This conference was great. It has changed me a lot in a good way so I can say it was really relevant for my professional experience. I've found out that both leader and entrepreneur qualities were lying in me without knowing and now I just have to bring them at surface. I see the world in a different way...I can say I'm more optimistic and my way of thinking is the best. I meet a lot of interesting people, role-models that gave me another perspective on things. I'm now more focused on what I have to do, on what road to walk...I see their steps in front of me so I now is the right way to go.
I'm motivated and hope to motivate others with my enthusiasm and my attitude. If so please let me know if I succeed...I'm waiting for feedback :) .
I'll do a little sharing on the information that I've found out in this conference in the sessions that I've attended.
First of all it was an workshop with Seyed Mehdian, professor of the University of Michigan-Flint. He started by telling us that "No job is to small. No job is too big." It all depends on your abilities and your determination. Entrepreneurship is the process of chaiging ideas into commercial opportunities and creating value and so the entrepreneur is the individual who thinks, reasons and acts to convert ideas into commercial opportunities and to create value.
A successfull entrepreneur sees and grabs a commercial opportunity, tends to be persistently optimistic (perhaps even to a mistake), plans to obtain the physical, financial and human resources needed. So success is unlikely if you "are hardly able to see an opportunity until it ends to be one" as Mark Twain said.
Today we can see the society chaigings from "industrial" society to " information" society, from suggested focus on human resources to information. At the level of global economy there is an awareness of international innovation and sourcing. What are the inflation rates? ... Well there are corporate finance.
Seyed Mehdian it's a finance professor that teaches trough practice and even confronted us with a real case so that we can see if we have entrepreneurial skills... it was the best way to start a conference on the entrepreneurship track.
The next session was about sustainable development presented by Tea Catana that told us: " Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable to ensure that it meets the needs". We watched a movie (story of stuff) called the story of stuff witch showed us the reality in a funny way. At the end left us a message "...people created it, so let's create something new!"
The second day of conference started with Todi Pruteanu marketing director from Microsoft and Ciprian Jichici from Genisoft that offers consultancy to Microsoft. While Todi Pruteanu gaved us informations more technical that I was really making an effort to understand things like : Empower for ISV, MSDN(I've cleared this out-it means Microsoft Developer Network :D ), Inovate on, Microsoft Partner Program and so on... maybe this kind of information might help IT guys 'cause I don't have a clue of what they really mean, Ciprian Jichici spoke on my language let's say. He talked about entrepreneurship in technology. And he shure said something true : " a fool with a tool is still a fool". He talked more about data mining witch he said that it's more a buzzword...it's like teenage sex...everyboby talkes about it but few really practice it. Well his definition about data minig is: data excavating with the purpose of extracting models; alternative name: knowledge discovery in databases(KDD); lots of disciplines, databases, statistics, AI (if you know what AI means please let me know:D ), raplidly maturing technology; almost unlimited applicability.
Ok so this was a commun track with the IT that is way I had to be like 5 times more focused on the information as usual and it worth it...hopefully I will take my database exam.
And finally the man I was waiting for ...Marius Ghenea. You might know him from "Arena Leilor" I know that I know him from that TV show, or if you read the economy press you might know that he put the bases of Flamingo, Flanco, PCFun, Viking and so on...
Well we had an workshop about entrepreneurship between vision and action. The ingredinents of a successfull entrepreneur are: opportunites, attitude, luck/chance and the entrepreneur himself. Now the attitude must be optimistic, determined, persistent, responsable, enthisiastic, must have market and business know-how, charisma and must be persuasive.
Motto: " Search and luck leads to opportunity"
Financing opportunities...the 3F : Friends, Family and other Fools, our own resources, business angels, venture capital or private equity, the bank and the EU grants.
The 4 entrepreneurial mistakes... team election, targeting the wrong marketing segment, evoiting in taking a decision, ignoring the results.
Examples of teenage entrepreneurs: Jerry Yang & David Filo (Yahoo), Serghei Brin & Larry Page(Google), Steve Chen & Chad Hurley(Youtube).
After the workshop on entrepreneurship we had a common session with the leadership track also with Marius Ghenea talking about the succesive generation of leaders.
He started talking about leadership and business success: in any business venture you need leadership...leaders raise the aspirations of their folowers.
