A Solid Foundation
Posted: 20 January 2012Week 1 at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation comes to an end...
And what a week! I'm exhausted! It's been a fantastic mix of social interaction, early morning exercise and intense learning.
We're spending the first few weeks in the Kauffman labs - a state of the art space designed to help you be as productive as possible and really bring out your creativity. It fills every work need you could want, in one (rather large) room. From food prep areas to a cafe/lounge style environment to brainstorming walls, publishing services, group workspace, board rooms, zen rooms, rapid prototyping rooms and more. And of course, everything is interactive. The paint on all the walls acts like a whiteboard, it can record what you write and display it elsewhere - it's like something out of the matrix or minority report!
Anyway, enough of that. What did I actually do?
The weeks lectures were delivered by Ted Zoller, a serial entrepreneur and business plan guru. http://www.kauffman.org/about-foundation/ted-zoller-biography.aspx . The theme was "Meaning and Models for Growth Companies: Lessons from Entrepreneurship", part of what Ted calls the 'New Venture Boot Camp'. It started by looking at the mindset of an entrepreneur, to
"think BIG, but start small"
Learning to define a businesses value proposition, and focus on the pain that your business solves.
Can you say what your business actually does? Even big companies struggle:
"Covansys Corporation (a CSC company) is a global consulting and technology services company offering industry-specific solutions, strategic outsourcing, and integration services through a unique onsite, offsite, offshore delivery model that helps our clients achieve rapid deployment, world-class quality and reduced costs." - sorry..... say again???
We spent the week clearly defining the value of our product/service/venture in order to build a solid foundation on which to grow. I will leave you with a quote from Albert Einstein,
"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction."
Albert Einstein
