"Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance. If we were capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things would happen to us. One, we would free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and two, we would provide ourselves with enough energy to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe."
Interview with Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of Bharti Group on entrepreneurship.
Key Pointers:
* Tied up with large entities / the big companies (much larger than your company) even when your company is still small. Persuade the large companies, show them the market, illustrate to the large potential business partners your company’s high governance structure etc to exploit / enter into markets together.
* Doing things that have not been done before, be first in the market – because otherwise you could not compete with the big boys.
* As an entrepreneur, you get trained on everything, and get to do a lot of different things and gained expertise and experience in many areas.
* When you could not compete on technology, capital, logistics, marketing and branding etc, you compete on speed. When you are caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed over perfection.
* Elements of Success: speed, first mover of bringing new products into the market, knowing what the customers want, passionate about the business.
* Good business model: Lowest cost with highest quality.
* Milestone event: Defiance of conventional wisdom, bidding and winning the telecom license against the big boys in 1992.
