Business vs Opportunities

Its been a while since I last updated my blog.  More than a year actually.

Time passes pretty quickly when managing 2 businesses and soon to be a new daddy... :)

In a short year stint of doing my own business, I realized that quite a number of things that affect modern businesses these days.

There are several old sayings in the business world out there which are pretty common...

"Business opportunities are always out there, its only whether you know where to look..."
"There is always risk when doing business, there are no definite outcomes..."
"A good business plan with the right opportunity sparks the evolution of a successful entrepreneurship..."

Though all have the facts and truths in them, the reality is that it is much deeper than just plain words.  Ideally, the idea of the business should take rule over the operations of it; but the operations of a business may be the one killing the idea without a balance.

From the people I have met who are holding powerful positions in large corporations have something in common.  Fundamentally they are brilliant individuals who are good at making business decisions in helping the corporations move in the desired direction.  But the main difference, especially in asian context, is that most of them don't 'own' the business. What I mean by that is these individuals can easily move into another corporation and be doing the same job for another company.  In the asian context, business still has a more conservative and tradition nature attached to it.  It may be down to this reality that we see that most Asian businesses are still family owned or attached.

Operating beyond that framework toward the corporation approach may take some time.

The point of it all is that doing business in asia still relies heavily on connections and trust.  It builds up through time and working together; but if individuals do not understand this when they work in/for asian businesses, it creates a negative effect where trust is not maintained and connection is lost through time.

The opportunities for business transactions are always present in the asian world.  However, the continuity of business, especially those long term ones may not be present without trust.  In the world of consumer products transactions in the thousands per day, it may not matter so much; but in terms of project based businesses where an individual project is a long term & continuous interaction between multiple products and businesses, it definitely makes a huge difference.

To be able to take this view and look beyond the simple transactional business takes courage.  But more importantly, it takes one 'first step' to have faith in building trust towards long term gain instead of having the oversight of short term profit taking.