Entrepreneurship is enlightenment

On Christmas Eve light blossoms everywhere, even in the most unexpected places.  The same should be not just all around us, but in our spirits.

Entrepreneurship too has definitely something to do with light.

Entrepreneurship can a way of taking steps to find enlightenment: reconsidering the past without judgement for instance is a step in this direction, through moulding it into a repeatable experience that you can share with everyone.

But a step to enlightenment includes for sure looking for a positive environment: every good entrepreneur craves being in the kind of positive environment that creates firstly the incubator for their own growth and then for their firm.

And last but not least, looking at entrepreneurship as a road to enlightenment means being able to do other two important things.

The first is the ability to appreciate and enjoy details; while performing such an hard task as being an entrepreneur, every little light on your path is something worthy of your consideration: always accept it as a sign of confirmation that will help to keep you on your path.

The second is to cope with difficulties: where everybody sees failure, enlightenment pushes you to see endless possibilities, where everyone sees defeat, try to see understanding.  Light will lead you to come across as seeing the “silver lining” in anything. Pollyanna’s “glad game”, in the end wasn’t silly or mindless at all: teaches all of us to become aware. Aware of the potential of our optimism. If you stay tuned with light, (sometimes) magic happens.

Best wishes to all of you!

Pubblicità

L’ombra del caso al Fringe Festival di Roma

L’ombra del caso: presentazione e firma copie a Roma: il 19 gennaio dalle ore 18.00 alle ore 22.30 circa.
Il FRINGE Festival si terrà al MACRO TESTACCIO DI ROMA PIAZZA ORAZIO GIUSTINANI 4

VENITE NUMEROSI!!! (una sorpresa per chi parteciperà…)

FringeBook

FringeBook è una delle tante novità di quest’anno.

Una vetrina sulla nuova editoria creata in collaborazione con Il Seme Bianco – Controluna / Castelvecchi Editore.

Gli spazi del Mattatoio – La Pelanda ospiteranno una serie di incontri, tra presentazioni di libri, firmacopie con autori e reading con ospiti prestigiosi.

Alcuni degli autori che saranno presenti al FringeBook:

Francesco Paolantoni

Nicola Vicidomini

Mario Marenco

Maria Grazia Adamo

Chiara Alaia

Arena Esther

Fabio Bacile di Castiglione

Massimiliano Bellavista

Annalisa Fabbri

Simona Bennardo

Andrea Bizzarri

Chiara Borghi

Evita Comes

Pierbruno Cosso

Claudia Dalmastri

Annalisa Fabbri

Elysa Fazzino

Gaia Mencaroni

Donatella Previtera

Lorella Natalizi

Corrado Passi

Giovanna Tatò

Marì Taverna

Marta Tedesco

Bettina Todisco

Kraus Folner

Delia Marzo

Francesco Fagioli

Il programma completo degli appuntamenti sarà disponibile a breve.

 

Doing business through listening

“We only see what we know” said once Goethe.

In entrepreneurial terms we do often the same. But, even more important we do often “listen only to what we like”. And, if we do, the chance of remaining what we are or, even worse, to fail, is very high.

Listening is entrepreneur’s very first friend, because is a powerful way of processing ideas, intuitions, emotions. Seeing sometimes can be immediate but also misleading, whereas listening can’t. It involves time and patience.

In conducting business, you’ll be busy with almost constant change management and with lots of people pretending their expectations to be taken into consideration by your business model. Both of these processes don’t involve at first speaking/pitching, but (apparently) the contrary: developing a deep listening attitude.

There are so many obstacles between a normal and an outstanding listening skill.

Many entrepreneurs and managers see their potential stakeholder like a mere on-demand moral support and reconfirmation service: as not so careful listeners they “download” from their words and messages only what they like and assume that counts as a reconfirmations of the ideas they already have.

More difficult, challenging and useful is being ready to analyse and listen even to those facts and consideration that at a first sight clearly contradict their own theories, being also prepared to change perspective for a while in observing reality.

So if as a human being and an entrepreneur you may learn to switch perspective and use for a while somebody else’s eye, your  listening skills and techiniques  instead are probably what more deeply personal and unique there is in your own identity. Nobody can listen the way you do nor you can ever do it in somebody else’s way. Therefore is so important and can make the difference for your startup project

Skilled listening, is a way of generating and testing new business ideas: it means in facts being able to pay attention to phenomena, eliminating background noise, and get the essential feedbacks from stakeholders, summarizing the content of their word. Mirroring, but in a creative way. (Then probably the better firms are the ones that are able not to mirror but to match, compensate and sometimes even counteract stakeholder messages, but that request time and starts anyway from a good listening phase)

In the end, that’s what a business plan represents: an entrepreneur is someone that find an original way of listening and then of creatively paraphrasing customers’ messages and statements in a way that both sound inspiring and reassuring.

