The Entrepreneurial Personality

Entrepreneurship has touched my entire life. The sum total of self-employed parents and grandparents, personal ventures, topped by an adult life of counseling and consulting with countless entrepreneurs made a profound impact on me personally and professionally. Because it is the human side of business that I find most interesting, I have used life experiences as a foundation to form fairly strong opinions on entrepreneurship and the personalities that drive it. What follows is a very abbreviated version of an earlier discussion published on entrepreneurial focus, but it makes the point none the less about the personality of the entrepreneur.

If asked to define an entrepreneur, the words most often chosen are motivated, focused, confident, aggressive, dominant, leader, etc. While these adjectives taken collectively may accurately describe some entrepreneurs, they certainly do not describe all entrepreneurs. In fact, short of saying that all entrepreneurs work for themselves, it is as foolish to define them as one personality type as it is to say that all athletes, students or employees are the same. A business owner need not be aggressive or dominant, although they might happen to have those traits.

Answer the following questions and decide for yourself if entrepreneurs are essentially the same. Is a happy, successful franchisee the same type of entrepreneur as the franchisor from whom they bought their business? Is the consultant the same type of entrepreneur as the founder of a high tech, innovative manufacturing firm? Is the grocer the same type of entrepreneur as the multi-unit regional franchise owner? No, they are all different. The concept of entrepreneurial type is a stand-alone discussion and I will offer it another time as a separate article, but I refer to it here because acknowledging the presence of different entrepreneurial types helps us accept sub-sets of entrepreneurs. It is the first step toward defining real differences among them.

For the general population with little or no interest in the subject, the fact that all entrepreneurs cannot be forced into one mold is really not an issue. But, for students of the subject, and especially for people considering, or actually pursuing an entrepreneurial lifestyle, grasping the nature of the ownership personality can be critical to one’s success or failure.

OK, ask the obvious question. “Nick, are going to get to the point and define the entrepreneurial personality, or are you trying to say that it really can’t be defined?” Ah, good for you, you want to cut to the chase. Here’s the answer, at least as I see it, and frankly it is a very simple one.

Of course there is an entrepreneurial personality, the rhetoric was to clear the air and allow us to start with a clean slate.

All entrepreneurs can be properly defined by one special trait, but that trait is not focus, confidence, aggression, dominance, leadership, intelligence, integrity, or loyalty. Any or all of those traits can be found in hourly employees, corporate executives, teachers, or any other population.

The one element that separates entrepreneurs from all others is their extra measure of “independent spirit.”

Further, you will find that the successful entrepreneur displays a natural executive talent in conjunction with their powerful need for independence. Why natural executive talent? Because the need for independence must be accompanied by the ability to plan as well as execute the plan. Without that, the drive for independence could not be harnessed and realized.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples in which independence rules the day.

The owner of your locally owned auto repair shop is most likely an ex-auto dealer or service station employee. However, the need for independence created the desire for ownership, and executive skills allowed the implementation of the ownership plan. The fact that the person is a skilled mechanic is irrelevant except that knowledge is required to operate the business. If this person were not driven by an independent spirit to own a business, they would have stayed at the dealership, and at best, “dreamed” of ownership. Such is the independence of an entrepreneur.

The owner of your local franchised print shop is most likely an ex-corporate manager who was downsized and decided to buy a job rather than tempt the corporate roller coaster again, or a frustrated executive who craved independence. However, this person was probably faced with the same problem that most corporate types face. Generally they do not have marketable trade skills that complement their administrative skills. The mechanic had knowledge of their business, but the corporate employee had to buy the required knowledge from a franchisor. Hail franchising.

The list of examples goes on and on, but no more are needed.

