Entrepreneurship is a combination of ideal and reality.
Entrepreneurs are usually very passionate and often talk about their ideals. Indeed, passion and idealism are necessary conditions for entrepreneurs. Without them, you wouldn't start a business. However, many entrepreneurs think that passion is the whole of entrepreneurship, which is wrong. Passion and idealism are only the first step in starting a business. The next thing is to turn the ideal into action step by step, and turn the instantaneous passion into lasting focus. Passion without action is cheap and can't last.
Entrepreneurs are a combination of idealists and realists. Without idealism, entrepreneurs cannot go too far; Without realism, this enterprise is even less likely to survive. As Guo Guangchang, chairman of Fuxing Group, said, Ma Yun is a "gullible" person, but the reason why Ma Yun is Ma Yun is not because of his "big talk", but because of his "big talk", which he realized one by one. In the past ten years, Ma Yun has founded Alibaba, Taobao, Alipay and other enterprises that can change people's lifestyles, and created a new business group called "online merchants". This is the difference between many entrepreneurs and Ma Yun. Many entrepreneurs have said it, but Ma Yun not only said it, but also did it and did it.
Success is a small probability event. Even if Alibaba develops smoothly, Ma Yun is soberly aware that its success is largely attributed to "luck". He said: "We are not the cleverest or the most diligent, but we owe much to luck." This is both a self-deprecating remark and a fact.
Behind the hustle and bustle of successful entrepreneurs, few people point out some cruel truths: less than 2% of enterprises can run for more than 10 years, and less than 1% of college students succeed in starting businesses. It is no exaggeration to say that the probability of a newly graduated college student's success in starting a business is similar to that of a person jumping from the fifth floor without falling to death. It is a standard small probability event. A lot of people took Bill? Gates, Michael? Dale, Steve? Jobs' case is used to encourage college students to start businesses. As we all know, encouraging people to take risks with a small probability is tantamount to encouraging a speculative mentality, so I have always had reservations about college students' entrepreneurship. Idealism deserves respect, but realism can often make a person live longer.
Another misunderstanding that entrepreneurs are easy to fall into is that they like to follow entrepreneurial idols, which is also too idealistic. Many entrepreneurs often tell stories about Ma Yun, Jiang Nanchun and Chen Tianqiao. It seems that as long as they learn from them, they will succeed in the future. The actual situation is far from simple. We are misled by entrepreneurial stories concocted by various media. On the one hand, the stories of successful people are carefully packaged. The real situation is not like this. What we can see is just the tip of the iceberg. On the other hand, even if their stories are true, the success of idols cannot be imitated, because success is the product of "the right place at the right time", and these cannot be copied. As the saying goes, the little rich depend on diligence, while the great rich depend on life, do their best and resign themselves to fate. Entrepreneurship also needs this kind of open-minded spirit, and nothing can be guaranteed.
For some entrepreneurs, it is understandable if they really need an idol to guide them forward, and some of their ways of dealing with people are also worth learning. Just remember you can learn from them, but don't imitate them. Entrepreneurship is essentially a process of self-discovery and self-realization, and everyone's self can't be imitated. Remember a word, learn, not imitate!
Values are more important than business models.
This is an era of rampant entrepreneurship. Every day someone tells you that he has a good business model and he is going to start a business. Every day when you turn on the TV, you will see programs related to entrepreneurship, and everyone is talking about their dreams. Go to any university and ask any college student if he wants to start a business. Nine times out of ten, the answer is "yes". Regrettably, this is another era that lacks values and professionalism. We seldom see that behind these fashionable words, anyone starts a business to change other people's lives; Few people say that entrepreneurship has anything to do with his values. So what we see are many small bosses and rich people, and we rarely see respectable entrepreneurs.
There are also many professional managers with MBA background who like to talk about business models and strategies, as if they are all starting businesses. I have analyzed hundreds of business models, and each business model has clear words, but in practice, I found that this is not the case at all. There is a simple reason. The problems you have considered in the business model are often not real problems in reality. Your earliest thoughts will definitely change in the face of reality. It is said that you can't plant flowers with your heart, but what you originally planned to do was inadvertently completed.
Values are more durable than business models. Take Starbucks as an example, in the current CEO Howard? Before Schultz took over the company, Starbucks was just a coffee bean company in Seattle. The two founders are crazy about drinking coffee and are not good at making money. Their only wish is to provide the best coffee beans in America, and it is this idea that attracted Schultz to join us. As we all know, Starbucks' business model has undergone many changes, from selling coffee beans to selling coffee, and now selling music, but their values have not changed much, that is, let more people experience the happiness of coffee. It is this simple value that makes Starbucks grow into a world-famous brand within 20 years.
