Hazaar Din.... 1000 days

I was asked last night if I would have made the same decision to start an education institute given what I know now about the challenges of making the public-private enterprises work. My answer - "I am glad that I did not know as much because that would have stopped me dead in my tracks". I deal with most challenges personal or professional with a five step thinking process - some may call it Strategy and others an Action Plan. This has served me well in the past in my leadership roles and now in my entrepreneurial role.

1.     Have a vision. The refrain "If you don't know where you're going, any road'll take you there" is a paraphrase of an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. My vision is to Build a Tech Institute for Lifelong learning to help put our graduates into Industry 4.0 jobs.

2.     Know your starting point - understand your current situation. How much time are you willing to invest to get to your vision? Rule of thumb, I am using my good friend’s benchmark – “Hazaar din”… 1000 days to go from a startup to a small business.

3.     Draw a path that takes you from your starting point to a point in your vision. In the strategy world, you hear the words "Intentional Strategy vs. Emergent Strategy". You may not end up in the exact place on your vision but you will be darn close.

4.     Write down all the likely obstacles that will surface during execution. Biggest obstacle – “Focus or lack thereof”. You see opportunity everywhere. Everyone has an idea that they want you to implement. But remember that your time is precious.

5.     Be prepared to overcome those obstacles. You will be surprised at the number of resources (friends, family, and your advisory board) that you may have already available to tackle these obstacles. This is about perseverance to stay in the game to give yourself a winning chance.

My boss once said, "Hold the big picture but tackle the snake in front of you". Well said!

We at Divergence Academy received our Certificate of Approval from Texas Workforce Commission Career Schools and Colleges for the third year in business. I am thinking about HoloLens and Augmented Reality based training content for new world of Industry 4.0 jobs for Cyber Physical Factories, Additive Manufacturing, Data Analytics, Data Security, Industrial Internet, Simulation, System Integration, Intelligent Devices, and Collaborative Robots. I am off to tackling the next 300 days.