Losing opportunities, wasting time: Ameera Shah on why saying 'yes' always isn't wise

Failure has been a big teacher for the Metropolis Healthcare MD.

By Maleeva Rebello, ET Bureau | Updated: Oct 29, 2019, 05.45 PM IST

Ameera Shah shared some personal anecdotes of how her multinational chain of pathology centers has grown over the years.

Failure has been a big teacher for Ameera Shah, Managing Director of Metropolis Healthcare. At an event in Mumbai a few weeks ago, she said, "Our failure has taught us more often more than our successes. Often as a small business owner 15 years ago as opportunities came my way, I wanted to be very aggressive and jump. What happens when you end up jumping at every opportunity possible, you land up being opportunistic. When you land up being opportunistic without a clear, strategic focus in place; often you land up doing too many things."

The 40-year-old entrepreneur shared some personal anecdotes of how her multinational chain of pathology centers has grown over the years. "In the early stage of our business growth, we did not know how to say no enough. We were so keen to say yes, that we forgot how to say no. Every time an opportunity would come, we would say, 'Yeah, we can do that'. We would get finding a way to do it, that was one of the biggest failures. The ability to say no is more important than saying yes. If you land up doing everything that comes your way, you are not able to realise the opportunity lost. You have to spend time cleaning up on all the opportunities you jumped on by saying yes. It causes time to be wasted," she said.

Now that lessons are learnt, the road ahead only leads forward for Shah and her company.

Google+, Orkut, hi5: Social Networks That Failed To Make It Big

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Google, on Wednesday, bid farewell to its social network Google+. Announced in 2011, it failed to make an impact and couldn't take on Facebook and Twitter.

Google+ was Google's fourth foray in social networks after Google Buzz, Google Friend Connect and Orkut. It replaced Google Buzz in 2011 to take on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Tumblr.

However, its user-engagement was not enough to keep the platform going, and rather it became a security liability for the tech giant. Google disclosed two data leak episodes that could have exposed its users' information to hackers. The second instance prompted Google to accelerate the process of shutting down the network, which was previously scheduled to go offline in August.

However, Google+ isn't the only platform to come to an end. Here's a round-up of other social media platforms that could not survive for long.