Bump up the value: Secrets that can fetch biggest price for you business

The Economic Times 9th Feb 2013

Here are some secrets that can fetch you the biggest price for the smallest slice.

Dream Team

The ideal management consists of people who have been part of successful mega-deals, have depth in your industry, and worked together as a team. Sadly, there's no such group. But some get close. Tap them.

Board Seats

Ensure a majority of board consists of outsiders. Try and attract some well-known luminaries without cash, and build on their reputations to benefit your own valuation.

Clever Affiliations

Part of the concept in both Dream Team and Board Seats is to build value by affiliation. The concept can be extended to contract, outsourcing, and joint venture deals.

Solve a Problem

Whatever the product or service you offer, it must solve some human problem that is not solved better elsewhere.

Know Your Rivals

To prove that your solution is the best, you must also expose the failings of the competitive solutions available in market.

Spiffy Testimonials

If you have customers, showcase them. It helps to put a face on real-world problems solved for real people.

Intellectual Property

To maximise valuation, you need to anchor down the intellectual property — via patents, trade secrets, and noncompete clauses.

Wide and Deep

Investors want to see a whole family of products for today and beyond. But they also want each product to be robust. So, focus on your best product.

Be Honest

Unlike selling a second-hand car, a company's valuation is best maximised with honest disclosures.

Financial Stuff

When you do your projections, go out 5 years, then cut it back to 3 and compare them. If the three-year projection is almost as good, just show the three years, otherwise five.

Deal Structure

Depending on your goals, sometimes deal structure can be traded off against a higher valuation. Properly done, both sides can stand to benefit, and the valuation zooms.

Business Plan

There is no one standard outline for a business plan. Each has to be tailored to the qualities of each company. Have a plan with all the key information.

(Source: harvardcapital.com)

Happy Life....tips from 90 year young :)

Written by Regina Brett, 90 years old, of the Plain Dealer, Cleveland , Ohio .

Mail from : Vaishnavi Ramesh 

"To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 42 lessons life taught me. It is the most requested column I've ever written.

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:

1. Life isn't fair, but it's still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Your job won't take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and parents will. Stay in touch.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It's more healing than crying alone.

8. It's OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won't screw up the present.

12. It's OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don't compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn't be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don't worry; God never blinks.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful.

18. Whatever doesn't kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It's never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one is up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don't take no for an answer.

21. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

24. Frame every so-called disaster with these words 'In five years, will this matter?'

25. Always choose life.

26. Forgive everyone everything.

27. What other people think of you is none of your business.

28. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

29. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

30. Don't take yourself so seriously. No one else does

31. Believe in miracles.

32. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do.

33. Don't audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

34. Growing old beats the alternative -- dying young.

35. Your children get only one childhood.

36. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

37. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

38. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else's, we'd grab ours back.

39. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

40. The best is yet to come...

41. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

42. Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift."

Hav A Nice Day!!

Great Tips from Robin Sharma....

Great Tips for Robin Sharma....

http://www.robinsharma.com/blog/01/35-fast-tips-to-make-this-your-best-year-yet/

I’m sitting on an airplane thinking about what the best performers and most successful people do to continually outperform everyone around them.

As we enter what I hope will be the single best year of your life yet, I’ve come up with 35 Tips that I invite you to concentrate on. Share these tips, reflect on then, post them where you can see them – and allow them to infuse your mindset:

