These notes summarize a talk to representatives of the Division of Student Affairs and the Order of Angells on the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. The previous posts are provided here, here and here.

My final post relates to the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. To me, they are deeply linked at the hip. Great entrepreneurs have to be great leaders – in fact, there are very good scholarly assessments supporting this. There are some aspects and skills of entrepreneurship that go beyond the typical leadership training.

Whether I would call leaders entrepreneurs relates very much more to their vision and purpose than it does to any other academic detail.  So, again it’s about vocabulary.

The leader of a group that raises the funds and volunteers to go build a school  in Brazil is a Social Entrepreneur in my book, and I suspect to many around the country. The same is true for almost any impact-driven student organization. They have leadership challenges identical or almost identical to social entrepreneurship ventures. A leader who builds an entity to take a Michigan invention and translate it for use in the entire world is an Entrepreneur in my book, needing to address all the entrepreneurial challenges a company has to address.

Thus, I don’t think the concepts are identical, but it would be a huge mistake to not recognize the substantial overlap in all of this. We would be a better campus, if we empowered our leaders with entrepreneurial visions and leadership aspirations and if we did so by focusing on student organizations.

To compare leadership and entrepreneurship, we may want to do so in four dimensions already addressed before (and following Cogliser and Bringham, Vecchio): Vision, Influence, Leading in the Context of Innovation/Creativity, and Planning.

Vision (followers/larger constituency)

Vision is the main component when inspiring followers toward exemplary performance or other goal-directed behavior as well as organizational performance.

Vision attributes (brevity, clarity, abstractness, challenge, future orientation, stability, and desirability or ability to inspire) and content (growth imagery) are related to new venture growth. Followers need to be motivated through involvement, participation, and a professionally meaningful mission.

Influence

A commonality across many of the various definitions of leadership is the ability to influence others toward a goal. Rational persuasion is widely used for both upward, lateral, and downward influence.

Entrepreneurs not only see opportunities (understand the ways and means), but are able to marshal resources to carry out their vision. Use of rational persuasion and inspirational appeals are likely to be effective when the request is legitimate and in line with the entrepreneur’s values and the constituencies’ needs.

Leading in the context of Innovation

Leading creative people requires technical expertise and creativity, employing a number of direct and indirect influence tactics.

Entrepreneurial leadership should involve idea generation, idea structuring, and idea promotion.

Planning

In complex, dynamic environments where people must coordinate their activities, planning represents a key influence on performance.

Entrepreneurs have a clear need for the mental awareness of future actions to anticipate potential reactions to strategic choices.

In summary, there is tremendous overlap of lessons of entrepreneurship and leadership.

These notes summarize a talk to representatives of the Division of Student Affairs and the Order of Angells on the relationship of leadership and entrepreneurship. The previous posts are provided here and here.

Before addressing leadership support, I want to provide some context of my leadership experiences.

My first leadership experience was in running a sports team. I raised the funds and managed the team. We won our league’s championship and moved up. It was great.

A few years later, I became a student leader and then a student representative to the university. As such, I was part of hiring decisions of all professors in my area of specialty, and also had influence in other policy matters. Basically, I was a pain for professors, pointing out that teaching quality should be a significant part of a professor’s tenure and promotion decisions.

But, most of my early leadership experiences came from being in the military. I do not know of any place besides perhaps a successful tech startup where a 20 year old can be responsible for 200 people. The last part of my service was as a leadership support officer.

After some very good training by leadership professionals, I wanted to put these new skills into practice. I would return with a camera crew and I would observe the military leaders at work. I would observe and analyze this persons’ leadership style and – in the evening – I would prepare an analysis while providing support and feedback to them. It was initially an experiment of the Swiss army, and everybody was worried that the officers would be self-conscious and distracted by us. That did not happen. Instead, they urged us to come back and continue to coach them.

Given that background, when I observe student organizations, they usually falter in a few simple ways, or they become massively successful…

The first one is about setting vision and purpose. What are we about? What are we not about? I spend 1-2 meetings on just this question. Here, the key is not to push but to ask questions. There *needs* to be unity behind this.

