The leading entrepreneurs of our time have taken some of the biggest gambles in history
For all you budding entrepreneurs what are the three definitive pillars of entrepreneurship?
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| Anurag Batra |
While you think through that, let me share with you that most foreigners say India is a land of entrepreneurs. Everybody in India is a born entrepreneur and a business person trying to make money from every opportunity that presents itself and turn it into a business proposition (pun intended). I am not talking about the above mentioned kind of entrepreneurial spirit that seems to exist in every traffic policeman, hawker, the bureaucracy etc. That brings me to my favourite point that facilitation money or corruption is illegitimate and un-institutionalized entrepreneurship.
What I am talking of is a capital enterprise, which is organised and above board. It’s a systematic attempt at creating a business enterprise.Coming back to my original question to judge your EQ (Entrepreneurial Quotient), let me again ask you what are the three pillars of entrepreneurship?
I have a twin-track theory on the three definitive pillars of entrepreneurship, or as I like to call the TRIPOD theories, both based on my personal experiences.
The first TRIPOD includes: Stability in personal life and relationship with parents/spouse/loved ones; his/her physical health; spiritual orientation and spirit of compassion. I call it the tripod of entrepreneurial success.
The second TRIPOD is a set of traits and attributes an entrepreneur must have or acquire or possess – vision, balls and capital
Vision and balls (the ones as in tennis or cricket or hockey) are more important than the third one as the third one can be acquired if you have the first two.
The third one is the gut feel and the ability to take risks, to do the not-so- obvious thing and going sometimes against conventional wisdom. Success rarely comes to the faint of heart - the leading entrepreneurs of our time have taken some of the biggest gambles in history.
One of the most successful person in the world (at least in monetary terms), Bill Gates (of Microsoft fame), must have taken hundreds of risk to achieve financial success, but the quantum of risk that he was willing to take can be viewed by his decision to drop out of Harvard to pursue his entrepreneurial ambitions.
The Chinese have another point of view on my tripod theory – they call it “Qi Ye Jia”. It is the perfect explanation of the spirit of innovation and business, where “Qi” refers to lifting up your heels to stand higher and look to the future, “Ye” refers to the God given responsibility, and “Jia” stands for teamwork and unity. It certainly explains vision, or the ability to forecast future events (maybe even help create them) and take advantage of them.
The entrepreneur also needs to understand that the synergy that is brought together by teamwork and unity is extremely difficult to duplicate through singular brilliance. If you are an entrepreneur, and your benchmarks are accurate, it is certain that your business success would also result in betterment of the financial status of your teammates (partners, colleagues, and other staffers).
Ultimately, an entrepreneur wins when his team also wins.
Anurag Batra is real life first generation entrepreneur who is Much Below Average (MBA) when he is not busy writing such columns and can be reached at anuragbatrayo@gmail.com.
ed: Anurag is the founder of exchange4media.com.
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