Lessons to be learned

August 20, 2008 · Filed Under Personal Excellence · 1 Comment 

It’s rather ironic that I recently recommended a book called Crucibles of Leadership.  The book sounded interesting as it is centered around creating a Personal Learning Strategy to take advantage of particularly stressful life experiences.  The author calls these experiences crucibles, and his premise is we all have enough crucibles to provide the basis for a lifetime of learning.  I looked for the book recently at my neighborhood B&N, but they didn’t stock it.  I ordered it and just picked it up a day or so ago.

What’s ironic about the book is that I just went through several days of a very intense personal situation.  It would definitely count as a crucible.  I’m not sure what I would have learned from it had I already read this book, but I did have some personal observations. 

Read more

Related posts

Essential qualities of entrepreneurship - ver. 1

August 11, 2008 · Filed Under Entrepreneurship · Comment 

Okay, time for you all to speak up and tell me what you think.  After taking my own notes as to the qualities I think are essential for entrepreneurship, I posted a question on the topic over at LinkedIn’s Q&A section and got some great additional feedback.  So in this post, I will quickly outline three lists:

  1. The qualities I believe are essential for successful entrepreneurship
  2. Qualities “on the bubble” that I can’t decide are essential or not
  3. Some ideas on what might be missing from the first list

I’m looking for your feedback.  As I’ve said numerous other places on this blog, I want to develop this topic through not only my own thoughts but a rich dialogue with everyone reading the blog.  Please comment early and comment often.

The yardstick I am using for these essential qualities is one of “necessary and sufficient”.  That is to say that each of these qualities not only has to be present for successful entrepreneurship (e.g. it is necessary), but possession of all these qualities is all you need(they are sufficient).  Therefore in your feedback tell me not only what is missing, but what can left off.  If “entrepreneurship” is not a familiar term to you, then evaluate these qualities from a leadership perspective.

The goal of this post is not so much to examine the qualities in detail, as to simply start the process of getting a list we all agree on.

Read more

Related posts