Comparison of Entrepreneurs, Intrapreneurs and Traditional Managers

I am    authentic .... …..and highly motivated ….... I can accept small risks and I want to lead and I can’t accept too many instructions from others! My eyes will be scorching and sending smokes signals right away…. I can work in any environment and adaptable to any situation. I am  not easily intimidated….....I  can work for more than 10 hours a day. I am tough and so resilient….... I can  accept failures  and I will bounce back and never give up too easily! I try to be innovative and creative in order to sustain my business and differentiate from others. I am an entrepreneur!

The above  mentioned are  the  common  characteristics  that you should posses in order to remain successful in your entrepreneurial activities. 

Wan Rosnah

Which one of these categories best describe you? Check below!

	Traditional Managers	Entrepreneurs	Intrapreneurs
Primary	Promotion and other	Independence,	Independence and ability to
motives	traditional, corporate	opportunity	advance in the corporate rewards
	rewards, such as office,	to create, and money
	staff, and power
Time	Short term- meeting	Survival and achieving	Between entrepreneurial and
orientation	quotas,	5-to 10 year growth of	traditional managers, depending
	and budgets, weekly,	growth
	monthly, quarterly, and	business	on urgency to meet self-imposed
	the annual planning
	horizon		and corporate timetable
Activity	Delegates and	Direct involvement	Direct involvement more
	supervises
	more than direct		than  delegation
	involvement
Risk	Careful	Moderate risk taker	Moderate risk taker
Status	Concerned about	Not concerned about	Not concerned about traditional
	status symbols	status symbols	status symbols - desires
			independence
Failure and	Tries to avoid mistakes	Deals with mistakes	Attempts to hide risky projects
mistakes	and surprises	and failures	from view until ready
Decisions	Usually agrees with	Follows dream with	Able to get others to agree to
	those in	decision	help achieve dream
	in upper management
Who serves	Others	Self and customers	Self, customers, and sponsors
Family history	Family members	Entrepreneurial	Entrepreneurial small - business,
	worked for large	small business,	professional, or farm background
		professional,
	organizations	or farm background
Relationship	Hierarchy as basic	Transactions and	Transactions within hierarchy
with others	relationship	deal making as
		basic relationship
Source:Pinchot, Intrapreneuring (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). pp. 54 - 56.

 

ENTREPRENEURIAL - DOS AND DON’TS

I hope this article could be useful for those who are running a business. Regrettably, the author could not be identified. But I am sure he or she would be pleased that I had posted this article for our entrepreneurial knowledge.

 

 

Things to remember after you have started the business

 

·        Nothing stays the same. Don’t quit researching your field. Competition and so on. Think constantly about how the industry is changing and how the market is shifting.

·        Don’t ever let your guard down or stop paying close attention to quality and details.

·        Don’t allow yourself to get diverted and lose sight of your business plan.

·        When you are growing, watch your costs, but when business is waning, spend money and do the things that drive growth.

·        Have a strong vision for what you want in the long run. Examine and reevaluate it periodically to make sure that it still holds for the current situation.

·        Revisit plans and strategies regularly.

·        Keep looking over your shoulder, and be prepared to act.

·        Paranoia is good. Ultimately you will be copied or someone else will do the job better. So continually look for ways to do a better job. Look for ways to reinvent your business.

·        Focus on how the company is doing, rather than only how much money it is making.

·        Always be looking for ways to add value to your business.

·        You always have to strive to do better.

·        Give every detail about your business your attention, but try to see the forest in spite of the trees.

·        Recognize mistakes and be willing to make changes quickly.

·        Step back and ask yourself periodically. “Am I best person to take this company to the next level?”

·        Realize that in most cases a new skill set equates to a new person leading.

·        Don’t expect that any one set of skills can lead the company through every stage of its development. The same skills that you started may not get you funded and will not get you through to financial solvency.

·        Get up from your desk every day and walk the floor. Speak to everyone within the firm.

