Based on the research, every entrepreneur has their own entrepreneur traits to achieve their goals and solve their problems in their organizations. Every single entrepreneur traits like initiative, foresight, decisive and others traits shown at above are owned by every successful entrepreneur in the world. A good example for successful entrepreneur is Howard Schultz who is the CEO and Chairman of Starbucks. If entrepreneur do not have any entrepreneur traits, these means that they would not be success in the future. Because of this, entrepreneur traits are main element for an entrepreneur to become a successful entrepreneur in the world. So, an organization with an entrepreneur who has entrepreneur traits, this means that an organization will be successful organization compare to those organization which do not have an entrepreneur owns entrepreneur traits.
Monday, 27 April 2015
Foresight
Foresight can be define as an ability to predict or plan for the future, often termed “vision” in management or business context. The entrepreneurs have a good foresight to know about future business environment. In other words, they well visualize the likely changes to take place in market, consumer attitude and taste, technological developments, etc. and take necessary and timely actions accordingly.
Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes, popularly known as Tony Fernandes, presents an excellent example of business foresight. Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes, CBE (born 30 April 1964) is a Malaysian entrepreneur. He is the founder of Tune Air Sdn. Bhd., who introduced the first budget no-frills airline, AirAsia, to Malaysians with the tagline "Now everyone can fly". Fernandes managed to turn AirAsia, a failing government-linked commercial airline, into a highly successful budget airline public-listed company. He has since founded the Tune Group of companies.
It was through Datuk Pahamin A. Rejab, the former secretary-general of the Malaysian Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry that Fernandes came to meet with then Prime Minister, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad in October 2001. Instead of starting from scratch, Mahathir advised Fernandes to buy an existing airline. AirAsia, the heavily indebted subsidiary of the Malaysian government-owned conglomerate, DRB-Hicom, was losing money. Fernandes mortgaged his home and used his personal savings to acquire the company, comprising two Boeing 737-300 jet aircraft and debts of US$11 million (RM40 million), for one ringgit (about 26 US cents), and transformed it into an industry player. One year after his takeover, AirAsia had broken even and cleared all its debts. Its initial public offering (IPO) in November 2004 was oversubscribed by 130 per cent. Fernandes says his timing was in fact perfect: after 11 September 2001, aircraft leasing costs fell 40%. Also, airline lay-offs meant experienced staffs were readily available. He believed Malaysian travellers would embrace a cut-rate air service that would save them time and money, especially in a tight economy. Fernandes estimates about 50 per cent of the travellers on Asia’s budget airlines are first-time flyers. Before the advent of AirAsia, he estimated that only six per cent of Malaysians had ever travelled by air.
As conclusion, all of these are already prove that Tony Fernandes consist of the entrepreneurial traits of foresight. This is because Tony Fernandes has an ability to predict or plan for the future, just like why he acquired the heavily indebted airline by only one ringgit. Hence, the result is the Forbes Asia valued Fernandes' net worth at $650 million, ranking him at number 28 on the Forbes list of Malaysia's Richest.
(Tan Sri Anthony Francis "Tony" Fernandes & logo of AirAsia.)
Ethical consciousness
The development of ethical consciousness is the responsibility of the entrepreneur because his or her vision created the venture. An entrepreneur practices good ethical standards require to engage their business venture in ethical behaviour. The entrepreneur also needs to ensure his or her ethical principles are wholly enforced throughout the business.
The entrepreneur that practice ethical consciousness is John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods Market that advocates in the movement for organic food. Mackey co-founded his first health food store, SaferWay with his girlfriend in Austin in 1978. After couple of years, Mackey built Whole Food into an international organization, with outlet in major markets across the country, as well as Canada and United Kingdom.
In April 2007, Whole Foods Market launched the Whole Trade Guarantee, a purchasing initiative emphasizing ethics and social responsibility concerning products imported from the developing world. The criteria include fair prices for crops, environmentally sound practices, better wages and labor conditions for workers and premium product quality. One percent of proceeds from Whole Trade certified products will go to the Whole Planet Foundation to support micro-loan programs in developing countries. The company’s goal published in 2007 is to have at least half of its imported products from these countries fully certified by 2017.
