If you do it as a “job”, it won’t be fun
Sex is fun, yes…? but try to do it as your “job”, it will lose the fun aspect of it. Beatles producing a lot of albums, that was when they do it for fun, when singing or producing album “become a job”, they split. The King of pop Michael Jackson is the same, he no longer able to produce new album when he “have to” do it.
The questions really is: “can we having fun out of our Job” ? If the answer is No, get out and find another one fast. Doing job without “fun” aspect out of it is only for desperate or survival mode. Doing it in longer period will only shorten our life.
If Steve Jobs do it, If Richard Branson do it… we should do it too… don’t you think?
If not an entrepreneur be an intrapreneur
I have been abandoning this blog for quite a while now due to my “busy-ness”and my personal mood. Luckily I have a good friend who remind me to take back what I like to do… So Thank you pal.. you know who you are… 
. Here goes my first post in this week.
If you like me who has many reasons not to be entrepreneur, yet we know that working as company drone is sucks, try this… be an intrapreneur… it means to be an entrepreneur inside the company. No it is not means to sell company data or to be double agent for a competitors. It simply means you treat your current job as one of your venture.
There are many benefits in doing this, one of them is : if you make wrong decision, it is not your money. You certainly will get scold, your manger will grind you to the max, or you demote or worst you get fired, but that’s it… all of them is worth the thing that you learn in that process.
But I can guarantee you, if you made the decision out of common sense and with a good will, there is a slim chance you make wrong decision, if you still do, chance that some one else will also make same mistake, you will be forgiven.
On the other side of the coin, if you make a good decision, you will also get the reward out of it.. like… “pat in the back…”, well money reward will also come if you are lucky or the office politics sway to your side .
The Intrapreneur mentality is very important for us to maintain our standing ground, because we do it for ourself, not for the company, the company benefit is the “by product” of our actions. Instead of we “being used” by the company, we are using the company as tool for our personal growth… and IT’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT..!
Agree or not, give your opinion in the comment section…
That’s it folks, as some one always said… Stay hungry, stay foolish
The Importance of Giving the Best Price to Clients
As part of my job, I have been in consistent negotiation process with some of the clients. Somehow I do not like it, because sometime it really can “wreck” friendship that I built over the years with some clients. I want to have more friends not enemies and life is just too short for the endless argument about pricing.
In the past few years, I am trying to give all my clients the best price or fair in the first proposal that I submitted to them. To me this serve some purposes very well
- This will cut down the negotiation process and we can focus our time, energy and money for something else that more useful for both party.
- If I lost the business, I will not regret it because I know that if I take the business, it will do more harm to me or company, unless if we are in the survival mode.
- If I do not give them best price, it means that I am not doing my job as their account handlers.
Similar analogy: you may prefer to buy in the modern trade, you do not bargain, just take the product according to your need and pay. But there are downside to it:
- At the first, you will be seen as a person who are very hard to deal with, it will lead to a perception that you are snob or arrogant. Yap.. been there few times..
- When the clients have what so called “purchasing department” the best price strategy as above may give you headache because their KPI is to lower down the cost, and I tell you they are very-very tough.
It took quite a while to your client to understand that you are in a good will to give them the best price. In my case I need around 4-5 years for some giant local clients.
I usually politely ask them to compare it Apple to Apple to the competitors . When the pricing is no longer an issue and client believe that we give them a good price already, we can have fun to work with them and have a closer client servicing relationship.
Reason to see another day
Why we generally hate monday and love friday?
I am sure it has to do with our anticipation of what going to happen in the next day. If it is Friday, we know that we will do the fun stuff, while if the week end ended, we know that we will do boring things or we worried that a crazy irate clients will scold us tommorow or there are some problems needs our attention to be solved.
In the seven days of the week, only two days that we really looking forward to, while the rest we want to avoid it if we can. No wonder we getting old faster than we should be.
What can we do to make the rest of the week, like the week end…? what is the reason for us to wake up tomorrow. Are we going to wake up early because of fear or because of excitement? our choice.
