Entrepreneurship Moments

Who is an entrepreneur?

In the mid 1980’s, Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson defined Entrepreneurship as “the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled”. Theoretically anybody who demonstrates the aforesaid behavior can be an Entrepreneur.

What it takes to be an entrepreneur?

Unfortunately for many, being an entrepreneur is an end state and it requires harsh trade-offs. Some leave stable jobs to chase that one Big idea. Others start by putting together a business plan backed by a detailed market research. Even some start by searching for the right angel investor. Often times, the very entrepreneurial spirit perishes in the complexities it entails.

Is it really that arduous to be an entrepreneur?

Not if we treat entrepreneurship as a journey, a collection of contiguous decision points and apply our entrepreneurial spirit at each of those. John Burgstone in his book, ‘Breakthrough Entrepreneurship” writes “Every time you want to make any important decision, there are two possible courses of action. You can look at the array of choices that present themselves, pick the best available option and try to make it fit. Or, you can do what the true entrepreneur does: Figure out the best conceivable option and then make it available.”

So the right question would be “did I act like an entrepreneur” today? Yesterday? Everyday? If answer is consistently yes, you are an habitual entrepreneur.

Analytics using R: Most active in my Twitter list

I follow some 80 odd people/ news sources on my twitter account. For a while I wondered which of these sources are most active on twitter. I picked a simple metric '# of status messages posted to twitter' as the measure of activity. Using R I quickly wrote a program to generate my top 10 most active twitter sources.

Here is the bar plot of the result

 

As expected news sources dominate the list. Among individuals "Michael Hyatt" and "Jurgen Appelo" are most active. 

If you are interested in 'R', here is the code to extract this report:

## Prerequisite: Install twitteR package 'install.packages(twitteR)
## load twitteR package
library(twitteR)

##get handle to a twitteR user object (in this case for user d_lalit
tuser <- getUser('d_lalit')

##get list of friends of d_lalit
tfriends <- userFriends(tuser)

##create an array to store the name and number of status messages for each friend
friendsCount <- length(tfriends)
friendsName <- character(friendsCount)
friendsMsgCount <- numeric(friendsCount)

for (i in 1:friendsCount) {
  friendsName[i] <- tfriends[[i]]$screenName
  friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(tfriends[[i]]$statusesCount)
}

## prepare a sortedlist and extract top 10 values from the list
sortedlist <- sort(friendsMsgCount, index.return = TRUE, decreasing=TRUE)
top10friendsName <- character(10)
top10friendsMsgCount <- numeric(10)

for (i in 1:10) {
  top10friendsName[i] <- friendsName[sortedlist$ix[[i]]] ## index is stored under ix
  top10friendsMsgCount[i] <- as.numeric(sortedlist$x[[i]])
}

## plot the chart
barplot(top10friendsMsgCount, width = 0.25, names.arg = top10friendsName, horiz=FALSE, main="Twitter friends by activity count", ylab="Number of status messages", xlab="twitter friends", space=0.2, density=50, angle=45, cex.names=0.7) 

  

I realize the code is not optimally written. Any suggestions refine the code will be appreciated.

Update: 11/29/2011
In the latest version of twitteR package, the method userFriends() has been deprecated. You may replace line#9 in the above code as with the code given below:

tfriends <- tuser$getFriends()

Cheapest Tablet in the World - Made in India

Check out "Akash" - World's cheapest tablet.  It is unabashedly optimized for cost. To be priced at $35 a piece (subsidized by Govt of India) for educational institutes and $60 a piece for retail sale.



Aakash Tablet from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

Specifications

• Screen: 7-inches; 800-by-400 pixels; Resistive touchscreen
• Operating system: Android 2.2, Froyo
• Processor: 366 MHz Connexant; HD Video co-processor (both with graphics accelerators)
• Memory: 256MB RAM (internal); 2GB Flash (external)
• Storage: 2GB card included, expandable up to 32GB
• Ports: Two USB 2.0; 3.5mm audio out jack; 3.5mm audio in jack (No built-in speakers)
• Connectivity: GPRS; Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g
• Power: Up to 180 minutes on battery; AC adapter, 200-240 volt
• Weight: 350 grams

How great leaders inspire action

One of my favorite talks from TED by Simon Sinek.

Simple, effective and insightful.

Agile tour pune - 2011

I delivered a talk on "Scaling agility" in the enterprise at Agile Tour 2011 @Pune. It was a great experience addressing some 70 odd agile enthusiasts, including some renowned thought leaders in the industry.


The talk aimed to answer the following questions:

- What are the typical challenges faced by enterprises while scaling agility (slides 8 ~ 12)
- Why we can not leave it to self organizing teams to manage scaling of agility (slide 14)
- What values the agile leaders should espouse for successful scaling of agility, in the form of a manifesto (slides 15-28)

Scaling agility - Story of a chicken

View more presentations from Lalatendu Das

Any suggestion or feedback to further improve the content will be appreciated.

A Chicken's manifesto for scaling agility

In agile Scrum parlance, the term 'Chicken' refers to those who are involved (but not committed) in the project and stand to benefit from it. Examples: Managers, Leaders, Coaches, Sponsors etc.

In a typical Scrum team, the role of Chicken is somewhat marginalized, at times to the extent of being derogatory. However as organizations Scale agility from doing individual pilot projects to enterprise wide Agile adoption, the role of Chickens assumes significant importance. A thoughtful organizational change management by the Chickens, can be the differentiating factor between success and failure.

Introducing 'A chickens manifesto for scaling agility':
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"As responsible agile practitioners, we are optimizing the value delivered  through agile software development by adopting innovative practices. In addition to the manifesto for agile software development, we have come to value:

attitude over skill

adaptability over predictability

effectiveness over efficiency

optimizing the whole over improvement in parts

That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I picked these values based on my own experience of scaling agility from a small team to be an enterprise wide phenomenon. Keeping your agile adoption journey in context, do you identify with the above mentioned? Do you have any other useful values to add?

Please leave a comment.