1) The document discusses the importance of an entrepreneurial mindset for career success, even for those not starting their own business. It emphasizes qualities like never giving up, building networks, securing funding, and accepting imperfect initial solutions. 2) Key lessons from cases and the author's experience include persevering through challenges, seeking help from others, demonstrating projects' value to obtain approval and funding, and improving over time with revenue. 3) Successful leadership requires qualities like healthy debate, prioritizing interests beyond one's own, learning from mistakes, and stepping aside if not performing well. Regular review and willingness to change course are also discussed.

1. ISOM 5480 Spring 2014
Final Report
SUBMITTED BY STUDENT ID E-MAIL
MAN, Ka Wai Joseph XXXXXXXX kwjman@ust.hk

2. ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report Page ~ 1 ~
Submitted By: Joseph MAN, XXXXXXXX
Many of us are employees in different companies. In reality, unless some of us may quit
our job to start our own business, most of the classmates will be continuing our career in
different industries. They will become managers, but few of us will become Entrepreneur.
So, how would Entrepreneurship relates to us?
Indeed, besides running your own business, I believe Entrepreneurship should be a kind of
attitude to do your projects every day. The spirit of Entrepreneurship should be part of
your career no matter you are starting your own business. At the end, to be success in
your job, you need to be working like you own your business.
Personally, I believe the topics and ideas worked in class should not be just related to those
who plan to start our own business, but should be related to every manager in all companies.
So, what have we learnt so far? Let’s have a review.
NEVER GIVE UP In the first case, Jai and his teammate made mistake and get into trouble.
He did not follow the rule and miss the time to get back. Getting back in the dark he fell
down the mountains. However, he keep going to the nearest village even he is seriously
hurt. Similarly, there will be all kinds of difficulties you will be facing. You would
make mistakes, and you will be getting in troubles. It doesn’t matter how you get into
situations, but it is more important that how you solve the problems and your attitude
facing the issues. This is the first thing we need to do in our career. There will be all
kinds of difficulties and we need the right attitude facing them, and this is the first among
all other factors to get out of the bottom of your career life. This is the thing we learn
from the first case -- “Never give up”. If Jai didn’t overcome his pain and keep moving
towards to a village, he couldn’t survive. Similarly, my experience tells me that you can
work hard and deliver the best to get your job done. However, you can make mistakes in
your projects and put yourself in a bad situation. It does not matter how you make
mistakes, but how you overcome the situations. If you give up, you can never resolve
the problem. It does not matter why you make mistakes, but have you learn from
experience how you would resolve it and avoid it in future. At the end, it is more
important that you have ever take risk and try and learn from whatever mistake you have
made, rather than trying nothing.
BUILD YOUR NETWORK You would always need help from others. Jai need help
from the village women, and he is lucky that he could find someone after he went
through the rough journey. It is the same in your career. You would need help from
others. It is better for us than Jai that we can have our network built before anything
happen. It is important that knowing people from different areas, and they can refer
you further to different people when needed. It is important to entrepreneurs, no
matter findings angel funds or VC, or resolve technical issues in their daily problems. In
my 18 years of career I only stick to one company, HSBC. The long history in one
company gives me the chance to know people. It is also important to me working in
such a big global company, and you would need help from colleagues of all the regions
when you are doing global projects.
GET FUNDINGS In HSBC IT, you cannot start your own projects, but need business
approval before projects commenced. There is a well-defined control of project and

3. ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report Page ~ 2 ~
Submitted By: Joseph MAN, XXXXXXXX
budget approval, while to ensure the projects started with valid reasons. In many case,
business will view estimations as too expensive and asks whether we can deliver it
cheaper. However, if you can give a view to the business on how much revenue gain or
cost savings by installing such a new system, the story can be difference. By such, they
can be more than happy to fund and approve the project. This is the same story if Zipcar,
and their success is based on the value the customer, as well as the VC, perceived.
Indeed, these internal funding approval processes are just like getting a VC funding, while
the internal business people are also evaluating the business opportunities a project can
provide.
NON PERFECT SOLUTION WHEN START Zipcar didn’t have a perfect system to start
serving their first log of customers. When they have revenue, they can re-invest and
improve the operation. It is the same for every business and every project. You may
not have a complete automated system for every area of your operation, but how you are
going to acquire the first bucket of revenue is more import. At the end, if you have
profit, you can always re-invest.
As a Lead Business Analyst, this could be something I need to educate my business and
service delivery counterpart. They may always put requirements of a complete solution
on their wish-list. Products need to go through a process of creation, being ridiculed,
then response and adjusted before the product is well accepted by the market, or before
the customers’ habbits changed by the product. As a result, these wish-list items may
not necessarily be correct items until the market says so. We need to do experiment
with the market, try whether a product is accepted by the market before investing too
much.
WEB 2.0 AND THE PLATFORM I am working in a software development team for the
Retail Wealth Management. Traditionally, people would believe that Wealth
Management is a business about relationship building and require advisors to give
advices supporting customers to make proper decision. However, with technology,
customers can now reach information via the Internet. Customers can reach financial
data through Internet from their Tablet and Mobile nowadays, not necessary going
through any advisory services. Meanwhile, the banks may have offered Internet banking
for quite a long while. The question remains is how the banks would attract customers
to utilize these online web pages to trade and invest through their platform which links up
the financial market and the consumers. If you can subside the consumers the rich and
powerful market information through convenience channel, they may keep trading
through your platform and the volume grow. With a large trading volume a better
negotiation power over the dealers and brokers and as a result a better price can attract
more customers. At the end, business model of traditional banking products may
become very mature already, with tighter and tighter regulatory control introducing
operation costs to the banking industries and lesser and lesser the margin will be.
Wealth Management could be a new source of massive revenue generation. The Web
2.0 model with the help of technology nowadays may help make Wealth Management
part of the customers daily life, but not necessary a scheduled appointment with the
advisors.

4. ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report Page ~ 3 ~
Submitted By: Joseph MAN, XXXXXXXX
LIMITED PEOPLE This is a problem every company would be facing. You have
unlimited project demands, while you always have a supply constraint. The business
needs to prioritize although they may not be willing to do so as everyone wants their
project to be the top priority. This needs the senior management to make the decision
then. However, sometimes this cannot be resolved, e.g. we have some regulatory
demands from Singapore so we have a hard deadline to deliver a project, while suddenly
there is a stock thru-train between Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges and you need to
hit the tight dates both then.
Your job is to deliver the project with the limited resource on hand. You’d sometimes
found that the team has some missing skills and you need to acquire from the market.
Yet, there could be policy or strategy restrictions that you cannot hire more people. The
management needs to react promptly, while need may need to persuade and seek
approval from the top executives. Even you are allowed to get more people to the team,
how long before you can find the right people? How long can they gear-up to full speed
and perform? How long can they fit into the company culture or what values they can
bring-in? You do not have definite answers to these questions. All you have to do is to
management and to monitor.
LEADERSHIP Yes, leadership is important. And I am glad that the management team
of my department is good. They can do healthy debate, with excellence judgments on
the priorities. They do not come to their own interest but decisions are made towards
the best interest of HSBC, not just the department. They can always come up and give a
consistent direction and the whole department can follow. However, this does not come
on day-one by default. Some managers come and go without success but leaving
problems behinds. Some managers did a great job but moved on to take up new roles in
other departments. To me, it is about learning from the mistakes of some managers
while try to be aspired by those did a great job. Leadership is something I should learn
continuously. On the other hand, it is important that if I know I am not doing a great job,
I shall step down someday and let other people. At the end it may not be losing, I can
still find another post for an internal transfer I believe.
STOP LOSS Stop loss is an investment term, also, it is a management action. We
will make mistake. As long as we try new things, there is always a possibility of making
mistakes. It does not matter we made mistakes, but it matters if we don’t know we
made mistakes. We need to set our plan. We need to set milestones. We need to
review the progress regularly. We need to review the external environment, and react
proactively. By such, we will not repeat the story of Iridium. In HSBC, we set our plans
each year, while the senior executives review the progress every month. For example,
we set our plan to rollout our application to several small countries in Europe, while in the
middle of the year the business direction changed to move ahead on some other regions
like Latin America but chop down some rollout projects to these European countries due
to the resource constraints. They monitor the market condition closely and take proper
decision on priorities. Sunk cost is spent already, and it is not a reason to continue a
project because some money is spent. You always need to have the courage to stop a
project and accept the fact that there is sunk cost forfeited.

5. ISOM 5480 Spring 2014 Final Report Page ~ 4 ~
Submitted By: Joseph MAN, XXXXXXXX
There are too many similarities of being a successful Entrepreneur and a successful manager.
I am sure there will be many other characters of Entrepreneurship would be useful for a
career. Risk taking, creativity, courage, indomitable, ambitious, charismatic, optimistic,
initiative, persistence, open-minded, like-challenge, sociable… etc., all these are characters
required by a successful manager. If you are not running your own business, you are selling
your brain as a service to a company, and selling is a kind of Entrepreneurship. Therefore,
someone may say that if you want to be successful in your career, you should work like
running your own business. At the end, there will be all kinds of situations you can get into,
and you would need all these characters of Entrepreneurship to overcome. Last but not
least, you would require the most important and essential character of an Entrepreneur in
your career, and this is LUCK.