The Leadership Entrepreneur

Orrin Woodward is a leader and entrepreneur. To date, he has built several 100 million plus businesses and two 40 million plus leadership companies. In addition, he has written two NY Times bestsellers on leadership. His leadership thoughts, accordingly, are not to be taken lightly. In this article from his blog, Orrin shares why an entrepreneur must also be a leader.

An entrepreneur must be a leader. Why? Because he or she must build and lead teams of people to accomplish the task, satisfy the customer, and do so at a price that leaves profit for the team members. In other words, ineffective leaders soon prove to be ineffective entrepreneurs because the customer isn't satisfied nor the teams paid well. Nonetheless, many would-be entrepreneurs start business while ignoring the importance of leadership to the health of their enterprise.

Entrepreneurs should enter into markets where they feel they can satisfy the customers better than their competitors. For instance, Jack Welch, in his early days, was called "Neutron Jack" because he refused to be in a business sector where he couldn't improve to either #1 or #2. His philosophy of business led him to get out of markets where he couldn't be the best, and move into markets where he could be the best, thus maximizing profits for the company and ensuring employment for the workers. Incidentally, few seem to understand that only a profitable company can maintain its workers. Since profit is the life-blood of any business, when a company is losing money, it's similar to a patient losing blood.  In both instances, death results if the bleeding isn't checked.

Accordingly, leaders are constantly studying the vital signs of their business, ensuring the business is not bleeding to death. In fact, leaders must be PDCA champions, constantly making adjustment in the areas where it can have the most impact. They don't just change things to make change, however. Instead, they listen, study, and analyze until they determine which area of change could have the biggest impact on the bottom line. Then they do something unheard of in our modern world, namely, take massive action to drive the team and business forward.

Whenever I study a business, the first question I ask is: Who is the leader? If an effective leader is in charge, he can overcome lack of capital, lack of resources, and still beat competitors who have plenty of both. Why? Because leaders constantly are developing innovative ways to solve problems while managers focus on the same methods that worked before. I love the saying: If it isn't broke, then break it and make it better.

When my co-founders and I started LIFE Leadership, we did so with little funds or resources, but we had a superbly talented leadership team. I knew that the leadership team would quickly build the leadership products that could compete with any leadership team anywhere. Interestingly, over the last 18 months LIFE Leadership has become a $50 million dollar conglomerate through building the highest quality personal development products in the industry.

For example, anyone serious about being an entrepreneur ought to purchase and apply the principles from the Mental Fitness Challenge personal development program. The 13 Resolutions are found in my All-Time Top 100 Leadership book RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE.  If applied daily, they will radically change the leadership capabilities of any hungry student. In fact, I have hundreds of emails from satisfied customers who did just that.

In summary, if the reader wants to be a successful entrepreneur, then he must be a successful leader. Building a company without building one's leadership is a fools way to launch a company. For no company will rise higher than the leadership within the company. America needs leaders to create the LeaderShift! What part will the reader play? Here is another segment of the article on the role of entrepreneurs.

Sincerely,

Orrin Woodward

Entrepreneur as exceptional leader

Hans Karl Emil von Mangoldt  (1824-1868) developed the notion that entrepreneurial profit is the rent of ability. He divided entrepreneurial income into three parts: (1) a premium on uninsured risks; (2) entrepreneur interest and wages, including only payments for special forms of capital or productive effort that did not admit of exploitation by anyone other than the owner; and (3) entrepreneurial rents or payments for differential abilities or assets not held by anyone else. The first part is a return on risk taking; the second part from capital use and production effort, and the third part from ability or asset specificity. Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) carried forward Mangoldt’s notion of rent-of-ability by adding the element of leadership to “entrepreneurial” responsibilities. Marshall’s entrepreneurs “must be a natural leader of men who can choose assistants wisely but also exercise a general control over everything and preserve order and unity in the main plan of business. In fulfilling this organizational function, the entrepreneur must always be “on the lookout for methods that promise to be more effective in proportion to their cost than methods currently in use”. Marshall noted that not everyone had the innate ability to perform this entrepreneurial role as these abilities are so great that very few persons can exhibit all of them in a very high degree. Accordingly, he termed the entrepreneurial rents specifically as a “quasi-rent”, which is a return for exceptional natural abilities, which are not made by human effort, and enable the entrepreneur to obtain a surplus income over what ordinary persons could expect for similar exertions following similar investments of capital and labour in their education and start in life.