“What is essential is invisible to the eye”…but most of the times it can be well perceived by the ears!

 

20000 hits and counting…

          Your appreciation matters. Your opinion matters. Your interaction matters.

          Thanks again!!!!!!!!!

 

 

Is it beautiful?

 

Is there enough beauty in your firm?

What’s the real motivation behind starting a business up nowadays?

We all know is difficult, hardly successful, time consuming and sometimes lead us to ruthlessy confront with our weaknesses.

Is probably because a real entrepreneur is somehow like an archaeologist, relentlessy looking for some hidden beauty.

Beauty tends to feel like something that must be found in special places—like museums and galleries.

There is neither a ISO standard about beauty, nor a spreadsheet. But the very first question every entrepreneur should ask himself before starting a new business is exactly this one “Is it beautiful?”

Look at the market nowadays: every firms wants to be customer-centric, adapt as much as it can to customer taste, make customer happy: only beautiful things have this ability, because beauty is talking an universal language, neither classic nor modern, able to communicate with everyone. And it may represent a promise of happiness.

Therefore beauty may represent a success- detonator for your business, being able to open the way to happiness, because happiness in the end is strictly related with interaction with beauty: observing something beautiful, experiencing something beautiful, creating something beautiful.

Keep you customer in contact with beauty, and he will be certainly happy: the big seven factors commonly addressed as happiness markers, such as wealth, family relationships, career, friends, health, freedom, and personal values will come right after.

Moreover, most of startuppers look for an efficient organization, able to offer not just effective/efficient performances, but also able to easily adapt to circumstances (and, theoretically, to almost every customer’s request) and to be memorable: there again, beauty plays a role, because what they are really looking for is a way of designing beautiful processes.

Every process in the end is a flow chart, like every painting is made of colours, but there is a slight difference between the Mona Lisa and a forgery.  So, be creative in designing your business, even with the elements that seem “cold”: beauty is contagious so even a flyer, a visiting card, am office, a presentation, a logo, a packaging may represent an important fact.

Nowadays, there are firms that created in their organizational chart the role of Chief Happiness Officer, in its essence, an HR Manager with the task of engaging employees, motivating them and raising performance levels through the enhancement of their happiness level. We believe instead that putting managers in charge of searching/pretending from their resources non just a high performance but a beautiful performance, and training people to always look for some inspiring beauty all around them, even in the small details,  is even more important.

Making your pitching seem larger than life

 

There are endless recipes in order to make the best out of your pitching experience.

Collecting the experience of some recent pitching events with startups, let’s go back to basics.

We won’t mention strategy for today, we want just to lay low. The devil is in the detail, especially in pitching, and you shouldn’t throw away the chance of making a good deal, or just putting the right foundation of your journey to success as an entrepreneur.

There are a few simple things that really can make the difference. Details, you’ll say. But they can make the difference: you know, exactly the difference between a room where it’s all quiet and everybody is listening and instead one where public complains or simply can’t care less (even worst!).

1. Slide show: please be clear. Drop on the slide a few concepts to talk all around, but be merciless in eliminating the not useful concepts. A few words and crystal clear (sometimes with a skilful use of facts & figures) this is all you need as to why they should remember, in order to make it stick. In facts, what public read shouldn’t be what they listen to. Slides are most of the times too crowded, simply unreadable.

2. Infrastructure: where are you planning to pitch? It will be organized for a large public, in a small room, or just a few persons? Try to have under control beforehand parameters like: a) distance to public, b) facilities available in the room (fi. Kind of videowall) c) pitching indoor/outdoor d) presentations file format (ppt, prezi, etc). Pitching environment is important, sometimes decisive.

3. Always respect time: is always one extra point gained for your pitching. Time keeping means respect for the audience, respect the following pitchers and…for yourself. In facts a god pitcher is a superb listener. So having time left means having time to answer questions and interact with public. People identifies (and recalls later on) much more with contents and concepts connected with Q&A moments. Because Q&A is like a game, where your ability to communicate and winging it can also be tested.

4. The power of a word, the power of your silence: as well as for point 1, don’t fill in your speech with too many words. The time you should give to the audience to adapt to your way of thinking (especially if you are discussing some difficult/highly specialistic subject and/or about some radical innovation) is directly proportional to the magnitude of your innovation. So don’t forget to use short and clear sentences (especially if you are pitching in a noisy or crowded environment) and use frequent effect pausing (that can be used also to test the effect of your words on the audience).

5. Talk, looking everybody in their eyes, don’t read.

6. The next 48 hrs: if you were able to break the ice and establish promising contacts with someone, don’t forget to write an e-mail within 48 hrs, providing further information about you and/or about some of the issues you have been asked about