A Reflection on Entrepreneurship

ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report

SUBMITTED BY STUDENT ID E-MAIL

MAN, Ka Wai Joseph XXXXXXXX [email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report Page ~ 1 ~

Submitted By: Joseph MAN, XXXXXXXX

Many of us are employees in different companies. In reality, unless some of us may quit our job to start our own business, most of the classmates will be continuing our career in different industries. They will become managers, but few of us will become Entrepreneur. So, how would Entrepreneurship relates to us? Indeed, besides running your own business, I believe Entrepreneurship should be a kind of attitude to do your projects every day. The spirit of Entrepreneurship should be part of your career no matter you are starting your own business. At the end, to be success in your job, you need to be working like you own your business. Personally, I believe the topics and ideas worked in class should not be just related to those who plan to start our own business, but should be related to every manager in all companies. So, what have we learnt so far? Let’s have a review.

NEVER GIVE UP In the first case, Jai and his teammate made mistake and get into trouble. He did not follow the rule and miss the time to get back. Getting back in the dark he fell down the mountains. However, he keep going to the nearest village even he is seriously hurt. Similarly, there will be all kinds of difficulties you will be facing. You would make mistakes, and you will be getting in troubles. It doesn’t matter how you get into situations, but it is more important that how you solve the problems and your attitude facing the issues. This is the first thing we need to do in our career. There will be all kinds of difficulties and we need the right attitude facing them, and this is the first among all other factors to get out of the bottom of your career life. This is the thing we learn from the first case -- “Never give up”. If Jai didn’t overcome his pain and keep moving towards to a village, he couldn’t survive. Similarly, my experience tells me that you can work hard and deliver the best to get your job done. However, you can make mistakes in your projects and put yourself in a bad situation. It does not matter how you make mistakes, but how you overcome the situations. If you give up, you can never resolve the problem. It does not matter why you make mistakes, but have you learn from experience how you would resolve it and avoid it in future. At the end, it is more important that you have ever take risk and try and learn from whatever mistake you have made, rather than trying nothing. BUILD YOUR NETWORK You would always need help from others. Jai need help from the village women, and he is lucky that he could find someone after he went through the rough journey. It is the same in your career. You would need help from others. It is better for us than Jai that we can have our network built before anything happen. It is important that knowing people from different areas, and they can refer you further to different people when needed. It is important to entrepreneurs, no matter findings angel funds or VC, or resolve technical issues in their daily problems. In my 18 years of career I only stick to one company, HSBC. The long history in one company gives me the chance to know people. It is also important to me working in such a big global company, and you would need help from colleagues of all the regions when you are doing global projects. GET FUNDINGS In HSBC IT, you cannot start your own projects, but need business approval before projects commenced. There is a well-defined control of project and



budget approval, while to ensure the projects started with valid reasons. In many case, business will view estimations as too expensive and asks whether we can deliver it cheaper. However, if you can give a view to the business on how much revenue gain or cost savings by installing such a new system, the story can be difference. By such, they can be more than happy to fund and approve the project. This is the same story if Zipcar, and their success is based on the value the customer, as well as the VC, perceived. Indeed, these internal funding approval processes are just like getting a VC funding, while the internal business people are also evaluating the business opportunities a project can provide. NON PERFECT SOLUTION WHEN START Zipcar didn’t have a perfect system to start serving their first log of customers. When they have revenue, they can re-invest and improve the operation. It is the same for every business and every project. You may not have a complete automated system for every area of your operation, but how you are going to acquire the first bucket of revenue is more import. At the end, if you have profit, you can always re-invest. As a Lead Business Analyst, this could be something I need to educate my business and service delivery counterpart. They may always put requirements of a complete solution on their wish-list. Products need to go through a process of creation, being ridiculed, then response and adjusted before the product is well accepted by the market, or before the customers’ habbits changed by the product. As a result, these wish-list items may not necessarily be correct items until the market says so. We need to do experiment with the market, try whether a product is accepted by the market before investing too much. WEB 2.0 AND THE PLATFORM I am working in a software development team for the Retail Wealth Management. Traditionally, people would believe that Wealth Management is a business about relationship building and require advisors to give advices supporting customers to make proper decision. However, with technology, customers can now reach information via the Internet. Customers can reach financial data through Internet from their Tablet and Mobile nowadays, not necessary going through any advisory services. Meanwhile, the banks may have offered Internet banking for quite a long while. The question remains is how the banks would attract customers to utilize these online web pages to trade and invest through their platform which links up the financial market and the consumers. If you can subside the consumers the rich and powerful market information through convenience channel, they may keep trading through your platform and the volume grow. With a large trading volume a better negotiation power over the dealers and brokers and as a result a better price can attract more customers. At the end, business model of traditional banking products may become very mature already, with tighter and tighter regulatory control introducing operation costs to the banking industries and lesser and lesser the margin will be. Wealth Management could be a new source of massive revenue generation. The Web 2.0 model with the help of technology nowadays may help make Wealth Management part of the customers daily life, but not necessary a scheduled appointment with the advisors.



