What are the general ingredients for success for an entrepreneur who is leaving his job to have his own set-up?

An idea. A business that is your hobby, passion or interest. So come up with a business idea. What hobbies or activities you like that can generate money?

Develop a business plan. Write down what your business will offer, how and to whom. Include your long-term goals. Writing brings clarity.

Do market research to check out your competitors. Who else is offering the same service? How do they promote it and at what prices?

Determine how will you market the product?

But when I look at all the people who left their jobs and are now successful small business owners, I find that they have different attitudes and behaviours. Everyone may not operate from the structured steps mentioned above. For instance, one entrepreneur would measure success by sales growth, while another by independent lifestyle.

Small business owners can be divided into five groups, each displaying distinct attitudes, according to a study conducted in the USA – Idealists, Hard Workers, Jugglers, Optimisers and Sustainers. While each type can be successful, they all take different routes to success.

Idealists: Twenty-four per cent of business owners surveyed, fit the Idealists mold, making this the largest of the five groups. Idealists start businesses to work on something special, according to the study. For example, Navin says. “I love creating content, developing software and doing all the designing.” After working for different organisations, he now owns his business that looks at interactivity of web-based applications.

Although they love creative work and are technically adept in their field, Idealists are impatient with administrative tasks. So they may not want to grow their business to an extent where all they would be doing is to manage people and administrative work.

Optimisers: At 21%, they prefer the personal rewards of entrepreneurship – freedom and flexibility for expansion. They do want growth, but the most important thing is the profit made.

Hard Workers: Representing 20% of those studied, they tend to put in more hours to achieve results. They’re detail-oriented, financially aggressive and the most growth-oriented group of entrepreneurs.

Jugglers: Accounting for 20% of the sample, they are the most personally involved in their businesses. They feel the pressure to pay bills, make payroll and keep cash flow positive. They’re technologically savvy and embrace the internet. They think nobody can do it like them and are consequently reluctant to delegate. Anup left his job as a senior designer while he was with a leading newspaper and now runs his own designing shop. While he has couple of junior assistants, he does most of the job and deals with clients himself. He is a one man organisation!

Sustainers: At 15%, these entrepreneurs are likely to have inherited companies rather than started from scratch. They might have left their job to join the family business or a friend’s business. They work hard and would rather put in more hours than apply technology to problems. They’re the most conservative group, often declaring they don’t want growth and are happy with the way things are.

As a young boy my years were marked with a monsoon that announced the beginning of an academic year and a summer that saw the peon shutting the huge windows of the classrooms and some suppressed tears of lovers indicating the end of the year.

Throughout my schooling I do not remember anyone talking about prioritizing life. Not even my dad who always saw life as black and white and right and wrong. It was kind of a known fact that after finishing the studies one is going to spend the time in dusty benches of a village library watching the neighbouring girls through the window till one got a government job.

Then one day while living in the forests of Bhutan, I learned that whatever we get in life is the result of the choices we make every moment and I could choose the future that I wanted.

Many a time, we just tend to focus only on one aspect of our life and while we are able to achieve that aspect we neglect the other aspects and feel empty at the end of the day. I remember a friend saying once that “we keep focusing on climbing the ladder and what would happen when we realize that the ladder was kept on the wrong wall?” One way to look at life as a whole is to put down various aspects of your life that you want to focus on.

Once you have decided what you really want to do in the next year in various areas, you may like prioritizing them. Are all these areas equally important to you? What is most important and what is least important?
If the most important thing in life to you is your family, why don’t you spend more time with them? The answer is that your activities aren’t in sync with your priorities. We feel best about ourselves when we feel that our everyday activities are a step toward our long-range goals. If we want to do what’s truly important to us, we have to make a conscious and deliberate effort to prioritize.

I’ll give you a simple method to organize yourself so that you spend more time doing what is really important to you and less time getting lost in the clutter of life and not being able to attend to what’s really important. I have a simple four-step process to help us get our actions in line with our priorities:
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Make your action plans realistic and concrete. Make them require some effort, but don’t make them impossible. Be somewhat flexible, and give yourself leeway for your own state of mind. Just don’t give up. Goals are simply statements of how we want things to be. To be helpful, goals should be specific, concrete, and measurable. I want to have more fun–what’s in the way right now? Mostly, right now it’s the nagging back pain that saps my energy. To deal with that, I’d better exercise, diet, and invest in some medical care, even though I’d rather not. To gain a long-term advantage, I have to put myself through some short-term pain.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Do some of our goals conflict with others? If my most important goal is to run a lean, efficient charitable organization, but I also want to have a big house and vacation in Europe every year, I’m setting myself up for depression. In the long run, we doom ourselves if our goals are in conflict. We are grown-ups and we have to face the fact that we can’t have it all. And it’s necessary to really give up. If you decide that a big house is not a primary goal for you, make a public commitment to giving up that dream. Talk it over with your spouse and friends. Have a ritual: light a fire in the backyard and burn up all the magazines you’ve been saving with beautiful pictures of mansions.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Then start making action plans about the goals you really do want to accomplish. What are your professional goals for this year? Where would you like to be in five years? At retirement? Do your goals for this year take you closer to your long-range goals? If they don’t, they should. Maybe you have to focus a lot for the present on simple survival strategies. But you will feel better if you can add to your daily activities something that will help you get to your long-term goals. When we feel that our everyday activities are in agreement with our basic values and take us a step further toward who and where we want to be, we add to our self-esteem and we have a little more evidence that we can have an impact on our future.
‚Ä¢¬†¬†¬† Finally, review your goals, and your progress toward them, regularly. Make sure that you have given yourself permission to change your goals. For goals that remain important, look at your action plans. Are there things you should be doing differently? Build some time into your routine when you can review your progress–at new year’s, on your annual vacation, monthly when you pay the bills, on a regular date with your spouse. Give yourself credit for doing what you’ve done, make new plans for doing what could be done better, and let the rest go.