1. Remember that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.
2. Keep the promises you make to others – and to yourself.
3. The project that most scares you is the project you need to do first.
4. Small daily improvements are the key to staggering long-term results.
5. Stop being busy being busy. This New Year, clean out the distractions from your work+life and devote to a monomaniacal focus on the few things that matter.
6. Read “The War of Art”.
7. Watch “The Fighter”.
8. In a world where technology is causing some of us to forget how to act human, become the politest person you know.
9. Remember that all great ideas were first ridiculed.
10. Remember that critics are dreamers gone scared.
11. Be “Apple-Like” in your obsession with getting the details right.
12. Take 60 minutes every weekend to craft a blueprint for the coming seven days. As Saul Bellow once said: “A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.”
13. Release your need to be liked this New Year. You can’t be a visionary if you long to be liked.
14. Disrupt or be disrupted.
15. Hire a personal trainer to get you into the best shape of your life. Superstars focus on the value they receive versus the cost of the service.
16. Give your teammates, customers and family one of the greatest gifts of all: the gift of your attention (and presence).
17. Every morning ask yourself: “How may I best serve the most people?”
18. Every night ask yourself: “What 5 good things happened to me this day?”
19. Don’t waste your most valuable hours (the morning) doing low value work.
20. Leave every project you touch at work better than you found it.
21. Your job is not just to work. Your job is to leave a trail of leaders behind you.
22. A job is not “just a job”. Every job is a gorgeous vehicle to express your gifts and talents – and to model exceptionalism for all around you.
23. Fears unfaced become your limits.
24. Get up at 5 am and take 60 minutes to prepare your mind, body, emotions and spirit to be remarkable during the hours that follow. Being a superstar is not the domain of the gifted but the prepared.
25. Write love letters to your family.
26. Smile at strangers.
27. Drink more water.
28. Keep a journal. Your life’s story is worth recording.
29. Do more than you’re paid to do and do work that leaves your teammates breathless.
30. Leave your ego at the door every morning.
31. Set 5 daily goals every morning. These small wins will lead to nearly 2000 little victories by the end of the year.
32. Say “please” and “thank you”.
33. Remember the secret to happiness is doing work that matters and being an instrument of service.
34. Don’t be the richest person in the graveyard. Health is wealth.
35. Life’s short. The greatest risk is risk-less living. And settling for average.

I genuinely wish you the best year of your life.

Stay Great

Learning from E Sreedharan career

ET on Sunday, 18th  December 2011, takes a close look at the career of the near-legendary and soon-to-retire Delhi Metro chief, E Sreedharan, and breaks down that fascinating story into learnings for everyone, whether you are a CEO, a manager or a policymaker

