By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News Welcome to this week’s installment of the “Neophyte Entrepreneur” series, where we deal with the fears and obstacles that hold corporate professionals back from their entrepreneurial dreams.  Today we discuss the fear of foregoing your corporate identity, and how to keep it from stopping your dream in its tracks. Sometimes, when you sit in your office and imagine life as an entrepreneur, it looks so rosy, so relaxed and free.  You get to be your own boss, you have more control over your time, and your work brings more personal satisfaction to your life.  […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News In corporate life, we know that at the end of the month, we’ll get a paycheck.  Sales might be up, or they might be down, but we know the paycheck is on its way.  Bills will get paid, vacations will get taken.  There’s a nice security and predictability to it.  The corporate life also brings prestige and social recognition.  Our families are proud, and our friends are impressed. But many of us hear a small voice at the back of our heads, and it never quite leaves us alone.  It beckons us towards another […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News The world’s most brilliant, talented people see patterns others don’t.  When Picasso saw a face, for example, he didn’t see an oval, he saw a triangle, and when he painted what he saw, people were shocked.  Usually people like this can’t explain to us how they see things the way they do.  The images just come to them too quickly, too intuitively, for them to explain what’s happening.  But give them a brush, and they paint a masterpiece. Fortunately, the Picassos of the world don’t have a monopoly on talent.  We’re all talented in […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News When we start our careers in the corporate world, we are trained to be specialists.  We become defined as marketing people, or operations people, or finance people.  As we advance in our careers, we become managers, and we are expected to become more generalist, to see the “bigger picture”. Still, we tend to manage our specialty areas.  If we were marketing people, we become marketing managers.  If we were operations people, we become operations managers.  We’re supposed to know a bit about the other parts of the business, but we’re not really required to […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News There isn’t a country in the world where the citizens don’t complain about the education system.  It’s never good enough, there’s always something wrong with it.  The dissatisfaction starts early, with many parents working second jobs just to send their kids to private school.  Then, if all goes well, eventually their kids will graduate from expensive, elite universities.  In between, almost 20 years will have been spent running from the perceived mediocrity of the nation’s public education system. After they graduate, we dump our youth into the workforce, where we continue to complain about […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News In just about every industry, the most competitive companies are scouring the world for talent, eagerly searching for innovation regardless of where they might find it. They do this because they know injecting “foreign DNA” into their culture keeps them creative, fresh, and nimble. The idea that you have to go outside to find new ideas is backed up by some of the best academic research. Jared Diamond, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, described the concept well in his book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”. According […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News Increasingly, Generation Y employees are dominating the workplace, and they are bringing their technology-enabled communication styles with them. To their older colleagues, they seem to speak a different language, one filled with jargon about the internet and social media. They use unfamiliar communications tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. They shop online, comfortably whipping out their credit cards and sending their data around the world. They post personal photos on Flickr, and they announce breakups on Facebook. When their older managers from the Gen X or Baby Boomer generations insist on face to face meetings, […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News In 1997 a colleague called me towards his desk, saying he wanted to show me something really exciting. “Have you heard of Amazon?” he asked. Of course I had heard of the Amazon, it was one of the longest rivers in the world. But he wasn’t looking at a river, he was looking at a website selling books. We spent about an hour browsing the site, analyzing it and debating the business model. Little did we know that someday it would be a legendary giant of ecommerce. Recently, I stumbled across an article by […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News It’s human nature. When we have a job, we complain about it, and when we don’t have a job, we try hard to get one. When we do have a job we want to find happiness in it, even though studies show what brings the truest happiness is one’s personal life. Work is the wrong place to look for it. Still, we spend many hours a day at work, and it’s natural to want fulfillment from it. So if you find your job unsatisfying, and you long to break out of it and start […]

By Fatmanur Erdogan, Hürriyet Daily News Istanbul is a city filled with diversity and color.  Last weekend, it rocked with the sounds of Bollywood at an event organized by an Indian friend of mine named Raja.  He hosted a large group for a great night of food, dancing, and music at the Dubb Indian Restaurant in Sultanahmet. Raja’s professional background is in engineering, and he manages quality control for one of the biggest construction projects in town.  But Saturday night, we saw a different side of him. Raja dressed formally, and he greeted each guest at the door, one by […]