully responsible for the complete job you undertake. When you strive to achieve excellence in business, customers comes to you for your service, they are ready to wait until you are free to take up their jobs, they spread your wisdom of excellence to others. Excellence is one of the the basic essence of “word of
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When I speak on the topic of success or failure, one or two people from the audience always ask me whether I have ever failed? Everyone of us has a story in us. Yes, I have failed many times. In my first few public speakings, I hesitated to tell about my failures. I feared that people will not believe my stories. Every time I failed, I always tried to learn from that. Thats why, I did not lost my will to win when I failed. The willingness in us makes the difference. But the results are great! Results may not be in terms of business success. Results can be in terms of mistakes learned along the way.

Things don’t always work out the ways you want. You test your concept, analyze, plan, project, design, implement and start perfectly but still fail at some point. How you take your failures will have more importance than the actual failures themselves.

Complacency is stagnation and procrastination. Failure, you can learn from and use for further improvement whereas complacency shields you to see it as a mistake (even though it is).

Besides many failures, I have been visibly successful as well. Because of the overwhelming success, many times I felt some sort of complacency grooming inside me. There have been times in the past that complacency almost ruined my life. I had achieved significantly more than I ever dreamed of. But I knew about it myself and I even talked to colleagues about this. I knew, I had to learn the hard way to be a better coach for myself. I learned, complacency is much more dangerous and harmful than failure. Read my previous blog post on Inner Quest.
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I am a regular reader of Seth Godin. I just read his post - The moment, a few minutes ago. Only Seth Godin can so nicely catch such moments of importance and describe in simplicity. I like how he communicates his ideas.

When you are sitting right on the edge of something daring and scary and creative and powerful and perhaps wonderful… and you blink and take a step back.
That’s the moment. The moment between you and remarkable. Most people blink. Most people get stuck.
All the hard work and preparation and daring and luck is nothing compared with the ability to not blink.
-The Moment

Seth Godin talks about the last mile. We mostly miss guaranteed achievements, because we blink, we step back, we re-think, we don’t know how to step one more step, we fear to fail at the very last moment. We always leave the last mile.

If you finish the last mile, then you win and shine.

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In my last post- “What you need to become an entrepreneur?“, I discussed about the different forms of “capitals” essential for business venture. Today I am trying to put forward few other fundamental things that you should really understand for successful entrepreneurial venture.

Your every move is the deciding move. Every move makes impact on your result. Your first move should be even more important, on that move you decide where you are heading towards? So you should make a thoughtful, well-informed decision to succeed. When I look at the successful, failed or “growth trapped” businesses, in general, I see three success pillars that decide their fate.

Three Pillars for Successful Business Venture

Work with Right People

Follow the Customer demand

Control your Finance

You must start with right people with required skills, experience, attitude and drive. And another essential is that you must know the mystery of your business.

You may have many crazy ideas and may be you are extremely capable but if those ideas are not doable or not achievable in short length, you can not win so easily. You must produce or deliver something your target customers really want, its
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When I speak to my audience, I love to ask warm-up questions at the beginning. If I ask them whether they know what they need to become an entrepreneur, most of them answer in one voice - “Capital”, “Capital”, “Capital”. True, capital is one of the major requirements to start a startup. And most of them consider the capital in terms of financial aspect only. Capital is more than just money and there are more other forms of capitals equally or even more important than money to become an entrepreneur. Yesterday, I discussed about the Integrity as the ultimate requirement for excellence in business and in one of my previous posts, I discussed on Innovation as the mantra for survival in business. Today I will discuss on one of such essentials, the capital and their other forms:

Emotional Capital
I have not seen coaches on Entrepreneurship spoke on this capital, the emotional capital. This is your aspiration, passion and perseverance that always keeps you thriving to excel and drives to become successful entrepreneur. If you can not keep your emotional capital leveled high, in many cases the start-up entrepreneurs tend to pull back themselves so often even at small waves. In another way, emotional capital is an entrepreneurial instinct, which is a well-rooted desire to have
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If you have integrity, nothing else matters. If you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.
Alan K. Simpson, former U.S. Senator

I have learned over the past several years as an technopreneur, working as offshore outsourcing service provider that integrity and only integrity help you achieving business excellence. If you ask me what is the most important in regard to the success of a business, I would tell you, in my experience as an entrepreneur - it is the “consistency of integrity”. Without integrity, business can not last longer, can not make everyone feel its presence. If firms can maintain its consistency in integrity, and make the integrity as its culture, it will surely will succeed and will be easier to prove its excellence.

What does it take to be a winner in the marketplace? There are many firms doing the similar things, providing similar services. If you search “Web Development Companies” in google, you will get millions of results. All of them competing for
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Bill Gates and Steve Jobs made the Historic Joint Appearance at the Fifth Annual “D: All Things Digital” Conference. In their rare joint appearance at All Things Digital 5, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates discussed their contributions to the technology industry, the qualities they most respect in one another, and former Apple CEO Gil Amelio’s seamanship. The two men also discussed the history and future of the digital revolution in an unrehearsed, unscripted, onstage conversation with D co-producers Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Watch out the inspiring and historic show of this decade in 7 parts.
Part 1 of 7:

To watch rest of the videos in this series, follow the links below:

• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 2
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 3
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 4
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 5
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 6
• Steve Jobs and Bill Gates Part 7

We never thought we would see the day where Apple and Microsoft so easily and so comfortably share the same stage with that much of respect to each other, but that happened today.

Click here for the full transcript of the conversation.

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