:: Malini Goyal 

    It took them 190 km and 14 years to muster the courage to let him go. And yet, two weeks before E Sreedharan quits as managing director, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC), their trepidation is palpable. The question is not whether Phase III of the Delhi Metro will be completed by its deadline — 2016. The question is whether it will be done the Sreedharan way. Will his legacy continue after he is no longer at the steering wheel?
The man himself is unruffled. Sreedharan has full faith in his team to carry forward Delhi Metro’s sterling tradition. After all, the credit for the project’s success must go to the 7,000 employees who work hard everyday, he says. 
    This is Sreedharan the leader, who has evolved a system that he believes, can do without him. This is Sreedharan the man, who is self-effacing in his humility and can’t be bothered with glory.
    Yet, in the past decade fame chased him. As the Delhi Metro rolled out track after track with speed, precision and transparency, the ‘Metroman’ became the icon for many Indians. 
    Along the way, there were several attempts to deconstruct his success. Every little idiosyncrasy was analysed, each quote repeated several times over. Fans tried to build his work philosophy with scraps of information about how he ran the Delhi Metro. But very few succeeded in inculcating a bit of the Sreedharan style in their lives. So as Sreedharan prepares for his time off, ET on Sundaydecided to revisit the decade and a half that made him an icon. Only this time, we have culled the learnings and formatted them to fit into your role in life. This is the list of lessons with tips from the legend, customised for YOU.
IF YOU ARE A POLICY MAKER Redefine the Context Benchmark yourself against the prevalent system and you’ll land with moderate success. It will not measure up to the grandeur of a Delhi Metro. Such things demand a vision not limited by convention or expectations. People would have been happy if the first phase of the metro was completed by the deadline — 2005. But Sreedharan raised the bar. He told his team, Delhites couldn’t wait for 10 years for a Metro. The deadline was shortened by three years and met. Focus on Goals Not Politics Shore up your perseverance and prepare for maximum resistance, especially by political expediencies. “I don’t know why some bureaucrats are not able to function. They should have the courage to stand up to their convictions and take decisions and not leave everything to the politicians,” says Sreedharan. He followed this principle throughout his career.
    One such occasion was as the head of the Konkan Railway project in the 1990s. They were years of flux as Goa saw chief ministers change four times between 1993 and 1994. Every change brought a fresh group of lobbyists into the spotlight. “Sreedharan was a rock who was determined to get the project completed,” recalls PV Jayakrishnan who at the time worked as the chief secretary, Goa.
    Sreedharan shares another anecdote. In the early years of his DMRC stint, he was to appoint international consultant for the project. His team chose the Japanese on the basis of their bids. But the then railway minister insisted on the Germans as they had lobbied hard for the position.
    “I refused to give in. And refused to even give him any explanation,” says the Metroman. He was confident he had chosen the best and followed all the required procedures. Finally, Sreedharan’s choice was accepted. “That one incident [withstanding political pressures] increased the confidence of my team enormously,” he explains.
IF YOU RUN
A COMPANY Pick a Few Good Men This one is a lesson by Sreedharan and about him. Despite being older than the 
rulebook allowed for (he was 65 years old), the government handpicked him for the job of heading the Delhi Metro project. The then Delhi chief minister, Sahib Singh Verma, the then Delhi lieutenant governor, Tejendra Khanna, the then Delhi chief secretary, Jayakrishnan, pushed for his candidature around 1996. “We were convinced Sreedharan was the one who could make it possible,” recalls Jayakrishnan, who is now the chairman of the central empowered committee on environment. So the then prime minister HD Deve Gowda granted special permission to let Sreedharan take charge as the DMRC head. The choice of the correct leader laid the foundation of DMRC’s dream run.
    Sreedharan also relied on a good team to translate his vision into reality: “I asked the government for two things — the independence to operate with no interference from politicians and bureaucrats. And the freedom to pick my own team.”
Practice What You Preach As the top boss, religiously follow the rules critical to establishing the company’s values. Punctuality is
DMRC’s hallmark — trains roll 
into stations precisely by the minute, meetings start on schedule and employees must walk into the office before 9 am. “Our business is about being punctual. We cannot compromise on it,” says Anuj Dayal, chief public relations officer, Delhi Metro. This is why, if an employee is five minutes late to work, it is clocked in as a half-day. The philosophy is: if you are late for office, you could be late for the project. Says Dayal: “Our trains are 99% punctual.”