The second one is about ways to influence. I like student orgs because that’s what you learn there. You cannot use rank and degree. You need to think about value for the person whose behavior you want to affect. Influence also relates to the marshaling of resources. How do we create and communicate this vision.

The third one is leadership of innovators. This is the challenge. How does one take ideas, shape these ideas, and promote ideas

Finally, there is planning and running things. I am focusing on simple mechanics. How do you run meetings? How do you plan events? There is a value to intermediate goals and reserves… Part of this is also conflict resolution. 

So, I spend 1 hour each week with my teams to assess and assist. I make a clear and conscious choice not to own the organizations. I will not make personnel decisions, but discuss what the key issues are regarding people or key decisions.

I have found that there is a huge difference between teams whose leaders get such training and mentorship compared to those who do not. There are many big things that can be achieved by empowering our best, and we should make this part of our DNA of student organizations around UM.

Entrepreneurs create new where there is nothing and change in the face of adversity and often against all odds. Entrepreneurship is therefore fundamentally about hope in a world that dearly needs hope. To me, that is one of the most important reason to be actively involved in creating entrepreneurial programs and work harder than is considered normal :  by empowering students, faculty and staff in their entrepreneurial quests, we kindle fires of hope that can turn into sweeping blazes of change for the good.

Hope is one of the strongest values we can have in our lives, together with faith and love. “Three things will last forever–faith, hope, and love–and the greatest of these is love,” says the bible. Having hope is holding on to a good outcome in the presence of negative evidence and inadequacy. It’s about believing that the best is yet to come and, in fact, we can affect that it does come. It is like looking at the stars while sitting in the gutter (according to Oscar Wilde).

Entrepreneurs are people who put hope into strategy and into action. The stories are countless, the evidence plentiful: Hope does in fact create better futures. In fact, many great achievements in the word came from discouraged women and men who kept on working, holding onto hope.

Whether they want to create social justice with their entrepreneurial venture, or work to save lives around the world, whether they want to create joy in people’s lives, or simply want to make lives easier and better through their new technologies, impact-driven entrepreneurs are what makes me hopeful even after a week of heart-wrenching news and visiting some political people in Washington DC.

What gives you hope? How do you turn your hope into action and positive impact in this world?

Throughout our lives we go through major phases of doubt. This could be doubt regarding our choices, our futures, our friends, our employees and even about us. Doubt is particularly important to deal with as an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are successful pushing the edge, dealing with ambiguity and making something out of nothing. So, how do they do it? How do they deal with challenges and times of deep doubt?

Before I address dealing with doubts, it is critical to state that doubts are in fact important. It is almost impossible to help people without doubts, because they stopped learning sometime in the past. “Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous,” said philosopher Voltaire. Doubts are a sign of intelligence, and wisdom. The wise don’t get stuck in their thinking, they question their conclusions, they doubt.

Times of doubts, like the ones mentioned above, can turn into times of innovation and change. “Doubt is the father of invention,” Galileo Galilei said. Thus, it is not the goal in life never to have doubts, but to handle these doubts in a way that makes them useful and impactful in our lives and environments.

Observing many change agents and entrepreneurs deal with doubts, I have found two key strategies that turn these times of doubts into times of success.

The first strategy is “collect data to address doubts.” When the doubts are about the job choices, go hang out with people who chose careers that you are considering. Collect data about their lives and choices. Find out in what way these careers are different. In business questions, the customer development strategy is basically a framework to manage ambiguity and doubt: develop the best hypothetical business model and check all assumptions by collecting data.

This process of collecting data creates certainty based on data and facts. But, there is a deep psychological benefit: if you get stuck thinking and worrying, it is pretty easy to get discouraged. If you take that doubt and turn it towards the collection of useful information, it is a lot easier to clear one’s mind. “When in doubt, don’t,” Benjamin Franklin is quoted as saying.

