29 Sep 2011

[Egypreneur] Managing, can it bring entrepreneurial satisfaction?

As one of our core cultural values and what we’re working on emphasizing in the entrepreneurship scene in Egypt is sustainability (check our culture page here) this blog started as the main tool for interaction for Egypreneur (Crew).

Twitter proved to be one of the most powerful tools for a real-time brain-storming sessions that leaves wealth of knowledge, experience and anecdotes shared in a specific matter to be wiped with the flow, as from now on, we’ll be blogging interesting discussions that we have on Twitter and any other tool in here. We haven’t started talking about our blog yet, but we’ll in the near future and consider this a teaser of what this website is meant to be for 🙂

Amr El-Gabry @AmrElGabry someone I personally had the pleasure of meeting while working on our CairoTraffic Solutions Project, asked a question about the source of satisfaction for an entrepreneur, is it from the environment or from Managing “your business” – (my interpretation: being the boss)

Experiencing that managing in an early stage, probably with limited resources, in a dynamic fast-paced environment with a place for a lot of risk and disappointment, that was my response:

Mostafa Naguib, finalist for Imagine Cup Award and one of my all-the-time most favorite geeks, added that sometimes management in a startup can get overwhelming tweeting:

Toffy El Shafei @ToffyElShafei , partner at Outreach Egypt Small and medium organizations’ institutional development consultancy emphasized that having systems in place would make managing fun:

Startups being so much of a dynamic, fast-paced place to be, I added:

Amgad Kaldas, @Amgad_Kaldas one of the voices that always brings wisdom to our twitter conversations added that right people on the right seats in a startup will require some effort:

Toffy then added that the process she mentioned should be developed according to the case of the organization – with some flexibility.

And a very good point is that this process can be initiated in a smaller scale and then expand as the organization grows.

Amgad then brought to our attention Jim Collis “From Good to Great” where he has a chapter speaking about getting the who “staff” first and then getting them used to the what “process”.

What I have learned from this interesting conversation is that in a startup environment – which passes with different stages dynamically and managing can be hard in some of these stages – the way to evolve the organization is to focus on who, who you bring in to play and then start slowly developing processes and coaching/training people to follow the process, hopefully that can lead to satisfaction to the manager side of you while running your startup.

Yet, more interesting input being added..

Thanks everyone who participated in this interesting conversation and keeping it flowing and if anyone have any ideas or interesting input feel free to comment below.

And, soft welcome to our blog 😉