The Hindu Business Line : <I>Eight patterns of highly effective entrepreneurs </I>

Seize opportunity. This is the first of the eight patterns of `highly effective entrepreneurs', as Brent Bowers lists in If at First You Don't Succeed... from Currency (www.currencybooks.com) .

"The gift for detecting - and grabbing - unique moneymaking opportunities that have somehow eluded everybody else lies at the centre of entrepreneur's mental universe," notes the book. There are two parts to the process of exploiting untapped opportunity, explains Bowers: perception and action.

The trick, as Guy Kawasaki puts it is `to stop thinking and start doing'; and Tom Peters would call it `a predisposition for action'. Bowers cites Kawasaki's view about iPod: "It had a better industrial design but that isn't rocket science. The product was tightly integrated with online sales, and that wasn't anything new. Anybody could have done both things at once, but no one did." The book quotes William D. Bygrave on why older people, like older companies, are less likely to spot and seize opportunities compared to younger people or start-ups: "If you know too much, the liability of sameness, the liability of staleness, the liability of knowing too much can blind you." And, more crucially, "Someone with the optimism of youth knows enough to know what can be done, but not enough to know that it can't be done."

Read about Mark Hughes and the story of Half.com, the name that Halfway, an Oregon town with a population of 350, adopted for a year in return for $100,000. The deal caught up on the media, and "in 2000, five months after the IPO, eBay bought the company for $300 million."

Gary Doan found an opportunity in oversights. How? "Doan discovered that the vast majority of small businesses had either nonexistent or inadequate archiving systems for their e-mail traffic and computer data." He reckoned that nearly 3 million companies were open to such a risk; "tens of thousands imploded every year because of lost information." Antidote? "Rocket Vault, a low-maintenance device that bundles both hardware and software."

The second pattern is `running your own show'. Means, `Rejection of authority'. The operative idea is freedom to be in charge of one's own life, and not power over subordinates. Bowers writes about how Umang Gupta found realisation in IIT: "Of 1,00,000 applicants, 1,500 had been selected, and in such elite company, he was ranked 500-something."

Gupta reminisces: "Suddenly, I wasn't the smartest kid in school... There was no way I would be number one. I had to find my niche, a way to exercise my leadership." Today, he is the chief executive of Keynote Systems Inc, a company that tests and evaluates corporate Web and wireless systems.

Pattern three reads, `Nurture vs Nature', and it is about whether there is such a thing as an entrepreneurial gene. "Within reasonable bounds, anybody can be an entrepreneur. All it takes is serendipity," is a quote of Kawasaki. But Frank Landsberger would say, "Entrepreneurship is intrinsic. The person who wonders whether he is an entrepreneur isn't an entrepreneur."

The fourth pattern that Bowers mentions is `turning on a dime'. Entrepreneurs have a tolerance for ambiguity, he explains. They have "a willingness to plunge into the marketplace and weave their way through its confusions, contradictions, and blurred boundaries." Read on: "They dodge and weave, backtrack and plunge ahead, make stupid moves and mount surprising recoveries."

They keep their ears open, even if they are non-stop gabbers. "Gupta can't wait to demonstrate all the amazing features of his new BlackBerry to me over a cup of coffee, and a few minutes later he is eagerly scribbling a picture of a contraption he built half a century ago as a boy in India." writes Bowers. "Entrepreneurs constantly take input. They talk to people, they tweak their product, they assimilate knowledge," reads an apt quote of Judith Cone of Kauffman Foundation.

Exciting exploration of the enigmatic world of entrepreneurship.

ROI is no silver-bullet metric

One may have to look at the economic life, rather than `the life span of usability', of IT assets.

Looking for `a single reference on the lifecycle aspects of wireless local-area networks'? Here's help from Cisco (www.ciscopress.com) : The Business Case for Enterprise-Class Wireless LANs, by H. David Castaneda, Oisin Mac Alasdair, and Christopher A.L. Vinckier. The book is a guide to the considerations top on your mind, including "the value proposition, cost-justification, and alignment of security, architecture, and operational components with the business."

ROI or `return on investment' is no silver-bullet metric, caution the authors. The measure instils rationality and standardisation in IT decision-making; but "the strategic impact of IT investments is next to impossible to quantify", thus making ROI imperfect.

IT infrastructure investments are a sunk cost, reminds the book. "This is because the average shelf life of today's IT assets is relatively short, even though the asset might be usable for a relatively long time." Therefore, you may have to look at economic life, rather than `the life span of usability' of IT assets.

Another noteworthy feature is that IT infrastructure becomes `an enabler of higher-order solutions', such as CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), e-mail, and Web services. "In their turn, the applications support various transactional, analytical, and collaborative processes... The flow of information in the institutional ecosystem creates a dynamic, fluid environment through which information flows with varying velocities."

Chapter 3 explains the solutions lifecycle through PPDIOO, which stands for the following phases: preparing, planning, designing the architecture, implementing the solution, operating the infrastructure, and optimising the system. Not a linear process, but a circular one.

The discussion on security begins with this fundamental premise: `No network is truly secure.' Even if your machine isn't connected to the Net, security can be compromised `if physical access can somehow be obtained'. To complicate matters, `most security attacks come from the inside of an enterprise.' Which is why it is necessary to maintain `an attitude of elevated paranoia' even as you `determine how to secure your infrastructure'.

Securing WLANs is possible if done correctly, the authors assure. They explain different security models, ranging from `no authentication, encryption, or hashing' to `overlay security solutions'. Consider using IDS (intrusion detection systems), advises the book. "Wireless IDSs are a more advanced and dedicated approach to radio-based rogue access point detection. They often use dedicated `scanners' and specialised software. They can also be used to detect client behaviour that you might want to prevent, such as the creation of ad-hoc wireless networks and client-to-client file-sharing networks."

Chapter 8 has valuable inputs for wireless network managers in the form of tools and management strategies. Part III of the book has a bunch of WLAN deployment case studies, each dealt with in detail. For instance, the healthcare case speaks about site surveys handled through a combination of internal staff supplemented by third-party contractors for frequency analysis. Because, "having a complex family of devices that operate in multiple frequency bands is a constant concern regarding interference."

The manufacturing case study also touches upon interference thus: "A constant hurdle in the factor and warehouse is that they are typically filled with wireless obstacles. Factories tend to be filled with large metal machines that perform specialised functions such as processing and metal machining through the use of robotics. This fact alone made the effects of multipath, attenuation, and interference very serious factors to contend with."

You needn't feel helpless about wireless any more!

Tailpiece

"My motto is: Wire less, talk more! What's yours?"

"Almost same: Work less, talk more!"

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