My current primary job is about establishing and developing business partnerships in different countries of Europe in CyberWatcher, a provider of technology for web monitoring and business intelligence. It means that our partners use this technology to enhance offerings for their potential and actual clients.
For me it means the tight cooperation with our partners - if they succeed, we succeed too. It's a classical win-win situation. But it is normally quite a long and complicated process - both parties need to win mutual respect and trust - and then work hard in order to maintain it.
Interestingly, I don't remember learning about the option of business partnerships as one way to develop a company in the business school's curriculum. It simply is not the part of a regular business theory. Competition - yes. Supply chain - having suppliers, customers and so on - yes. Franchise - yes.
But building a product/service offering together with another company in a specific market, sharing both inputs and outcomes of such cooperation - this is something a normal "inside-the-box" business manager is apparently not supposed to learn about. I have learnt it from the practice - and see the tangible benefits of such work.
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Monday, May 10, 2010
Impressions from St.Gallen Symposium in Switzerland
I got a privilege to be part of 40th St.Gallen Symposium in Switzerland which took place on 6th-7th of May with the pre-programme on 4th-5th of May. This Symposium provides a platform for some young people from the best business schools across the world to meet with the prominent business leaders from across the globe. I got selected there to represent the BI Norwegian School of Management.
The topic of this year's Symposium (the topic is different every year) was "Entrepreneurs - Agents of Change" - relevant for both my studies, as well as for my academic and professional interes
ts. The event was organized on a very professional level (around 300 students participated in organizing it, guided by the board of trustees). The line of speakers and workshops leaders was very impressive - the most high-profiled event I have attended so far. CEO of Nestle, Chairman of the Board of UBS, Chairman of the Board Deutsche Bank, the Managing Partner of McKinsey&Co, Chairman of the Board of BASF, Minister for the Economy of France, to name a few.
The most impressive for me were the stories from the European, American and Asian entrepreneurs - both of established successful businesses and those among young ambitious "leaders of tomorrow" (I was being labelled a "leader of tomorrow" as well). Very smart people, impressive conversations, good fun with some of the "leaders of tomorrow", new ideas and insights, yet another confirmation that I have a larger responsibility towards this world.
I took many notes during this symposium and decided to type in some of them here.
Global barometer (the survey among the "leaders of tomorrow")
99% of young leaders of tomorrow (400 respondents from across the globe) think that globalisation is good.
The Eastern Europeans are least proud of their countries across the globe. Only 35% are proud, while in total 85% of young leaders of tomorrow are proud of their countries.
Entrepreneurship
Suhas Gopinath (India) started his first business venture when he was 14 in an Internet cafe in Bangalore (he didn't have his own PC) – a freelancer which was dealing with the design of the websites. When he was 15, he first employed people, although his family was against him being involved in the business venture (they wanted him to learn in school properly). Later started with the e-commerce systems, e-systems for education, dealing with the systems that distinguish between real/fake medicine according to the bar code. He now employs several hundreds of people, being 23.
“One advantage with being a young entrepreneur is that you are not afraid of failure”
“Capital without capitalism”: everyone can start up a firm on a kitchen table with a laptop for $300 and have a global audience from the day 1. (Peter Dey, BBC business reporter).
Dr. Bert W. M. Twaiihoven (Switzerland/Holland), an entrepreneur who has established several companies:
- “If you know what you don't know, you are a winner” - there must be people who can be better than you (managers, project leaders etc.)
- Business plan – you are always too optimistic. The success of the technology business venture almost always takes at least 5 years. The first year is always unprofitable.
- Reluctance to change among the people around you: “The only one on the world who likes change is the baby in the wet diapers”
- He was 82 when giving the talk, but was doing a lot of sports with his wife, because it holds one to be healthy.
- “Entrepreneur is the one who creates a long-term wealth, a long-term value”
- “Entrepreneurs surround themselves with the people who are smarter than they are”
- “Money is a measure, a by-product. It is a form of energy”
- “Fortune favours bold and determined”
- “Cash is the king, profit is an opinion”
- “Don't be afraid to fail. If you will, you will fail”
“Everybody can become an entrepreneur. But only some can become successful entrepreneurs.”
Christian von Koenigsegg (Sweden), entrepreneur:
- “I never wanted to build a business. I wanted to build the sports car. That's why I succeeded as an entrepreneur.”
- “If Einstein has figured out how does the universe work while sitting in a cafe, I could have figured out how to build a car without an engineering background”
- “You should only become an entrepreneur if you have a reason to do so. Ask yourself: Do I have something special to contribute? Am I ready to sacrifice?”
“Entrepreneur is a combination of a great explorer and a great bullshitter”
Morten Lund (DK), co-investor of Skype, failed as a newspaper investor, multiple entrepreneur:
- “Forget about the ideas. Ideas mean nothing. What matters is a team”
- “Money comes from sales”
- “There is no formula” - no unique recipe for success
- “Vision is everything. But be sure you don't mess it hallucination with it”
- “Network is the key” - learn to communicate
- “Technology is the key”
- "Try. Self-confidence every day."