Whole Foods was placed third on the U.S Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the ‘‘Top 25 Green Power Partners’’. The company also received the EPA Green Power Award in 2004 and 2005 and Partner of the Year award in 2006 and 2007. The company plans on purchasing 458 gigawatt hours of wind energy credits. This will keep about 700 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere. This is equivalent to taking 60,000 cars off the road or planting 90,000 acres of trees.
(John Mackey and the logo of Whole Foods Market.)
Ability to learn from mistakes
To become a successful entrepreneur, a person must equip themselves with the ability to learn from mistake and go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Instead of giving up, an entrepreneur will question themselves regarding their mistakes, what went wrong? How can they succeed next time? And so on. They will not give up easily but learn how to improve themselves from the mistakes they did. For them, the mistakes they made is an experience and a learning process in their life.
Ford Henry was the founder of the Ford Motor Company. He developed and manufactured the first automobile that affordable by many middle class Americans. Henry Ford stands tall as a pioneer of modern business, yet this founder of the Ford Motor Company failed many times on his route to success, His first business attempt at building a motor car was shuttered after just a year and a half when stockholders lost confidence in his ability to succeed. He gathered more cash and restarted his effort, but a year later he was forced out of his own company yet again. The entire motor industry had lost faith in Henry Ford but he was not deterred. He found another investor to start the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford’s famous quotes such as ‘‘Even a mistake may turn out to be the one thing necessary to a worthwhile achievement’’ and ‘‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’’ shows that Henry Ford was inspired to keep learning from mistakes he made.
(Logo of Ford and Ford Henry, Founder of Ford)
Perceptiveness
A successful entrepreneur always sees opportunity everywhere. They are always on the lookout to either develop a new idea or improve an existing product or service. At some point in their lives they noticed something that could be better and they will take the opportunity to expend their business. In other words, entrepreneurs have the ability to see the future before it happen.
An example of entrepreneur that have the perceptiveness is the founder of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos. He was the youngest-ever senior vice president at Wall Street investment banker D.E Shaw & Co. Jeff had plan to expand the business of electronic retailing while he was making six-figure salary. He wanted to create his own company on internet. In four year time, the Amazon.com (virtual bookstore) created by Jeff became the template for how e-commerce businesses should be run. Jeff Bezos first got the idea to run an internet enterprise in 1994. While surfing the Internet in search of new venture for D.E Shaw & Co to invest in, he came across the statistic that Internet usage was growing wider and wider day by day. Bezos immediately recognized the fast growing of internet user can develop a huge market for his online business at the same time.
Bezos drew up a list of potential products that might be sold well online including CDs, computer software and books. After reviewing the list, he choose books as the product he going to put in his online business because he realized that even the largest bookstore only could stock less than hundred thousand books however a virtual bookstore could offer millions of titles.
Bezoc and his family moved to Seattle and started his new business. In nearly a year, Bezoc and his another five employees learning how to source books and setting up a computer system that would make Amazon.com user-friendly. In 1995, Amazon.com opened to public and calling itself ‘‘Earth’s Biggest Book Store’’ with more than 1 million titles to choose from.
Amazon.com had grown into a company of 100 employees and had racked up more than 15.7 million dollar in sales by September 1996.
(Logo of amazon.com and Jeff Bezos)
Time Competence
Time, can be said as the most precious commodity of all. Especially, to the entrepreneur, who is holding an important role and always looking to do more in the time he or she has. An entrepreneur carries heavy and a lot of responsibility. He or she must do more research to make improvement, planning to ensure the efficient of the process, more building and testing to make correction and provides solutions, more thinking, more selling and other more important role to ensure that his or her company or firm achieves every goals and objectives that determined. Besides, time management is the creation of tools and processes that allow individuals and organizations to accomplish more in a set time period. While time management is critical to success for all individuals, it is more critically important to entrepreneurs. This is because entrepreneurs are typically faced with tons of challenges each day and quickly compile massive "To Do" lists. “The most important thing is to make the most important thing the most important thing”. Thus, entrepreneurs are always competing with “Time”. They must have a good time management, then know how to appreciate and uses all the time that they had usefully and carefully.
For example the entrepreneur that had this characteristic is Jack Ma. Jack Ma was born in September 10, 1964, and he is a Chinese entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is the founder and Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group, a family of highly successful Internet-based businesses. Besides, he is the first Chinese entrepreneur to appear on the cover of Forbes. In 1994, Ma heard about the Internet.
