René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

Traditions require pursuit. So when Frank Richter from Horasis is inviting to one of his legendary “Global Business Meetings”, the best option is simply to show up and receive a stimulating update on the state of the globalized world. This times it was the Global Russia Business Meeting 2011, last year I attended in Ljubljana, this year in happened to take place in Limassol (Cyprus).

As it was the first time to this island for me, I decided to come two days earlier and do a little bit of sightseeing, mainly into the surprisingly high mountains up to 1,900 meters …

… as well as trying out the local cuisine which is famous for its “Meze”. Shared dishes which keep on coming in endless numbers and makes. Apparently, me including, every foreigner on his first time consistently commits the same mistake: Eating too much in the beginning and then facing complete paralysis when more and even more food is arriving to the table.

The Island-Republic has been for decades an attractive destination for Russian tourists and investors alike: The single biggest source of Foreign Direct Investment (FTD) into Russia comes due to favourable holding- and taxation structures indeed from Cyprus.

Our hosts were enormously hospitable who made our stay a truly memorable experience. During the gala dinner on Sunday evening, the President of the Republic of Cyprus, Mr. Dimitris Christofias welcomed us …

… after which inspiring and funny conversations with other attendees extended way after midnight.

On Monday, in fact the major day of the event, there were a couple of “all hands” plenary sessions with CEOs and ministers of state as well a plenty of parallel “break out-sessions” for a more intimate exchange. Like last year in Madrid for the India-Meeting, I had the honour to moderate a session about “Creating Innovation Capacity” with eight distinguished participants on the panel.

In the nutshell, a couple of issues pertaining to Russia:

• Assumptions from foreign businesspeople that Russia is operating like a Western country are strongly overstretched; one needs to know how to navigate the system with all its intricacies.
• Political regulation changes frequently, and not always for the better.
• Russia has strengths in R&D, yet deficits in devising products and services out of this, also with sub-standard abilities downstream when it comes to marketing and sales.
• Russia’s strongest GDP-driver, natural resources, is both a salvation as it is a curse: It lacks the necessary “eco-systems” (benchmark: Silicon Valley) to allow other truly innovative sectors to emerge in order to contribute to a better diversification of the economy.
• Russia possesses a healthy self-awareness about its strengths and weaknesses and has set up a variety of private and public initiatives to foster exchange to gain best practices.

This appears to be especially true after the financial crisis where the government is listening better than ever to entrepreneurs how to be serious about the necessary implementation of change.

Thanks Frank for once again putting a great program with inspiring people together, hope to see to see you soon at one of the subsequent events.

And on a personal note: Thanks to Davor, from Les Clefs d’Or- Concierge from LeMeridien in Limassol who helped me within 18 hours print my forgotten business cards and held some true insider tips for the best local dining in the area ready. “Hvala vam ljepa na vasoj pomoci, Davore”, – who originally hails from Bosnia and with whom I proudly conversed in our mother tongue Serbo-Croatian. That’s globalization at its best as it comes with the touch of home … :-)

For more than half a year I have been really busy creating something new. Today, I am proud to announce that I started a new venture MillonMiles Media Ltd. and we just went live with our really cool flagship site aMillionLives.com. And, yes, we have a Facebook Fanpage, too, where I like if you like ;-) In case you want to read our „official press release“, it’s here for download.

Let me explain here on my blog in a bit more of a conversational tone what we are up to. We are global publishing network writing stuff that matters for our life, in particular the various lives of each of us. You might be familiar with Edward de Bono’s concept of the various hats we should put on during decision making. Similarly, on a broader perspective in one’s life somebody might be a teacher by profession, have a family with a lovely wife raising two kids. But there is more to life than the obvious on the surface: This human being might be an avid guitar player, enjoys going for a hike in the mountains and really love his food. That same person will find help, advise and entertainment for his various lives like in a magazine as a teacher, spouse, parent, musician, naturelover and foodie. Check out our overview of all the lives we are writing for.

