An article in the April 2007 issue of the Harvard Business Review discusses one of the biggest challenges in managing and growing a 21st century business -- namely getting business stakeholders (employees, clients, partners, and vendors) -- to actually do/deliver upon what they promise.

The article has a number of incredibly salient points for the modern manager/entrepreneur, including:

According to this month's Red Herring magazine, India's software industry is growing at an average rate of 28 percent a year, with revenues for the 2006-7 fiscal year topping $47.8 billion, up nearly tenfold from 1998. Close to two-thirds of this total represents exports -- namely Indian software firms selling products and services to overseas customers.

According to Dealogic, the value of tech companies waiting to go public has quadrupled -- from $1.1 billion in January 2006 to $4.7 billion in 2007. This build-up is being driven by a number of factors -- the NASDAQ composite index being up over 16% since May 2006, the number of filings by private tech companies being up 31% in the first 3 months of 2007 over the comparable period in 2006, and perhaps most importantly, the fact that technology IPOs in 2006 returned an average of 37% over their offering prices (renaissance Capital).