It is important to be open to new experiences and ideas, then to be focused when making decisions, and then flexible when executing the plan.
One of the first pieces of advice that any veteran entrepreneur will give a novice is “stay focused.”
Countless ventures have failed because they were a little of this and a little of that but never became the vendor of choice for any given customer segment. Countless more have never even opened their doors because the founding team kept pursuing too many options and never followed through on one of them enough to turn it into a viable business.
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| Philip Anderson |
Certainly it’s good advice to know yourself, know what you are trying to do and focus like a laser on doing it as well as you possibly can. But consider the INSEAD case in this issue of DARE, which profiles serial entrepreneur Jayesh Parekh. As Jay would be the first to tell you, his entire career has been based on being open to the unexpected.
Although Jay’s family background predisposed him to start a company some day, he launched his first venture because, as he says, “the stars were aligned.” IBM wanted him to give up his expatriate life in Singapore, and with encouragement from his wife and a friend who became his partner, he changed his career in the blink of an eye, building his first enterprise on opportunities that friends or work colleagues brought his way. A year later, the venture that made his fortune was the product of simply helping a friend, then being willing to learn about a new industry. Three years later, he discovered social ventures simply by being willing to attend a conference, then deciding to fund his own venture when he spotted a need.
Most entrepreneurs I have interviewed tell me that a great deal of their success has stemmed from luck. Maybe it’s true that luck is the difference between successful and unsuccessful startups; after all, Napoleon once said that the one quality he valued above all in a general is luck. However, I tend to think they actually mean chance, not luck. They are aware that one or two moments in their careers made all the difference, that if a couple of events had happened one way instead of another, their fates might have been dramatically altered.
Yet it seems to me that most of us have as many chances in life as are needed to make a fortune as entrepreneurs. The “lucky” ones simply recognized and seized several of them—and I’m willing to bet that even they unknowingly missed far more opportunities than they discovered. Is there a way to maximize your exposure to chances to change your life? I believe there is—and it involves losing focus in the right way at the right time.
Jayesh Parekh could have said in 1994 when asked to join the venture that grew into Sony Entertainment Television, “Sorry, I’m running another venture right now and I would lose focus if I became involved in something else.” That would have been a perfectly reasonable response…that would have cost him the opportunity of a lifetime. His willingness to explore, to step outside his zone of comfort and tackle an uncertain but promising prospect, is just as much the hallmark of an entrepreneur as is “keeping the main thing the main thing.”
How can entrepreneurs reconcile the need to stay focused with the need to be open to life’s unexpected breaks? I’d like to suggest that we distinguish between three different types of focus: in what we experience, how we decide what to do, and how we pursue our goals. It seems to me that a lack of focus in our experiences, combined with laser-like focus in how we choose and controlled focus as we pursue our goals will give us the right balance between chaos and myopia.
The key to having “lucky” experiences like Jay Parekh’s is to look deliberately for variety in our experiences. When he heard an interesting idea for a Hindi television channel, Jay was willing to devote some time in order to see just how promising it might become. The opportunity came his way because he had built a broad and diverse circle of energetic, interesting friends. If all your friends are from IBM, the only kind of ideas you’re likely to discover are those related to IBM’s businesses. You’re certainly not going to see a seven-page business plan for a new entertainment channel.
An interesting sociological theory called the “strength of weak ties” suggests that the most novel opportunities we discover come not from our friends but from friends of friends. Most things your friends know are things you also know; friends of friends are close enough to share with you, but far enough away to be exposed to different influences. And this is one of India’s great advantages: far more than China, it is a place where a lot of people are open to meeting other people they don’t know very well.
I remember well the first time I visited Mumbai. The research director of INSEAD’s Rudolf and Valeria Maag International Center for Entrepreneurship then was Aparna Dogra, an ex-Reliance executive whose husband was one of my MBA students in Singapore. Three days before my trip, whose purpose was to get to know some Indian entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, our schedule was in chaos. Aparna told me not to worry, that although it was difficult to pin down meetings in India well in advance, the beauty of Mumbai was that it was easy to meet important people on the spur of the moment. “You wait and see,” she said, “one person you talk to will call another, and suddenly you’ll have an appointment that afternoon with someone you couldn’t ordinarily see without a month’s notice. That’s Mumbai.” And of course, she proved to be right.
India has any number of ways in which ordinary people can meet entrepreneurial veterans who can help them. The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) is one. NASSCOM is another, for those in the IT sector. If you know someone who has graduated from a good university, whether in India or abroad, you can take advantage of the extraordinary connections that batchmates maintain throughout their lives. There really is no excuse for an Indian not to come across dozens of opportunities per year, if he or she simply is open to meeting many different kinds of people and taking advantage of the rich social mosaic that is India. Staying too focused on what you already know or who you already know is precisely the wrong thing to do.
In contrast, absolute focus is required when deciding how you are going to evaluate the many opportunities you uncover. First, you have to know what you love to do, what you do well because you truly enjoy it. Second, you have to know when and how you bring value to other people. The two partners who asked Jay Parekh to help them didn’t need a television industry expert. They needed someone who exuded professionalism, who walked and talked like an IBM veteran. Usually, people don’t help you just because they like you—they help you because they value ways in which you have helped them or can help them in the future. Decide how you can be of most value to others and hone the skills, knowhow, and other resources that cause people to seek you out.
When an opportunity comes along, ask yourself whether you truly can add value to those who would turn it into a business. Then ask yourself what you will stop doing in order to make time for it. When people don’t fulfill their promises, it is usually because they have made too many of them. If you agree to take on something new, you must have the mental strength to drop something you are doing that is less valuable. Otherwise, you end up unfocused because you never devote enough time to any one thing to do it as well as is necessary to succeed.
Finally, employ controlled focus as you pursue your goals. Often when you try to execute a plan, things work out, but in a different way than you had planned. Ruthless execution means you will not be deflected from your goal, but you can be quite flexible in how you get there. Notice what’s working and what’s not, and follow up vigorously when something succeeds unexpectedly. Rigidly pursuing just one path to your goal regardless of what you learn is not focus: it is tunnel vision.
Entrepreneurs are focused, but not at all times in all ways. If you are open to many experiences, even those outside your present scope, then are focused when making decisions while staying flexible when executing a plan, you’ll strike just the right balance. “Stay focused” is great advice—as long as you think critically about what it really means.
INSEAD Alumni Fund Professor of Entrepreneurship, Director, Rudolf and Valeria Maag International Center for Entrepreneurship and Director, 3i Venturelab
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