The Hindu Business Line : Take a good reasonable idea

Having an idea is great, and in reality you don’t need a ‘hot’ one, advises Jon Gillespie-Brown in So You Want to be an Entrepreneur? ( www.landmarkonthenet.com). Just focus on something you want to do that you are passionate about and excited about, he urges.

“Almost invariably the initial idea an entrepreneur has is not the one that makes the money. The trick is to take any reasonably good idea in a growth market in which you have skills, experience and contacts and just get going.”

But what should you do when you come to a fork in the road where it’s a choice between your original idea and what your customers actually want? Make a judgment call about the ‘hottest idea,’ says Gillespie-Brown. In the final analysis, it will be about the execution and the team, rather than the idea, he reasons.

Great takeaways.

Think simple

In Search of the Obvious The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess Jack Trout

Vietnam pretty much told us what would happen in Iraq; and so it is in marketing, writes Jack Trout in In Search of the Obvious: The Antidote for Today’s Marketing Mess ( www.wiley.com). Stu dy the past and avoid thinking that the world is different, he instructs. Chapter 1 opens with a reference to a book written in 1916: Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman by Robert R. Updegraff.

Trout offers four guidelines to help you think in simple terms. First, get your ego out of the situation. Good judgment is based on reality, he reasons. “The more you screen things through your ego, the farther you get from reality.”

His second advice is to avoid wishful thinking. Third, be better at listening, since common sense by definition is based on what others think. And the fourth guideline is to be a little cynical. For, “things are sometimes the opposite of the way they really are,” the author cautions.

Compulsory read.

Meaningful info?

Survival Tactics The Top 11 Behaviors of Successful Entrepreneurs Ted Sun

You are a meaning-making machine, says Ted Sun in Survival Tactics: The Top 11 Behaviors of Successful Entrepreneurs ( www.macmillanindia.com). “For any information to become knowle dge that has a relative permanent recall, you must attach personal meaning to it.”

Though, on average, a human brain processes over 400 billion bits of information per second, a mere 2,000 is within some level of awareness to us, he informs.

Think back to commercials you remember the most, whether they were on television, the Web, or radio, the author exhorts. “Which ones do you remember right now? The ones that draw on your ability to make sense of them are those you remember.”

Sun mentions that a study by Cornell University found the human retention of new information to be within 5 to 10 per cent when just reading or listening. “Yet the retention rate increases up to 75 per cent when we use what we received within a short time period.”

Recommended addition to the businesspersons’ shelf.

D. Murali

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