The second strategy may actually be the defining strategy for entrepreneurs: “when in doubt, do,” quoted from Don Graham ‘s seminar talk. You have collected data, you have thought about things, have weighed your options, and you just really can’t decide what to do. Graham says: “pick one, any one, and do. “

There is deep wisdom in this second strategy. Often, we are stuck on some minor question which prevents us from getting to move towards the major and essential question, which we will only find once we actually start moving towards implementation. For example, we will only really know 100% how the customer reacts to a new product once we start selling. We can learn key information about this before using customer development strategies, but we will learn the true and most important stuff by doing stuff, not just by thinking about it.

One of the most important failure modes of companies and world-changing ideas and products projects is the absence of action. After you think about this, you discuss it; you collect data – go do!  Go, do not because you have no doubts, but because the only way you will address them are through action.

This post was motivated by a panel discussion I participated in by the Honors Physics 135. Thanks to Dr. Lydic, Dr. Akervall and the students for a very stimulating discussion.

This piece was inspired by a workshop I attended with the people of D1-Solutions, a company located in Switzerland. D1 Solutions seeks to provide insights to customers into data, which is often the success factor for businesses in the information age. D1 Solutions sees itself as the Champions League of consulting firms active in this space.

Sometimes, magic just happens: your vision, the preperation, a pitch, a connection – and amazing results! It’s like lighting the fuse of a rocket – a very small action causes a very much bigger and more remarkable impact. Everything just clicks and we wonder why this does not happen all the time? Why can we pitch 50 times with little effect and keep pushing the ball and it just seems like nothing ever takes off?

We then learn the impact of our actions depends critically on the right timing, and that each such amazingly timed event takes often months of preparation and hard work. That is the magic of good timing!

Although a perfectly timed success seems to appear from nothing, there are usually four steps that are critically important and that need to occur days or even months before. They are: anticipate success, prepare yourself, prepare the partner and read the situation.

The first step is “to anticipate success.” I consider that to be absolutely critical. It is very hard getting hired after an interview if you cannot see yourself in that new job. It is also difficult raising funding for your entrepreneurial venture if you do not truly believe in the importance and likelihood to see that venture succeed. Your confidence in success will draw others with it.

A good pitch or success has to be prepared. Frankly, many unsuccessful pitches are just a part of that preparation. Many failures help identify a weakness that can be eliminated or a lack of communication that can be improved upon next time. But, great preparation is an important part of the sale. Understand whom you are selling to, understand her background and her passions.

The preparation also needs to include the partner from whom a desired action is anticipated. In some cases, a pitch can be prepared by providing information, giving the person the background that is needed to accept the basic premise of your pitch or sales-proposition.  It is very tough to walk into somebody’s office and sell during the first call. It is particularly tough to get investments for your companies or non-profit programs during the first meeting. People want to get to know you and ensure that you are sincere. That takes time and patience.

The final preparatory step is to read the situation. Am I ready and in a good position right now to pitch? Did I do the right preparatory work I needed to? And, do I think today’s pitch will result in success?

Once we have the confidence that comes from the right mindset and the right preparation – we need to go for it! This is, by the way, a place where many fail. They never actually ask investors for money. They never actually sell their products, because they are worried about failing. I think the worst kind of failure is the one that results from a lack of trying!

So, what is the magic of perfect timing? What creates great success in pitching, in sales, and it many inter-personal interactions? It’s the right attitude and great preparation instantaneously coming to fruition.

This piece was inspired by a workshop I attended with the people of D1-Solutions, a company located in Switzerland. D1 Solutions seeks to provide insights to customers into data, which is often the success factor for businesses in the information age. D1 Solutions sees itself as the Champions League of consulting firms active in this space.

Working in teams and especially when we lead teams, we are not only responsible for our time but we need to ask ourselves - 2 important questions, if we are being trampled by ants, and my suggestions - offering quality solutions,  but we affect the time of others or even control their time. I consider this one of the most difficult parts of my job and an aspect where I think that many of us have alot to learn.

Valuing the time of team members is of critical importance for a host of reasons. The most important one is that of respect. Teams can only work well if we respect each other, no matter how we relate to each other work-wise. It is very discouraging to work with somebody who makes us waste time.

