Ok, any advice for someone trying/considering the reverse?? Am an average programmer a tad tired of programming and foraying into business by writing functional spec, Business Justifications etc.... What are recommended readings i must do?
The easiest way to move into business is to realise that you will need to understand the business. This is not some nebulous Zen crap I'm pulling here, but a fact. If all you've ever done is work for a blue chip software company then it's likely that your only "experience" with "users" are those you sell your software or services to: in most businesses your users are the ones you write internal software for.
Moving into it can be as simple as asking for training and a transfer to another department or business area (if you work in big corp) or simply involving yourself in the day-to-day workings of your users. If you show a genuine interest in learning how they do their work you can use your existing IT skills and your honed, technical mind to making their lives easier.
You'll be surprised by just how utterly inefficient most things are. Fixing these deficiencies range from yanking data from crufty Excel spreadsheets on network drives into a proper database or munging crap data or other sort of automation tasks.
The only real way to learn a business, aside from domain areas like finance where you're as likely to receive in-house training, is to sit next to them and help them do their jobs.
(Sneaky Ninja edit: Your line manager may hate that you're leaving as he's losing a developer, but the business may well end up loving you even more. You're no longer a cost centre but you're actually improving the business.)
This absolutely extends into technical writing. Have you ever read horrible specs? :) They're time wasters, frustrating, and almost insulting. If you care about your audience, and I mean really care, you'll produce damn good specs.
Business guy means taking risk, being persistant, able to sell and to network. That's it.
Taking risk doesn't make you a good at business. In fact, quite the opposite. Great businessmen are experts at limiting their risk and identifying and acting on high risk-to-reward opportunities.
One of the reasons so many businesses fail is the misguided notion that you "must" take a lot of risk to start a business. So people take out a lot of debt / make risky decisions because they believe it's just part of the whole process. I think the best way to start a business and excel is to limit your risk and bootstrap as much as possible.
However, I do agree with you on the other three... ;-)
But I believe that 'risk' is a highly relative term. Spending three months on a new idea and investing lets say 3,000 USD on this idea is ...
1. for the average employed office drone a huge risk (at least that's how he feels about it=>different value system)
2. for a first time entrepreneur a risk (and objectively higher than for 1 because this guy doesn't have any incom)
3. for a experienced entrepreneur its daily business and no risk at all
The principle is just don't go all in but keep on doing and risking.
When you are product/marketing/sales person, you typically work for a while, aren't sure if what you are doing is correct or optimal, maybe find out later it did or didn't work, and then you have to do it again and again and again.
So, to make the transition, you have to get comfortable with the uncertainty inherent in business activities. To put it another way: You'll "fail" far more frequently in business than in programming, and the causes of your failure will be far less obvious.
Thanks for that simplification