The Power of "Ristakes"

Vineet Nayar, the radical, high performing CEO of HCL Technologies, in his HBR blog has written about ‘the power of Ristakes’

http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/nayar/2010/08/the-power-of-ristakes.html

With Risk Take, one tries to challenge the conventional wisdom with a new 'unknown' wisdom which only the person/team who takes the risk is convinced about. Over 200 years conventional wisdom say ‘don’t over inflate economic with higher domestic spends, while China injects more than 50% in to building the country – if China prove right, 200 years of basic economic laws may go wrong!

Pythagoras did a Ristakes challenging the conventional wisdom at his time that the ‘world is flat’ – clearly short term loss proved very low compared to long term gain for Pythagoras – he is still remembered for his contribution to the world and will be continued in coming centuries. ‘The power of Ristakes’ have such an enormous strength and multiplier effect – as Vineet pointed out – as long as they are supported by conviction, persistence, and discipline, and based on knowledge.

Cheers
Karthik Duraisamy

My Entrepreneurial Chase

Entrepreneurs, in my opinion, are the principal nugget of a nation. Entrepreneurs give the fresh blood to the society - new innovation, new direction, new outlook, new life style, new culture are created by entrepreneurs with that simple idea - be it Microsoft or Google or Apple or Oracle or Infosys or Virgin - all are created by entrepreneurs who had a dream and determination to startup on their own.

Business @ School

My dream chase to become an entrepreneur start way back to my school days where I learnt, practiced and excelled in the art of making money by playing trump cards. I use to earn good amount of trump cards and selling it for fair price. I then, would start the game again with few cards to earn many. The cycle went on and on. I made some loss but yet it didn’t bother me in a big way as I know I would make profits soon.

Then, we had the ‘stamp collection’. When I entered this business, it was late. We already had few champions in this business at my school. But that excited me. What started with a single rare stamp of Bermuda grew in to four big albums of rare collection. Soon I saw myself moving from a starter in to strong performer and then in to champions circle. I used to hunt for rare stamps shop by shop, from relations, from friends relations, etc and bring to school very rare collections which should competitive against the fellow champions. I will quickly understand which of my rare collections has the highest weight age, keep few for my self and trade the rest for a higher exchange – either big money or for multiple rare stamps from my competitors. I used to earn more than INR 2K per month which is a very good sum during 92-94’s.

The dream went on and on with different chase at different time. The best knock was during my stay in UK where me and couple my friends did tried to explore export venture options in Marbles and Handcrafts from India to UK. We did knocked big labels like TESCO and Safeway. It was an exciting and enriching experience as we struggled to make progress inch by inch learning a lot quicker.

Of all the biographies I have read on business life, the most exciting was of Richard Branson’s ‘Breaking my Virginity’. He traces his winning to his mother who used to give him hard targets to met from his child hood.

I am still on my dream chase and am sure that will soon crack it one day. I would love to get connected, share the views, experience, inspirations and incidents of young entrepreneurs and dreams like me.

Cheers

Karthik