WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO SUCCEED as an entrepreneur? I mean really succeed, like Elon Musk, Michael Dell and Phil Knight have. And do these wildly successful founders have attributes that set them apart from other successful business leaders?
I myself am a veteran of three entrepreneurial ventures — with one win, one loss and one draw to my name. I have studied entrepreneurs extensively and have taught and learned from close to 2,000 of them in executive programs at leading business schools and elsewhere. As a result, I’ve observed first-hand the differences between entrepreneurs and other successful businesspeople. It’s their mindsets, I’ve discovered.
A couple of years ago I set out to codify these mindsets to help people everywhere — not just start-up founders — become more entrepreneurial. The six mindsets I have identified break the conventional rules that are widely observed in large organizations, and they fly in the face of much of what we teach in business schools — about finance, target marketing, strategy and more. In this article, I will summarize them.
MINDSET 1: Yes, We Can!
When a customer asks an entrepreneur to do something that they are not currently doing for them, the answer isn’t, ‘Sorry, we don’t offer that’; instead they say, ‘Yes, we can!’ Then they figure out how to deliver on the promise.
Big companies almost never do this. Broadly speaking, leaders are advised to ‘stick to their knitting’: They are supposed to know what their organization’s core competencies are, nurture them and do what they can to make them more robust. If a customer asks for something outside the box, they say, ‘No, I’m sorry, we don’t
