From 33Crores to 20000 crores

These days we people are listening that various companies are creating sensation by getting sold for huge amounts ,especially in the fields of software and mobile applications.

In the field of Biotech ,its not that easy to get sold for huge amounts as there is a very tough competition in it. But a company did it and with in a short span of time(6 months).

Axovant,a company founded by an Indian named Vivek Ramaswamy(29) is the one which started its travel from 33 Cr and had achieved a huge amount of 20000 Cr by getting its shares sold in the public issue in the New York .

The reason for grabbing such an sensational attention is its research on developing the medicine for
Alzheimer's disease (a disease of memory loss and dementia).

It had a notable development in their research by developing their leading drug candidate called RVT-101,recently entered MINDSET,a confirmatory phase 3 clinical study in mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease patients.The drug has demonstrated statistically significant benefits in cognition and function in a 684-patient phase 2b study in patients with mild-to-moderate Alzheimer's disease.They also intend to develop RVT-101 for patients with other forms of dementia

Actually the famous Biotech enterprise "Glaxo Smith kine Pharmaceuticals " is the first to start research on developing the drug for Alzheimer's disease.But they stopped their research after a period. Vivek observed it and had bought the formula developed by the "Glaxo Smith kline" for 33Cr.

He further developed it and had recorded a good results in research.This made many legendary Pharmaceuticals have an attention towards Axovant.Vivek felt it would be the right time for keeping the company shares in public issue and did it.And there it is where Axovant shares were got sold at a very huge amount of approximately 19,980Cr.This all happened in a short span of six months.

Now he became billionaire and had listed in the International reputed magazine Forbes"30 under 30".Hope he would create more sensations further.

How can one be as great as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson?

Steve Jobs from the wilderness years (Photo: AP)

It’s quite fascinating. 

This question has been studied by a lot of people. 

Most of these people have focused on individual traits such as hard work, deliberate practice, etc.. But when we look in the real world, we see that individual traits aren’t the whole story. There are so many people who work extremely hard, have great ideas, plan out big things and so forth, yet they are not nearly as successful as these four legends.

I myself am an entrepreneur. I have been since the age of 16. Recently though, I had the same underlying question you had. 

Because of that, I went out searching for the answer. 

Through my interviews I do for Forbes, I recently came across the field of network science. This field has studied how people become successful from a completely different angle. They’ve found that how we build our network may be the best predictor of success.

Since then, I have interviewed many of the world’s top network scientists on a quest to understand how networks create competitive advantage in business and careers.

Out of the four legends that have been mentioned, I feel that the best person to showcase as a prime example of how networks impact success is  Steve Jobs.

It has been almost four years since Steve Jobs died.

Since then, books have been written and movies have been made.

Each has celebrated his legacy and aimed to share the secrets he used to build the largest company in the world; things like attention to detail, attracting world-class talent and holding them to high standards.

We think we understand what caused his success.

We don’t.

We dismiss usable principles of success by labeling them as personality quirks.

What’s often missed is the paradoxical interplay of two of his seemingly opposite qualities; 

1. Maniacal focus
2. Insatiable curiosity

These weren’t just two random strengths. They may have been his most important as they helped lead to everything else.

Jobs’ curiosity fueled his passion and provided him with access to unique insights, skills, values, and world-class people who complemented his own skillset. Job’s focus brought those to bear in the world of personal electronics.

I don’t just say this as as someone who has devoured practically every article, interview, and book featuring him.

I say this as someone who has been monomaniacal in the study and research of what the underlying key components are that create career success.

Through my research, I have been able to identify the best kept secret of successful business people. There is just one key variable that causes massive success...

The Simple Variable That Explains What Really Causes Career Success

In December of 2013, I interviewed one of the world’s top network scientists, Ron Burt. During our discussion, he shared a chart that completely flipped my understanding of success. Here is a simplified version:

The bottom line?

According to multiple, peer-reviewed studies, simply being in an open network instead of a closed one is the best predictor of career success.

In the chart, the further to the right you go toward a closed network, the more you repeatedly hear the same ideas, which reaffirm what you already believe. The further left you go toward an open network, the more you’re exposed to new ideas. People to the left are significantly more successful than those to the right.

In fact, the study shows that half of the predicted difference in career success (i.e., promotion, compensation, industry recognition) is due to this one variable.

Do you ever have moments where you hear something so compelling that you need to know more, yet so crazy that you’d have to let go of some of your core beliefs in order to accept the idea?

This was one of those moments for me. Never in all of the books I had read on self-help, career success, business, or Steve Jobs had I come across this idea.

I wondered, “How is it possible that the structure of one’s network could be such a powerful predictor for career success?”

How A Closed Network Impacts Your Career

To understand the power of open networks, it’s important to understand their opposite.

Most people spend their careers in closed networks; networks of people who already know each other. People often stay in the same industry, the same religion, and the same political party. In a closed network, it’s easier to get things done because you’ve built up trust, and you know all the shorthand terms and unspoken rules. It’s comfortable because the group converges on the same ways of seeing the world that confirm your own.

To understand why people spend most of their time in closed networks, consider what happens when a group of random strangers is thrown together:

David Rock, the founder of the Neuroleadership Institute, the top organization helping leaders through neuroscience research, explains the process well:

We’ve evolved to put people in our ingroup and outgroup. We put most people in our outgroup and a few people in our ingroup. It determines whether we care about others. It determines whether we support or attack them. The process is a byproduct of our evolutionary history where we lived in small groups and strangers we didn’t know well weren’t to be trusted.

