Bill Hobbs passed along a blog post by Steven Berglas from Business Week:
While there is no simple answer I believe that combativeness, one of the three attributes I presented in my last post as defining serial entrepreneurs, is the characteristic that best predicts who will thrive in the most oppressive market conditions. By “combativeness” I am not referring to orneriness, acting despotically, or -worst of all– manifesting narcissistic entitlement. Instead, I see combativeness as the ability to convert anger into healthy, goal-directed passion and, as a result, to be positioned to pluck diamonds from coal bins.
It is true that entrepreneurs need to be able to shift into a crisis mode. I know that when I get in that mode I certainly become more decisive and keenly focused.
However, as we take a little deeper look into his post, some complexities come to light.
First, it is clear that he is defining entrepreneurial success in terms of maximizing financial returns. Now don’t get me wrong — I went into business to make money. But making money was by no means to only “goal-directed passion” that my partners and I had in mind.
We wanted to create a certain culture for our employees. We also wanted to create stable and reliable jobs for them. We would often miss paychecks and borrow more money rather than make temporary lay-offs. I know we did not maximize our financial returns at all times. Creating the culture we wanted cost potential profits, as did providing stable employment.
In our new book Bringing Your Business to Life, Mike Naughton and I define entrepreneurial courage this way:
[W]e need to be mindful of two necessary characteristics that define courage. First, as we’ve already mentioned, courage is the habit of taking risks and enduring hardships. The second characteristic, which often gets overlooked in the popular press, is the ability to direct risk-taking and endurance to good ends. It is the goodness of the end that determines when to stick at something, how much to sacrifice, and when, ultimately, to give up.
Courage is an entrepreneurial virtue. But, every virtue is like a road that has two “ditches” – one ditch is excess and the other is defect. The defect “ditch” for courage is easy to see. It is the entrepreneur who becomes paralyzed with fear and is unable to act. The economy goes south and the entrepreneur is unable to make the hard choices.
What Berglas calls “combativeness” sounds a lot like the other “ditch” of excess. It is easy to lose one’s way when all that is pursued is financial success at any cost. Is financial success worth sacrificing the other reasons we went into business? Or even worse, is it worth us losing our souls along the way because we did whatever it took to meet our financial goals?
I think you make a valid point here, and it puts Berglas’ “combativeness” comment in perspective. I would argue that successful entrepreneurs are combative not in the sense that they will do whatever it takes to make money, but in that they will do whatever it takes to keep their project alive when the going gets tough.
You use the example of skipping paychecks and borrowing money rather than laying off employees. I’d argue that you had to be courageous in that situation and were, at least a bit, combative when confronted with the market situation.
Business might exist to make money, but that’s not always the sole goal of an entrepreneurial venture.
Nice Way to share your thoughts on entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur always have that competitiveness to survive in the business.
The Leader World – Social Enterprise