Outsourcing was the bogeyman of the '90s. Protectionists portrayed it as an evil that would take American jobs away. Yes, some jobs did go offshore as people feared, but it made the global economic pie grow bigger.
Corporate executives and business owners need to realize that there can be no compromise when it comes to ethics, and there are no easy shortcuts to success. Ethics need to be carefully sown into the fabric of their companies.
When I start getting embroiled in heated debates and feeling stressed, I just turn everything off and disconnect from the world. I simply tell my colleagues and friends that I am not well and need to cancel all meetings for a day or more. I take it easy - go for a long hike, take a vacation somewhere, or just stay at home and read.
Most business schools are geared toward churning out investment bankers and management consultants.
Ask any venture capitalist, and they will tell you that they consider the experience and completeness of the founding team to be a more important factor in their investment decision than the technology that is being built.
I advise all of the entrepreneurs that I know to attend at least one entrepreneurship event every week. The worst thing an entrepreneur can do is to confine his or herself to a cubby hole.
I realized that, after tasting entrepreneurship, I had become unfit for the corporate world. There was no turning back. The only regret I had was having wasted my life in the corporate world for so long.
After my health suffered due to the stress of running my second company, I had to switch careers. But I still didn't want to go back to the corporate world. So I became an academic.
Writing a book is usually a full-time job that takes years. I didn't have years. So I decided to crowdsource content for the book.
The mentor-mentee relationship is ideally like that of the guru and disciple: motivated by the desire of the guru to impart knowledge to the disciple.
An open-minded and diverse population that readily shares information, encourages experimentation, accepts failure and dispenses with formality and hierarchy is what makes Silicon Valley the successful hub that it is.
The stereotypical successful entrepreneur is Mark Zuckerberg - the young college dropout who dreamed up a crazy idea while in his dorm room.
During the dot-com days, one could take just about any company public and reap fortunes. All you had to do was to make sky-high projections for growth, say you were in the Internet space, and go along with unscrupulous investment bankers and their analysts.
When my generation grew up, our only sources of knowledge were books, teachers, parents and friends. The encyclopedia was an item of luxury. We faced big limits in what we could learn, where we could be and who we could reach.
The harsh reality is that if you are middle-aged, write computer code for a living, and earn a six-figure salary, you're headed for the unemployment lines. Your market value declines as you age, and it becomes harder and harder to get a job.
In the U.S., PC-makers have no incentive to lower prices because it kills their profit margins. They keep adding new features like high-end retina displays and faster processors to justify their high prices.
Business executives need to start by spelling out and communicating their values. Then they need to lead by example. This means getting rid of the bad apples and declining opportunities that bring instant wealth at the cost of selling one's soul.
The lesson is, because there will be many lemons in life, to learn to make the proverbial lemonade - and be open and honest. That's the best way of doing damage control and positioning yourself for success.
A key to achieving success is to assemble a strong and stable management team.
The natives of Silicon Valley learned long ago that when you share your knowledge with someone else, one plus one usually equals three. You both learn each other's ideas, and you come up with new ones.
