[via Jayesh Matani] Anil Ambani of Reliance Industries recently gave a convocation address at the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, Ahmedabad. Some excerpts:
The first, and perhaps most important, requirement for success, as an entrepreneur, is a passion for your work. To be able to look forward, to every new day of work, with a sense of optimism, with a sense of purpose, with a sense of challenge, and with a view to enjoying the work you are doing!
Far from being a solitary pursuit, entrepreneurial success is a highly collaborative process. A good entrepreneur has to bring out creative ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit from all his people. This can happen only when the sense of passion, and romance, of building a successful business, is shared by the entire organization.
[Another] important attribute for success as an entrepreneur is the necessity of dealing with people, in every walk of life, at a very human level, building, and nurturing, relationships, preserving ones humility, and never losing family and social values.
Successful entrepreneurship demands constant raising of the bar to achieve higher and higher levels of performance, encouraging people to stretch and sweat, to venture where few others would think of stepping out, to take calculated risks to achieve growth on an exponential scale, to never give up, to take every obstacle, or setback, or even outright failure, as a learning experience.
Successful entrepreneurship is not just based on brilliant and innovative ideas, powered by a constant flow of energy. What is ultimately required is hard action and results.
Good entrepreneurs have the ability to execute – to effectively marshal resources to achieve end objectives to ensure that there is no gap, between what the entrepreneur wants to achieve, and the ability of the organization to deliver it.
Entrepreneurship also involves, taking what most people might consider to be big risks cutting across accepted boundaries, going against the status quo, defying conventional wisdom.
Successful entrepreneurs always focus on goals, not on possible hurdles along the way and that is why they are not paralysed into immobility, but keep moving ahead. All entrepreneurs are faced with adversity at some point of time. The secret is to convert every adversity into opportunity, and keep moving on.