    Sreedharan leads by example: he is never late for any commitment, at the work sites or at meetings. Speed is the buzzword. Decisions at DMRC are quick, with tenders as big as 2,000 crore are cleared in 15-20 days without missing out on any government procedure or audit guidelines.
Seek Different Narratives You can never pre-empt the company’s problems by staying closeted in the corner office. Sreedharan ensures he is always in the loop of the goings on of the company. Every Monday, at 9.30 am, he holds weekly meetings attended by the four directors and 40-odd department heads. This is a freewheeling chat and the minutes of the meeting are not recorded. Sreedharan takes stock of the previous week’s performance and sorts out glitches for the future. “We discuss everything here. That is one place I send my message to my people,” he says. For ready reference, he always carries a small diary to take notes.
    On the first Monday of every month, Sreedharan also holds a meeting with midlevel managers to get a broader sense of the issues and his employees. He is approachable for all and does not limit his interactions by hierarchy. 
Challenge Yourself and the Team Stagnation sets in after efficiency so pull up goal posts and demand higher quality standards to force constant improvements. DMRC executives say every time their goal seems achievable and easy, Sreedharan throws up a surprise by setting a tighter deadline. He then works with his team to make it possible.
    Sreedharan is humble, thrives on challenges and faces them head on. Recalls Rakesh Mehta, ex-chief secretary, Delhi government: “There was a Calcutta Bridge near ring road in Delhi that we wanted to widen. The project was awarded to a contractor. After spending 10 crore over four years, he gave up in 2004 claiming it was logistically impossible. There was a drain pipe under the bridge and the contractor claimed the road couldn’t be broadened without damaging the pipe.”
    Desperate, Mehta called Sreedharan for help. Within 24 hours, he visited the site
    with his engineers, redesigned the
    process, suggested minor modifications and the bridge was later completed within a year.
Keep the System
Squeaky Clean The message must go out loud and clear: integrity is priority and non-negotiable for the company. DMRC is perhaps the only mega infrastructure project of the country considered free from corruption taints. To achieve this, Sreedharan puts ethics high up on his goals list. He personally handpicked his team members in the initial years after lot of due diligence. Once on board, strong structures and procedures are in place for every activity — from tendering of contracts to recruitments — to keep employees on the ethical path.
    To foster values, a copy of Makaranda Bhagwadgita is given to all employees when they join. “I do not consider it a religious text. It is an administrative gospel that teaches you how to face challenges and overcome them,” says Sreedharan. All new DMRC staff also take an oath of integrity when they come on board.
IF YOU HEAD
A PROJECT Keep the To-do List Small When the time period is short, prioritise to keep confusion out of execution. And don’t pile your plate too high. In 1989, Sreedharan was appointed member, engineering, Railway Board for only 11 months. His ex-colleague, CBK Rao, now a senior adviser, ITNL Enso Rail Systems which is developing rapid metro rail in Gurgaon, recalls how Sreedharan picked only three goals for the stint: to reduce track fracture, improve quality of rails and their welding. As a result of his focus, in 11 months, there was spectacular progress on all three fronts, Rao recalls.
Think Bigger Than the Brief... A bridge is just a bridge till you envision it as a state-of-the-art engineering wonder. Sreedharan always dreams big. “I have always aspired to get the best technology available in the world,” he says as an example. This has translated into many technological firsts for Delhi Metro. For instance, it was the first in the world to use contactless smart card technology — where the machine could deduct fares from the smart card from a short distance.
    To sustain this edge, employees at DMRC are encouraged to go abroad and understand new technologies. These tours are no holidays, says an official with the company. The trips are packed with meetings and appointments. As a result Delhi Metro keeps up with the latest trends in engineering.
    “I can say we have got some of the best experts of the world in each category — from signalling to engineering — in my office today,” says Sreedharan.
...And Beyond It Be proactive and don’t shy away from unconventional solutions as long as the problem is resolved. The focus must be getting past an obstacle. Here’s how Sreedharan does it. In 2009, DMRC was building the Delhi-Gurgaon line which was to pass through some Chhatarpur farm houses. The owners took the matter to court and work was stopped. Realising that the legal wrangle will delay the project, Sreedharan got his engineers to build an entire station of pre-fabricated steel. Six months before the metro line was to be commissioned, DMRC won the case. Then the employees simply moved the steel box and erected the station — and met the deadline.