"Vision without action is daydream, action without vision is a nightmare"-japonesse proverb.
Now: You have a vision!...The vision will elevate the enrgy, enthusiasm and self-esteem of everyone in the company. Ensure that everybody sees a benefit in folowing the vision!
What is the difference between a leader and an entrepreneur?
Bouth has to have an enthusiastic vision, determination and persuasion, responsability, to be decisions-makers, positive thinkers, but the entrepreneur must also have know-how.
in conclusion, leaders tend to look very much like entrepreneurs.
Next topic was about Benchmarks. A great leader knows how to benchmark! We all need to know how we are doing compaired to others. The attributes that needs to be measured and improved continuously are: meritocracy, fairness, openess, justice, speed, imagination and excellence in execution.
"There is no great leader without a great team!"
The 8 actions for a leader to build a great team:
- provide an enspiring vision
- define shared values
- set stretch goals
- synergize complementary skills
- encourage team activities
- empower teams
- provide coaching
- reward results and achievements
"Comming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success" - Henry Ford
Results of teamwork:
Better results we can obtain by strategic focus, people doing their best, synergistic collaboration.
Better process with a higher volume.
"Victory comes from knowing when to atack and when to avoid battle. Victory comes from corectly using large and small forces. Victory comes from everyone sharing the same goal. Victory comes from finding opportunities in problems. Victory comes from having a capable commander and the gouvernment leaving him alone." - The Sun Tzu's "Art of war".
On the third day we started with a session of Gabriel Mardarasevici from NESS Romania. He had that russian accent talking in English, didn't have a session ready so didn't know what to tell us so he told us to ask him questions...it was borring 'cause he talked a lot about comunism and computers and I made a huge effort to understand was he was saying.
Next session was with Vlad Stan who talked about online entrepreneurship and leadership again a common session with the technology track...this time I understood everythig. It was awesome. In his vision an entrepreneur is optimistic, sees opportunities and not problems, has a vision, has courage, has trust and acts.
Well a thing that really surprised me was saying that an entrepreneur NEVER gets fustrated!!!
And i liked the definition of courage that he told us: "Courage means scaring the shit out of you and still going for it!"
Statistics say that : 2% of the people have the most money in the world; 2% of people have higher education; 1 out of 10 people get to be entrepreneur and only 1 of 10 succeed.
Why 9 of them don't succeed? Because they don;t have enough trust/faith in themselves, they didn't had a clear vision.
Leadership means having more faith in your people that they have in themselves.- Now this is a thing that really got me thinking.
After almost 2 hours break, we had the Firewalking session with Bruno Medicina. I didn't give him too much credit because of his appearence : tatoo's and his bad english anyway... this session encourage me to set up goals even if I didn't succeed in setting 100 of them. It was a lot of people, we were tired and I didn't take seriously all the breathing and concentrating exercises 'cause i didn't belive that we will actually have to walk on fire. When we had to sign the document in witch we take full responsability in case something goes wrong I actually realised the thing was serious. Generaly I'm afraid of fire...it is or at least it was like my worst nightmare and on that state of mind that I had then I said: " What the F word... I'll do it!"...and so I did. If I'm planning to do bungee jumping, jump with a parashute and so on, comparing to this those will be like peace of cake.
The las day of conference for me started with an workshop on Marketing with Madalin Matica. It was called New Marketing. New ways of success and it was really inspiring.
I learned differences between the old way and the new way of marketing.
The Old marketing is based on needs witch is a wrong key word. On the new marketing the key word is "we want" and it says that we are not selling the product, we are selling a story.New marketing is all about lovemarks(no not brands). We talked about viral merketing, permission marketing and how to build a personal brand.
The second session of the day was again common with Techincal and it was about Bussiness and IT from an entrepreneurial perspective. It was presented to us by Remus Cazacu, general manger of Bit Software. It was a nice presentation focused on entrepreneurship and the steps to start a business. It palyed a movie for 30 minutes that was borring...no offence it was about computers, how many clicks/seccond and so on...we finished earlier witch gaved me the opportunity to meet Jim Bagnola on the holeway. He was talking with Andra Mircea about training and gaved us really good informations.
Unfortunately we couldn't stay for the last session eith Jim Bagnola 'cause we had to come home and prepare our trainings but anyway it was awsome.
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