Of course, there are varying degrees of independence and varying degrees of executive talent, but those issues are associated with the different entrepreneurial “types” mentioned above. The key point is that entrepreneurs are different from other people and non-entrepreneurs cannot fully come to terms with that difference because they are not driven by the same need for independence. A different “feeling” exists inside. The banker, government administrator, or teacher who works with the entrepreneur may understand the business they are advising on, but they do not understand the entrepreneur’s heart, and therefore cannot apply their advice directly to or for the business owner. A gap exists that is real, and that gap generally creates a divide between the entrepreneur and the rest of the world that is difficult to bridge. Less than 10% of us are involved in some type of entrepreneurial venture; the other 90% does not live in, or understand that world. I might understand that NASCAR drivers love speed, but I could never understand what that need for speed “feels” like. If I was a good mechanic, which I am not, I might be able to give the driver better tools to work with, but only the driver would have the ability to apply those tools. It is the application or implementation of tools and systems that requires the “hands-on” person. Coaching, teaching and advising are NOT the same as doing, and that point is often missed in the business of serving and helping entrepreneurs.

The entrepreneurial personality is driven by independence and supported by varying degrees of knowledge and executive skills. Further, it is the varying level of each of those traits that determines entrepreneurial type.

Written by Nicholas A. Bibby

9 Sales Lessons For Entrepreneurs From a Baseball Pro

Getting a new product off the ground can leave you feeling a lot like this year’s Red Sox crop of rookies: What was once a season anticipated full of success, has turned to one of scratching and clawing for every personal and team accomplishment.

This scenario can be very similar to what young founders, or rookies,  face when launching a company or product. They’ve incubated an idea (single A ball), got through their first product development cycle (AA ball) and secured a small round of funding (AAA ball). But upon entering the marketplace (MLB), find a whole new level of difficulty when it comes to making sales.

I should know. My time with the Red Sox organization taught me more about sales challenges than any book I ever read on the topic. In the true nine-inning spirit of the game, here are the nine most important sales lessons I learned from baseball:

1. Get a good pre-game scouting report. While most entrepreneurs do their initial market research and identify target customers before diving into the sales process, many don’t bother learning about what it’s like to sell into a particular industry. The most successful salespeople are the ones who take the time to do this scouting homework. Try to find mentors that have sold into the industry in question to learn about potential challenges, and make friends working inside related industries that can offer you insight into your prospective customers.

2. Be prepared to implement “the shift.” No two customers are the same, and you need to be sensitive during each new interaction about what they’re looking for and what they might consider a deal breaker. Remember to ask probing questions early and often when engaging with new customers, and try to avoid playing out of position as a result of a poor scouting report.

3. Make yourself a five-tool player. Much like professional baseball players are acutely aware of their offensive and defensive strengths, in sales it’s important to recognize as early as possible what you’re good at and what you need to improve. For instance, if you’re great at establishing an initial meeting, but have a more difficult time closing a sale, you may want to seek out a team member or mentor who is particularly good at closing a sale and see what you can learn from their success.

4. Don’t dwell on the failures. Most likely, you won’t make every sale. But you shouldn’t let a loss get you down – after all, the best hitters in baseball fail two out of three times. Try your best to evaluate why you didn’t close a sale, make an effort to adjust for the next prospect comes, and move on.

5. Have an inning-by-inning approach. Just because you closed your first one or two big sales doesn’t mean you’ll be able to close again without putting in the same amount of time, effort and dedication that got you to your first customers. Stay grounded and don’t forget the things that got you those early wins. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can cut corners in the sales process the more success you have.

6. Take your cuts. Swinging and missing is part of the game. Whether you’re making or missing sales, stay motivated by your love of winning rather than fear of losing. Fear will force you to play it safe, tighten up and ultimately not connect with the customer as effectively as possible. If you want to hit your sale out of the park, you have to be willing to put everything on the line and not fear rejection.

7. Review your stats regularly. When starting out in sales, don’t be lazy about looking at your monthly, quarterly and annual stats associated with the number of calls made, emails sent, prospects visited and deals closed. Much like baseball stats are invaluable for pro players’ learning and improvement, sales stats are invaluable to helping you see objectively what sales methods are working best for you and what you need to work on to improve year-over-year.

