Tag Archives: creativity

09/22/18

Toward An Entrepreneurial Mindset—Seven Skills

Family businesses are described as having three complex, interrelated subsystems. The family comprises one subsystem; the ownership and the business itself comprise the other two. Over the past couple of decades particular attention has been given, and necessarily so, to understanding and addressing the needs of the family subsystem. But a shift of focus is now required. Marketplace and consumer expectations are changing overnight. Consequently the way we do business has changed. For family businesses to remain successful, greater attention must now be focused upon the business subsystem, and of particular value today is the cultivation of an entrepreneurial mindset.

A mindset consists of our attitudes about something. Today, the entrepreneurial mindset is considered more important than experience, knowledge and family history for the success of a business venture.

Seven critical skills contribute to an entrepreneurial mindset:

1. Plasticity: The ability and willingness to change actions and plans to overcome present and future challenges.

2. Communication and Collaboration: The ability to clearly express ideas to an intended audience, including persuading others to work towards a common goal.

3. Creativity and Innovation: The ability to think of ideas and create solutions to problems in the absence of clearly defined structures.

4.Innovation and Problem Solving: The capacity to apply higher-level, process-oriented thinking, consider an issue from a range of perspectives and use that reasoning to make decisions.

5. Future Orientation: An optimistic disposition with a concentration on obtaining the skills and knowledge required to transition into a career.

6. Opportunity Recognition: Seeing and experiencing problems as opportunities to create solutions.

7. Comfort with Risk: The capacity to act upon a decision despite uncertainty and challenges.

The mindset of a given business leader toward applying these skills reflects one of two fixed perspectives: a fear perspective defined by thinking, “when I fail I am no good,” or a growth perspective, defined by “when I fail I learn.”

10/21/16

That Which Endures

I recently received a review copy of Geoff Colvin’s new book, Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will.[1] In it he asks which human skills will be highly valued tomorrow, given the growth of ever more awesomely able technology.

Calvin observes that the skills valued by the economy are changing. He explains that mastering technical skills that have been in demand in the past, no longer makes us different. In her review of the book, Pulitzer-prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin writes that the skills that differentiate us are: “Instead, empathy, creativity, humor, relationship building, and expressing ourselves with the greater power than logic can ever achieve.”

I can’t help think of these as inherent qualities of successful multi-generational enterprises.

I like Colvin, not for dispelling the unspoken fear of being replaced by a machine, which does certainly appear from time to time—not so much for me as for my children—but for emphasizing the value and importance of inherent talents and personal qualities over and above skills that can be mechanized.

It is, then, the vital human touch that will carry our businesses; our economy; into the future.

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1 Colvin, Geoff. Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will. New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2016.