Here’s the deal with „global“ for our publishing network. I’ve been living and working in various continents for the last years where I dare to say that I have a fairly good understanding how to assemble a business that brings together the best pieces from each part of the world. Our company is incorporated in London (U.K.), a big chunk of our operation runs out of Bangalore (India) with an international team, the design for aMillionLives.com has been done in Poland, our writers hail from India, the Philippines. Our users as we know from our logfiles appreciate our content from all over the world, the U.S. running with 60 % at the forefront.

Where does the name MillionMiles Media (MMM) come from? Two simple explanations: I was looking, no surprise, for something that sounds somehow cool and has „Media“ at the end. If you check out every freaking word on this earth in combination with „Media“ at the end, the domain is taken by some filthy domain-grabber. So extending the query to two prefix-words, landed me with MMM. Second, I liked it because last year with all my travelling I had crossed the mark of a million miles in my frequent flyer programme.

Yep, that’s my news of the day. Happy about every feedback, good or bad, sympathetic or just pathetic. If you like our Fanpage on Facebook or moreover, place a link from your blog or site to aMillionLives.com, I’ll include you in my evening prayers – hands duly folded. Promised.

It’s been quite a while that I had done the last seminar – completely detaching myself from the everyday routine. And this one has paid off big time. Thanks to my friend and fellow EO member Karl Funke for organizing it and hosting our powerful group in his beautiful house in Munich.

I was lured into the seminar with the bait of “speed reading” and what I got went way beyond. Our trainer, Ruth Wenger, founder and CEO of the Swiss company Alphaskills opened up a completely new world to us. Ruth has been professionally involved into research, studies and moreover practical application of human consciousness for the last 30 years.

What is all of this about? From a starting point, we all have to digest a lot of reading material for professional purposes. Our seminar on “Informations Management” was geared towards increasing both our efficiency and effectiveness in doing so. It is worthwhile to pre-empt that “reading faster” is only one piece of the entire puzzle:

1. First, one is supposed to screen the material and decide if it’s really relevant. The decision to dismiss an article is sometimes the most effective way of all.




2. Then, preparation for reading is supposed to scan over the content to get an idea of the structure. This would apply for an article as well as a book.




3. Goal setting: Formulating and setting of an objective what should be known/learnt/achieved after having read through. (“After reading this book, I want to have a better understanding how to apply global innovation into my company.”) This is indispensable for directing one’s brain onto the right path and indeed quite a change to “let me just see what’s written in there.” This can include setting up the primary branches of a mind-map, which is very conducive for the right brain that will come in charge for the next step.




4. This one is entirely new for most of us: Putting oneself into the “Alpha-State” through an imagination/breathing-technique. This is no cosmic yadda-dadda, but something that can be measured during EEG in a frequency spectrum between the state of external awareness and that of dreaming during sleep. In this meditative “Alpha State”, the mind is relaxed, yet alert and very much receptive similar to a dry sponge.





5. Next comes the actual “speed reading”: Letting ones eyes flow over the text by pulling the eyes over it. Rather vertically top down than jumping over each word line by line. Therefore text printed in rather narrow columns is particular well suited for this technique. It is surprising how much one will perceive via this scanning technique, which relies broadly on our ability for peripheral vision.




6. It is not prohibited, rather the opposite, to slow down and read in the regular, also called “digital technique” to absorb some facts and data really, really well, as long as it serves the objective set under (3). At this point, one might also get back to the mind map and continuously enhance it with more branches and relationship.

This technique worked astonishingly well for me. I was able to increase my speed from 450 words per minute (which I got told was a lot anyway) to 1002 words per minute in our last exercise. In a longer exercise, we got 6 times 5 minutes (deliberately these 30 minutes were broken down with interruptions) to get a gist of the book I had brought: C.K. Prahalad’s “The New Age of Innovation”. It was surprising to observe on myself that I got more than just a fair idea what the concept of the book is about by following the Alphaskills-methodology. I guess I’ll invest another 30 minutes into that book and will then happily put it into the shelf as “done”, whereas I would have at least needed 4-5 hours to read it in the old style.

