Seeking Opportunities and Aspiring for Quality as Winning Behaviors of Successful Entrepreneurs
Being an entrepreneur may be second nature to some, but becoming an entrepreneur is possible too.
To do that you need to look inside yourself to understand your behaviors and reflexes. You need to start somewhere in order to build the set of skills that will lead you to success and that “somewhere” is yourself; that is why you need to harness your behaviors and to hone them to build positive and effective habits that will help you achieve your goals. Reflection and practice are keys to success. Learn and apply, reflect and practice - a two-way road from self to the objective world out there and vice versa is your ticket to achievement and success.
In the 1980’s, the US National Science Foundation contracted Management Systems International (MSI) to carry out a five-year research project “to analyze the behaviors of distinguished entrepreneurs from different countries.”
On that basis, they developed, with the help of the renown psychologist David McClelland, an Entrepreneurship Development Program (EDP) to identify how to “expand participants’ potential to create or improve small businesses or other entrepreneurial activities” and “harness the entrepreneurship characteristics that are needed to be successful”.
Some 12 years later, I personally got certified by one of the gurus of EDP, Marina Fanning, co-founder and Executive Vice President of MSI, and I have since then been an adept of the idea that successful entrepreneurial behaviors could and should be grounded in achievement, planning and power sets of skills and behaviors. The fourth element that completes the set should be successful business creation and planning.
“When as a child you walk your first step, when you put your desires into a word form, you have already started a long journey of achievement. Do not squander it by reveling in nothingness,” Lahcen Haddad.
Marina Fanning and EDP experts divide this set into five categories, including looking for opportunities, quality and efficiency, taking risks, persistence, and honoring commitments. They are called achievement behaviors because they help the successful entrepreneur achieve results. Some of these could be innate, but they could also all be acquired through reflection, practice, and constant and relentless work by the entrepreneur on him/herself.
In this piece, I will focus on the first two of the five achievement skills, namely “Seeking Opportunities” and “Aspiring for Quality,”
“What others see as obstacles, entrepreneurs transform into opportunities,” Lahcen Haddad.
Michael Dell, the founder, chairman, and CEO of Dell Technologies said, “It’s through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our path.” Seizing opportunities is a quality of successful entrepreneurs. Dell’s business experience is a model of just that. He founded the company while a student at the University of Texas in Austin, describing it as “initially running the business from a dormitory room…providing customized upgrades for PCs.” When he found out that “the venture proved profitable,” he left college and devoted himself to building his business. Years later, he became one of the richest men in the world.
Therefore, if an “opportunity appears,” as Tom Peters, an American writer on business management practices said, “don’t pull down the shade.” Successful entrepreneurs not only refrain from putting down the shades when an opportunity presents itself, but they have the knack to see it when others see nothing but problems.
For instance, UNLEASH is a non-profit founded in 2016 that runs different solutions, including Traffic Jams (JT) which delivers healthy, tasty, ready-to-eat breakfast to young professionals on the go in fast-growing cities of developing countries. Their aim is to transform traffic jams in Beijing, Cairo, Lagos, Mexico City, and Johannesburg into opportunities for stuck drivers to eat healthy food and for young people on mopeds to get a job delivering it — and, of course, for their business to grow and prosper. In this case, everybody is a winner. Therefore, what most people would see as a problem, these social entrepreneurs saw as an opportunity to sell, create jobs, and serve the community.
A successful entrepreneur, according to the EDP experts, acts before events push him/her to do it, expands his/her business to other sectors, and is always on the lookout to get more funding, more customers, more space, different suppliers. Acting on time (or before the crisis hits), branching off to other activities, and always seeking to grow resources are basic behaviors that help entrepreneurs stay alert when opportunities strike. That is why they always think outside the box by breaking “imaginary limits” (EDP) and always converting hurdles into solutions and junk into resources.
“Quality is not a plus, it is the essence of work itself. Non-quality work is not work at all,” Lahcen Haddad
A Chinese proverb says that “a bad workman always blames the tools.” Blaming the tools is a refusal to focus on quality as an impact of the doer and not that of the instruments used. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was paralyzed from the waist down by polio before running for office, worked alongside Churchill, who used to have learning problems, to defeat Hitler. Helen Keller lost sight and hearing but that did not prevent her from becoming one of the most famous advocates for women’s and labor rights in the US.
