ARE ENTREPRENEURS BORN OR BUILT OR
BOTH?
I was part of a recent Oxford-style
debate in Chicago where the proposition under consideration was that “Entrepreneurs
are born, not trained”. It was the classic nature versus nurture type of heated
argument between two pairs of seasoned senior executives and serial
entrepreneurs. And truth be told, I
think that each of the advocates in the debate (except maybe my debate partner,
Amy Wilkinson) could have easily argued in favor of or against either side of
the proposition. Amy herself was pretty hardcore on our side of the argument (we
were the “built” team) and she had some pretty strong ammunition as well based
on her most recent research in the field.
In fact, the entire contest was especially
informed and influenced by Amy’s participation since she (after 5 years of
serious investigation interviewing dozens of hugely-successful company
founders) had just published a new book on entrepreneurs called The Creator’s Code. I’d say it’s a must
read for anyone who wants to understand what it takes to survive and succeed in
the startup world. I don’t want to try to summarize it because I couldn’t do it
justice and because the many concrete examples in the book which are drawn from
one-on-one conversations with all of these people are invaluable additions to
the book’s own concrete conclusions. But – as noted below – while you definitely
need the big names and boffo stories to move the books off the shelves, the
real value of her years of diligent research and analysis is how the findings
can help all of us everyday entrepreneurs be better at accomplishing what we’re
trying to do.
Amy’s book identifies and describes a
cluster of distinct abilities that will sound very familiar to any serious
entrepreneur, but it also makes the more interesting assertion that real
break-through success depends on the presence, not of some of these talents and
capabilities, but of ALL of them at the same time and in the same person. Her research
shows that every one of the six essential skills which she had identified were
present in each and every one of the male and female entrepreneurs in her study.
The underlying study basically focused
on the founders of companies which had reached $100 million or more in revenues
over a 5 year period. Rapidly growing and highly impactful companies. Every one
of the founders she spent time with is a household name today to millions of
people, but not a single one of them would call themselves an overnight
success. Nor would they say (even though the premise of the book is their skill
sets) that they achieved their successes alone. And, in fact, one of the six
essential skills is the ability to network and draw talent and resources to
your ideas. These narratives are all about striving, persistence, passion and
even patience which is something we rarely talk about in this context, but it’s
invaluable to understand that you should never confuse a clear view of where
you’re headed with the time or distance that it will take to get there or how
difficult the journey will be.
Amy’s research also demonstrated that
the more times a given individual exercised these abilities and the more
businesses he or she created over time, the better they got each time at the
process and the higher the likelihood that they would again be massively
successful. Practice and application make increasingly perfect. Perhaps the
prime poster boy (and serial entrepreneur) in the book is Elon Musk for obvious
reasons – although, as she noted – nothing was sure or obvious (except his raw
intelligence) when he started and – in fact – Elon faced the abyss multiple
times in several of his most successful ventures, but he never stopped believing. By his own admission, he taught himself a
great deal about a number of different industries and, throughout his journey,
he learned immense amounts from each and every bump in the road. The bottom
line of Amy’s research and the most compelling conclusion was that all of these
critical tools and techniques can be learned, honed, and improved upon throughout
anyone’s career and over successive instances of starting new businesses.
Note that I use the term “learned”
rather than “taught” because so many of the individuals in Amy’s study were not
classically advantaged or trained in the areas of their ultimate triumphs. In
fact, they were almost all more scrappy and “street smart” than brilliant or
“book smart” in the areas that really mattered to their eventual businesses. This distinction – of course – became a major
bone of contention in the debate itself. Our view was that becoming an
effective entrepreneur and a business success was about experience, iteration,
and learned craft (as well as a full measure of good fortune) rather than some
genetically-determined destiny that inescapably assured you of eventual success.
At the outset of the debate, the audience was informally polled and they agreed
substantially (60-40) with our side of the argument. The trick was not to lose
them over the course of the discussion.
Our opponents immediately attempted
to pigeonhole us in the academic world and repeatedly stressed that their view
of the “training” under discussion was the type that could only take place in the
narrowest confines of colleges, universities and graduate programs. We
countered that they were attempting to make a distinction which made no real
difference in the real world. Where and how you gained and developed the skills
didn’t matter a bit – the point was that none of these talents appears
fully-realized and ready to roll at birth or at the outset of anyone’s careers.
As you might expect, there was a lot
of loose talk about crazy people, college dropouts, about people happy to take
insane risks, about fatal optimists, and about the absolute cream of the crop –
those few super entrepreneurs whose names we all know and revere. But, when the
dust settled, the thing that struck me at the end of the contest was that we are
actually doing so many aspiring entrepreneurs a real disservice by focusing on
the very few Michael Jordans and the Lang Langs of business (who may be amazing
or may just be the luckiest people alive at the right time and right place) rather
than on the thousands of equally successful (if considerably smaller)
entrepreneurs who are working just as hard every day to build their businesses
and who can really learn and demonstrably benefit the most from the important
lessons which Amy’s book has to share.
Uber is a
great story, but the real growth and expansion of new businesses and the
creation of new jobs will come from the hundreds of businesses that apply the
new lessons of the sharing economy and “Uberize”
their own businesses and industries. Similarly, there will be Airbnb-ish solutions brought forward in
many market sectors. All of these successes will be driven by individuals who
master and intelligently apply all of the essential skills which Amy sets out
in her book to their own enterprises and not by the ones who think that the key
to success is to emulate Travis or Zuck by rocking a hoodie and then sitting by
the roadside waiting for the lightning to strike. Hope is not a strategy for
success. Hard work, perseverance and iteration are.
Finally, in the interests of full
disclosure, I have to confess that by the discussion’s end – due in no small
part – to the under-handed and reprehensible behavior of our opponents (and
some pithy comments about the height of NBA players and other flagrant
grandstanding), the audience was somewhat swayed in favor of our opponent’s
position and the gap in opinion was narrowed although we ultimately prevailed
in a purely mathematical sense. Small solace.