It is worthwhile noting that reading a poem or a novel will not follow this strategy, because the beauty of the content lies in their linguistic nuances. However, after rigorously practising the technique it is well known that it will also speed up the time for such leisure-reading without compromising on anything.

All in all, a highly recommended experience with a phenomenal highly experienced trainer Ruth. After the 2-day seminar there are in addition different online-modules to be worked on from the company’s website in order to increase the level of practise. This online curriculum will last for the next 8 weeks and start for me right now.

3.51 PM

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Horasis and its founder Frank-Jürgen Richter are really coming to ever new heights with its format of “Global X Business Meeting”. Take “X” as a placeholder for China, India, Russia and soon Arab, too. The concept is brilliant: Create a platform for political and economic leaders for a specific country, let them fly out of their cocoon for 2 days in a completely different continent and blend them with political and economic leaders from the host country. For the recent Global Russia Business Meeting that host country was Slovenia (in Ljubljana), last for last year’s Global India Business Meeting it was Germany (Munich) and for this year it was Spain in its magnificent capital of Madrid. (All pictures of the event here on this set.)

This year’s top participants from India were the Union Minister of Commerce, Anand Sharma, who spoke about his country’s resilience to weather the storm of the global economic crisis, aspiring to a double digit GDP-growth and acknowledging the requirement build stronger ties to Europe. As a reference to his hosts Mr. Sharma mentioned in particular Spain whose trade volume with India ranks only 43.

From the Spanish side, the Crown Prince Felipe gave himself the honour to speak. As someone who has rather reservations to monarchy, I was honestly surprised not to see some smug royal retard, but a highly educated, soft-spoken and down-to-earth guy who is very well able to play his constitutional and social role in such a setting very well.

I had the pleasure to moderate panel on a topic which is personally very dear to me: Innovation. In particular “Driving the Future: India’s Technology Pioneers – India’s IT and other technology firms are emerging as global players in their own right. What areas are they pioneering in and how do they compete in world markets?” The participants had a lot to share from their experience:

• Dinesh Dhamija, former Founder and CEO of ebookers.com, now Founder and Chairman, Copper Beech Group, United Kingdom
• Sachin Dev Duggal, Chairman, Nivio, India
• Naeem Ghauri, Co-Founder, NetSol Technologies, Pakistan & United Kingdom
• Clas Neumann, President, SAP Labs India, Germany
• Jeff Heenan Jalil, Head – Wipro Technologies, Europe, Wipro, India
• Glenn Proellochs, Chief Executive Officer, Travelpaper.com, Switzerland
• Sudhir Sethi, Chairman, IDG Ventures India Advisors India
• Sudhakar Shenoy, Chairman, IMC, USA

This format of a so called “board room dialogue” in an intimate setting allows for a true conversation among the panellists where the “audience” blends seamlessly in. Three main conclusions on innovation that I’d to summarize here:

• IT-Innovation in India has multiple dimensions. It’s not just about the classic Western understanding of filing a patent for some say cutting edge laser-thing. It’s often process innovation: Just think of the 1 million resumés (!) that Infosys is getting every year to fill 12,000 positions, you need to handle that somehow. Or business innovation with a particular focus on the price point, see for example the world-class rate of 0.5 US-Cent per minute on Indian mobile operators.




• Bigger organisations like SAP or Wipro can only innovate of their culture embodies constant change whereby their organizational frameworks act like a stable meta-layer for innovation.




• India is not good at everything, should and often does recognize both its strengths and weaknesses. For instance anything around User Interface can be done with a company in the Silicon Valley much better. The conclusion here: In times where you can assemble easily global sourcing chains, also from the Indian perspective applies: Do what you can do best and outsource the rest :-)

After all the inspiring discussions over the day, we headed off for a cocktail reception to the beautiful Jardines de Cecilio Rodriguez where Mr. Peacock was greeting us with his evergreen mating-show.

Last but not least, thanks a lot to Frank for once again putting such an awesome Horasis-event together.

7.22 AM

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In fact it’s already one year ago, but were were asked by the founder to keep a low profile in terms of communication in order not to attract unnecessarily competition. When I say “we”, I mean the fine group of entrepreneurs and executives from MumbaiAngels which I had joined one and a half years ago.