In my experience, interactions don’t have to be perfect, but if interactions do not reflect mutual respect, we will hurt our team and also our work. A disrespected member of our team will stop thinking for the team and will isolate himself. He will perform tasks in an uninspired fashion and without much thought and passion. He will worry about details that are never an issue with a motivated team. Instead of talking about goals and dreams, we are now talking about five minutes of overtime and about office-space inequalities. And, most importantly, we are now wasting money.

Startup companies without mutual respect have a much tougher time surviving than those who have that magic ingredient to their culture. Similarly, change-projects in big organizations, intrapreneurship, have a very rocky around ahead of them if people are not feeling respected. That includes all people: the task-leads, the assistants and even the cleaning personnel. If I can help it, I never work with anybody who treats their staff like they are dirt stuck to his shoe.

Disrespect for each other’s time will create useless work, destroy collaboration and create negativity. I therefore I believe respect is an absolutely critical part of success of any team. I want to share some experiences and observations relative to emails, my next blog will address some broader issues.

I am a strong believer that the less a team relies on email, the better the team communication can become. I don’t think there are many aspects of our life that are more annoying than email, and I think effective teams need to focus on improving emails or they will lose much time. Email as a communication device in teams is both frustrating and ineffective. I have often played with the idea to basically stop answering emails unilaterally. I have not had the courage to do that because I have not found an alternative. But, I think it is a goal of effective teams to reduce or cut emails as a key communication device among them. There are a number of reasons for that.

First, there is a tremendous chance for miscommunication. Email can and should not be used to resolve personal problems – absent seeing body-language, it is almost impossible to guess how a critical email was actually intended to be read.

I recently received an email from a professor that made my blood boil. He critiqued me for not being responsive to a request he had sent. Going back to his email, I could not figure out how I would have possibly been able to guess what he wanted. I thought many things about him I will not write. I then typed a blistering email that had the appropriate dose of correcting information, sarcasm and anger. It made me feel better typing this email, that’s for sure. But, I read through it one more time and asked myself: is that making things better? I decided that I already benefited from the therapeutic impact of writing things down and erased the email. I sent a friendly email back and apologized to him for misunderstanding and corrected what he thought I screwed up. His answer made me smile “Perfect, thank you so much.” I was so glad I did not send the first email.

Second, I think emails are just not a very good communication tool. I believe that only bad teams sit next to each other sending each other emails trying to solve problems that would take a grand-total of 30 seconds of face to face communications. I really, really don’t like to be in email exchanges about a topic. Let’s rely on older technology (i.e., phone, a meeting) or a newer technology (i.e., text message, Skype, etc.) to address the question at hand.

Third, we need to read our emails, while thinking of the recipient. For example, emails should not be letters. I don’t know anybody younger than 45 who likes reading long emails. Like so many, I cannot handle emails that have more than 1-2 key points because I get well over 200 per day. Emails should have a title that suggests whether an action is required, a problem exists, or whether the email is just informational. Emails should then get to the point and keep the text lean – most emails are not read on big monitors, but on mobile devices. You send a long email, the likelihood of the email being completely read is almost zero, except if the recipient either loves, needs or fears you.

Fourth, the most important aspect of email: It does not count as a valid communication. A question like, “did you tell your customers about this important new product?” is often answered with “yes, I sent them an email.” It’s ok if an effective customer communication starts with email, but that is not where it should end. Having sent an email is not equivalent of having communicated. If there is data proving the opposite, the likelihood that your email was read is near zero. This is particularly true when emails are sent to people younger than 20 years old, a group of people who has basically given up entirely on email.

Fifth: no, we do not need to cc everybody on every single email! We should only cc people who need to know. The default is not to cc anybody.

In summary, I believe that valuing each other’s time is a critical characteristic of a great and impactful team. Despite its proven usefulness for so many aspects, I do not believe that email should be the preferred communication of good teams for a whole bunch of reasons mentioned here.

How does your team handle email as a communication tool? What are the lessons you learned that could help others?