About a month ago I was surfing over to the Harvard Business Review (HBR) site and ran across one of their bloggers named Anthony (Tony) Tjan. He wrote a clear and direct entry called Great Entrepreneurs’ Secret: Smarts, Guts, and Luck. I posted a summary called Three Requirements for Entrepreneurs. He recently followed up that entry with another that points out some of the negatives about Great Entrepreneurs. But as he states in Why Do Most Entrepreneurs Fail to Scale? it’s all about balance. The three characteristics are: Persistence and Stubborness, Controlling Interest, and Team Loyalty.
Regarding Persistence and Stubborness:
Perseverance is an admirable quality of great entrepreneurs. However,
when perseverance is confused with unhealthy stubbornness the outcome
is not likely to be great. Stubbornness is fantastic when it is right,
but it is a bitch when you are wrong. Or to paraphrase the bible, “Hell
is truth seen too late.”
Regarding Controlling Interest:
This control freak nature and maniacal attention to detail are almost required
during the early phases of company growth. But as a company grows,
entrepreneurs need to demonstrate not only that they can do the task
(i.e. no task is too small or beneath them), but also that they can
appropriately delegate. Fast growing businesses quickly move beyond the
ability of one person to manage without proper delegation, founders can
unknowingly limit the start-up’s growth potential.
Regarding Team Loyalty:
To be clear, loyalty should be recognized and is culturally important,
but it cannot be confused with the performance and future needs of the
organization. As a start-up becomes a full-fledged business, an
entrepreneurial leader has to be prepared to deal with difficult and
inevitable personnel situations where business decisions need to be
made for the interest of the company and not personal or historical
reasons.
Working Thoughts 