A few weeks back, we got the green light that communication was free. So I wanted to post a few lines on the company, the founder and why I thought it was a good idea to invest. Reverse Logistics India (RLC) operates in a space which at the first glance does not appear as sexy as promising to build the next Facebook. But I have learned well from my entrepreneurial experience that such businesses can bear an amazing business potential in combination with very healthy margins and – unlike Facebook – really make money :-)

So what does RLC do? To provide a simple example: An Indian consumer buys a new mobile phone with one of the big retailers, after a few weeks well within the warranty-period the things breaks. What now? So far in India, for retailers unlike in the U.S. or Europe, the legal obligation to manage the scenario is just in the making and therefore the priority of installing a proper process rather low, whereby plenty of customers have been left behind dissatisfied. Or, the retailers did not know how design the process at all.

This is where RLC as the outsourced solution comes into place: Organizing this entire process end to end with both satisfying the customer and recouping value in mind. Concretely, the company would on behalf of the retailer handle the customer from communication, picking up the broken item from his home, delivering it to RLC’s delivery centre to finally inspecting it. The inspection can yield that the item has to be disposed of (within the legal framework of “e-waste” in India) or, if it can be repaired, resell it. Just a simple example with plenty of variations and different use-cases.

RLC, based out of Delhi, runs by now two additional operating centres out of Mumbai and Bangalore. I met the founder Hintendra Chaturvedi last year January in Delhi and was impressed by his vision how to occupy this under-served market in a big picture, yet at the same time keep a razor-sharp focus on getting traction in this extremely “execution-heavy” industry. Interestingly, Hitendra is one of these famous cases of “reverse brain drain”: He had been living in the U.S. for two decades or so, before he took an executive position to run the OEM-division of Microsoft India. There, he realized that this huge sphere of “reverse logistics” he had see in the U.S. did not exist on the subcontinent and decided to set-up his own company. Here, on LiveMint is a nicely written portrait about him along with a sound depiction of the reverse logistics-landscape in India.

We from MumbaiAngels were convinced both about the concept and the founder so that we decided to give it a go by providing the necessary seed-funding. Good to know that a year down the line, RLC has been building traction with several marquee-customers and Hitendra is step by step executing on his vision.

9.34 AM

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Even after a week of TED India, I feel the inspiration of this unique event still hasn’t left its grip on me. On the weekend, there came via e-mail the request from the TED-team to rate the event, it took me some 10 minutes in all various categories and questions, but the last one was certainly the most important. Besides all the dissecting of single aspects of the event, the holistic question was “How would you rate your overall TED India experience?” On the given scale I gave it the best marks with “off the charts”. This applied for the venue, the Infosys Campus in Mysore, as well.

(All pictures of the event, here on my Flickr-set.)

What makes this event so fundamentally unique is the mix of phenomenal speakers in a broad array of disciplines combined with an extremely open discussion culture with the attendees, around 1,000. In terms of the latter: The norm is to just sit down e.g. at lunch or before a session and start a conversation with the people left and right of you. Every time, I felt it was interesting what they had to say, moreover the conversation was characterized by mutual curiosity. The topics started mostly with “what do you do” (without the sales-pitch to it) or “where do you come from”. A phenomenal review of the event which speaks from my heart here at GodInChief from my dear friend Vishal Gondal.

For instance during the last night at the party, I spoke to a PhD in biology who has been running a field study in South India how to reconcile the two apparently contradicting systems of wildlife conservation and that of agriculture for the neighbouring farmers. (There seems to be one …)

Plenty of such exciting conversations on how to lift the life of the underprivileged, especially through grass-root-projects which create some self-sustaining momentum. Those can have an approach of “one person at a time” to scalable models. A brief update at this point on our own charity “Wipro Netbooks for Vatsalya”: We are optimizing tiny little bits and pieces. Being an anal German we bought some buttons from felt which we installed below the table-legs to stop them rock, got some pillows for the chairs so that the very little girls would not have to have their arms at the level of their ears to reach the keyboard.

