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By Posted on Posted in Awareness, Bad Experience, Inspiration, Motivational No Comments

Humans are all born equal with the same teacher, LIFE!
And the lessons start, some soft, some hard and some even harder, some stay fool, some get clever, some smart and some wise and wiser.

Being smart and wise come with time, experience and mainly age, anyone can easily decide which path to follow and practice to be smart and later wise by being the CEO of their own life and evaluating people, promoting, demoting and/or terminating their presence.

And when it comes to making decisions and choices, things get complicated depending on your age, the same question or decision is being looked at very differently for someone in their 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s. The older you are, the more you will say I wish I knew this few years ago.

Personally I wish I have read the below quote many years ago, but surely it is never too late to catch up!

smart vs wise
photo credit: https://unsplash.com/

By Posted on Posted in Books, CEO, Influential, Inspiration, Motivational No Comments

hiroshi mikitani

I started few days ago reading Marketplace 3.0: Rewriting the Rules of Borderless Business written by Hiroshi Mikitani the CEO of Rakuten.

I will not discuss the detailed content of his book which is extremely interesting to read for every person involved in daily consumer related business activities not matter the industry, even that his company is mostly focused on online marketplaces but a lot can be learned from this gentleman and the culture he created for Rakuten in Japan and its subsidiaries worldwide.

Mikitani is a visionary and this is very obvious in his book or when you take a look at the global success of Rakuten which means “optimism” in Japanese, he started a very small company and took it big and i am sure his dreams are way beyond what he already achieved.

You can feel how Mikitani is keen about lifting every one around him up to the top and setting his standards very high, his vision of going global and making all the needed efforts to achieve it without losing focus on the core business and the fundamentals.

He easily can be an excellent business mentor for many <failed CEOs who unfortunately think they have what it takes to run a company or create a business culture> thru his book at a very marginal cost, by just buying his book(s).

But the question is if humans are not resistant to change, the positive change!

I am looking forward to finish this book to start his latest one entitled The Power to Compete: An Economist and an Entrepreneur on Revitalizing Japan in the Global Economy.

Rakuten Group is one of the world’s leading Internet service companies, providing a variety of consumer- and business-focused services including e-commerce, eBooks & eReading, travel, banking, securities, credit card, e-money, portal and media, online marketing and professional sports. Rakuten Group is expanding globally and currently has operations throughout Asia, Europe, the Americas, and Oceania.

By Posted on Posted in Inspiration, Motivational No Comments

estee lauder We should take a time to reset. From everything that is surrounding us, not because we are weak or we are afraid, but sometimes it is better to take a step back to have a look from a wider angle after being drowned deep and deeper in the moving sands of our everyday routine.

Then everybody wants to be successful in their work and life, and to be successful we should try, try hard and even harder. Success does not come while you are sitting back having a beer. You need to work hard, try, learn, fail and then try again and again. Lots of people will try to stop and discourage you, VCs will tell you things you don’t want to hear, they will send you to burn in hell with all your excel financials that you spent days and night fixing meticulously. And you say to yourself, I will keep trying.

And suddenly something bad happens in your life, a family issue, you lose money in the stock market or even get fired from your job and the only choices on the table are between awful and shitty. So you are standing alone with no idea what to do next.

And this is the time when you need to reset.

When a relationship ends (no matter what kind of relation it is) it is a matter of fact. You don’t face a gradual ending, it just stops and ends. And it takes you long time to reflect on what happened and why it happened. But believe me, the more you reflect on the reason, the more you will be delayed in doing more interesting things. And this brings a quote from Mad Men: “Get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened”.

Take a mental break from all your ideas, projects and dreams and try to come back with a fresh mind. This looks easy to write in a blog post, it’s hard to do, but not impossible to achieve and then make a heavy comeback and most probably you will think that what ever went wrong was one of the best things that could have ever happened to you because you were so focused on the end that you missed everything in between.

After feeling energized, enter an empty room, and write every idea you have on a white paper and place them on the floor, take a wide look at them and start prioritizing by numbering them and then plan how you want to achieve them. If you have tried previously on the same ideas and failed then try a different way that may lead you to the same result.

But you will be vulnerable at this stage in your life, because telling people what you believe in is quite hard and it takes lots of determination. And it won’t happen overnight, but surely you will find some people to connect with.

Most important is to make choices that can make you happy in life and always remember what Tony Gaskin said: “If You Don’t Build Your Dreams, Someone Will Hire You To Help Build Theirs”.