By understanding this process, we can begin to understand why the world is the way it is. We understand why Democrats and Republicans can’t pass bills with obvious benefits to society. We understand why religions have gone to war over history.

It helps us understand why we have bubbles, panics, and fads.

The Surprising Power And Pain Of Open Networks

People in open networks have unique challenges and opportunities. Because they’re part of multiple groups, they have unique relationships, experiences, and knowledge that other people in their groups don’t.

This is challenging in that it can lead to feeling like an outsider as a result of being misunderstood and under-appreciated because few people understand why you think the way you do.  It is also challenging, because it requires assimilating different and conflicting perspectives into one worldview.

In one of my all-time favorite movies, The Matrix, the main character, Neo, is exposed to a completely new world. Once he is, he can’t go back. He’s an outsider in the new group, and he’s an outsider in his old life. He’s had an experience that everyone he’s ever met would never understand. This same phenomenon happens when we enter new worlds of people.

On the other hand, having an open network is a huge opportunity in a few ways:

• More accurate view of the world. It provides them with the ability to pull information from diverse clusters so errors cancel themselves out.Research by Philip Tetlock shows that people with open networks are better forecasters than people with closed networks.

• Ability to control the timing of information sharing.While they may not be the first to hear information, they can be the first to introduce information to another cluster. As a result, they can leverage the first move advantage.
• Ability to serve as a translator / connector between groups. They can create value by serving as an intermediary and connecting two people or organizations who can help each other who wouldn’t normally run into each other.
• More breakthrough ideas. Brian Uzzi, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Change at the Kellogg School of Management,performed a landmark study where he delved into the tens of millions of academic studies throughout history. He compared their results by the number of citations (links from other research papers) they received and the other papers they referenced. A fascinating pattern emerged. The top performing studies had references that were 90% conventional and 10% atypical (i.e., pulling from other fields). This rule has held constant over time and across fields. People with open networks are more easily able to create atypical combinations.

The Revisionist Timeline Of Steve Jobs Success

As a result of pursuing his curiosity in different fields throughout his life, Steve Jobs developed an extremely unique perspective, skillset, and network; one that no one else in the computer industry had. He turned these unique advantages into the largest company in the world by having a razor sharp focus. Within Apple, he cut out people, products, and systems that weren’t world-class.

Many are quick to label parts of Steve Jobs’ life as the ‘lost’ or ‘wilderness’ years. However, when we view his life in retrospect, we see that his diversions were critical to his success.

What is labeled as the magic of Steve Jobs or the quirks of his character become replicable principles we can all follow.

It is from this vantage point that we can begin to understand the following quote from a Steve Jobs interview for Wired in 1995:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something.

It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

Unfortunately, that’s too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences.

So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Throughout human history, all societies including our own have created myths that share one common element, the hero’s journey.

Here’s what the journey looks like according to Joseph Campbell, the originator of the term…

Things are going great. You feel normal and fit in. Then something, happens and you change. You start to feel like an outsider in your own culture. You hide parts of yourself to fit in, but that doesn’t help. You feel called to leave and fulfill part of yourself, but that has a lot of uncertainty. So, you hesitate at first.

Finally, you take the plunge. You go through difficult times as you’re learning to navigate the new world. Finally, you overcome the challenges. Then, you go back to your old culture and have a huge impact because you share the unique insights you’ve learned.

The hero’s journey myth is embedded in everything from our society’s classic movies (i.e., Star Wars) to the heroes we glorify (i.e., Steve Jobs), because it hits on core parts of the human experience.

The field of network science shows us two things.

1. The hero’s journey is the blueprint for creating career success. 
2. We can all be heroes. 

It just takes a little faith as you follow your heart and curiosity into unknown worlds. As Steve Jobs said,

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

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I'd love to hear how an open network has expanded your growth opportunities, or even how a closed network has been limiting for you. Feel free to reach out and share your story by commenting with your personal experiences.

Advantage India: From Challenge to Opportunity

• Late President A P J Abdul Kalam was a tad cautious about ‘Make in India’ campaign saying though it’s “quite ambitious”, it has to be ensured that India does not become the low-cost, low-value assembly line of the world. 

• On Digital India, he felt it has the potential to activate the knowledge connectivity needed in villages and remote areas and “we need to bridge the gaps of lower level of literacy, language and customised content, though” 
  

• These views are expressed in the soon-to-be published “Advantage India: From Challenge to Opportunity”, one of the last books written by Kalam along with his aide Srijan Pal Singh. 

• The book, published by HarperCollins India, also has his unfinished speech of July 27 at IIM-Shillong where he collapsed only to breathe his last hours later.

• Worried about Politics:
• According to Kalam, there is a distinct feeling that politics is fast evolving into a game of musical chairs where the same set of leaders, or their favoured few, occupy the seats of power with huge entry barriers for others. “Where this set of leaders lacks integrity, the baton passes from one corrupt leader to another who is part of this set.

•  Politics needs streamlined processes for the people to pluck out and permanently discard the corrupted and also a mechanism by which fresh talent and creative leaders can find their way into the system, using ethical means,” he wrote. 

• On the election process, he wrote that proliferation of parties has significantly added to the burden of elections on the nation, and also distorted the political equations post elections, leading to the spread of corruption.

•  “The debauchery of the political leaders perhaps hurts the citizens more than any other form of corruption… When the leadership turns indifferent, corrupt or callous, it is a breach of faith and a shattering of hope. 

• “But apathy and indifference was never, and will never be, an answer. It is not difficult to fathom that political corruption is easily the most dangerous of all forms. In any mature or emerging democracy, the quality of the political leadership can mean the difference between a welfare state and a bankrupt one,” he wrote.