Entrepreneurship: Forget IQ and EQ. Best Entrepreneurs Have High BQ

I’ve met very smart people with advanced degrees who thought they were brilliant entrepreneurs. Most of them failed. I’ve met street savvy businesspeople without a single degree who succeeded beyond my wildest expectations. Why?

By:
Jack Roseman
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

http://www.nasvf.org/web/allpress.nsf/pages/9635

Maybe in addition to IQ and EQ (Emotional Intelligence), there is something we should call BQ — Business Intelligence — and you either have it or you don’t. You can’t test for it, but you can certainly see it in action. People with high BQ are the maestros of the entrepreneurial world, deftly orchestrating aspects of a business that those without it aren’t even aware exist.

I bring this up because the question I am most asked is what does it take to be a successful entrepreneur? And the answer is never very satisfactory. In my book, "Outrageous Optimism," I identify certain success traits in the first chapter: Passion, persistence, communication skills, people skills, an understanding of human nature, self-knowledge, and knowing the difference between a good idea and a market opportunity.

But all of these traits can be taught. And when I was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, we did teach them. I assume they still teach them. And yet alumni don’t always succeed. You can say the same of the University of Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurial program as well. So training in business skills does not ensure a successful entrepreneurial venture. There is something else. And that’s what I’m calling BQ. It might be instincts; it might be personal identity. But when you see it in action you recognize it as successful execution.

I stay in touch with many of my students and some of them seek me out for consulting. Often I’ll take a look at a business and say, "Why are you doing this? You were explicitly told not to do this in class." And they will say something like, "We tried your way, but we couldn’t find the type of top-notch salesperson or marketing person, or technical person you were talking about, so we settled for several mediocre people. And then six months later we had to fire them." Even though they had been taught to hire the best by winning them over to their vision, they were either unable or unwilling to do this. Not having the perseverance to do this was a blind spot.

Another example of blind spots is when people have an intellectual understanding of something, but freeze when you put them in the trenches. They can talk a good game, but just can’t get it done. I once had a sales consultant I used as an outside speaker to my class at CMU and he was outstanding. He knew the business back to front. So I urged one of my consulting clients who badly needed sales to hire him. They did, and six months later, he hadn’t sold a thing. So there are people who can talk a good game — know the theoretical end of it cold — but can’t do it. They just can’t execute.

I have good business instincts — a good feel for business. And some aspects of business I know better than others. But when you put me on the field, I slip into my warrior mask and I’m Jerome Bettis. Everything I do, I do 150 percent and then some. Know yourself. Understand what you can do and what you can’t. And when it comes to one of those areas where you are blocked, hand the ball off to another great individual.

Whatever success I have achieved owes more to the people I have surrounded myself with. My partners. Sure, they’ve had their own different weaknesses and strengths. But I am acutely aware that I have blind spots and I have tried to attract exceptional people who would compensate for them.

Some blind spots are benign and some are fatal. One of my blind spots is directions. I have no idea why, but I can’t find anything. I just can’t get oriented to North, South, East and West. Maybe nobody in Pittsburgh can. My partner and friend at On-Line Systems, John Godfrey, couldn’t believe that someone who graduated with a master’s degree in mathematics, who worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, could get lost so easily. But it’s a known blind spot with me. I’ve got a list of blind spots, and I’m sure there are blind spots I haven’t discovered yet.

Let me make sure everyone is on the same page. Blind spots are shortcomings that you may or may not see in yourself. Everybody has them, but for entrepreneurs they can be especially fatal. What makes blind spots insidious is that most of us know what we do well, but we hate to admit to ourselves what we don’t do well. So we go around with a distorted idea of our strengths and weaknesses. Everybody does this, not just entrepreneurs.

But suppose you’re an entrepreneur without empathy. For me to be able to sell you on my product, I really have to understand how it feels to be in that chair with the problems you have. Why should you buy this? What’s your pain? A shortage of empathy in salespeople is a common blind spot.

I’ve seen entrepreneurs who don’t know how to motivate people, and get them to share their vision; entrepreneurs who don’t know how to create excitement within a company. Chief executive officers who can’t multitask or focus; entrepreneurs who are too straight-laced and lack cunningness. Your company is going to pay consequences for those blind spots.

In fact, I would put people skills, and therefore hiring the right people, high on my list of blind spots. You can be a genius in quantum physics and a dunce in hiring people. And the genius part of you won’t let you see that you can’t do something as simple make an appropriate hire.

Most often I see this in terms of software programmers or engineers who go off with an idea for a business. They are blinded by their brilliance at programming, or mechanical problem-solving because that comes easy to them. But try as they might, they can’t relate to people. They keep failing and don’t know why. And they will keep failing until they see that they have a blind spot with people and get somebody in there who is talented in that area.

(Jack Roseman, who taught entrepreneurship for 13 years at Carnegie Mellon University, is director of The Roseman Institute, a subsidiary of Buchanan Ingersoll, and president of computer firm On-Line Systems.