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ANNOUNCEMENT

Forms Now Available At CROSSWORD, Elgin Road, Kolkata Mr. Bikram Dasgupta (Chairman & CEO, Globsyn Group) addresses more than 100 business owners of Kolkata at a seminar organized by AIFB.

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"Over my many years of developing and building enterprises, I have been fortunate to cross paths and interact with some brilliant people and have learnt a lot from all of them. In many of these discussions, a huge latent gap on higher structured education for Entrepreneurship in general, and Family Business in particular, came about. I also felt, that in a world, where 80% businesses are driven by family and entrepreneurial instincts, there is a strong need for research based, business cases driven, education edifice that not only provides a sharing based platform, but helps entrepreneurs excel and successfully navigate the various challenges that they come up against as they progress on their entrepreneurial journeys. AIFB, is a tribute to all of them. We will make AIFB as 'THE' platform, for all Entrepreneurial and Family Business Research and Education, in Asia. I thank the many out there, who have inadvertently, made this happen."

Bikram Dasgupta
Founder & Chairman, AIFB

While on one hand there is a dearth of research on what happens after entrepreneurs establish successful businesses and keep it growing by their sheer risk taking ability and spurred on by innovative ideas until they reach the 'Tipping Point' so aptly described by Malcolm Gladwell in his recent best selling book of the same title. On the other hand Family businesses has been singularly focused on succession planning and family dynamics at the expense of a larger gamut of issues that plagues today's business owners. This is the quintessential problem being faced by first generation entrepreneurs and owner-managers today.

. The Starbucks experience is an apt case study of how entrepreneurs flounder, due to a lack of research driven data and education to help them explore the veracity of their intuitive decisions.

From 1987 to 1997 the Starbucks brand was primarily in the embryonic phase. Then from 1997 to 2002 it grew. Schultz left active management of the brand in 2000 and stepped down completely in 2004 confident that he had set in motion a wonderful experience for Starbucks loyal customers that could only get bigger and better with the whole world to look forward to over the coming years.

That momentum that he had set in motion continued and in 2002 Starbucks reached the 'tipping point' and from 2002 to 2006 Starbucks exploded. The stock went from $20 a share in 2000 to $30 a share when Schultz stepped down in 2004. Then on to $40 a share in 2006 when as a result of the dilution of the original value proposition and the "watering down" of the Starbucks experience customers began to desert the brand and moved on to the "better brew" being promoted by McDonald's and the variety of Dunkin Donuts, as well as to a new types of coffee shops started by other coffee mavens.

Schultz captured it best when he recently described what he found on his return to Starbucks and said "Starbucks has lost its edge, evolving from a culture of entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation to a culture of mediocrity and bureaucracy". He went on to describe what happened as a "watering down of the Starbucks experience and the commoditization of the brand".