Whether you lead an early-stage startup or a well-established company, it is critical to challenge yourself and your team to prepare for the next disruptive force - be it a shift in the market, a new consumer trend, or a competing innovation.
In any business, you get your numbers together before you go out and do the work.
You might indeed be able to provide this money that people need to start a business, but can they run a business? This new consolidated agency [National Empowerment Fund] focuses on that matter of preparing people so that they can run business successfully.
Most people end up owning a business by accident. Therefore, they don't usually have a thought process and a strategic plan in place.
Even though Traf-O-Data wasn't a roaring success, it was seminal in preparing us to make Microsoft's first product a couple of years later.
Launching a newspaper without a coherent idea of how you're going to promote it, or get it to people who might want to read it, is like launching a boat without a rudder or an engine... or a hull, now that I think about it.
Do your homework or hire wise experts to help you. Never jump into a business you have no idea about.
A thoroughbred business man cannot enter heartily upon the business of life without first looking into his accounts.
The fact was that I had always been considered a leader in my scholastic career. It just never dawned on me that this was any kind of preparation for the business world. Like most young women of my background and education, I always performed on demand and never anything else.
I do not know whether the Government will be able to get ready to conduct this transaction together with the management of Rosneft itself, whether the appropriate strategic investors will be found. And I believe it is about such investors that we should talk. But we are getting ready, and it is in the current year that we are planning to do this.
