E-Business
Issue No. 30 - August/September 2006
Nazareth syndrome strikes again
How to make waves at home and abroad
by Ms Leila Henderson
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been immersed in a new book called Winning Credibility - A guide for building a business from rags to riches, which proposes that the real difference between success and failure is perception – how your business is perceived by influencers, investors, customers, media and so on.
So when I attended the SA Government’s launch of ANZATechNet 2006, I was struck by the synchronicity between the book and the common theme of the presentations by five South Australian entrepreneurs who had attended the Silicon Valley networking conference.
Digislide CEO Luceille Outhred summed it up when she spoke about the “Nazareth Syndrome” – how hard it is to be taken seriously in your home town until you’ve “made it” overseas (Jesus faced the same issue within his own community).
Until she took part in the ANZATech Gateway to the US program, Luceille had missed out on both media coverage and seed capital in South Australia.
Winning Credibility is all about tackling this issue. The authors say that no matter how good your technology or idea is, you won’t be able to build a successful business around it unless your whole organisation has credibility. Digislide was talent spotted to attend the DEMO conference in Arizona, the leading technology launchpad in the US. The company went on to win the DEMO Award, previously won by the likes of the Palm Pilot, Java programming language, and South Australia’s Net Prioritizer and In the Chair. (That makes three local companies in three years taking a major prize at a US-centric conference!)
Anyway, DEMO resulted in Luceille being interviewed by Wall Street Journal, Business Week and CNet, among many others. She now has an entrée into the most lucrative technology market in the world for her mobile phone projector.
“That’s a perfect case study for Winning Credibility,” says Matthew Michalewicz, who co-authored the book with his f...
