Steve Jobs is an icon and a beacon to entrepreneurs around the globe, although not as a management role model.

Many have weighed in on what made Jobs so great, but in a recent talk Malcolm Gladwell focused on a trait that anyone, in any field and any position can cultivate and become great at.
It’s not a trait that’s inborn nor does it require any special abilities.

It’s what Jobs had in abundance; it’s what drove him.

It’s what you can have, too.

What is this magical trait?

“Urgency,” Gladwell declared, characterizes Jobs and other immortal entrepreneurs. (…)  “The difference isn’t resources,” Gladwell said. “It’s attitude.”

Cultivate urgency.

Own it.

Flickr image credit: Pati Morris

No question about it, I am a Malcolm Gladwell fan and his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, sounds fascinating.

I can’t comment further, since I haven’t had a chance to read it, but two points from this interview stood out among many others.

First, I have always believed the road to Hell was paved with bad assumptions and Gladwell seems to see that also.

“We are misled by the narrowness of our assumptions about what constitutes an advantage in any given situation.”

Second, his comments regarding leaders and managers score a perfect bulls-eye, as do his thoughts on why hiring a good fit is so difficult.

I realize now that an effective leader or manager can come in a virtually infinite number of forms. I have way more respect for the heterogeneity of excellence. That took a long time because it is so tempting to try and paint a very specific picture of what you think effective leadership is or what an effective organization looks like. The older I get and the more I see, I realize high performers of one sort or another have certain things in common. But they are almost more distinguished by what they don’t have in common than what they do.

Understanding fit is a much more important issue than defining the characteristics of excellence — understanding the combination of individual and organization and why at different points in your life cycle you might want a very, very different kind of person. The purest example of this is in sports, where the notion of fit between the athletes that you have and the coach that you hire is only occasionally considered. You will read that they brought in a coach whose plotting style is ill-suited to the athletes that he has. And then you wonder: Why did they bring in that coach? Why do a plotting style if no one on your team wants to play the plotting style? It is interesting how hard that notion is. Maybe it’s because it renders the task of defining what you want a lot more complicated, and we would rather not deal with that.

Below is the video interview or, if you don’t have time to watch, you can read the edited transcript.

EMANIO CEO and occasional contributor here KG Charles-Harris and I were discussing an article about how being a trouble-maker as a teenager can be predictive behavior to becoming an entrepreneur.

The same urge to innovate, think outside the box, take risks and break rules that helps an entrepreneur later in life might lead them to more destructive behavior as a teenager.

But only the guys.

However, the association only held up in the case of male entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneurship could not be predicted by moderately anti-social teenage behavior.

And those guys were well-off and white.

People coming from families that were comparatively well off in 1979, where the parents had some level of higher education, and where they lived in a two-parent home through age 14 or so, were more likely to be entrepreneurs.

Essentially the whole thing says what we all know, but rarely admit.

Affluent, white, male troublemakers are more likely to become entrepreneurs.

Their families have enough pull and resources to prevent them from being labeled ‘difficult’, let alone ‘delinquent’, because once you label a person and they are treated by society according to that label they often end up believing the label themselves…whatever it is.

And that label often becomes self-fulfilling prophesy.

Are you really surprised that when a middle or upper-class boy acts out the long-term result will be substantially different than when a black, inner city boy does the same thing?

Professionally, managers often do the same thing when they treat their people based on their title—then wonder why they don’t fulfill their promise.

Flickr image credit: SiSter PhotograPher

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

These days any talk about luck is considered heresy.

But there is such a thing.

Malcolm Gladwell understands the role luck plays and explains it in Outliers: The Story of Success.

A woman I know said, “You can be the best parent in the world, but raising great kids still requires a good dose of luck.”

Nolan Bushnell once said, “Don’t mistake good luck for good management.”

It’s luck when you bump into an investor having coffee with both the time and the inclination to listen; it’s hard work and being prepared that doesn’t waste the opportunity.

When managing people, process or circumstances, you can’t count on luck, but you also can’t ignore it.

And you shouldn’t try to take credit for it.

Image credit: HikingArtist

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

This is not about politics, but when I read a description of Karl Rove in an Op-Ed column I found amusement as to how easily you could change the word “consultant” to “entrepreneur” and “buy advice” to “invest in/join the company.”

And yet another is that prophets are people too, blinded by their own self-interest, swayed by their own self-promotion, neither omniscient nor omnipotent. (…) Of course arrogance, or at least self-assurance, is a consultant’s stock in trade. That’s what we buy when we buy advice: not just the content of it but the authority, even the grandiloquence, with which it’s delivered.

Finding needs, taking risks, starting companies is the basis of what entrepreneurs do, but, when they do it has enormous impact on their potential for success.

The problem is that the best ‘when’ is a function of hindsight and history.

