Sunil Mittal on Entrepreneurship

knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu

45 points·ideas101··9 comments

Good quote:

Our theory was: If you're caught between speed and perfection, always choose speed, and perfection will follow. You never wait for perfect positioning, because in business you don't have the time; especially if you're small, you can't do it.

Good interview but the speed-perfection quote has to be taken with a grain of salt and should not be generalized, by Sunil Mittal's own admission the retail stores venture with Wal-Mart is "surely going slowly..."

The reason being they are Big now, big things don't take change easily. Bigger you get, slower you get. So be small, be agile.

exactly ... speed - perfection compromise cannot be applied in all cases even when you are small...

This is very evident if you are customers or airtel, lousy customer service, clearly there is no perfection here.

Well, customer service is bound to be lousy to a decent number of people due to the very nature of it. (I would still rate their customer service much above than most other companies that i've dealt with.)

Really good interview! What I really liked was the clarity with which Sunil Mittal is able to express his thoughts without using buzzwords or jargon anywhere.

Great submission!

For me the key take away was that there will always be changes in the competitive landscape and instead of complaining you should accept them and move on. Either figure out how to adapt your business of you think there is no chance of survival just move into something else. They key is to not spend time complaining when you could be working.

He also gave a convocation address (20 min mp3 interview): http://deshgujarat.com/2007/04/03/speech-by-sunil-bharti-mit...

I liked it, YMMV. He briefly mentions Microsoft and Google.

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