In Japan they call it Ikigai where a study in area which has long live expectancy shows that most of the oldies in the community, have very strong will to wake up tomorrow just to be able to play with her/his grand son.
have a good weekend every one…
Why our salary is getting less and less
The company have to make money first to be able to pay us. The competitor drive the profit almost at 
zero level, hence he company will in constant effort to look out for cheaper, faster and better alternatives. And yes, the alternatives is somewhere out there.
World is connected like never before. The job that you currently have can be outsourced to other country with cheaper labor. The more efficient engine or equipment can slash a job or two. The middleman is now having a tough competition from online shop or efficient retailers.
In result, now the job is getting scarce, but new talent is joining the market and hungry for a job. It’s simple economic, when the resource abundant, the price go down. But we all already know that aren’t we? Yet, we still think that we can have our job forever.
Currency, your currency
It is interesting to see how world currency evolve.
At first, the currency is the product it self, we barter things, and then some use shell and some also start using salt as salary and it moved to precious metal, and then now moved to a worthless paper with some pretty printing on it. US$ is the currency of the world but now Euro getting stronger and slowly taking US$ dominance to be world currency and so on and so on.
Currency is not all about money…
- Website visitors is currency
- Google, Alexa, yahoo rank are currency
- Nielsen ratings is currency and so is you market share
- And names are currency too
Currency is about trust, you can not have currency without trust. If a currency losing its user trust, the value will decline. I remember a story, where in the past, you can use a napkin paper signed by a conglomerate to do a business with other company. On the other side of the coin, US$ losing its dominance because users trust is slowly eroding,
If a well known celebrity tweet that one particular restaurant is good. Chance that the follower will flock in trying that restaurant. If a well known unbiased website said one particular product is bad, more consumer will abandon the product right away.
How about your name, how trusted is your name? Is it a good currency? Unfortunately we can not buy trust, money can speed up awareness level, but trust have to be earned, have to be build.
To me, building trust come down into three things :
- Commitment
- Honesty
- Integrity
Start building your own currency now…
The bubble will burst… eventually…
The secret to have many good balloon is to pump it slowly and steadily, at some point we know when to stop and move to other balloon. If we pumping air to a balloon at the very fast rate and have no ideas when to stop, naturally it will burst at some point.
Similarly to the business, we witnessing many bubble burst in our history: great depression in the early 19th century, Dot com burst in 2000, Enron, banking financial crisis and the most current is Dubai World. Are we human learning at all…?
But the bubble burst is good… it weed out a speculative or weak and average company. Usually after the burst, some company will emerge as strong company, either a new one who learn a lot from the burst and the old one who strong enough to survive the burst. See how the net evolving in Indonesia.
Remember how Astaga!com spending like crazy in advertising to capitalize the internet boom around the world. At that time the internet penetration is still around 3%. Alas the bubble burst before they IPO. The company finally sold to M-web at the very low price. Now when the internet penetration getting higher, some company can actually make money out of it like Bhineka.com or detik.com, they build their business slowly and steady. While for Astaga.com although they still exist now, if they don’t do anything, they will become irrelevant and potentially gone forever.
If you see a bubble being pumped very fast, be prepared… it may explode soon… problem is, we do not know when, and if it actually explode, it always surprised all of us, even if we somewhat prepared…
Fake discount…
Anything equal or below 20% discount for non FMCG product (like apparel, shoes etc), it’s not a discount period. Ok I might be exaggerating, it certainly not all, but be careful if you see 20% discount or less, it may be on sale forever, or having more sale period than not.
For FMCG, the average Joe or Jane will know what is the real price anyway. A big chance that the consumer will know that it is fake discount or not, they will feel cheated and disappointed if a manufacturer or retailer doing that.
Rest In Peace Gus…
Today morning (Thursday, Dec 31 ) my twitter account was buzzing around GusDur who just passed away in Cipto Mangun Kusumo hospital. The news shook the nation, In his (relatively short) time as Indonesian president he dismissed a department who used to control the media by previous regime.
Although he is coming from a very strong Muslim background, he actually the one who strongly promoting pluralism among our society… He is a true teacher and father figure of all Indonesian… Rest in Peace Gus…
