1. Motivation. The single most important characteristic is the drive to accomplish, the need to accomplish. How do you score in this department?
2. Continuous action. This is the ability to keep moving toward objectives, despite obstacles. It’s perseverance. It’s the willingness to put in months and years of effort in order to achieve that ‚Äîor avoid that, as the case may be ‚Äî which motivates you.
3. Taking counsel. Obtaining the best available intelligence but making a solitary and individual judgment. The person with a characteristic of an Entrepreneur will listen to the opinions of others. This person will also be quick to adopt their plans if he or she thinks they’re good ‚Äî and also quick to give full credit for an idea. Since this person does not suffer from feelings of inferiority, it is not important to this person that he or she must come up with all the good ideas or take all the credit. Just the contrary is true. This person will take counsel.
4. Flexibility. The ability to develop alternate courses of action. In every description of maturity I’ve ever read, the word flexibility is high on the list. Yet in the world of business, you quite often find the ineffective employee whose ideas are set in concrete. This is the employee misfit who will say, “We’ve always done things a certain way around here, and that’s the way we’re going to continue to do them.‚Äù This person has no place in a growing business and is a serious detriment to growth. He or she should be given an unimportant job or fired. If you can get your competitor to hire this person, so much the better.
5. Simplicity. Now, this is that marvelous and rare talent to reduce the seemingly complex into simple terms and ideas. To be able to see right through all the maze of confusion to the basic goals and the basic reason for being in business. As a successful client once said to me, “We have to constantly keep in mind that the entire aim of our business is to move people and things from one place to another as efficiently as possible.‚Äù
6. Dramatisation. That’s the skill and imagination in expressing beliefs. Now usually with the really good entrepreneur, this dramatisation comes perfectly naturally. It’s born of enthusiasm and interest in what’s being done and in plans for the future.
7. Being the boss. That is to say, maintaining enough detachment so that there’s never any question as to who’s in charge. This is difficult to define. It’s never a matter of egoism; it’s a matter of stature. It’s something that’s been earned and is deserved.
So, what of these characteristics are you going to choose? If any!