·        It’s critical to identify and maintain your competitive advantage. Recognize every perspective customer has figuratively tattooed across his or her forehead the question, “so what?” This is even more important as competition increases.

·        Don’t expand for the sake of expansion; grow only when it makes strategies sense.

·        Don’t get cocky. Don’t let your successes lull you to sleep at the wheel. Remember the past success is no indication that you will avoid future disasters.

·        Maintain a big picture perspective.

·        Don’t forget to plan for the future.

·        Constantly develop new strategies to sell your product.

·        Come up with new ideas constantly and apply them to your business.

·        Don’t over stretch your plans. Be future oriented, but be realistic, too.

·        Expect the unexpected all the time. Every day be ready for new problems, new people, and different challenges.

·        Don’t be satisfied with how good things were yesterday; it won’t pay the bills today.

·        Remember that too much of a good thing can be bad. Celebrate your successes. Enjoy the wins along the way, but don’t become complacent. Don’t take your eyes of  the ball.

·        Take care of your health.

·        Take vacations every once in a while to reward yourself and recharge your batteries.

·        Don’t rest on your laurels. Continue to raise the bar.

·        Reinvest profit into business instead of supporting your lifestyle.

·        Avoid getting caught in a rut.

·        Don’t let minor setbacks deter you.

·        Don’t wear technical superiority blinders – you’ll be caught off guard and lose market share.

·        Don’t lose track of keeping your accounting records current or your taxes.

·        Don’t begin in expansion project without enough preparation.

·        Know when and how to expand.

·        Avoid expanding too quickly because overhead could eat you alive.

·        Use the down times in business to prepare business for the up times.

·        Keep your skills up to date.

·        Keep up with modern technology.

·        Constantly look to catch the big waves.

·        Don’t do anything halfway.

·        Don’t be afraid to take on a loan to help your business expand, but know how much of a loan you can handle so that you are to keep the business finances healthy.

·        Learn to get energy from the good days so that you can make it through the bad days.

·        Be loyal to the people who take the best care of you.

·        Don’t be afraid of change. You should continuously question your most cherished assumptions.

·        Take incremental growth steps.

·        Don’t try to get too big, too fast. As businesses grow, there are various inflection points along the away, and which require action /organizational change. Success will depend on how these inflection points are managed.

·        Always stay focused on the long-term objective, because if you don’t, things will not go as planned.

·        Don’t exceed your capital and go into too much debt.

·        Don’t expand beyond what can be managed to your satisfaction.

·        Don’t be afraid to admit when you are wrong.

·        Learn from your mistakes and move on.

·        Don’t leave the business to someone else too early in the game.

·        Keep business and personal life separate, and definitely have a personal life outside work.

·        Make sure you take personal time. Work hard but do not forget to take vacations as well, even short ones. You need sometime to recharge your batteries if you expect to be profitable.

·        Make sure to have balance in your life. Take one day a week for non-business activities.

·        Don’t forget about the people who got you where you are; don’t neglect your family and loved ones; not everyone understands your drive. Don’t build your entrepreneurial house and lose those close to you, or get divorced and lose half assets.

·        Don’t fall prey to every organization that wants a charitable donation.

 

 

CLOSING POINTS

 

• Keep your ego under control.
• Don’t lose your entrepreneurial spirit.
• Know when to exit. Don’t invest too much time or money into the business if it is failing. Knowing when to quit and minimizing your losses is very important, since this may determine if you’ll have anything left for the next venture.

 

Barack Obama’s Authentic Dream and Personal Brand

      

                                                   By  Dr. Hubert K. Rampersad

 

Having an authentic dream and a related personal brand is a very important asset in today’s online, virtual, and individual age. This is the key to personal success. It is the positioning strategy behind the world's most successful people, like Barack Obama. It’s therefore important to be your own brand based on your authentic dream. This will help you to actively grow and distinguish yourself. Remember what Walt Disney said; “If you can dream it, you can do it”.

