Peculiarities crucial to business success
Self-awareness is a learning that’s pushed and supported by spiritual leaders and motivational speakers, as well as by human resources gurus and business schools. The thesis is that if you know what inspires you and where your power comes from, you unsurprisingly become a better leader, you make more sensible choices and you intuitively turn into a better business-builder.
The book Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck jointly authored by Anthony K. Tjan, Richard J. Harrington and Tsun-Yan Heish embarks upon the human facet of entrepreneurship, leadership and management. The tome deduced that every person is inclined towards one of four peculiarities — specifically heart, smarts, guts, or luck — in the way we make decisions. The core concept is that entrepreneurs possess these four traits and one of them tends to be dominant or at least more appropriate for a given situation than the others are. “We call a person’s unique mix of Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck an ‘HSGL profile,’ and we’ve devised a survey, the ‘Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test,’ to help you figure what your profile looks like,” the authors said. The authors shared these highlights for each attribute:
Heart. Purpose with passion, sacrifice and agape, or self-sacrificial love, and nuance — these tiny moves swerving to the direction of fixated faultlessness are the three distinctive qualities embedded in heart-driven people. They are idea originators and cultural leaders, and “big picture” individuals who possess a robust sense of vision and values, facilitating to distinguish one business from another. Heart-driven people are commonly founders of businesses who engage in utmost risks and harvest the utmost rewards. They are more emotional than logical. They are occasionally blindsided by their obsession with their ideas and need to complement their passion with the right capabilities and market acceptance to succeed. The definitive question here is: If you had all the money you could ever want, what would you choose to do?
Smarts. There are four dimensions to what the authors term “Business Smarts”: book, street, people and creative smarts. “Book Smarts” are people like the wizards of Wall Street or Silicon Valley who are masters at research, analysis, strategic planning, code and number crunching; “Street Smarts” are individuals who have ascended to success through experience, persistence and a few sore knees; “People Smarts” are those who can discern how people will react in particular situations, prioritize relationships and develop talent; and “Creative Smarts” are whiz kids who are exceptional at foreseeing and feeling patterns — a great example of which is Guy Laliberte, the founder of Cirque du Soleil. At its center, being smarts-driven is about being familiar with prototypes and having a distinct ability to grasp both macro and micro trends ahead of most ordinary mortals.
Luck. Humility, intellectual curiosity and optimism characterize “luck-dominant” people. They embrace a “lucky attitude” and build a “lucky network.” They deal openly with people and their relationships are typified by openness, genuineness, and bigheartedness. While dumb luck and constitutional luck — where you’re born, who your parents are and the like — can’t really be proscribed, the probability for incidental luck can be enhanced. A “lucky outcome” can be made higher by adopting the qualities of a “lucky attitude” and a considerate and unrestrained “lucky network.” Additionally, an optimistic outlook is always advantageous as it boosts the possibility of “surprise” face-offs of good fortune while downplaying the impacts of bad luck. The authors have also identified seven characteristics leaders must master and maintain, and self-awareness around these seven qualities is key to becoming a connected leader with a clear roadmap to follow.
1. Humility: People can mistake humility for weakness and avoid it so as not to lose perceived power. However, humility can actually increase one’s influence. As Dale Carnegie wrote, “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” Genuinely caring for and recognizing the talents of others makes one more accessible and, frankly, more liked. Confidence is required to command respect, but humility is the necessary counterbalance to earn it.
2. Intellectual curiosity: Make time to be curious. Work it into your calendar, and don’t cancel. Set goals to meet new people and try new things. Leaders with intellectual curiosity more willingly prioritize meeting new people, listening to ideas, and relishing novel experiences. But day-to-day responsibilities often trump the time allotted to such pursuits, which may be deemed as trivial. But this is exactly the arrogance that allows new upstarts to unseat titans.
3. Optimism: People are fascinated by a positive attitude since it has a magnifying effect. But leaders are expected to dissent, find the holes in logic, and predict pitfalls. While these skills are key, they don’t need to be a leader’s first instinct, especially when presented with a new idea. The most evolved leaders can hold back their gut criticism (even if based on experience) and first try to process and contemplate all the reasons why a new idea might work better or the potential in a talent before the weaknesses.
4. Vulnerability: Power, strength, and confidence are attributes that leaders are expected to project to employees and investors. But vulnerability humanizes leaders, creating a “pull” of people towards you. People who ask for help often find others rallying behind them, fueled by a feeling of being needed and collectively working towards success. Again, it is a difficult but essential “yin-yang” balance to achieve — to be confident with a willingness to take risks and embrace failure.
5. Authenticity: Your dealings with your network should be authentic expressions of your interests and feelings. In most instances, leaders are all too often over-positioned and under-authenticated. Awash in positioning statements, investor decks iterated many times, and memorandums carefully crafted by communications experts, you can lose the authenticity in yourself and in the true purpose behind your company. Worse, you can start believing the spin around you.
6. Generosity: Power brings with it innumerable requests for favors. So it makes sense for successful leaders to be discriminating. But never lose the spirit of generosity; instead, allocate it appropriately. Remaining a mentor to others, connecting with community activities, expressing more words of gratitude, and doing more things without overthinking the potential “value-exchange” equation, is a pay-it-forward attitude that in the long run usually pays off in spades. Plus, it just feels good to be generous.
7. Openness: In the eyes of the lucky, openness is about welcoming things that might not fit a traditional mold. Be willing to receive intelligence and wisdom from all sources in an effort to further your view of the world. The open-source software phenomenon — and crowd sourcing, more broadly — was built on this notion that insights and good work can come from anywhere.
Written in an effortlessly consumable format, Heart, Smarts, Gut and Luck encapsulates the real meaning of personal leadership. Probing profoundly into the heart and soul of what real entrepreneurship is about, it challenges basic precepts of your beliefs as business creators, managers and leaders.
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