ANALYSIS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Exceptional Achievement
This is your project description. Whether your work is based on text, images or a different medium, a summary provides helpful context. Don’t forget to showcase your project in the media section or include a link.
BUILDING A STRONG CLARITY ON PERSONAL MISSION.
Some key questions that entrepreneurs should ask themselves are their primary purpose for wanting to start their business and how they are either adding value or solving a problem. Through increased self understanding and awareness, entrepreneurs can gain significant advantages. By being clear on one’s own mission and strategy, one can understand if their business is adding value. Further, clarity can help build market perceptions by understanding what entrepreneurs want their businesses to be known for.
Moreover, by developing clarity on the business’s purpose, there is less room for challenges faced relating to strategizing. In addition, when faced with barriers and challenges, the quest to find solutions is stronger due to a strong motivation, based on tenacity of purpose.
The concept of focusing on mission, and exploiting strengths effectively was also highlighted through the research. Focusing on personal strengths to solve problems, rather than resolving weaknesses.
DERIVING VALUE BASED IDEAS
Throughout the research analysis, passion was found to lead to beliefs. Further, it is important to truly believe in the mission and its value, since this eases self-efficacy and belief. By converting any limiting beliefs into enabling beliefs, entrepreneurs are able to be more persistent and focused on their ventures.
For example, Romain Diaz’s previous venture Jumpin Rides to make car rides more accessible in South Africa targeted a sector i.e. transportation.
MAKING OPTIMAL STRATEGIC CHOICES
A common theme in my project was in understanding how entrepreneurs generate ideas and what motivates their decisions. The topics of following market trends, imitating business models and religiously analyzing consumer data to identify problems were often quoted to strategize and generate ideas for growth. At the same time, topics of trusting intuition, believing in the business idea, perseverance and focusing on values were also mentioned and deemed important in the strategy process.
In order to build a successful business, it is crucial to focus on personal strengths and the long term vision. By understanding personal strengths, and having clear clarity on purpose (Recommendation #1), entrepreneurs should focus on their own strategies and plans of action.
For the technology industry, it makes sense to a certain extent to keep an eye on market trends. However, before launching, it is important to integrate the idea with the market context and personal values. For example, Romain Diaz mentioned that when he tried to copy an existing business model that performed well in Europe, it didn't perform as expected in South Africa due to adoption challenges. As a result, he learned that it may be more valuable to understand potential customer segments rather than following technological trends.
Therefore, the key takeaway is to understand consumer insights and data, but be selective about the feedback that’s integrated.
EFFECTIVE DELEGATION AND COLLABORATION
Finding the right people was listed as a key challenge for the interviewed entrepreneurs. The art of effective execution lies in delegation and decentralizing control. Building off of recommendation 1, an effective strategy to focus on strengths is to delegate responsibilities. According to serial entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, “It’s vital to the success of your business that you learn to hand off those things that you aren’t able to do well.”
Delegating tasks can allow more time to focus on the long term vision and strategize more effectively. For example, for MakeMyTrip, Deep Kalra can outsource data collection procedures and usability labs. Since his primary expertise is in business, he can delegate responsibilities of product design and app development. Additionally, since Franziska Iseli outlined her strengths as marketing and branding, she can delegate and collaborate on aspects such as measuring fiscal performance and forecasting business plans.
A key recommendation based on the analysis is that entrepreneurs should focus on working and engaging with stakeholders that have aligned values and different skills. Differing skills help create a balance and ensure better strategies. Evidence suggests that diversity in strengths and backgrounds promotes inclusivity, open-mindedness and more varied views. Multiple perspectives can help in understanding consumer segments better and result in overall growth. From the evidence, aligned values may also be significant for success and generate focus for businesses. Entrepreneurs can ask about values during the hiring process, and being aware of personal values and strengths can help significantly in identifying people to collaborate with.
ADOPTING A GROWTH MINDSET
From my results and previous literature, it is apparent that the ability to develop a growth mindset is a key factor in entrepreneurial success. The findings showed that the growth mindset may play a fundamental role in informing other characteristics. For example, self-efficacy can be defined as one’s belief in the ability to succeed. This attitude was a common theme in my findings. According to Marksman and Barron (2003) , this trait was highly correlated with entrepreneurial success. Further, it was found to be one of the most essential entrepreneurial skills. (Morris, Webb et al., 2013)
However, it is important to avoid an overoptimism bias, which is more common in entrepreneurial individuals. (Puri and Robinson, 2013) According to Casser (2010), entrepreneurs were twice as likely to estimate future success than they were to actually experience it.
The growth mindset is especially relevant since there is empirical evidence that entrepreneurial overconfidence does not decrease with experience, indicating that entrepreneurs fail to change beliefs after failing in the past (Landier and Thesmar, 2009) Therefore, placing an emphasis on failure as a tool to learn and consciously forecasting realistic expectations is an important recommendation from my analysis.
Since overconfidence is a detriment to success, there is a difference in the effects of self-efficacy versus overconfidence. However, an implication is that optimism and overconfident forecasting may be directly related to rise averse behavior and entrepreneurial tendencies. Based on this paper, future research can shed light on improving understanding of growth enablers in entrepreneurs.
A deeply connected recommendation for entrepreneurs is to let go of limiting beliefs and fear in order to develop a growth mindset. As suggested in the recommendation 1, it is important to focus on growth, and not obsess on competition or failures. Evidence suggests that dwelling on challenges and unhealthy counterfactual thinking leads to a higher probability of giving up (Baron, 2000). Further, a growth mindset enables adaptability while maintaining focus on one’s purpose. Thus, developing a growth mindset by consciously readjusting the negative connotation of failure is tremendously beneficial for entrepreneurs to realign beliefs.