Santhosh Babu focuses on transformations related projects, leadership development and CEO coaching. He looks at organizations as ecological systems and helps you understand hidden inter-connections within your organization. Contact santhosh@odalternatives.com or visit http://www.odalternatives.com.

For a change, I happened to be in Delhi the entire months of July and August, 2008 and took an additional responsibility of telling my six-year-old daughter a story every day. Within a week I had exhausted my supply of stories that would interest a six year old. Then I began creating my own new story each day. I noticed that all my stories had the same pattern and patter – the super Hero facing challenges, winning and returning to the village. It reminded me of a book Hero with Many Faces by Joseph Campbell which I read way back. Campbell explained the Hero Myth in this book. A myth is a universal story experienced by everyone in every culture. Campbell said that the Hero Myth always began with a man just living his humdrum life. Suddenly and unexpectedly, either by chance or by choice, man is either pulled out of his ordinary life or chooses to leave his ordinary life to launch into a great adventure, whose outcome is unknown at the beginning.

The Hero journey goes through several specified stages. First, there is the ordinary life of the Hero that changes when something triggers his journey to the unknown. This is his call for adventure forcing him to leave the known, comfortable life behind and move to the unknown, difficult future that might also offer great rewards. There could also be a wise man or a mentor at this stage advising and preparing the Hero for the journey. This mentor could come also as a teacher who gives him instructions in the new skills he will need to learn to successfully achieve his goal. In many cultures and stories the Hero may also have to fight an animal from water. Usually, water represents the unconscious mind and the creatures below the water are the personification of different fears we all have in our unconscious mind. Then comes the final fight of the Hero which is the most difficult one among all the obstacles he faced till now. Finally the battle is won and the whole journey has now transformed an ordinary person into an extraordinary one.

The Hero archetype in literature and cinema is pervasive. Rajinikanth, Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Hassan and James Bond are some examples. Look at the movie Matrix and see how it is following the steps of the Hero Myth. Watch the Rajinikanth movie Shivaji to see the pattern of the Hero Myth. The fact that most of the popular movies are made in the same formula and pattern shows the power of this archetype deep within each one of us.

How could we then use the power of this universal myth to awaken the Hero, the leader within us? When we take a closer look at different stages of the Hero Myth, we could plot ourselves at various places of the journey. Remember the first stage is the routine, boring, mundane life and the next is a call to do something different, bigger where you will have to stretch and fight the unknown. Are you here, in this stage now? What is stopping you from starting the journey? What happens to individuals before they cross their Rubicon? Are you on a stage where you are fighting challenges and obstacles? What are the resources and mental states that would allow you to cope with this stage of constant challenge? What would be some of the unconscious fears that you need to tackle at this stage?

By being aware of the journey and the steps, we could look for resources and support that we need to move step by step in our leadership and transformational journey. At certain stage we need a wise man to tell us what to do and at another stage we need to fight our inner fear.

In a nutshell the universal Hero Myth is all about ordinary people doing extraordinary things and becoming transformational leaders. Each one of us could use this model, pattern and design to create our leadership journey.

Santhosh Babu heads OD Alternatives focusing on transformations related projects, leadership development and CEO coaching.

The coming months can be decision making times for senior leadership of Indian organisations. Decisions that are vital to the health of their organisations and employees. These decisions then need to be communicated and the entire organisation needs to be aligned with the new decisions. When it comes to taking tough decisions, asking important and difficult questions and taking a stand, most leaders still follow a traditional command and control path, which creates tremendous resistance, tension and uncertainty across the whole organisation in times of change.

Most of the decision making happens at the executive level. Command and control system assumes that the leader has all answers and all he needs is a bunch of people who could execute what he knows. At times like this when the problems are chaotic and complex, depending on the wisdom of the leader or the top team alone is foolish. How could then leaders involve the entire organisations in times of complexities and navigate through ambiguities? The answer is to effectively use the whole system intelligence. This way the leadership team can involve and engage the whole system in the process so that they do not have to later communicate and align everyone to a change agenda.

So the leadership team’s challenge now is in engaging the whole system and tapping into the whole system intelligence for actions that would help the organisation cope with the present crisis. One way of doing this is to use whole system approaches to planning and implementing change and what have come to be known as large group methods.

All organisations and communities are strongly influenced by factors and events that lie outside their boundaries. A shared understanding of these environmental influences – in the past and the present – has been an important aspect of popular large group interventions.

Large group intervention designs that allow people up to thousands to come together to co-create the destiny is what organisations would be using instead of boardroom decision making that then needs to percolate down. Command and control based management practices feel insecure to use the whole system and leaders feel others will not agree to the idea. But the fact is if leaders can involve all stakeholders, tap into the whole system intelligence, the system would be able to see the problem in a holistic way and take decisions that would have an agreement from all.

So, the need of hour for leaders is to create large group intervention platforms where a significant number of people in the organisation can come together to take effective decisions that affect their lives and organisations’ future. Tapping into the whole system intelligence, gives voice to greater numbers of stakeholders, promotes whole system organisational learning, produces faster and more sustainable change, generates higher levels of commitment from organisation members, and achieves business results.