In fact, it was Petra who who took care of it during her and her husband’s Jürgen visit to Bangalore in the last weeks. Jürgen with his IT-network expertise installed a new, more robust WiFi-router which is better suited to serve 12 concurrent connections. Last, but not least: This month, the computer training started with an experienced female teacher twice a week.

Also, I would not like to withhold the official “thanking letter” from Shashi in the name of the institution.

What TED’s inspiration taught me or at least recalled to keep in consideration: If you do business for profit, there is always some higher calling beyond the P&L. Go out, find this mission and inspire your employees, your customers and all your other stakeholders with it. Your following will be manifold.

When you are doing well, there is ample of space of doing good. Go and understand what is what you do best in your organization. Find a way to apply a tiny portion of time and resources from it. Find a way to transfer this abilily in order to enable those who need this little kick-start before they can get lifted on their own.

That’s something I have just embodied in a recent business plan. In one year down the line I will have to be measured by my actions resulting from the easy part called words.

Back in India, the mental dust has settled after those four days of amazing conversations on Martin Varsavky’s farm for the MenorcaTechTalk. Besides being hyper-inspiring with plenty of take-away value to be put into action, I found it at least as interesting as a sort of „social experiment“.

Bring around 60 fantastic people together on a farm, have almost no structure (apart from the „official“ 4-hour session on Friday afternoon), have bikes and a quad ready for usage, let people hang out on the pool, take them on the sailing boat and see what happens.

Even more so, put people – who would usually stay in chic hotels – and have them share a simple but honest room and then see what happens.

Interestingly, much more than if you met the same people over the same period of time on a conference where you get conversations of the type “I am the XYZ from soandso and we are the number 1 in thisandthat). In Menorca, it was quite different, because people open up in a completely new way on the personal level, which then also transcends to the “professional conversations”, or even more so, makes the distinction between the two obsolete. (By the way, my entire picture-set under Creative Commons-license here on Flickr.)

On another note, the event confirmed my discovery that dressing-down is directly proportional to better results in a team-setting. (Maybe investment bankers should also relax and start coming in shorts and flip-flops to work to prevent them from final extinction …) Martin is in that context clearly “leading by example” himself with our host’s take on the event on his blog.

It certainly helped that this brief formal part allowed every participant who wished to give a maximum 5 minute-talk which had to conclude with a tangible problem. This kind of anchoring allowed the other participants afterwards to start a meaningful conversation about how to solve the problem whereby the communication usually took extremely interesting and unpredicted routes.

Picture courtesy of Rodrigo SEPÚLVEDA SCHULZ

I introduced my latest project “OLPC for the Vatsalya-Orphanage” asking for sharing of experience how to structure charity in general as well as best practises in fundraising, performance-metrics and how to avoid the traps of diluting focus and/or as over-investing. Very concretely, I got three very interesting contacts referred where I started to interact with. (And by the way, two days back, I was able to close the round of funding.)

One of the most mind-blowing presentations came from Isaac Shpantzer who presented a new technology, which allows for the transmission of broadband internet via laser. Yes, laser. The concept: A laser-beam in the blue spectrum (therefore also suitable during daylight) is beamed vertically into the sky and carries the digital information where the 1s and 0s are transformed through some “language” into light.

Because of the earth’s atmosphere, the laser beam begins to scatter. Now: Whoever is located in the line of sight of the upper part of the laser (where it scatters) and has a signaling-device installed e.g. behind his window is able to exchange data. The technology is fully bi-directional and allows for a dedicated bandwidth per household of up to 100 MBit/sec. If only 50 % of this concept became feasible at reasonable economics, I bet that it will fundamentally impact the backend-infrastructure of internet-connectivity.

Besides such food for thought, the food for real was absolutely stunning with an ever changing variety of dishes over the days. (I could still kick myself that I had to leave too early on Sunday and miss the Asado.) But for sure, I got a fair share of this paella:

Thank you very much Martin and Nina, for your kind invitation and putting this event with lasting impressions together. The atmosphere, the networking, the fun and especially the bonding were unparalleled. Thanks also to Matias and Eva for the perfect organization and their ever-sunny-mood for – as a Germany proverb goes – “herding a sack of fleas”.