8. Do your part AND rely on your teammates. A successful season for a baseball player is judged by both individual and team performance. Individual sales skills will get you a long way in closing initial deals, but as your company scales, you won’t be able to handle all sales single-handedly. You’ll need to build a sales and support team around you as your company grows and provide them with the resources and training they need to succeed.

9. Make sure to take an “off-season.” Baseball has one of the longest professional seasons, and the off-season is invaluable for resting, reflecting and practicing. You might think as a young entrepreneur that you have to work every waking minute for the whole year. But, if you don’t take time off, more of your sales will likely fall flat. As much as possible, try to step away on weekends and make sure to get the occasional day or week away from the “game.” 

From Entrepreneur

7 Things the Army Taught Me About Running a Company

Like all entrepreneurs, I know that success requires strategic thinking, risk-taking, and leadership skills. But unlike most people who start their own businesses, I was trained by the greatest institution on Earth: the United States Army, where I served as an intelligence officer.

Trading my uniforms for a pair of jeans and sneakers, then going to work for Amazon, Etsy and other leading technology companies, I realized just how applicable are the lessons I learned while in the service to the constant, joyful struggle of running a business.

Seven lessons in particular stand out:

1. "Plans are worthless, but planning is everything." This quip by Eisenhower is absolutely true. Few operations go according to plan but building a good plan forces you to think through constraints, resources and contingencies.

A good leader knows to plan. A great leader anticipates no plan will survive first contact with the enemy and knows just what to do about it. It's hard to train your mind for both the rigidity necessary to come up with good blueprints and the flexibility to improvise when plans fall apart but, on the battlefield or in the boardroom, it is crucial.

2. "Mission first, people always." The first time I heard this military adage I thought it was just another one of those feel-good sayings that had little to do with reality, but the more I experienced army and corporate life, the more I realized it is absolutely true. Accomplishing your missions and taking care of your team are one and the same. No victory ever is won single handedly. First-rate leaders treat glory as a communal reward to be shared and enjoyed by all.

3. "Drive on, private." When I was in basic training, there were some scenarios that were extremely demanding and offered no alternatives. I won’t gross you out with the details but imagine being as tired, dirty, itchy and dispirited as you’ve ever been. Imagine being willing to pay any price just for a 10-minute nap, a hot shower or a juicy burger but knowing that no comfort is to be had. There is no choice other than driving on, pulling through, getting past the hardship and persevering.

The cliché is true. Sometimes you can only grit your teeth and put one foot in front of the other. Starting a business is one of the times. There are fun and easy parts but the hard parts are many, lonely and testing. When they come along you have no choice but to close your eyes, grit your teeth and keep going.

4. Officers eat last. Anyone who has been in the U.S. military knows that when food is served, officers eat last. It's a way of showing your team that you're putting their needs above your own.

It’s a shame we’ve lost some of that spirit in the age of massive executive bonuses and other perks for corporate leaders. The leader who truly cares about the team is guaranteed to produce better results in the long run.

5. Lead from the front. Strong leaders lead by example, which means they take on all the same challenges as their team, if not more. In the army, this means being the first one to storm into the line of fire. At the office, this means working harder and longer, and being the first to take a hit if things go south for a spell.

The worst leaders make demands on their people that they themselves have no intention of following. The best ones make no demands but simply behave as they wish their employees would, too. It works every time.

6. The buck stops with you. Real leaders realize the great wisdom of that saying by Spiderman’s Uncle Ben: with great power comes great responsibility. They never blame others, even when others are to blame. They know that there’s always a time and a place for learning lessons, but that publicly, the only right thing to do is to stand up and own up to their decisions.

7. This isn’t about you.  If you’re any good, you know that this isn’t about you. There’s a company of men depending on you with their lives, or a corporation of people who rely on you for employment. It’s about your team, the passion you share and how you put that passion to work making something great. Act accordingly. Ask your team more questions, listen intently to the answers and take their ideas and feelings into consideration.