But as we all know, success breeds arrogance, not always, but too often.

Martha Stewart, who controls 90% of the voting rights of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia and, as the old saying goes, spends her days cutting off her nose to spite her face, is a good example.

Her net worth is inextricably tied to the value of the shares. That would seem obvious to everyone except, perhaps, Ms. Stewart herself. She continues to collect lavish multimillion-dollar compensation and perks while her company teeters under the weight of huge losses, its shares trading for a fraction of their former value. The paradox is that if the stock had risen even $1 a share in recent years, Martha Stewart would be wealthier now than if she had taken only nominal compensation from the company.

And arrogance brings us back to the description above.

Option Sanity™ undermines arrogance.
Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that as important as hard work, good planning, etc., are, there was something else at work in my life. Something outside of my control and I wanted to know what it was.

I finally decided it was luck—definitely outside my control.

I wrote recently abut how the luck of right time/right place luck played a role in the early success of a startup and also touched on Malcolm Gladwell’s research as described in Outliers: The Story of Success.

A few days ago I read a brief article about University of Chicago researchers Susan Goldin-Meadow and Meredith Rowe, who have been studying the effects of gesturing on toddler language development.

“Higher-income parents did gesture more and, more importantly, their children on average produced 25 meanings in gesture during that 90-minute session, compared with an average of 13 among poorer children, they reported in the journal Science. … Gesturing also seems to be an important precursor to forming sentences, as children start combining one word plus a gesture for a second word. … In fact, kindergarten vocabulary is a predicter of how well youngsters ultimately fare in school.”

Such a little thing, but with such potentially enormous impact.

I don’t remember my mother gesturing, but I do know that she talked to my sister and I using the exact same vocabulary that she used with her peers and that became our vocabulary. Fortunately for us, she had a large vocabulary between having gone to college and being an avid reader, but I wonder where I would be if that had been different.

Plus, researchers are finding that children start learning long before it was originally thought.

The problem is that from zero to six kids dependent on what they get from home; from 6 or so to18 or so they look to their peers, which is the blind leading the blind, and then it’s on to adulthood where changes are far more difficult and, if the research is at all accurate, limited.

No one can control when they’re are born, who their parents are or the economic strata into which they’re born, but you can reach out and help change the people’s luck.

And for all those who look at me and say that they’re busy or that they have donated all they can or it’s just not their problem and there are schools/social services/etc., to deal with it I have a news flash for you.

Unless you plan to die tomorrow, it’s your problem.

It’s your problem because of a little thing called demographics.

This recession will eventually turn around, even if it takes longer than our instant gratification culture likes, and when it does the US is going to need every warm body if it plans to retain/regain its success and influence.

No one is expecting you to solve the problems, but you can reach out and touch just one life. If everyone over 21 did that we would be well on the way to change.

Your choice is whether to be part of the good luck or the bad.

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: flickr

Is it talent and smarts—or is it luck. How real is the old saw ‘the luck of the draw’? Apparently more than you might think.

Not just luck of the draw, but definitely ‘right place/right time’.

First, I read an article regarding the serendipity-based success of Ustream.tv, a new website.

It started when a “Bay Area couple’s pet Shiba Inu, a kind of Japanese hunting dog, gave birth, and its owners decided to train a Webcam on the newborn pups so they could keep an eye on them from work…after a Ustream employee spotted the Webcast and began passing it around to friends and family, the video went, as they say, viral. It has had 6 million viewers, 4 million in the last week alone, spanning the globe from Egypt to Venezuela. Those viewers have streamed nearly 4 million hours, or 391 years, of doggie video…” Pretty good for a site that normally has around ten million US visitors a month.

A little over a week later I read a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success that documents the premise of luck and right time/right place.

Gladwell looks at impact of when you’re born. Consider these high tech legends, Bill Gates, born 1955, Paul Allen, born 1953, Steve Jobs, born 1955, and Bill Joy and Scott McNealy, born 1954.

Coincidence? No. timing offered opportunities that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

More proof?

“Two-thirds of Canada’s pro hockey players were born in January or February. The same holds true in college and high-school all-star teams. Canada organize kids by age, based on the calendar year. Children born in the first two months of the year are inevitably larger and more coordinated than teammates six to 10 months younger. So they get more ice time, more coaching, and more chances to excel.”

Obviously, luck and right time/right place aren’t any kind of guarantee. It still takes a lot of hard work and effort. Companies can’t count on puppies and kids can’t count on being conceived in the merry month of May.

Companies need to pay better attention to serendipity and look for how it can be replicated or enhanced.

For kids, there needs to be a way to level the playing field, because we’re wasting an enormous amount of talent for silly reasons such as being born too late in the year. As Gladwell says, “When we misunderstand or ignore the real lessons of success, we squander talent,”

Image credit: sxc.hu