- Being positive. The power of minds.
- Being crazy vs. the mainstream
- "Go with your interests and hobbies"
- “Look for good people. Good people will succeed with anything”
- “Don't over-strategize”. Forget about BSC, McKinsey and similar
- “Find people who you share values with”
- “Try to stay in love”
- “It's all your fault”. Don't blame the others
- "7 out of 8 businesses die. So, don't jump into anything."
- "Do branding."
Would we have had such a financial crisis if there would have been more female leaders around?
Christine Lagarde, Minister for the Economy, Industry and Employment of France (my absolute favourite governmental representative there):
- “There are too many dark suits around. And not enough legs [in financial world]”.
- “If Lehman Brothers had been “Lehman Sisters,” today’s economic crisis clearly would look quite different.”
Saturday, January 03, 2009
Why global financial crisis is good fo us?
I had a blast New Year's eve with my girlfriend. Only me, her and enormous amount of fireworks everywhere seen from the upper floors of my dormitory in Oslo. Picturesque view it was!
There is a tradition in many countries for the top-person to deliver New Year's greetings to the people. I watched recorded speech of the President of Estonia, I read the speeches of the King of Norway and the President of Kazakhstan. They all had one obvious common trait in common - they all touched upon global financial and economic crisis as well as upon the need for national unity in order to overcome economic difficulties.
These days financial crisis (or economic crisis followed by it) is in the top list of the most discussed topics around the world. Many fears and many negative thoughts are expressed in relation to it.
There is indeed much trouble for people who have lost their money due to previously done risky investments, for people who are loosing their jobs, for small and large businesses which are losing their clients, for national governments which do not receive enough money with taxes to sustain necessary level of social services and so on and so forth.
Yet there is another side of the coin which is not that obvious. Taking an abstract side away from individual troubles and personal losses (which are hard to underestimate!) one can indeed find a number of positive sides about current economic outlooks.
1. A crisis cleans up a system. When we don't clean after ourselves in our apartment, the rubbish piles up. It may not worry us in the beginning if we are not all too aesthetes. Once it starts to smell badly, however - a crisis! - we move ourselves to clean up this mess and make our house tidy again.
Economic crisis wipes out inefficient corporate companies, shows clearly the holes in national and local financial governance, punishes people who have misused seemingly easy credit opportunities.
2. Growth is always followed by decline. Growth is not eternal. People and organisations tend to forget these two simple theses and become too careless. Living organisms grow, but then decline and die. Empires, states, organisations, religions all experience their growth and decline phases. Decline may well be followed by growth again, but this change is always there.
Investors putting their money into risky projects, people taking large loans, states expanding their national spending all have made these decisions taking into considerations that "my stock price / salary / tax revenue will continue to grow". Alternative scenario planning is always useful... Many have hopefully learnt at least that from current situation.
3. It's not wise to live beyond your means. People like to feel reach. They like expensive and shiny things.
People working in financial services have universally enjoyed the highest payments. If you work in the bank, investment company, trust fund etc, a very high personal bonus would be guaranteed. Yet financial services do not create any value - people there just move money around. And often this money is not simply moved from those who have money in excess to those in need for that, so that latter would pay interest to former (that should be the basic logic of finance world). In contrary, many smart people around the world spend days and nights playing on speculations, on risk perceptions and so on. Being straightforward, many people get paid a lot for doing something similar to a man going to casino.
Financial services' officers have indeed a very high responsibility. But don't engineers, scientists, doctors, journalists (you continue) have lesser responsibility than them?
Financial crisis has shaken this self-created money-creating-money-world. I am not naive to believe that many dwellers of this world have become poor thanks to that (ex-executives of infamous Lehmann Borther have gotten millions of USD as a compensation after the bankrupt). Yet probably many of them had to refuse from buying a yacht, a diamond or another expensive thingy making them a little bit more happy.
On the other hand, there were so many people all around the world miscalculating their ability to pay back the loans they have taken in order to have bigger house, another car, to consume more. I know personally people in Estonia who have taken a loan to buy something, then took another loan to cover payback of the first loan and so on... until they got in the real trouble with paying all of their debts back.
Island has been labeled a notorious victim of financial crisis. How about the data from 2006 which shows that Iceland has been of the biggest consumers of oil per capita in 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7090664.stm)? One could indeed argue that Iceland is cold country which simply requires a lot of oil to heat up itself. People who have travelled to Reykjavik said that literally every household there had their own 4x4 Jeep or another huge truck (although most of them would go at most 2-3 times a year outside of the city)...
4. Crisis triggers entrepreneurial ideas and improvements. When everything is good and rosy, we don't seem to want to change something much. Difficult circumstances, on the other hand, push us to think in a creative way. Of course, this creativity may manifest itself in more creative ways to commit crime. But it also may mean improved effectiveness of existing companies, better calculation of personal expenditure and savings, new ways to do business.