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration 1 Comment

Part 1 – Part 2

Over the weekend, we have decided to work on some more logo options for the brand name of my daughter: “La P’tite Parfumerie” including the very 1st design (No. 1).

We will go together slowly thru them maybe tonight and meanwhile feel free to vote for your favorite logo, it might help us decide.

If we don’t reach any final decision with this set, we might run a 3rd round of new logos.

To be continued …

all-logos_600

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration No Comments

For those who missed the Part 1 of this series, you can start reading here.

So after a small brainstorming session, my daughter wrote down few names she had in mind for her future business, the perfumes store.

We went together thru the list and ended up picking: La P’tite Parfumerie, sorry for her being Frenchy, she is French educated in a Francophone country :-)

Dad, can you make a logo for the name?

Sure sweetheart, just give me 1-2 days.

After showing her the below logo, she goes, hmmm, it’s nice “but” can you make some other options so I can choose from.

Great, she is on the right track!

To be continued …

la ptite parfumerie

By Posted on Posted in Entrepreneurship, Family, Inspiration 1 Comment

lemonade stand Yesterday evening I arrived home and my daughter, who is 9, looked quite busy then suddenly approached me saying: I have decided what I will do when I grow up, I want to open a perfume store with my 2 best friends, I will ask them to check if they accept being in this with me but I only have one condition, I want to be the manager and run the business, they will be helping me.

I was quite astonished hearing this, me, who spent and is still spending a large amount of time chasing VCs and investors to launch my own retail startup.

I looked inside her innocent eyes which had no clue about the complex process of funding and launching a new business but at the same time saw the sparkle and enthusiasm.

And what is your plan for this business, how are you going to start? I ask.

First I am going to name the store/business, what names do you propose something nice and short like Zara, Mango or similar to these brands?

And why don’t you try naming it yourself, this is your business, you should come up with name? And let us say we manage finding a name for your business, what is next?

Next, I will start writing down the name of the perfumes brands that I will sell in the store, Lancome, Lacoste, Mont Blanc, Estee Lauder, Burberry, … please help with more names daddy!

And I propose: what about in between naming the store and the list of products, we include the design on the store and maybe later after naming it, I help you creating a logo for it and draw some design with some colors, so you can have an idea how it is gonna look like?

And she agrees.

So now we are in the process of brainstorming for a business name and in the meantime she will ask her 2 best friends if they want to be her business partners.

To be continued … in case the project is not dropped.

By Posted on Posted in 2012, Books, Inspiration, Retail No Comments

I finished reading Smart Retail: Practical Winning Ideas and Strategies from the Most Successful Retailers in the World, a book by Richard Hammond.

From the moment you start the 1st page till you finish, of course if you ever have worked for retail or have passion for it, you will keep saying, I know this, I did that, I have been through this, I always thought of that and so on … Every single detail in the book will take you to a place in the back of your mind. So the good thing about this book is the centralization of the retail information, tricks, tactics and strategies and can be easily used as a general guideline.

Because retail and no matter what kind of retailer you are (food, fashion, electronics, books, etc…), is a huge universe, so no matter how many years you spent in retail, you will always remain a student, discovering every day something new, so thank you Richard Hammond for writing this book and putting all the common points together as a reference to come back and pick any idea and make it work in our retail world.

Book Description

The world’s #1 guide to retail success, complete with crucial, up-to-date insights–including new case studies, ideas, strategies, and tactics from today’s best retailers, like TopShop, IKEA, and Best Buy. Smart Retail incorporates several valuable chapters, including:

  • Opportunities to learn from past retail pioneers: simple yet effective strategies your competitors have forgotten.
  • How to use data to drive profit and growth.
  • How to do more with less, and maximize the value each team member brings to the table.
  • How to use new technology to develop highly productive, innovative “Remote Teams”.

Covering everything from creating the ultimate retail experience to understanding the customer and the importance of motivated workers, this is the book that will equip managers, team-workers, retail entrepreneurs and indeed anybody who sells direct to customers, with practical winning ideas and strategies.

About the Author

Richard Hammond is proud to call himself a retailer: He has more than 25 years of experience and still gets a buzz from it every day.

He has developed a practical problem-solving approach to creating great retail experiences. His consultancy business put this into practice for clients ranging from convenience stores in Kazakhstan, fashion brands in Sweden, to big stores and brands in the UK.