It's not that business model and strategy are not important. The knowledge taught by these business schools may be really useful in analyzing the mature business in a mature market, but it often doesn't work when developing new business. This is because those innovative enterprises usually face a non-existent market, and the relevant data usually do not exist or change rapidly. What supports those entrepreneurs to make decisions is often based on the values of entrepreneurs. The business environment of an enterprise is constantly changing, and the business model will change accordingly, but the values of the enterprise have not changed much. In this sense, the values of an enterprise are more lasting and stronger than the business model of this enterprise.
Ma Yun's success can be largely attributed to the success of values. Before Ma Yun founded Alibaba, he realized the influence of e-commerce on the future business form, and formulated the mission of "making the world have no difficult business". Before Alibaba received a $20 million investment from the son of Softbank, he visited more than 40 venture capitalists in Silicon Valley with his team, all of whom were turned away. Many people's comments on his business model are "this plan is stupid" or "come to me when you think about it". In the eyes of venture capitalists, these ideas that no one has ever succeeded in practice are really crazy. Fortunately, Ma Yun met Masayoshi Son, who was also a little "crazy", talked for 6 minutes and gave him 20 million dollars. Son later said that it was the values embodied in Ma Yun that moved him.
People who have a little business school education are silent, but they don't understand the true meaning of this word. Management guru Henry? Mintzberg said that strategy is essentially a craft, not formulated by entrepreneurs hiding in the office, but slowly adjusted through constant practice. Strategy is the result of corporate vision's running-in with reality. Therefore, it is natural to talk about the so-called strategy when starting a business. Due to the lack of flexible response to the real environment, the so-called strategic roadmap has become a constraint, leading to the failure of enterprises. Ma Yun once said, "People who have been in the company for less than half a year should not talk about any strategy", because the so-called strategy that does not understand the company's current situation must be bragging.
Strategy, like management, is essentially a practice. People with entrepreneurial experience say, "shoot first, then adjust, talk less about theory, and then do it." Once the general direction of the company is determined, don't stay at the strategic level. The key is to put these business models into place. The key to enterprise success is not business model or strategy. Although these two things are important, they are actually easy to grasp. The difficulty lies in getting every detail right, which is often the difference between winners and losers. Therefore, entrepreneurs should not neglect execution and enterprise management, which determines how far enterprises can go.
Misunderstanding of Entrepreneurial Team and Resource Integration
Qi Xin's 1 lion plus 9 wolves is often better than the 10 lion with different ideas. There was once a business school graduate, with an MBA of 10, who had an excellent background and was called a "luxury man". They worked together, and in less than a year, they parted ways. The reason is that they put too much energy into discussing business models and formulating strategies. As a result, the two could not reach an agreement and refused to give way to each other. Instead, no one went to implement it, and finally had to break up.
In sharp contrast, it is Alibaba's entrepreneurial team. In Alibaba's "18 arhat", in all fairness, except Ma Yun, none of the other 17 people are outstanding figures. This is precisely a condition for Alibaba's success. Alibaba only needs one leader, and the rest is responsible for implementation. A good entrepreneurial team should be good at matching, only need a core team, others try their best to be responsible for implementation, so the probability of success is greater.
In the early days of starting a business, "an affordable man" is a more suitable business partner. They are often people with strong execution, instead of hiding in the office to talk about ideas or complain to each other, but no one takes action. Feng Lun said, "The core part of an enterprise is often the' affordable people' who start their own businesses and make continuous progress through learning". For the highly educated "luxury man", Yu, chairman and president of New Oriental Education Group Co., Ltd., suggested that "it can be reused in some professional fields, but the integration of talents must be strengthened when attracting, just like solving the rejection problem of organ transplantation."
Let me talk about integrating resources. Zhou Qiren, a professor at Peking University and a famous economist, said, "Small enterprises are enterprises that rarely use other people's money, while large enterprises are enterprises that use a lot of other people's money." Is a small business small because it seldom uses other people's money, or because it seldom uses other people's money? This is very similar to a chicken-laying or egg-laying cycle, but most small enterprises are small because they rarely use other people's money, and the result is small enterprises. Therefore, entrepreneurs should be able to integrate resources, and only enterprises that can effectively integrate social resources can be small.