5 Essential Qualities for Entrepren

5 Essential Qualities for Entrepreneurial Leadership
Are entrepreneurs born or made? This is a question endlessly debated in startup circles. For the last 3 years, Michael Marascoand I have taught a class at Northwestern University, calledNUvention Web. On Wednesday, we had the final presentationfor the third year. In many ways we provide a great laboratory for students to test their entrepreneurship leadership metal. For the first three years, we’ve culled people who apply to the course and assembled teams with a balance of developers, designers, and business people from across Northwestern schools. We’re always excited and pleased with how leaders emerge—and they emerge from as varied backgrounds as we draw from in the class—many from the fine business school at Northwestern, the Kellogg School of Management, but also from our journalism school, Medill; our liberal arts college Weinberg, and of course the engineering school where the NUvention program lives that focuses on ―whole brain‖ engineers, McCormick. Each year we also struggle with a few students each year who think they have what it takes only to fail and exit the class. Hopefully while those students don’t learn from completing the class, they learn form the early experience of the first contact of their entrepreneurship leadership style with a roomful of like minded strangers who had the potential to help them achieve their vision. As an employee at Microsoft, Angel and Venture investor, participant in social entrepreneurship, and teacher, I’ve seen 5 essential qualities in common for entrepreneurial leaders: 1. Vision and dissatisfaction with the present.
When I think about what it takes to be an entrepreneur, I often come back to a paraphrase of Harvard Professor John Kotter’s forumla discussed in his management classic Leading Change that I kept pinned to my bulletin board for years. Leading change depends on a defined dissatisfaction with the present, a vision for how things should be, and a clear idea of the first steps that need to be taken. Three clear examples come to mind that I’ve been able to observe up close.