In the early year of 1995, Jack Ma went to the United States occasionally, and with his friend's help, he got introduced to the Internet. Then in April 1995, Jack Ma’s wife and a friend collected twenty thousand dollars and started an Internet company. Their company was dedicated to creating website for companies. Jack Ma then named their company as "China Yellow Pages." Thus, within three years, his company had made ¥5,000,000 Chinese Yuan which was equivalent to $800,000 US dollars at the time.
In addition, from year 1998 to 1999, Jack Ma competed with the time. He headed to an information technology company established by the China International Electronic Commerce Center, which also is a department of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. In year 1999, he decided to quit his job and went back to Hangzhou with his team in order that they founded “Alibaba.com” in his apartment with a group of 17 friends. He started a new round of venture development with 500,000 Yuan (which equal to Malaysian Ringgit of 293377.10). Moreover, Alibaba is a China-based business-to-business marketplace site which currently serves more than 79 million members from more than 240 countries and territories.
In October 1999 and January 2000, with the great effort of Jack Ma in compete against the time, "Alibaba" won twice total of a $25 million international venture capital investment. The program was expected to improve the domestic e-commerce market, and build a perfect e-commerce platform for those Chinese enterprises especially SMEs, which is determined to meet the "WTO" challenge. Besides, Jack ma still wanted to make improvement. Due to the intension to do so, Jack ma improved the entire e-commerce system, and since 2003, he founded Taobao, Alipay, Ali Mama, and lynx etc.
In a nutshell, “from zero to hero”, Jack Ma had competed with the time and giving great efforts since year 1998 to year 2000 until all his hard work gain success.
(Logo of Alibaba Group and Jack Ma as an Executive Chairman of Alibaba Group)
Sunday, 26 April 2015
Decisive
A decisive person will show the ability to make decisions quickly but effectively. An entrepreneur needs to have this characteristic in order to become a good leader. In addition, uncertainty in making a decision exist in any organization can be called as a “killer” of the organization. Therefore, when an entrepreneur takes too long to make a decision, either due to lack of knowledge or fear of making mistakes, it creates a period of anxiety in the employees toward the entrepreneur. It can also be stated as an act of procrastination, which means that the entrepreneur puts off or delaying, especially something requiring immediate attention or decision. This is not an admirable virtue for great leaders. An entrepreneur needs to consider all pertinent facts in making a decision. Hence, entrepreneurs need to lead by some examples and being decisive will instil the same level of rapid response in the rest of the organization.
The characteristic of decisive can be seen in the Malaysian’s entrepreneur, Dato’ Azman Hashim. Nowadays, he is the heads of AmBank Group, which he started in 1976 as the Arab-Malaysian Merchant Bank. In October 2014, a statement was released that saying he was not negotiating to sell his stake after rumors that he was looking to cash out. He also holds stakes in investment bank ECM Libra; RCE Capital, which he chairs; and Amcorp Properties, which younger brother Azmi chairs.
There are examples that can be seen that he have the characteristic of decisive. In March 1988, when a number of banks forcing Dato’ Syed Mohamed Syed Kechik to sell Temerloh Rubber Estates Bhd as a way to settle his debt, Dato’ Azman Hashim save the situation by take the firm and the parent company. By making a strong bid and reasonable decision, he applied for a period of one week prior to the Committee on Foreign Investment and won the bid for the firm.
Then, he was easily agitated after four years working in the Bank Negara Malaysia (BNM) and then resigned to establish accounting firm Azman and Co. In 1964, accounting is a very new field and does not have a lot of practitioners. Over the past 10 years with Maybank, he successfully opened the largest bank network in Southeast Asia to introduce computing system and eventually founded the largest bank in Malaysia. In the early 1970s, he sits on the board of directors of many companies and has been involved with the establishment of Pernas International Bhd. In 1980, he took the opportunity to give a block of shares of Kwong Yik Bank Bhd but then quit because it would be a minority shareholder of the bank.
Besides that, following with the acquisition and expansion of Taiping Textiles and Arab Malaysian Development Bank at the time, he was carrying a huge debt. At that time, analysts expect the debt to reach between RM350 and RM400 million. He had to make a decision which is to offer as low as RM1.50 per square feet rent than RM5 to attract tenants along with three months free rent to solve the debt problem.
