1. Of or characterized by a highly developed or wide-ranging skill or proficiency 2. Being an outstanding example of a kind; quintessential.
If you are reading this page, you likely aspire to be the compleat businessman, even if you hadn't quite thought of it that way. What you probably have thought of is that you desire to improve your business skills, although you might not have made a list of exactly what that entails. Nor have we.
Even so, we are fortunate to be in touch with a number of sources of wisdom on the subject of business (the business of life?!), and we hope to share with you sources of insight here to augment your business skills, broadly defined.
People often think that a successful business just appears, because to the outsider, it can often seem like magic or luck, or connections, which may sometimes be true. But that doesn't explain the folks who achieve wonders without magic, luck or connections. We highlight two sayings we wish we had said:
"90% of success is just showing up." Woody Allen said that.
"You can observe a lot just by watching." Yogi Berra, the "Yoda" of the New York Yankees, said that.
We hope this page can lead you to the occasional flash of insight that allows you to put to better use your years of just showing up and observing a lot by watching.
We have to credit Malcolm Gladwell, who brought the following books to our attention in his recent article in The New Yorker, which alerted us to these items of interest:
In a recent study From Predators to Icons, the French scholars Michel Villette and Chatherine Vuillermot set out to uncover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. They present case histories of businessmen who built their own empires—ranging from Sam Walton of Wal-Mart, to Bernard Arnault, of the luxury-goods conglomerate L.V.M.H.—and chart what they consider the typical course of a successful entrepreneur’s career. The truly successful businessman, in Villette and Vuillermot’s telling, is anything but a risk-taker. He is a predator, and predators seek to incur the least risk possible while hunting. Would we so revere risk-taking if we realized that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are actually doing no such thing?
From here we move on to The Greatest Trade Ever, the story of how a hedge fund
manager put on a trade a couple of years ago that made him quite a few
billion dollars. It's a story of a risk-averse predator who saw the same markets everyone else saw, but in a radically different way, based on independent research. Thus he entered into what he believed to be a secure transaction that all his competitors thought was nuts. The moral for us mere mortals is that we should stay alert to our own visions in business, as long as we back them up with a bit of research.
Each of the two books mentioned here has a place in the library of anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit.