Tag: entrepreneurship

If business owners can learn to embrace two certainties, they’ll be able to get through anything, says David Sax. In his new piece for Entrepreneur, he considers how the challenges presented by COVID-19 are showing us what we’re capable of.

When it comes to making a first impression, whether it be a job interview, a networking event, or a pitch, many people tend to cater to the other person’s interests, rather than behave according to their own. But does this approach help or harm our chances of getting what we want? Harvard professors and fellow Lavin Speakers Laura Huang and Francesca Gino explore in their new research.

It turns out, laughing at your job interviewer’s jokes or pretending to adopt an interest in their hobbies won’t necessarily land you a job. New research by Laura Huang, Francesca Gino, and Ovul Sezer suggests that catering to someone else’s interests can actually increase anxiety and, as a result, hinder, instead of improve, performance. Why? In a field study where entrepreneurs pitched their ideas to potential investors, the researchers found that anxiety was heightened by trying to anticipate what another person wants to hear. Against conventional wisdom, it appears that catering to someone else, rather than behaving authentically, will hurt our chances of success.

 

Read the full report here.

 

To book Francesca Gino or Laura Huang for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency today, their exclusive speakers bureau.

 

In her debut book Edge, Harvard Business School professor Laura Huang busts the myth that hard work alone will get us to our goals. Instead, she teaches us how to find our “edge”—the unique qualities that set us apart—and open doors to money, time, and connections.  

Wouldn’t it be nice if career advancement was directly linked to how hard we work, or the skills we possess? Unfortunately, the reality is more complicated than that. Biases, stereotypes, and perceptions of who we are often get in the way of our success—even if we’re the most qualified for the job.

 

As a business professor who studies early entrepreneurship, Laura Huang has seen her fair share of failure. But we needn’t give up because the obstacles are stacked against us, she says. Instead of letting other people’s perceptions limit us, we can actively shape those beliefs—in part by recognizing our own strengths and flaws—into a competitive edge. “Life isn’t fair. We can’t just wait around for people to make the right decisions for us,” Huang explains. “So how do we take all the disadvantages stacked against us and flip them in our favor to succeed within an imperfect system?”

 

Huang’s book Edge: Turning Adversity Into Advantage (Out Today!) draws from award-winning research on entrepreneurial intuition, persuasion, and implicit decision-making to show us how to strategically turn our shortcomings into assets.

 

To book speaker Laura Huang for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency today, and speak to a knowledgeable member of our sales team.

Founded by Professor Ajay Agrawal at the Rotman School, the Creative Destruction Lab has supported over 1,500 founders from over 30 countries—generating more than 4 billion dollars in equity value. Now, in its partnership with International business school HEC Paris, the CDL is poised to “play a vital role in building the next generation of European deep tech champions.” 

After starting a business with her brother Ravinder at the tender age of 19, Manjit Minhas became the President, CEO, and sole owner Minhas Breweries—the tenth largest brewery in the world. In a new feature in Menu, she opens up about the challenges she faced in the industry, and how she grew a successful business despite them. 

You’re in the middle of pitching investors on your business idea, and someone brings up contradictory evidence to a claim you’ve made. Do you acknowledge it and change your mind? Or do you dig in your heels and argue that you know best? New research by Francesca Gino (featured in Inc) suggests the former will make you look smarter. 

Francesca Gino, Leslie K. John, and their collaborators tested pitch competitions to see which situation fared better. They found that “Entrepreneurs who changed their minds during the pitch were almost six times more likely to advance to the final round of the competition.” The reason?  “Participants perceived those who changed their minds as lacking confidence, but demonstrating intelligence.”

So the next time you’re worried about changing your mind publicly, remember that being flexible can actually work to your benefit, while being stubborn could actually have adverse effects. You can read more about the phenomenon here.

 

To book speaker Francesca Gino for your next speaking engagement, contact The Lavin Agency today.

Through their scholarship and teaching, The Academy of Management Journal aims to inspire and enable a better world. This year, they’re honoring top business school professor Laura Huang with the AMJ Best Paper Award for her groundbreaking work on how the gender gap affects startup funding. 

Male entrepreneurs tend to raise higher levels of funding than their female counterparts; however, the reason for this disparity remains unknown and widely contested. In their paper, We Ask Men to Win and Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding, Laura Huang and her colleagues found strong evidence that the gap is caused by gender bias in the questions posed by investors. Through a Q&A intervention on the TechCrunch Disrupt conference between 2010 and 2016, Huang and her co-authors discovered that male entrepreneurs were more likely to be asked promotion-focused questions, while female entrepreneurs tended to be asked prevention-focused questions.

 

The paper demonstrates that each additional prevention-focused question significantly hinders an entrepreneur’s ability to raise capital for their idea. “By experimentally testing an intervention, we find that entrepreneurs can significantly increase funding for their startups when responding to prevention-focused questions with promotion-focused answers.” Offering evidence-based tactics for reducing the gender disadvantage, the paper has both practical and theoretical implications for entrepreneurship.

 

To book Laura Huang for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency today.

How can we make our paths to success a little easier? We all have biases working for and against us, says Laura Huang, one of the top business school professors in America and author of the hotly anticipated book EDGE (2020). Whether it’s a natural confidence (or lack thereof); established networks (or no professional connections at all), if we learn what these biases are, we can strategically empower ourselves—in other words find our edge—and create personal success. 

In the video below she discusses one of the business world’s most harmful biases—why female entrepreneurs face tougher questions from venture capitalists—and offers solutions to combat it.  

 

 

To book Laura Huang, or another business speaker for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency.

In less than a decade, Kickstarter—the world’s biggest and most successful crowdfunding site—has raised almost $3 billion dollars for new products, cutting-edge technologies, and even Oscar-winning movies. “We can resist and thrive,” says co-founder Yancey Strickler. Without formal business training, he turned a radical idea into a massively successful business—and without ever compromising his values.

“This is a core moment where we can really have a meaningful impact,” says Strickler, who has been listed among Vanity Fair’s New Establishment, and Fortune’s 40 Under 40 List. Strickler built integrity right into his business model by becoming a public-benefit corporation—that is, making a legal pledge to always operate responsibly, ethically, and sustainably. “This isn’t idealism,” he says. “It’s the future.” Values matter to the next generation, and they matter to the next generation of entrepreneurs, too.

 

In talks, this entrepreneurship speaker takes audiences through the growing pains of building an international business: all the mistakes, failures, and successes. He breaks down the lessons he learned-by-doing as CEO, including ways of leading an innovative company that not only turns an incredible profit, but also leaves a legacy to be proud of. It all starts with this core code: “Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Don’t try to capture an entire market. Focus on exactly what’s important to you and just try to do that as well as you possibly can.”

After more than a decade with Kickstarter, Strickler is now writing, consulting start-ups, and spreading his defiant brand of infectious optimism for the future of success. To book Yancey Strickler, or someone else who speaks on the new wave of entrepreneurs, contact The Lavin Agency. 

CBC’s Dragons’ Den, a Canadian television staple for the past decade, kicked off its eleventh season this fall and is once again in full swing. For the uninitiated: the show sees would-be entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to a five-person panel of venture capitalists—“Dragons”—in hopes of landing them as investors. One of the newest Dragons is Lavin speaker Joe Mimran, a serial businessman and fashion mogul who made his debut last season. Among his entrepreneurial credits are Club Monaco, Alfred Sung, Joe Fresh, and Caban—a decorated résumé that speaks to his vision, instinct, and eye for detail.

 

Recently, Mimran has been featured in a pair of Toronto publications. In a Globe and Mail interview, the savvy Dragon lays out his investment strategy for all to see (but not in too much detail, of course). And alongside his wife Kimberly Newport-Mimran, he’s lauded for his fashion sense in the pages of Toronto Life.

Be sure to catch Mimran (and fellow Lavinite Manjit Minhas) Wednesday nights at 8 on CBC’s Dragons’ Den. And to book him for a keynote on curiosity as a powerful driver in business, get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.

Season 10 of Dragons’ Den begins this Wednesday at 8 p.m. EST on CBC television—and two of our exclusive keynote speakers are joining the series. Tune in to catch author, multi-business entrepreneur, and $155 million “beer baron” Manjit Minhas, as well as sartorial icon, brand master, and major investor Joe Mimran as they endorse the projects of budding entrepreneurs (or else breathe a little fire).

The Globe and Mail recently ran profiles of Minhas and Mimran to highlight their prime time arrivals. The Globe calls Mimran “that rare combination—a visionary spirit with a brain for numbers” and a “crystal ball for where the sartorial landscape is headed.” In this month’s article, the founder and former Creative Director of Joe Fresh is said to be “happy supporting other people’s big ideas” as he moves from the office to the studio, and shares his searching style of leadership and business management with the show’s hopefuls (a key aspect of his fascinating talks). “With Joe, there is this feeling that he’s the chosen one,” says Nicholas Mellamphy, a Hudson’s Bay VP who worked with Mimran in the 90s. “You just feel like you want to be part of that energy and maybe, just by proximity, some of that stardust is going to rub off on you.”

Whether producing beers for Costco worldwide, craft beers for Trader Joe’s, TV commercials and documentaries, or design work and marketing material, Manjit Minhas has built an empire on unprecedented success in multiple fields—and demolished stereotypes in the process. Now, as a new Dragon, it’s all about paying that success forward. “Helping somebody else achieve their dreams is important to me at this stage,” she tells The Globe, channeling some of the energy of her down-to-earth, enlightening, and inspiring keynotes. “And I think I can really help them be entrepreneurs, either with advice or cash if I make a deal with them. But it also goes the other way. Some people, just as much as they need an idea to push [a business] forward, they need help to kill an idea in business. It’s important to me that people don’t waste their time, money and energy.”

Remember to watch this Wednesday at 8 p.m. to see two of the best and brightest in Canadian business. 

In her keynotes, Manjit Minhas speaks on the subjects of entrepreneurship, innovation and leadership. She traces her rise to corporate success against not only incredible financial and competitive odds, but against the gender stereotypes that only now, thanks to women like her, are starting to fall away. In his own talks, Mimran will explain how his constantly searching style of leadership and business management is a model to emulate, either in a start up or established business. To book Manjit Minhas or Joe Mimran as the keynote speaker for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency speakers bureau.

Jessica Jackley—Kiva co-founder and author of Clay Water Brick—stopped by the University of Pennsylvania as an [email protected] guest lecturer. In this video interview (and podcast!), titled “Entrepreneurs Doing the Most with the Least,” Jackley shares her entrepreneurial journey, and, “more importantly … the incredible insight and wisdom that [she] encountered in unexpected entrepreneurs along the way.”

Throughout, Jackley also describes the inspiring origins of Kiva, the future of microfinance lending, the special relationships she’s forged with entrepreneurs in disadvantaged nations, and her take on the entrepreneurial spirit:

When I got to get out into the world and travel and work a lot with entrepreneurs—[often] in developing countries and communities that were socioeconomically disadvantaged—I would meet these incredible people doing really important work despite the fact that they had very little education or very few resources [and] often no connections to anybody in a powerful position. They lacked or had lost a lot, but they were incredibly wise, incredibly clear thinkers, intelligent people doing incredible things. I find their stories the most motivating and empowering and inspiring of any other entrepreneurial stories that I’ve encountered.

Bright, energetic, and unapologetically optimistic about the power of business to change the world, Jackley offers a refreshing keynote speech relevant to any company, from not-for-profits to Fortune 100s. To book Jessica Jackley for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency speakers bureau.