Being in the army was a distinct privilege during a period of my life that made me who I am today. While everyone doesn’t need to join the ranks in order to run a company, my hope is that business leaders of all stripes will apply these ideas in their own endeavors. That’s something I can solute.

From Entrepreneur

The Hard Truth of Entrepreneurship: You Will Suffer

Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.

This is a famous quote that has often been incorrectly attributed to Buddha. Not only is the citation incorrect, the advice is too. It’s an absolute lie, suffering isn’t optional. The truth is that suffering is mandatory, unless of course you want to toil away in obscurity and barely survive.

There is a lot written on customer service, leadership, sales and innovation, but not a lot about the most important aspect of being an entrepreneur -- suffering. Or should I say, learning the value of suffering.

There’s a lot of lip service paid to the value of going the extra mile, doing a little more, over-delivering and a host of other tired old expressions. There isn’t a whole lot of discussion on the value of suffering, which trumps all the other aforementioned areas combined.

If you want to achieve something outstanding and get results you never got before, you’re going to have to suffer. You will have to go against your inner voice that tells you to hold back, stay in the routine you’re comfortable with and play it safe.

Do you have to suffer every single moment? Absolutely not. But make no mistake about it, to get from where you are to where you want to be you’re going to have to suffer. To get what you’ve never gotten before you must do what you’ve never done before. And doing what you’ve never done before often is somewhere between uncomfortable and downright painful.

It’s a lesson I’m learning right now. My goal at age 44 is to get in the best shape of my life, even better than when I was a college athlete. So I invested in a personal trainer, Joe Carabase. (Coaches need coaches too!) The first thing he talked to me about: suffering!

“John, It’s not going to be easy, nothing worthwhile is," he tells me. "Are you prepared to suffer both physically and mentally?”

Sounds a lot like entrepreneurship, doesn’t it?

We changed my diet and workouts dramatically. Joe’s rationale is “if you eat what you’ve always eaten you will weigh what you’ve always weighed. And if you train the way you’ve always trained you’ll be in the shape you’ve always been in.”

This is also the truth about your business. If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

I’m changing, and I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't suffering. But I know what’s on the other side of suffering and the long-term gain is well worth the short-term pain.

It’s a great metaphor for entrepreneurship because to get to that next level in your business you’ve got to go against your inner core and fight through your emotions. Our feelings are a lousy leader. They lie to us and tell us to quit when really we should be digging in. They lie to us to try to convince us to slow down in the face of adversity when we should be running through the adversity. Emotionally, they tell us we’ve done enough, when intellectually we know that there's more to be done.

There is suffering on the last few miles of a marathon, but the sense of accomplishment at the finish line makes it all worthwhile. In this instant-gratification society, we need to remember that running a business is a marathon, not a sprint. There will be suffering during the various mile markers or phases of your business -- startup, growth, expansion -- but you need to remember suffering makes you stronger.

Mohammed Ali was once asked if he liked training. His response: “I hated every minute of training, but I said to myself, 'don’t quit, suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'”

To win the championship in your industry you need to do the same. You may hate every minute of studying the market, pitching investors, prospecting and facing rejection, but if you learn to embrace short-term pain, you’ll reap the long-term gain.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs are undisputed heavyweight champions of lying to themselves, because denial is more comfortable than action. The suffering is what makes entrepreneurship great. It’s supposed to be hard.

From Entrepreneur

9 Things Successful People Won't Do

TalentSmart has tested more than a million people and found that the upper echelons of top performance are filled with people who are high in emotional intelligence (90% of top performers, to be exact). So, I went back to the data to uncover the kinds of things that emotionally intelligent people are careful to avoid in order to keep themselves calm, content, and in control. They consciously avoid these behaviors because they are tempting and easy to fall into if one isn’t careful.

While the list that follows isn’t exhaustive, it presents nine key things that you can avoid in order to increase your emotional intelligence and performance.