Barack Obama’s dream is—Bring about real change, change that we can believe in. His passion for change is the pillar of his authentic Personal Brand. Parts of his speeches:  “America is a land of big dreamers and big hopes. It is this hope that has sustained us through revolution and civil war, depression and world war, a struggle for civil and social rights and the brink of nuclear crisis. And it is because our dreamers dreamed that we have emerged from each challenge more united, more prosperous, and more admired than before…….The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them. Whether chance of birth or circumstance decides life’s big winners and losers, or whether we build a community where, at the very least, everyone has a chance to work hard, get ahead, and reach their dreams….Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek…. I don't want to settle for anything less than real change, fundamental change - change we need - change that we can believe in. It's change that I've been fighting for over two decades ago. Because those dreams - American dreams - are worth fighting for”.

Barack Obama:

·         identified and leveraged his authentic, relevant, meaningful, inspiring, enduring, ambitious dream and hope 

·         responses to his dream/hope with love and passion and adds value to others 

·         knows what make him unique, special, different and outstanding 

·         recognized and identified his genius and expanded his limits based on this 

·         succeeded by living according to his dream and doing related work he loves  

·         has faith in himself and the courage to pursue his dream and hope, and based on this delivered peak performances and is exceptional 

 

Remember this (Rampersad, 2008):

 

Dream it, hope it, believe it, fix it in your mind, visualize it, accept it, respond to it with love, passion, and integrity, give your peak performance to it and you will achieve it

Barack Obama is a man of peace, love, integrity, and vision, who is fighting for change. We admire him because of his genius, achievements, success, and added value to others. Anyone can deliver peak performances and be successful in life, because all of us have the genius within us to do so. Success is not something that will come automatically or something that the world will define for you. It’s what you define in your ambitious dream (hope) and in the way you pursue this dream. Remember what Marva Collins said; ‘Success doesn’t come to you …you go to it’. You must have a dream in life, follow your heart and love what you do, if you expect exceptional success. You will surely have it, since people who ask for it, wish it, dream it, hope it, fix it in their mind, visualize it, feel it, allow it, give your peak performance to it, respond to it with love, passion and integrity, attract success. Obama has proven that if someone has a clear authentic dream, responds to it with love and passion, has the courage to pursue this dream, has faith in him/herself, and lives according to their dream, this dream will guide that person’s life and will result in purposeful and resolute actions. He took the responsibility to identify his dreams and hope, and to respond to them with love and passion. Stop complaining and do not blame others for your failures. Take the initiative and the responsibility to develop, implement, and cultivate your authentic dream and hope as well, and keep it at the forefront of your mind each day. You should have faith in yourself. Also remember this (Rampersad, 2008):

no dream + no hope +no faith + no self-knowledge + no thinking + no mindset change + no integrity + no passion + no trust + no love = NO SUSTAINABLE CHANGE

Love is an important element in this equation. It is about loving yourself (self-love), loving others, and loving what you do. You should love yourself in at least equal measure to others or things. This can be found in most religions: “to love others as you love yourself”. Remember what Abraham Maslow said: “We can only respect others when we respect ourselves. We can only give, when we give to ourselves. We can only love, when we love ourselves”. Without knowing who you are (self-knowledge), it’s very difficult to love yourself and others. You need to make a positive emotional connection with yourself and find yourself interesting first, otherwise others you will not make a positive emotional connection with you and will not find you interesting. With an authentic Personal Brand (based on your dream), your strongest characteristics, attributes, and values can separate you from the crowd. Without this, you look just like everyone else.

This article is based on Dr. Hubert Rampersad’s new book Authentic Personal Branding:  A new blueprint for building and aligning a powerful leadership brand' (Information Age Publishing, USA; Pearson Malaysia; 2008 ).

 

WORKSHOP:

TO ATTEND FOR THE PERSONAL BRANDING WORKSHOP IN MALAYSIA IN JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 PLEASE CONTACT:

WAN ROSNAH 

WRA AGENCY& CONSULTANCY

info@trainingwra.com

www.trainingwra.com