For the risk of sounding repetitive, I am deeply honoured and humbled about your instant participation which led to the final commitments for our charity “OLPC for Vatsalya Orphanage”. We got the money together, EUR 2869 within 5 days of fund-raising. Stunning! Thank you very much for your support; together we are making it happen.

Here the list of all those who walk the talk and have agreed to support me in equipping the Vatsalya Orphanage with 11 OLPC-computers.

Juri Reisner
Martin Wunsch
Rene Seifert
Malte und Tina Krüger
Fabian Seyfried
Dirk Schornstein
Petra Rautenberg and Jürgen Kock
Andreas Hörr
Sascha Mladenovic
Paul Fritze
Simone Bayer
Michael Munz
Alexander and Michaela Erlmeier
Lukasz Gadowski
Nils and Anita Rauterberg
Jan Poerschmann
Daniela Hinrichs
Anju Rupal
Anca Carstea
Philip Brunner
Michael Gebert
Julia Knop

Now it’s on me to deliver based on your support and put the concept into action. As for the next steps I will be writing to all donors tomorrow the details of my bank account along with the request to wire the funds. Again, full transparency here on the donors’ list about the payment-status. Then we are going to order the computers directly from the non-profit organization OLPC which is so far established in India that it will clear customs and take care of logistics within the country. In short, the computers will be delivered directly to the orphanage. The excess of EUR 69 I dare to put aside for some foreseeable work putting the network-infrastructure together to bring a server as well as the WiFi-hotspot to life.

Actually, in order to give you a bit clearer picture (literally) of the organization itself, I aggregated the photos which I have taken so far in this picture-set on Flickr. The one above in this post depicts the stone plate for the inauguration of Vatsalya back in July 1948 by the Maharaja of Mysore. At that time in India one labeled such a foundation “Association for Moral and Social Hygiene”. That’s of course both an obligation and a leitmotiv which we will – through our laptops – proudly catapult into the digital age :-)

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Last week got the lucky mail that I got accepted to TED, in my opinion one of the finest organizations these days to make a change for the better to our world. Under the claim “Ideas worth Sharing”, smart minds with a good heart get together to discuss concepts that are often extremely bold, yet possible to achieve only through a joint effort. Projects which are independent from governmental politics and for profit interests, from their approach moreover deeply democratic. Whoever decides to buy into an idea and support it, can do so. If many do so, chances are that that the bold objective might turn into a new reality.

So far I have watched the many TED-talks (Technology, Entertainment, Design) “free to the world” mostly on the treadmill in the gym through my iPod Touch, always inspired by the rigor of reason applied to the concepts, its fabulous storytelling and admiration of the creative human mind. Hence, I feel deeply humbled and honoured to be able to participate in that crowd live. The first event I will take part in is – suprise, surprise – TED India, in fact from November 4th to 7th 2009 in Mysore, around 80 km northwest from Bangalore on the legendary Infosys campus.

What I also liked are the terms of participation which one has to opt-into and which couldn’t be any clearer:

I understand that those who attend TED do so in a spirit of curiosity, open-mindedness, respect and tolerance, thereby enabling constructive conversation and allowing TED speakers to be more open than they might otherwise be. I confirm that I will respect these values, and will abide by the conference rules. I also understand that the atmosphere at TED is appropriate for high-level relationship-building, not salesmanship. I confirm I will not use my TED attendance to aggressively pitch my company, organization, products or services to other attendees.

It reminds me a bit of our non-solicitation policy at the Entrepeneurs Organization (EO). There is nothing more damaging to building a trustful relationship that if you have to suspect that the person opposite is only talking to you with a hidden agenda for the sake of selling you his crap.

Till then, I will continue watching the talks on my iPod as well as developping a little project further which I actually picked up from TED. Happy to make an announcement soon here on my blog. Else, please let me know if you are coming to TED India as well so we can connect already ahead of the event along the lines of the conference’s motto “The Future beckons”.

6.06 PM

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