1. They Won’t Let Anyone Limit Their Joy

When your sense of pleasure and satisfaction are derived from comparing yourself to others, you are no longer the master of your own happiness. When emotionally intelligent people feel good about something that they’ve done, they won’t let anyone’s opinions or accomplishments take that away from them.

While it’s impossible to turn off your reactions to what others think of you, you don’t have to compare yourself to others, and you can always take people’s opinions with a grain of salt. That way, no matter what other people are thinking or doing, your self-worth comes from within. Regardless of what people think of you at any particular moment, one thing is certain—you’re never as good or bad as they say you are.

2. They Won’t Forget

Emotionally intelligent people are quick to forgive, but that doesn’t mean that they forget. Forgiveness requires letting go of what’s happened so that you can move on. It doesn’t mean you’ll give a wrongdoer another chance. Emotionally intelligent people are unwilling to be bogged down unnecessarily by others’ mistakes, so they let them go quickly and are assertive in protecting themselves from future harm.

3. They Won’t Die in the Fight

Emotionally intelligent people know how important it is to live to fight another day. In conflict, unchecked emotion makes you dig your heels in and fight the kind of battle that can leave you severely damaged. When you read and respond to your emotions, you’re able to choose your battles wisely and only stand your ground when the time is right.

4. They Won’t Prioritize Perfection

Emotionally intelligent people won’t set perfection as their target because they know it doesn’t exist. Human beings, by our very nature, are fallible. When perfection is your goal, you’re always left with a nagging sense of failure, and you end up spending your time lamenting what you failed to accomplish and what you should have done differently instead of enjoying what you were able to achieve.

5. They Won’t Live in the Past

Failure can erode your self-confidence and make it hard to believe you’ll achieve a better outcome in the future. Most of the time, failure results from taking risks and trying to achieve something that isn’t easy. Emotionally intelligent people know that success lies in their ability to rise in the face of failure, and they can’t do this when they’re living in the past. Anything worth achieving is going to require you to take some risks, and you can’t allow failure to stop you from believing in your ability to succeed. When you live in the past, that is exactly what happens, and your past becomes your present, preventing you from moving forward.

6. They Won’t Dwell on Problems

Where you focus your attention determines your emotional state. When you fixate on the problems that you’re facing, you create and prolong negative emotions and stress, which hinders performance. When you focus on actions to better yourself and your circumstances, you create a sense of personal efficacy that produces positive emotions and improves performance. Emotionally intelligent people won’t dwell on problems because they know they’re most effective when they focus on solutions.

7. They Won’t Hang Around Negative People

Complainers are bad news because they wallow in their problems and fail to focus on solutions. They want people to join their pity party so that they can feel better about themselves. People often feel pressure to listen to complainers because they don’t want to be seen as callous or rude, but there’s a fine line between lending a sympathetic ear and getting sucked into their negative emotional spiral. You can avoid getting drawn in only by setting limits and distancing yourself when necessary. Think of it this way: if a person were smoking, would you sit there all afternoon inhaling the second-hand smoke? You’d distance yourself, and you should do the same with complainers. A great way to set limits is to ask complainers how they intend to fix a problem. The complainer will then either quiet down or redirect the conversation in a productive direction.

8. They Won’t Hold Grudges

The negative emotions that come with holding onto a grudge are actually a stress response. Just thinking about the event involved sends your body into fight-or-flight mode. When a threat is imminent, this reaction is essential to your survival, but when a threat is ancient history, holding onto that stress wreaks havoc on your body and can have devastating health consequences over time. In fact, researchers at Emory University have shown that holding onto stress contributes to high blood pressure and heart disease. Holding onto a grudge means you’re holding onto stress, and emotionally intelligent people know to avoid this at all costs. Learning to let go of a grudge will not only make you feel better now but can also improve your health.

9. They Won’t Say Yes Unless They Really Want To

Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco shows that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression. Saying no is indeed a major challenge for most people. “No” is a powerful word that you should not be afraid to wield. When it’s time to say no, emotionally intelligent people avoid phrases like “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments and gives you the opportunity to successfully fulfill them.