LIMITED PEOPLE This is a problem every company would be facing. You have unlimited project demands, while you always have a supply constraint. The business needs to prioritize although they may not be willing to do so as everyone wants their project to be the top priority. This needs the senior management to make the decision then. However, sometimes this cannot be resolved, e.g. we have some regulatory demands from Singapore so we have a hard deadline to deliver a project, while suddenly there is a stock thru-train between Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges and you need to hit the tight dates both then. Your job is to deliver the project with the limited resource on hand. You’d sometimes found that the team has some missing skills and you need to acquire from the market. Yet, there could be policy or strategy restrictions that you cannot hire more people. The management needs to react promptly, while need may need to persuade and seek approval from the top executives. Even you are allowed to get more people to the team, how long before you can find the right people? How long can they gear-up to full speed and perform? How long can they fit into the company culture or what values they can bring-in? You do not have definite answers to these questions. All you have to do is to management and to monitor. LEADERSHIP Yes, leadership is important. And I am glad that the management team of my department is good. They can do healthy debate, with excellence judgments on the priorities. They do not come to their own interest but decisions are made towards the best interest of HSBC, not just the department. They can always come up and give a consistent direction and the whole department can follow. However, this does not come on day-one by default. Some managers come and go without success but leaving problems behinds. Some managers did a great job but moved on to take up new roles in other departments. To me, it is about learning from the mistakes of some managers while try to be aspired by those did a great job. Leadership is something I should learn continuously. On the other hand, it is important that if I know I am not doing a great job, I shall step down someday and let other people. At the end it may not be losing, I can still find another post for an internal transfer I believe. STOP LOSS Stop loss is an investment term, also, it is a management action. We will make mistake. As long as we try new things, there is always a possibility of making mistakes. It does not matter we made mistakes, but it matters if we don’t know we made mistakes. We need to set our plan. We need to set milestones. We need to review the progress regularly. We need to review the external environment, and react proactively. By such, we will not repeat the story of Iridium. In HSBC, we set our plans each year, while the senior executives review the progress every month. For example, we set our plan to rollout our application to several small countries in Europe, while in the middle of the year the business direction changed to move ahead on some other regions like Latin America but chop down some rollout projects to these European countries due to the resource constraints. They monitor the market condition closely and take proper decision on priorities. Sunk cost is spent already, and it is not a reason to continue a project because some money is spent. You always need to have the courage to stop a project and accept the fact that there is sunk cost forfeited.



There are too many similarities of being a successful Entrepreneur and a successful manager. I am sure there will be many other characters of Entrepreneurship would be useful for a career. Risk taking, creativity, courage, indomitable, ambitious, charismatic, optimistic, initiative, persistence, open-minded, like-challenge, sociable… etc., all these are characters required by a successful manager. If you are not running your own business, you are selling your brain as a service to a company, and selling is a kind of Entrepreneurship. Therefore, someone may say that if you want to be successful in your career, you should work like running your own business. At the end, there will be all kinds of situations you can get into, and you would need all these characters of Entrepreneurship to overcome. Last but not least, you would require the most important and essential character of an Entrepreneur in your career, and this is LUCK.