Last Friday, 5th of March, Kenneth Morse gave some Inspirational Entrepreneurship Lectures at Esade Business School, and sure they were inspiring. You can understand that better when you know he is the former Managing Director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and has started some very successful technology start-ups among many other things during his life. He has not always been successful, but failure, as I believe to know, can teach you more than success itself.
The lectures ran through the importance of following good communication channels, through the importance of networking and how matching people can be a very useful and valuable ability. Mr. Kenneth P. Morse explained to the audience how simple strategies like starting mails with “You” instead of “I” or going to business cocktails with a well-trained wingman that gives you 30 to 55 seconds to speak with whom you are interested can improve very much the contacts you manage to make and the attention paid by others. Good advice for a beginner like me, student in the 4th year of the Business Administration Degree, who tries to discover the path between attending class and successfully starting a company in the future. Not an easy path indeed, but definitely the most rewarding as the founder and chairman of the E3 club from Esade, Ivo Vasilev, said last Tuesday in an event where 6 entrepreneurship clubs from Barcelona met.
Trying to figure out how to walk through this path I asked Mr. Morse how to take the first steps, how to build my own network and how to start a company. A difficult question which he answered with extreme simplicity and huge personal impact. “After this, go there and talk with 5 people you haven’t met before […]”. This sentence, as simple as it may seem, did not only make me talk with some very interesting people after the lectures with whom I expect to maintain contact, but got much further: in less than a week time, in the Barcelona entrepreneurship club’s meeting I gave the same advice to 3 students of BBA who ended up contacting many more people than they expected. So, when it comes to entrepreneurship – and with great remorse due to my scientific points of view – energy cannot only be converted but also created and multiplied.
So what is this energy? What shall move us through the unknown and the exciting life of discovering new paths? Mr. Morse explained how passion was one of the most important values that one should find in a management team, passion is that thing that turns intelligence into something real that everyone can see, that thing that won’t allow you to stop in your way. In his words: “Motivation will support you through the darkness of entrepreneurship”.
This energy, motivation or passion for the mission is your most powerful resource, the one that will really make the difference, the one that will change failure as a barrier into failure as an ingredient for success. This is my inspiration….hopefully helped to build yours too.
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