Quality is about a predisposition to always strive to do better despite the odds or the tools. As Peter F. Drucker said, “Efficiency is doing better than what is already being done. Effectiveness is deciding what to do better.”
The successful entrepreneur, according to the EDP experts, always “strives to do better more rapidly and at a lesser cost.” We will go back to time and cost later, but what is important here is the will to constantly do better. Michael Moritz, the billionaire chairman of Sequoia Capital, “prefers the word ‘obsession’ as a way to describe (this) essential quality shared by the world’s most successful entrepreneurs.”
According to EDP, quality standards are not only respected but surpassed — the successful entrepreneur challenges him/herself to always go the extra mile to achieve the best for a patron or a customer. Quality should not be at the expense of time: striking a balance between quality and timeliness is a trait of a successful entrepreneur.
That is why it is important to understand the difference between quality and efficiency. EDP explains that “quality is about improving the product or service while efficiency is about achieving quality in a timely fashion and at a reasonable cost.”
For an entrepreneur, there is always a need to strike a balance between the two — a good quality product that comes later than needed is useless; however, rushing through a product for the sake of meeting a deadline without worrying about quality is not only risky but bad for the brand reputation.
Quality is a way of life: EDP states that it means believing that everything could be improved. In fact, successful entrepreneurs link “lifestyle entrepreneurship” to “the quality of life” so much so that the two become intertwined.
In a book, Sara B., Marcketti, Linda S. Niehm, and Ruchita Fuloria defined “lifestyle entrepreneurs as individuals who owned and operated businesses closely aligned with their personal values, interests, and passions.”
Lifestyle entrepreneur does not have anything to do with luxury or posh life but with passion, style, high quality of life, and business. Passion drives the successful entrepreneur both in life and at work.
EDP puts an emphasis on the will to always improve, to always think that there exists a better way- “Quality means care and coherence.” It is not a technique or a skill, but “it’s a way of life, a passion — quality is expressed everywhere and at every moment. Worrying about quality is an element that is integrated in one’s life.” It also requires also patience and persistence.
“Absolutely tenacious with a will of steel,” are the words that Jim Armstrong used to describe Steve Jobs, Apple’s iconic maker and shaper, when he died on October 5, 2011. Steve Jobs said that passion comes from loving what you do and striving to always look for doing what you could love. Love and patience go together; in fact, loving induces a sense of care, an eye for beauty, detail, to perfection, all sinequanon traits of quality.
The great Sufi poet, Jalaludin Rumi, said that “patience is seeing the Creator in the wound.” And for Rumi, “every moment is made glorious by the light of Love.” Love is what guides you to heal the wound. Patience seeks to find love in adverse moments. Patience and love are the essential rudiments for quality work. The successful entrepreneur has a Sufi side to him/her — they patiently care about what they love. They are passionate, but this passion comes from a deep belief in what they do. EDP asks, if you don’t believe in what you do, how can you sell it to others? You can neither be committed nor passionate about your product if you do not believe in it yourself.
As we have said above, quality should not be at the expense of time, nor should it be costly.
The triangle of quality, time, and cost (EDP) is a way to approach the relation between producing the best on time and at a reasonable price. Keeping a balance between those three elements is essential for success. Nonetheless, you can invest in any of those three aspects to conquer a market or a sizeable part of it. Steve Jobs never accepted to lower prices of Apple PCs or Smartphones or sacrifice the time it takes to produce them but invested in top quality and became a world leader. Polaroid worked on the time it took to produce pictures some seventy years ago and presented a product that was more costly than traditional photographs but that printed pictures in three seconds rather than two weeks (EDP). Polaroid increased cost but hugely reduced time for roughly the same quality product.
Therefore, it is important to define well your products or services, identify your clients, study their expectations, and find ways to measure their needs (EDP). Always ask yourself if your product or service is up to the expectations of your clients and if the processes and operations are necessary for improving your product or service (EDP). Always ask yourself how you can do better, and how you can improve the quality of what you sell (EDP). How can I correct what I see as shortcomings? As the American entrepreneur, television personality, media proprietor, and investor, Mark Cuban said, “it’s not about money or connections — it’s the willingness to outwork and outlearn everyone…And if it fails, you learn from what happened and do a better job next time.”