Entrepreneurial Qualities Survey
So after a little break (that included sleeping overnight on the floor of the Houston airport), I’m ready to start diving in to entrepreneurial qualities.
I have some clear opinions on the topic. However, instead of just starting off with what I think, I thought it would be fun to take the temperature of you folks out there and see what you think are the important qualities for being a successful entrepreneur.
So I’ve put together a short survey that I’d like your participation on. There are only three questions:
- I ask you to classify yourself as a Leader, an Entrepreneur, a “person of excellence”, or Other. You don’t have to be an entrepreneur to take this survey. Don’t get too caught up in these classifications, just pick the one highest on the list you feel most closely matches you. However, if you are an entrepreneur, please select that, even if you feel you match other categories.
- The heart of the survey is a list of qualities often associated with entrepreneurs. You shouldn’t find many surprises here, and the list is a combination of my thoughts along with several books and articles. For each quality I ask you to rate it as necessary, supporting, not an entrepreneurial quality, or no opinion. “Necessary” and “Supporting” are defined in the survey.
- Finally, I give you a feedback question where you can tell me what you think I missed, what should be combined, etc.
All in all, I wouldn’t expect this to take you more than a few minutes. Unless of course, you are the overly thoughtful type and spend a lot of time thinking through each quality. You can follow this link to go directly to the survey.
Now, I’m not one of those people who believe you need 100 responses or more to get consensus results. In fact, quite the opposite. My experience has been that trends generally develop with very little data. I’m going to keep the survey open until I get 30 responses or 10 responses from entrepreneurs, whichever comes first. I’ll then take a look at the results and see if we have some clear consensus around qualities. I’ll report out and we’ll figure out where to go from there.
So please take a minute to give me your thoughts on the topic. If you have some friends, be they leaders or entrepreneurs (or both), please forward the link to them and ask if they would participate. I’m going to be sending to several of the entrepreneurs I’m working with. I’m excited about seeing the results – I think they will be very interesting.
Technology bottom note
I’m trying out a new service with this survey – PollDaddy.com. PollDaddy is an online poll and survey creation provider. This puts it in direct competition with the ever popular SurveyMonkey. I’ve used SurveyMonkey for a couple years at work and it is a great service at a fair price. While PollDaddy doesn’t have some of the bells and whistles SurveyMonkey does, it has a “fresher” look and feel to it and you also get all functionality in the free package. Upgrading removes branding logos and reduces restrictions on number of questions and responses. For corporate use, I don’t know that I saw a reason to abandon SurveyMonkey, but for personal use, or uses where the flat look and feel of SurveyMonkey doesn’t play well, give PollDaddy a try. And just in case you’re considering an online survey provider and not sure what to look for, here’s a good article to start with.
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