Pakistan at the moment needs real walk persons instead of real talk ones. Don’t get carried away when gurus advise you that you don’t have a business model or a proper plan, and that there are giants against whom you can’t survive. Just believe in yourself and your idea or product. If its really good, you can eventually make 100 business models out of it. Give it your 110% and Insha’Allah you’ll succeed. If you fail, try again. One day you will.

Don’t wait. Somebody else might have the same idea. Go and grab the opportunity NOW. Even if you’ll let it go due to failure someday, at least you won’t regret that you never tried.

P@SHA

Imran Sayeed, a serial entrepreneur, a consultant, an engineer, a mentor, a rainmaker, and a great supporter of many initiatives in Pakistan including the OPEN-MITEF initiative would be in Lahore on July 29.

Imran is the Senior Vice President, Global Architecture, Application Development and Management Practice and leads all commercial sector industry practices for Keane, a global BPO and IT Services company with ~14,000 professionals worldwide. Industry practices include Financial Services, Insurance, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing, Retail, Hospitality & Travel and Energy, and together comprise most of the key business lines and customers for Keane.

Imran Sayeed came to Keane through its acquisition of netNumina, a boutique technology strategy and consulting form that he founded and grew from a 15 person startup to one of Computerworld’s Top 100 emerging companies. netNumina won more than 30 of the leading financial services & pharmaceutical institutions in the world as clients, raised more than $25MM from venture capitalists and strategic investors and received more than 20 industry awards for its work.

Imran has over fifteen years of experience in software and services. Previously, as a founder of Open Environment, Sayeed helped pioneer multi-tier client server technology, and grew the company from a 10-person startup to an IPO and leadership in the middleware market.

He has written and spoken extensively in leading industry conferences and trade journals over the last 13 years on entrepreneurship, e-business, financial services, insurance and technology. Sayeed serves on the Advisory Board of several software and private equity companies.

Imran Sayeed also holds a patent on technology for providing secure financials transactions over the Internet that he jointly developed with Citigroup. He is currently a visiting faculty member at MIT’s Sloan School of Management where he teaches in the MBA program on technology business strategy.

He attended Brown University where he majored in Engineering, and Harvard University, where he did post-graduate work in business, marketing and product development.

The interactive talk is being held at the NIB Auditorium at LUMS from 5:30 – 7:30 pm on July 29, 2010. It is a FREE event but you must register so that the management can do arrangements accordingly.

Click here to Register.

Click Here to RSVP on the Facebook Event Page.

It was late 2005 when I started promoting entrepreneurship, social media and startups amongst the techies in Lahore. I came up with a name called “Technology Entrepreneurs Den (TED)” for our meetups but little did I know that there was already a global phenomenon known as TED. I got to know about it when few people asked me if I am coming up with a local TED event. I had to drop down the name but at least it introduced me to the wonderful TED Platform and since then I have listened around 80-90 phenomenal TED Talks.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TEDx program and the annual TED Prize.

The TED Conference, held annually in Long Beach, is still the heart of TED. More than a thousand people now attend — indeed, the event sells out a year in advance — and the content has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot, and there are many shorter pieces of content, including music, performance and comedy. There are no breakout groups. Everyone shares the same experience. It shouldn’t work, but it does. It works because all of knowledge is connected. Every so often it makes sense to emerge from the trenches we dig for a living, and ascend to a 30,000-foot view, where we see, to our astonishment, an intricately interconnected whole.

Last year in July, when Asim Fayaz told me that a license has been acquired, I was overjoyed that finally we would have a platform to share ideas and reach out to masses. Asim did invite me to earlier events at LUMS and Kinnaird which were held on July 25 2009 and February 23 2010 respectively but few professional commitments didn’t let me join both the events. On May 22, 2010, I got an email from Asim for the third event. I decided the very day that this time over I’ll definitely register for TEDxLahore and make it to the event.

The best thing was that Asim had a humungous plan for this one unlike previous events. Last month, I got to know that 3 other friends would be amongst the top management as well. Tajdar O. Chaudry is there for PR, Conventional Media Relations and spamming our twitter feeds. If you see good publicity on TV and Radio Channels this time around, he’s the man behind all this.  Bilal Rashid performs the wonderful duty of adding “X” to the event and is standing besides the TEDxLahore Team with his brilliant photography and talent management skills.

Khurram Siddiqi, who’s a relatively new to my friends list, did a marvelous job in selecting the speakers for the event. He finally managed to convince few females to speak at the event. Moreover, I was introduced to Nuzhat Saadia Siddiqui by them whom I have never met earlier but I guess I would definitely try to meet her on the event day if she’s free from the volunteer tasks to know more about the Mobile and Door Jamming programs that Khurram has worked on in order to avoid any disturbance during the event.  The ever humble Jazib Zahir, the COO of TinTash has never failed to impress me. If it’s an entrepreneurial effort of any sort, he’s there for you without any attitude.

The TEDxLahore received around 900 applications till 22nd July against 270 seats and the successful applicants have been informed. I would like to congratulate Asim for assembling a dream team and then putting up a marvelous effort into the event with all the volunteers. This team of professional and student volunteers surely deserve kudos. Those who want to know more about the event should watch and listen the following links and I would appreciate if no one from accepted audience drops out. The event would include some good short films and musical performances apart from the inspirational & motivational talks. If you are not coming, please inform the TEDxLahore Team. There are definitely hundreds of people waiting for this opportunity to come to them.

Those in Islamabad can join the Islamabad Viewing Party at  Civil Junction (Near Jinnah Supper Market, F-7/3) whereas Karachiites can watch the live feed at The Second Floor (T2F) in DHA, Karachi. Live stream of the event will be hosted at the Pakistani Embassy in the Netherlands as well. The event would be held on July 31, 2010 from 2:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m. (PST) at Ali Institute of Education, Lahore.

A report on TEDxLahore by Rabia Mahmood of Express 24/7

TEDxLahore Team on Express 24/7’s “The Morning Show” with Waqas Rafique

Coffee Republic with Aysha Raja – TEDxLahore Team’s interview on City FM 89

Do you have a company that you’re tired of running or do you just want to watch your company slowly and painfully die? Follow these steps to ensure you will lose your employees, piss off your clients and end up as WalMart’s only greeter under 65!

• Hire people because they are your friends, not because they know what they are doing. Your friends will be loyal and it will be really fun working together!
• Be afraid to fire people who aren’t pulling their weight. Firing people makes them mad and making people mad is so uncool. Not cutting the low performers makes you a cooler boss and everyone will like you more even while they are doing twice as much work as the slacker sitting next to them.
• Don’t document anything.  It’s better to talk about the same thing over and over again because you can’t remember what you decided last time you talked about it. This will give you the opportunity to talk to your employees more frequently and they love talking about their projects over and over again.
• Use email as your project management system.  Sending an email to someone ensures they will complete it.  You don’t need any system in place with deadlines, project planning or resource management.
• Regularly forget to attend meetings that you set up. Your employees like getting together in the conference room and waiting for you for 20 minutes until they decide you aren’t going to show up.  It gives them a chance to chat with each other.  And they probably aren’t that busy anyway so it’s not a big deal.
• Every few months, freak out and call a bunch of meetings to find out what’s going on. After those meetings, promptly forget everything that you were told.
• Drastically change priorities regularly. You don’t want your employees getting too comfortable. If they never know what the goal is they will always be on their toes.
• Don’t measure anything. Trust your gut.  It’s always right and will tell you how those tests would have turned out anyway.
• Trash talk your employees to other employees.  Rely on that information getting back to them so they improve performance so you don’t have to waste time on performance evaluations.
• Don’t offer benefits to employees.  Your company is so unique and awesome that people should want to work there for free.
• Argue with employees in front of their peers. This lets them know you care about their projects.
• Go around managers and task their employees. Rely on the employees telling their supervisor what they are working on. The managers will be grateful for you giving their underworked staff something to do.
• Be “too busy” to properly communicate or use tools that everyone else uses to manage projects.
• Never hire people that are smarter than you. You don’t want them showing you up.
• Consistently tell your employees how busy you are. They aren’t busy so hearing how busy you are will make them realize how important and smart you are.
• Have your employees send you lots of reports but don’t bother reading any of them.  Then regularly stop by and ask employees for updates on projects even though the full update is in the reports you ignore.
• Give vague directives like “follow up on the email I sent last week” and assume your employees know which email you are talking about.  When they ask which email, pretend they are stupid for not knowing what you’re talking about.
• Be impatient.  Employees are really motivated by you standing over their shoulders while they work. Also, calling them every 30 minutes to find out if something is done makes them more efficient.

Sadly these are all things I have witnessed far too regularly.  I actually did witness them all in one company, which coincidentally isn’t doing so hot.  I’ve done some of these things myself.  But through years of being the low level employee, then being in middle and executive management, and now running a business of my own, I’d like to think I’ve grown and learned a few things.

So take a hard look at yourself and your management style and make sure you’re not a major offender. If you are, you can change. You’ll find that not only will your employees be happier but you’ll be happier with their performance and output. Having good communication with your employees will always result in a better product or service for your clients and a stronger company overall.