Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck
What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur and Build a Great Business
-
- $29.99
-
- $29.99
Publisher Description
What’s your entrepreneurial profile?
Do you have what it takes to build a great business?
In this book, three prominent business leaders and entrepreneurs—now venture capitalists and CEO advisers—share the qualities that surface again and again in those who successfully achieve their goals. The common traits? Heart, smarts, guts, and luck.
After interviewing and researching hundreds of business-builders across the globe, the authors found that every one of them—from young founder to seasoned CEO—holds a combination of these four attributes. Indeed each of us tends to be biased toward one of these traits in our decision-making, and figuring out which trait drives you will lead to greater self-awareness and likelihood of success in starting and growing a business.
So are you:
• Heart-dominant, like renowned chef Alice Waters or Starbucks’s Howard Schultz?
• Smarts-dominant, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon or legendary investor Warren Buffett?
• Guts-dominant, like Nelson Mandela or Virgin’s Richard Branson?
• Or are you most defined by the luck trait, like Tony Hsieh of Zappos (and a surprisingly high proportion of other successful entrepreneurs)?
Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck includes the first Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test (E.A.T), a simple tool to help determine your specific profile.
Though no single archetype for entrepreneurial success exists, this book will help you understand which traits to “dial up” or “dial down” to realize your full potential, and when these traits are most and least helpful (or even detrimental) during critical points of a company lifecycle. Not only will you know how to build a better business faster, you’ll also take your natural leadership style to the next level.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This team effort from the business-savvy trio of Tjan, Harrington, and Hsieh is a well-written, high-energy guide and "framework" for increasing entrepreneurial effectiveness. Beginning with a brief self-assessment to help readers glean whether they are heart-, smarts-, guts-, or luck-dominant, the authors move on to consider real life examples of each, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon and eBay's Meg Whitman (both are "smarts" people). What follows is an in-depth examination of each type of businessperson, including brief interviews with key entrepreneurs, discussions of crucial habits, probing self-assessments, and succinct summaries at the close of each chapter. The combination of anecdote, homework, and shared wisdom is a powerful one, and the text's tendency to frequently shift gears makes for a dynamic and engaging read. The authors note that in addition to helping readers raise self-awareness (and with it productivity and profits), they hope "to communicate the wisdom and habits that we have either developed or seen in action." They meet their goal and then some there's plenty here for business newbies and old pros alike. Illus.