5. Economic crisis pushes oil prices down. Oil prices have sunk dramatically over the course of October-December 2008 - more than twice. National economies don't simply need that much oil to sustain themselves in times of decline.
This is certainly bad for environmental reasons: cheap oil will not push humankind to think of new, environmentally-friendly sources of energy. Yet low prices of oil may make radical elements in governments in such oil-rich countries as Venezuela, Iran or Russia to think more before wasting money on populist nationalistic projects which are not sustainable for their own people and dangerous for other nations.
Happy New Year, with the crises or without them!
There is a tradition in many countries for the top-person to deliver New Year's greetings to the people. I watched recorded speech of the President of Estonia, I read the speeches of the King of Norway and the President of Kazakhstan. They all had one obvious common trait in common - they all touched upon global financial and economic crisis as well as upon the need for national unity in order to overcome economic difficulties.
These days financial crisis (or economic crisis followed by it) is in the top list of the most discussed topics around the world. Many fears and many negative thoughts are expressed in relation to it.
There is indeed much trouble for people who have lost their money due to previously done risky investments, for people who are loosing their jobs, for small and large businesses which are losing their clients, for national governments which do not receive enough money with taxes to sustain necessary level of social services and so on and so forth.
Yet there is another side of the coin which is not that obvious. Taking an abstract side away from individual troubles and personal losses (which are hard to underestimate!) one can indeed find a number of positive sides about current economic outlooks.
1. A crisis cleans up a system. When we don't clean after ourselves in our apartment, the rubbish piles up. It may not worry us in the beginning if we are not all too aesthetes. Once it starts to smell badly, however - a crisis! - we move ourselves to clean up this mess and make our house tidy again.
Economic crisis wipes out inefficient corporate companies, shows clearly the holes in national and local financial governance, punishes people who have misused seemingly easy credit opportunities.
2. Growth is always followed by decline. Growth is not eternal. People and organisations tend to forget these two simple theses and become too careless. Living organisms grow, but then decline and die. Empires, states, organisations, religions all experience their growth and decline phases. Decline may well be followed by growth again, but this change is always there.
Investors putting their money into risky projects, people taking large loans, states expanding their national spending all have made these decisions taking into considerations that "my stock price / salary / tax revenue will continue to grow". Alternative scenario planning is always useful... Many have hopefully learnt at least that from current situation.
3. It's not wise to live beyond your means. People like to feel reach. They like expensive and shiny things.
People working in financial services have universally enjoyed the highest payments. If you work in the bank, investment company, trust fund etc, a very high personal bonus would be guaranteed. Yet financial services do not create any value - people there just move money around. And often this money is not simply moved from those who have money in excess to those in need for that, so that latter would pay interest to former (that should be the basic logic of finance world). In contrary, many smart people around the world spend days and nights playing on speculations, on risk perceptions and so on. Being straightforward, many people get paid a lot for doing something similar to a man going to casino.
Financial services' officers have indeed a very high responsibility. But don't engineers, scientists, doctors, journalists (you continue) have lesser responsibility than them?
Financial crisis has shaken this self-created money-creating-money-world. I am not naive to believe that many dwellers of this world have become poor thanks to that (ex-executives of infamous Lehmann Borther have gotten millions of USD as a compensation after the bankrupt). Yet probably many of them had to refuse from buying a yacht, a diamond or another expensive thingy making them a little bit more happy.
On the other hand, there were so many people all around the world miscalculating their ability to pay back the loans they have taken in order to have bigger house, another car, to consume more. I know personally people in Estonia who have taken a loan to buy something, then took another loan to cover payback of the first loan and so on... until they got in the real trouble with paying all of their debts back.
Island has been labeled a notorious victim of financial crisis. How about the data from 2006 which shows that Iceland has been of the biggest consumers of oil per capita in 2006 (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7090664.stm)? One could indeed argue that Iceland is cold country which simply requires a lot of oil to heat up itself. People who have travelled to Reykjavik said that literally every household there had their own 4x4 Jeep or another huge truck (although most of them would go at most 2-3 times a year outside of the city)...
4. Crisis triggers entrepreneurial ideas and improvements. When everything is good and rosy, we don't seem to want to change something much. Difficult circumstances, on the other hand, push us to think in a creative way. Of course, this creativity may manifest itself in more creative ways to commit crime. But it also may mean improved effectiveness of existing companies, better calculation of personal expenditure and savings, new ways to do business.
5. Economic crisis pushes oil prices down. Oil prices have sunk dramatically over the course of October-December 2008 - more than twice. National economies don't simply need that much oil to sustain themselves in times of decline.
This is certainly bad for environmental reasons: cheap oil will not push humankind to think of new, environmentally-friendly sources of energy. Yet low prices of oil may make radical elements in governments in such oil-rich countries as Venezuela, Iran or Russia to think more before wasting money on populist nationalistic projects which are not sustainable for their own people and dangerous for other nations.
Happy New Year, with the crises or without them!
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