In a nutshell, Tan Sri Dato' Azman Hashim has the ability to identify things and make decision quickly. Due to the banks and business entails a lot of agreement on paper, he will often overlooks piles of paper which may lead him fall into stressful situation, but he was able to overcome it in the end. This characteristic is a need for entrepreneur or even managers in the review of all documents, from corporate loans until the money for charity purposes. Therefore, having a characteristic of decisive is very important for any entrepreneur to ensure the success of its hard work.
(Logo of AmBank Group and Dato’ Azman Hashim)
Versatility
The word versatility describes having many different skills or qualities. Versatility allows you to adapt many different situations. The noun versatility derives from the Latin word versatilis, meaning "turning, revolving, moving, and capable of turning to varied subjects or tasks." Companies seek employees who have versatility so they can adapt to different work situations. A soccer player with versatility can play forward, defender, and goal keeper exceptionally well. A master chef's versatility means she has extensive knowledge of French, American bistro, Italian, and Spanish cuisine.
Lee Kun-Hee is a South Korean business magnate and the chairman of Samsung Group. He had resigned in April 2008, owing to a Samsung slush funds scandal, but returned on March 24, 2010. He speaks Korean, English, and Japanese. In 1996, Lee became a member of the International Olympic Committee. He and his family ranked among the Forbes richest people in the world with an estimated net worth of $12.6 billion. Lee was named the world's 41st most powerful person by Forbes Magazine's List of The World's Most Powerful People in 2013, the second highest among Koreans after Ban Ki-moon.
He joined the Samsung Group in 1968 and took over the chairmanship on December 1, 1987, just two weeks after the death of his father, Lee Byung-Chul, who founded Samsung. In the early 1990s, believing that Samsung Group was overly focused on producing massive quantities of low-quality goods and that it was not prepared to compete in quality, Lee famously said in 1993 "Change everything except your wife and kids" and true to his word attempted to reform the profoundly Korean culture that had pervaded Samsung until this point. Foreign employees were brought in and local employees were shipped out as Lee tried to foster a more international attitude to doing business.
Under Lee's guidance, the company has been transformed from a Korean budget name into a major international force and arguably the most prominent Asian brand worldwide. One of the group's subsidiaries, Samsung Electronics, is now one of the world's leading developers and producers of semiconductors, and was listed in Fortune magazine's list of the 100 largest corporations in the world in 2007. Today Samsung's revenues are now 39 times what they were in 1987, it generates around 20 percent of South Korea's GDP, and Lee is the country's richest man.
On March 24, 2010, he announced his return to Samsung Electronics as its chairman. In an interview, Lee expressed pride in the fact that Samsung attracts the brightest minds in South Korea but added that his new goal is to attract talent from all over the world to ensure that Samsung will remain one of the top companies in the world for years. At that time, Samsung industrial subsidiaries include Samsung Electronics, Samsung Heavy Industries, Samsung Engineering and Samsung C&T, and Samsung Techwin. Besides, other notable subsidiaries include Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Everland and Cheil Worldwide. These are under control by him and assisted by his employees so this can prove that he able to control every task and solve problems in every industrial and others subsidiaries.
Because of his personal traits, Samsung in 2006 produces around a fifth of South Korea's total exports and its revenues are larger than many countries' GDP, it would have been the world's 35th-largest economy. The company has a powerful influence on South Korea's economic development, politics, media and culture and has been a major driving force behind the "Miracle on the Han River".
(Logo of Samsung and Samsung's Chairman, Lee Kun-Hee)
Initiative
Initiative means a personal quality that shows a willingness to get things done and take responsibility. An initiative is the start of something, with the hope that it will continue. A person with initiative is motivated to do things. If you take the initiative, you're willing to get things done on your own. Taking initiative can be risky: If you do something on your own initiative, then there's nobody you can blame if it goes wrong.
Akio Toyoda is one of the successful entrepreneurs in the world to rescue Toyota when Toyota had coped remarkably well with the tsunami and that the recall crisis had served as a wake-up call for a company grown complacent. Akio, the grandson of the company’s founder was been a young president at the head of the company who was effectively born into the job and has little experience in crisis management.