Written by Dr. Travis Bradberry

The 9 Best Real-World Strategies Every Entrepreneur Should Know

I sometimes troll popular business websites. Don’t ask me why I do it to myself. It drives me nuts to see all the mind-numbingly generic fluff that passes for business advice these days.

It’s as if some evil genius sat down at the drawing board and said, “How do I get half the population to think they’re experts and the other half to read everything they write?” So he made cheap computers, smartphones, Web 2.0, WordPress, blogs and social media. Voila. Here we are.

Let's try something different. Let me show you what real-world business strategies look like. You know, ideas that get you thinking in new ways that actually help you differentiate and beat the competition. That’s right: if you want to be successful you have to think. You have to differentiate. And you have to beat the competition.

Now let’s get down to business.

Create a cult-like culture of religious zealots. Letting people bring dogs to the office is not a corporate culture. Neither is a waterslide on the premises or Friday beer blasts. The Green Bay Packers. Harley-Davidson. Apple. Trader Joe’s. Zappos. They’re all like religious cults. Getting your people to believe they can accomplish something insanely great and create an amazing customer experience, that’s corporate culture.

Study what works and doesn’t work. We learn from experience. We also learn from the experience of others. That’s how all successful executives and business leaders got that way. If you have to read anything, read about real successes and failures in the real business world. Try Organizing Genius by Warren Bennis or Business Adventuresby John Brooks. It’s Warren Buffett’s and Bill Gates’s favorite business book for a reason.

Go where your competitors aren’t. How did China-based Huawei take 7% market share from Samsung in the hypercompetitive smartphone market? By focusing on Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Apple in retail. Amazon, eBay and Alibaba online. The Uber app. They all used new sales channels or existing ones in innovative ways.

Plan for success and develop competitive barriers. Come up with a plan, put all you’ve got behind it, then figure out what can go wrong, including coming up with a strategy to keep bigger and better funded competitors from beating you at your own game. If you’re successful, that’s exactly what will happen. If you’re not, it doesn’t really matter, now does it? That’s why you always plan for success.  

Create a larger-than-life buzz. There once was a startup that made microprocessors. Yawn. Then they painted a bulls-eye on industry giant Intel. They actually had a tombstone in the lobby with “RIP” beneath the trademark Intel Inside swirl. Now that was news. Everyone loves a David versus Goliath story. If you’re creative you can generate buzz on a shoestring budget, but it does help to deliver a competitive product.

Learn to say “yes” a lot. You never want to lose a good growth opportunity, give up momentum, or minimize the challenges of scaling a business. And you can never have too much money in the bank. When Box filed to go public, co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie was asked why VCs own two thirds of the company and he had just 4 percent. He said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I’d rather own 4 percent of $2 billion than 40 percent of nothing.”

Listen to your customers ... and yourself. Don’t know what problem to solve or product to develop? Ask your customers. They won’t know what they want because it doesn’t exist yet, but they will tell you what they want to do but can’t. And they have nothing to gain by blowing smoke up your you-know-what, the way some of your own lieutenants might. Also trust your gut – your own focus group of one. You just might be right.

Learn how business works. Finance, income statements, balance sheets, operations, sales channels – yes, I know how boring and uninspiring that all sounds. But guess what? It will keep you from falling into any one of about 9,000 different hellish pitfalls that swallow most entrepreneurs and business owners whole because they have no idea how business works.

Target your biggest competitors. List the leaders in your market, analyze your products and capabilities relative to theirs, and devise a plan to use your relative strengths while exploiting their weaknesses to take market share from them. The goal is to beat them, to topple them and take your rightful place at the top. That’s how little companies become big companies, by competing to win. 

Look, anyone can start a business. Anyone can be an entrepreneur. Anyone can call himself a CEO. It only matters if you can make and sell something that customers like or want enough to buy it from you instead of the other guy. And that’s just the beginning. What’s the end game? Keep moving forward and enjoy the ride.

