Entrepreneurs: Born or made?
Posted on 13 November 2009 by Lucy
I just watched a lecture on Academic Earth by Randy Komisar as part of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Kleiner Perkins: Advice for Entrepreneurs series.
It is a question that I have heard thrown around a lot, are entrepreneurs born or made? Are entrepreneurial skills innate or can they be built by seeking out a set of learnings that enables you to better understand what is happening in your business and around you?
In the lecture Randy Komisar says what he thinks CAN be taught is a set of skills around the domains it takes startups to succeed:
-Finance
-Organisation
-Transactions
-Strategy
-Business Models
Get exposure to these and raise your entrepreneurial IQ 100 points. With these strands you will understand better what is going around you and what you are doing in your own business. Through the case study method in particular you can get a better understanding of the personality and characteristics of entrepreneurs, including the tortured lives some live to realise their dreams!
He also said he thinks there are things you can’t learn at school or on the job – the entrepreneurial character, some have it, some don’t. Some think they have it – they don’t. Some think they don’t have it – they do. If you aren’t an entrepreneur Komisar says “thats okay too.. there is a lot of other value to be created in the marketplace.”
The entrepreneurial character is very comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity, is very capable of understanding and targeting opportunities that people don’t see, and is tenacious about pursuit, at the same time they remain permeable to new ideas and course corrections through feedback from the market or from those with insights and experiences. There are personalities comfortable in this environment and some that are not is the overarching message delivered by Komisar in the lecture.
You can learn a lot and accelerate your ability to learn more by building a context. But you have to ask yourself the hard question, am I suited for the ambiguity, uncertainty of being an entrepreneur or am I not?
I am interested in methods (formal education, self-study, mentoring) that entrepreneurs use to pick up these domains Komisar highlights as important: Finance, Organisation, Transactions, Strategy and Business Models and am also interested in what level in each domain they should educate themselves.
I am going to ask a few people in the industry about this and then report back with some extra perspectives. I know there is also a lot of research findings on this so I am going to look into this also. I promise a post a day next week on this topic to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week.
Update: As per Ross’s comment on this post and an equally important question – how do you LEARN entrepreneurship? A key question to take into account when shaping how entrepreneurship is taught.
I've always believed that formal education about entrepreneurship has value, but the value is limited. It's like teaching someone to fly a plane based on theory but not putting them inside a plane, behind the controls. Some things, like Finance, are more appropriate when taught through formal education, while others, such as strategy, really blossom from practical experience. In fact, there's a risk that someone will be too cautions and will spend far too much time studying and reading instead of focusing on practical experience. I talked about that risk recently – http://rosskimbarovsky.com/2009/10/startup-tip-ev...
There's also a related question – equally important to the one you've raised: How do you LEARN entrepreneurship? The answers to that question can help shape how entrepreneurship is taught. After all, it's very difficult to be a good teacher if you've stopped learning.
Thanks Ross, just checked out your video, these messages resonated:
-"Spend less time reading, studying how other people did things and more time really getting your feet wet"
-"Even imperfect experiences of your own are going to be generally better than constantly reading more and more about what other people have done"
-"Don't over think your business model or an action, figure out what a simple step would be and take it. The practical experience of one simple step is going to be far more valuable than reading about it."
Did you agree with Randy Kosimar's view in the Stanford video that the domains of learning are Finance, Organisation, Transactions, Strategy and Business Models?
I haven't given a lot of thought to the mechanics of entrepreneurship, but I think that Randy Komisar has listed the important domains. I don't know if he'd include marketing within strategy (if he wouldn't, then I would add Marketing as another important domain).