Although he knew that himself is just has little experience to control the whole company but he believe himself can do it by showing initiative to let him job done. 8 millions of Toyotas involved into the recall crisis in year 2009 until 2010. It is because there are the reports showed that Toyotas involved in horrific accidents cause by that ran out of the control and could not be brake to a stop. Besides, another problem occurs after the recall crisis. The tsunami damaged plants in the north of Japan, disrupting the supply of over 500 parts and Toyota could not find any replacement.
By solving the problems, Akio assembled general managers of departments such as body engineering and powertrain in Japan and took the unusual step of instructing them to restore production and not waste time reporting upward. They sent two-man teams of engineers to visit each supplier plant and to identify and locate backup parts until the suppliers were running again. Lastly, Toyota solved the problems in half the time expected by the leading of Aiko but they suffered a lost 800,000 production units which equal to 10% of its annual output.
Integrity and reliability
Having integrity means doing the right thing in a reliable way. It's a personality trait that we admire, since it means a person has a moral compass that doesn't waver. Reliability can be defined as the quality of being dependable or reliable. Integrity and reliability are the entrepreneurial traits that highly needed and applied to operate the business by the entrepreneurs. It give the meaning as the quality of honesty, fair dealing and reliability in terms of doing what one has promised to do. These are the crucial factors to success because it establishes good personal and business relationships among investors, partners, customers and creditors.
Lawrence “Larry” Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan, United States on March 26, 1973, is an American computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who cofounded Google Inc. with Sergey Brin, and is the corporation’s current CEO. Page is the inventor of PageRank, Google’s most well-known search ranking algorithm. As of November 2014, Page leads a global organization that consists of 55,600 employees operating in more than 40 countries.
During the founding stage, they soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Brin and Page scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. After that, Sun Micro systems co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money." During the early management style, Page manages to gain the result of faster Google’s search engine due to his management style. He fretted over milliseconds and pushes his engineers, from those who develop algorithms to those who built data centers, which is to think about lag times. He also pushed for keeping Google’s home page famously spare in its design because it would help the search results load faster. During the changes in management and expansion (2001-2011), there are two most prominent investors, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital, agreed to invest a combined total of $25 million into Google. Page also did his best to contribute to the benefit of his entire employee, which is Page promise and had provided a very conducive and comfortable environment to his employee to work.
Conclude all of what had Page do, we can understand that Page is an entrepreneur which consist of the entrepreneurial traits like integrity and reliability. This is due to Page had built up the quality of honesty, fair dealing and reliability in terms of doing what he has promised to do, and everyone is confident with Page. For instances, can be said that most of the customer of Page are satisfied with the use of the Google search engine, and it is been used popularity. Page’s integrity and reliability had attracted and built up the confidence for the investor to make investment like Kleiner Perkins Caufield. Moreover, Page never forgot to carry out what he had promised, like provide a comfortable and conducive environment for his employee to work. This is the reason why I think Lawrence “Larry” Page consist of the entrepreneurial traits like integrity and reliability, which bring him to success.
(Google logo and the CEO of Google, Lawrence “Larry” Page)
Introduction
This assignment we are presenting about the relevant entrepreneurial traits and analyses through application on successful entrepreneurs.
According to Wikipedia, Entrepreneurship means that the process of starting a business or other organization and the entrepreneur refers to a person who has a business idea, and who is willing to take a risk to implement that idea. Entrepreneur is also taking the role as a leader of the company or organization and assuming full responsibility for its execution, success, or failure. Entrepreneur is a risk taker, but the risk that he takes is calculated. Entrepreneur is a person who will be more creative and innovative than others and they need to be more work hard and responsible person.
Entrepreneur is an important person for a business or in a company. Being a successful entrepreneur in the world is not an easy job. They need to be thinking out of the box. So, a successful entrepreneur, they highly needed to apply entrepreneurial traits, which is Integrity and reliability, initiative, versatility, decisive, time competence, perceptiveness, ability to learn from mistakes, ethical consciousness and last is foresight. These nine entrepreneurial traits are very important and all successful entrepreneurs will apply all this traits. The example for the successful entrepreneurs are Howard Schultz, who is the current CEO for Starbucks; Jack Ma, who is the current CEO for e-commerce company Alibaba and others successful entrepreneurs. They will success because they apply the entrepreneurial traits. These show that important of the entrepreneurial traits for the Entrepreneur to operate their company or businesses.
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