From Entrepreneur

The Absolutely Essential but Most Overlooked Skill You Need to Succeed at Management

Think that you have to be a great talker to be a great manager? According to

four legendary tech CEOs, the best managers share this surprising, overlooked skill.

The exemplary manager is often shown as the outgoing guy that gives his team pep talks and high fives. He's a fast-talking genius and a smooth operator. In reality, though, that stereotype couldn't be farther from the truth.

To four highly effective, seasoned, and successful tech executives, being a good talker isn't just overvalued, it can actually be detrimental. Instead, there's a subtle, often-overlooked ability that's one of the most vital skills you can have as a manager--the ability to write.

"Written communication to engineering is superior [to verbal communication] because it is more consistent across an entire product team, it is more lasting, it raises accountability."

--Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

When managers write, you create work product--white papers, product requirement documents, FAQs, presentations--that lasts and is accessible to everyone in the organization. From marketing to sales to QA to engineering, everyone has a document off which they can work and consult.

The upshot of writing it down is that the manager takes public responsibility for what happens when the rest of the team executes on the point of view taken by the documents. That ratchets up accountability throughout the entire organization.

To Horowitz, the distinction between written and verbal communication is stark and, in fact, it's what separates bad managers from the good ones. Good managers want to be held accountable and aren't looking for ways to weasel out of responsibility. And so, good managers write, while "[b]ad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament ... the 'powers that be'."

"When I'm interviewing people, I like to give them a writing test. . . . Many people can pretend to be something they're not in person, but very few people can do so in writing."

--Phil Libin, Evernote

The importance of writing over talking is the reason why Phil Libin, founder and CEO of Evernote, makes the ability to write an essential qualification during the hiring process. He'll only hire people who can write. In lieu of a lengthy verbal interview, Libin asks candidates to stop talking and "write a few paragraphs in normal English."

The exercise shows Libin whether candidates can communicate using the written word, but Libin had an additional insight--that writing gets closer to revealing the candidate's true personality.

"I find that you can tell a lot more about a person's personality from a few paragraphs of their writing than from a lengthy verbal interview," Libin said. That's because when it comes to talking, the presentation makes a big difference--however, with writing, it's just words on a page, which approaches pure thought.

"There is no way to write a six-page, narratively structured memo and not have clear thinking."

--Jeff Bezos, Amazon

Jeff Bezos values writing over talking to such an extreme that in Amazon senior executive meetings, "before any conversation or discussion begins, everyone sits for 30 minutes in total silence, carefully reading six-page printed memos."

That's because, to Bezos, just talking and going through bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation concealed lazy thinking. It's easy to jump from one bullet point to the next without having expressed a complete thought. "I don't want this place to become a country club," Bezos said, as he pushed his team to eschew intellectual laziness and think more deeply.

Writing out full sentences enforces clear thinking, but more than that, it's a compelling method to drive memo authors to write in a narrative structure that reinforces a distinctly Amazon way of thinking--its obsession with the customer. In every memo that could potentially address any issue in the company, the memo author must answer the question: "What's in it for the customer, the company, and how does the answer to the question enable innovation on behalf of the customer?"

"Reports are more a medium of self-discipline than a way to communicate information."

--Andy Grove, Intel

Like Bezos, Grove finds value in the process of writing. The surprising thing, then, is that reading what's written isn't as important to Grove.

When you talk, there are often "ad hoc inputs," meaning whatever pops into your head often comes out of your mouth. When managers write, you question those inputs and that reflection drives you to make better decisions.

That's why the main point of writing is to force yourself "to be more precise than [you] might be verbally." That self-imposed precision, according to Grove, is a "safety-net" for your thought process that you should always be doing to "catch . . .anything you may have missed."

Accountability, coherence of thought and planning, and commitment to vision and mission are amazing benefits of what too many consider a ho-hum, even old-fashioned, tool.

From Inc. Magazine