Thanks a Vinay, well done for keeping the blog going. This triggered me to check a small social enterprise I helped set up in the early 90’s it’s still there! No bigger but still doing it’s stuff. Most of the projects I’ve developed over the years have morphed into different things or no longer exist. Not surprising, partly as their objective is individual or community change. S

Thank you Steve, it is such a delight to hear from you and your experience. Having switched over to writing about startups, business – I was wondering if my posts were touching a similar wavelength, this is indeed a huge boost to have these thoughts from you…

I can only imagine the challenge with those two sectors- not usually the first ones to adapt to change and respond quick. I sometimes feel that the amount of paperwork involved in getting things moving stands in the way of completing things. A common strand that’s very interesting is the impact of time and feedback on the projects that are undertaken. Time and again, things change so much that it is impossible to plan for all scenarios and even if we do that, we tend to miss something or the other.

The last few years of mine have been working with startups and some mid size companies which were customers. The number of times I have replanned a proposal made me feel that the deal was running away from happening. And funny enough, none of the deals which took so much of planning and over engineering happened, it ended up becoming a red tape exercise which did not yield desirable returns. I suppose that is hard in a startup where we are trying to do everything reasonably possible to get a deal and even though it takes enormous planning time, we still keep working on it with a faint hope which statistically yields very low results. Having said that, startups and stats don’t seem to marry very well too :) ..

Thanks so much for your thoughts above, I am sure it will add a wealth of experience for the readers in this discussion :)