A dream always seems feasible to execute but the reality of it being harsh. Why?

'Do not look at the low points in your life as defeats,
but as opportunities to make progress'

The enterprising individuals with or without MBA, who started their own ventures they were driven by the desire to prove themselves. To lead interesting, passionate, meaningful lives their stories say one thing loud and clear. You don’t need a fancy degree or a rich daddy to dream big and make it happen it’s all in your mind, your heart and your actual effort.

A dream always seems feasible to execute, but while we are doing the actual execution, the reality of it being harsh, hard and tough sets in.

To realize the dream, you therefore need to use measured reality of objectives, targets, tasks, process and risk and practically follow through with measurements. Follow through your actions with practically established rhythm and progress will be visible.

‘If you have a positive attitude showing you have faith in someone, that person will probably try to live up to your expectations.’

A systematic way that helps understand the practical realities and thus enable decision on actions required to progress will go a long way in seeing you through.

There are a variety of ways in which we may react to results. This may be to trigger specific activity relating to performance (i.e., an improvement plan) or to use the data merely for statistical information. Often closely tied in with outputs, performance metrics should usually encourage improvement, effectiveness and appropriate levels of control.

For example: Clock rate of a CPU, Calories per serving, Contrast ratio of an LCD, Frequency response of a speaker, Fill factor of a solar cell, Resolution of the image sensor in a digital camera, Detection performance of a solar system, Noise figure of a radio receiver, Battery life of a laptop computer and etc..

One more example when we would like to build customer centric efforts and dedication, we must measure customer satisfaction and with respect to customer satisfaction, market share and growth must be measured. One has to therefore work on the realities such as;

Customer satisfaction index: Percentage of complaints, invoice accuracy rate, percentage of break downs, selling price calculation time, field service response time, contract negotiation time, cycle time offer to order, evaluation time for warranties, product performance, component failure rate and etc..

Market share and growth: Churn ratio, Market share, Market share index, Market success factor, win/lost ratio, Percentage of escalations, percentage of new customers per year, returns % sales, exploitation index, coverage index, reach of service locations, quotation conversion, percentage of service requests, percentage of warranty requests and etc.

Story taken from ‘Who says elephant cannot dance’ ‘We announced first quarter operating results at the end of April and they were dismal.

Revenue had declined 7 percent. The gross profit margin had fallen more than 10 points to -39.5 percent from 50 percent.

The company’s loss before taxes was $400 million. In the first quarter of the previous year, IBM had had a pretax profit of close to $1 billion.

At the end of May I saw April’s results and they were sobering. Profit had declined another $400 million, for a total decline of $800 million for the first four months.

Main frame sales had dropped 43 percent during same four months…’ and the story goes on that the performance was very bad and many journalists had predicted that IBM would be shut down.

However it was not the case. Louis V. Gerstener, Jr. revived the company from a state of dismal to the greatest company in the world. One of the most important aspects of revival was that the performance measures had been analyzed and the company had taken brave and hard decisions as well as acted on those decisions for its revival.

If you want to start a business, I would say find out something which is not available and which people want a hunger, a need for service or product then you go out to satisfy the need, in the best way possible.