Steve's Seven Insights for 21st Century Capitalists

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/08/steves_seven_insights_for_21st.html?referral=00563&cm_mmc=email-_-newsletter-_-daily_alert-_-alert_date&utm_source=newsletter_daily_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alert_date

Herewith, without further ado, a minor eulogy for Steve Jobs the CEO. When you look at the global economy today, here's what might strike you: Apple is an organization almost singularly unlike the massed hordes and would-be contenders to the throne that surround it. It is the one company seemingly tuned to hit the revolutionary apex, not race past the lowest common denominator. So how did Steve — after a legendary decade in the wilderness, exiled from the island of his own creation, watching it turn grey, dull, bland, and colonized, perhaps even lobotomized — rebuild it that way?

I looked through this excellent compendium of Jobs quotes and found seven lessons for people and companies looking to succeed as 21st century capitalists.

Matter. "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water — or do you want to change the world?" That's what Steve famously asked John Sculley. Translation: do you really want to spend your days slaving over work that fails to inspire, on stuff that fail to count, for reasons that fail to touch the soul of anyone?

Master. "Design is a funny word. Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it's really how it works." Whatever your domain, you have to appreciate Apple's impact on the field of design. Apple built a mastery of design so deep, it reshaped the entire field. Would you say the Gap's reshaped textiles? Would you say McDonald's has reshaped nutrition? Nope and nope.

Do the insanely great. "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it." We're awash in a sea of the tedious, the humdrum, the predictable. If your goal is rising head and shoulders above this twisting mass of mediocrity, then it's not enough, anymore, to tack on another 99 features every month and call it "innovation." Just do great work.

Have taste. "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste." Great work doesn't just require legions of beancounters, or armies of willing muscle — it requires the capacity to make cultural judgments: in a word, taste. I don't mean to be rude (though I do mean to be impertinent) but if the opposite of taste is tackiness, then I'd say: we might just be approaching the tackiest point in history known to man. In a world where customer service can barely pronounce your name (and you theirs), a world where big-box stores barely even bother to tidy up the over-crammed shelves, a world where things get cheaper and cheaper — but look and feel like they were dreamt up by the dream team of Frankenstein, Simon Cowell, and the Wolfpack — a tiny morsel of taste is probably a competitive superweapon.

Build a temple. "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do." If you have the audacity to do great work, then it probably deserves a home worthy of its title — not a doghouse. Putting great work in a big box store is a bit like the legendary Ferran Adria, arguably the world's most creative chef, deciding to serve his groundbreaking tour de forces of molecular gastronomy at KFC: it might get the job done, but people are going to gulp it and chomp it, rather than savor it, revel in it — and value it. The nuances, complexities, attention to detail, inspiration, and artistry inherent in great work need temples: places and spaces where they can be explored, investigated, discovered — where people can be delighted, surprised, and amazed. Think of it as a tale of economic complementarities, that works both ways: if you want to know why the Sony Style store doesn't work, the reason's simple: the work isn't great; it's an empty temple. The Apple Store's one of the most successful retail spaces in the modern economy — a testament to the power not merely of great work, or cutting edge design, but giving people beautiful spaces in which to want to actually spend time enjoying all the above. Imagine that.

Don't build a casino. "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting. The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament." This one's easy in principle — but difficult in practice. To illustrate: guess how much debt Apple has? Zero. Not as in "a few million," but as in: "not a single penny." In an era where it's harder and harder to resist the voluptuous temptations of glittering casino capitalism, Apple did in practice what most companies struggle and strain to — it built an enterprise so solidly managed financially it might as well have been a fortress. Steve wasn't in it to win the alarms-blaring jackpot — his goal was to create stuff that endured.

Don't pander — better. "We didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves." It's the received wisdom that Steve never listened to his customers — and he'd often make a point of saying so. But how many other CEOs do you know that were listening so intently that they responded to the average fanboy's (or troll's) emails? Steve's goal in paying obsessive attention to all things Apple wasn't merely to "listen" but to discern people's wildest expectations, and then firmly take a quantum leap past them, instead of merely discovering the lowest-common-denominator of what people wanted most today, and then pandering to it. Leapfrogging your customers means creating new markets, not just new products. And Apple's created (or rejuvenated) market after market by applying the logic above.

Those aren't the only lessons, nor probably the best lessons. Just a quick reflection on my own. You might arguably conclude: Steve took on the challenge of proving that the art of enterprise didn't have to culminate in a stagnant pond of unenlightenment — and won. In doing so, he might just have built something approximating the modern world's most dangerously enlightened company. Can you?