What does it take to be a great entrepreneur or business-builder? How do you nd such a person? How do you become one?

These were some of the questions the three of usmore on who we are in a minuteasked ourselves when we embarked on the journey of writing this book. Along the way we asked a few more questions: What are the crucial character traits and habits for business-building success? Are they always the same, or do they depend on the circumstances? What are the things a business leader can learn versus the things that are innate? What role is played by luck, and can it be inuenced? Do business founders possess fundamentally different strengths than the scalers who take businesses to the next level of growth? What are the most important crossroads that business-builders must face? Are there tools or experiences to help them with those decisions? Where can we look outside of the business world for clues and advice? And given how many business books and experts there are out there, what are the most useful lessons that we might impart? What weve ended up with is a book that aims to leave readers with two things. The rst is an increased self-awareness as it relates to starting and sustaining a business and the decisions we make on those issues. The second is the practical wisdom, case studies, and habits that will help you get the job of business-building done right, or at least better.

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That self-awareness is the most critical factor for business-building and effective decision-making success is not a new insight. But the tougher code to crack, and what we emphasize ahead, is how to become more selfaware. To help frame this endeavor, we dene four key business-builder character traitsHeart, Smarts, Guts, and Luckand ask you to evaluate yourself against them to gauge where you are today and where you need to be tomorrow. With awareness, you can begin improvement. Which brings us to purpose number two of the book: conveying important principles and practical tools that can be learned, honed, and practiced over time. We have tried to put forth a curated set of business lessons from our own experiences and those of the hundreds of entrepreneurs and business builders we interviewed. No business book, school, or mentor can guarantee success, but the combination of self-awareness and the right toolkit will certainly increase your odds. So, who the heck are we? The three authorsTony Tjan (thats me), Dick Harrington, and Tsun-yan Hsiehcome from backgrounds as entrepreneurs, large-company CEOs, consultants, and most recently as venture capitalists. My own career has given me cause to reect often on the forces that shape business success and failure. I grew up in the farthest-east point of Canadain St. Johns, Newfoundlandand I have always felt an entrepreneurial urge, beginning with the proverbial paper route in my preteen years. Things progressed from there to starting a small silkscreen T-shirt and sportswear venture (age thirteen), to selling imported picture frames door-to-door (age fteen), to selling Apple II series computers for a local authorized dealer (age fteen), and to being a distributor for a large multilevel-marketing skin care company (age seventeen). Throughout college, I continued doing things on the side. When I was accepted into Harvard Business School (HBS), some mentors and administrators there suggested that I try a more conventional job for a couple of years. So I deferred business school and in 1994 joined McKinsey & Co.s Toronto ofce. Thats where I met one of my most important and trusted mentors, my coauthor Tsun-yan Hsieh. Back to him in a bit. Then I went to HBS, where with a few classmates and former McKinsey colleagues I founded a company called ZEFER, one of the earliest Internet

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advisory and development rms. (No, its not an acronym; we just liked to capitalize all the letters.) It was 1997, and for a few years, ZEFER was a spectacular, unbelievable success. We raised money while we were still students, won the HBS business plan competition, raised a whole whack more dough, hired hundreds, and grew to more than $100 million in annual revenue. Then came the year 2000, and after the Internet bubble burst right before our planned IPOthings went downhill fast. ZEFER lived (and lives) on as part of the Japanese conglomerate NEC, but back then it became clear that I had to move on to a new job. I did advisory work as a senior partner with The Parthenon Groupwhere I remain vice chairmanand separately as senior advisor to the CEO of the Thomson Corporation (none other than my coauthor Dick Harrington), before founding Cue Ball, the Boston-based venture capital rm where I work today. One of Thomsons divisions was a ZEFER client, and it turned out Thomson was also a client of Parthenons, which is how I rst got to know Dick. At the time, Thomson was a diversied holding company that owned one of the worlds biggest newspaper organizations. But Dick had other ideas. Dick grew up in West Roxbury, Massachusettswhere he too had a newspaper routeand likes to joke about his protracted path to a degree at the University of Rhode Island, where he put his studies on hold to found and run a plumbing supply business. After graduation and a stint as an accountant, he worked through a variety of executive positions at Thomson, including head of its newspaper business. In 1997 he was named CEO, not long after which he made the shockingand prescientdecision to start getting out of newspapers, as well as other noncore assets for the organization. Eventually, he would build and transform Thomson into what is today the worlds largest information company, Thomson Reuters. I spent much of this time working very closely with Dick, and when he retired from Thomson Reuters in 2008 he joined me as partner and chairman of Cue Ball. Now back to Tsun-yan. Dick and I were thrilled when Tsun-yan agreed to collaborate with us and be a coauthor because he brings not just a wealth of strategic wisdom but deep insights about leaders in context. Tsun-yan grew up in Singapore and spent thirty years, about half in North America and half in Asia and Europe, with McKinsey & Co. His leadership roles

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included chairman of McKinseys Professional Development Committee, managing director of Canada, and managing director of its ASEAN practices. He mentored multiple generations of younger partners and associates, among whom several top leaders, including the current managing director of McKinsey, have emerged. Many of them turned to Tsun-yan for his counsel at pivotal career junctures. From these experiences, he has also seen and helped many others nd inner resources to start or build a business. Today, Tsun-yan continues serving as a trusted counselor to company founders and CEOs across Asia and the Americas as founder of the LinHart Group. In addition to directorship on the boards of global companies, he is a senior advisor and investor member of Cue Ball. Those who have worked with Tsun-yan use words such as guru, unsettling, profound, and mesmerizing. He is indeed a Yoda in the universe of strategists. As Dick, Tsun-yan, and I began working on this project, we wanted to start by articulating a framework for successful business-building. We asked ourselves what were the most essential strengths of great entrepreneurs and builders of businesses. After many conversations among ourselves and with company founders and business leaders, the answer began to crystallize. Over lunch in Stamford, Connecticut, a couple of years ago, a former Thomson colleague asked, What is it that really determines the success of businesspeople? I started talking about some informal research we were doing and thoughts we had, then just blurted out, You know, it really comes down to Smarts, Balls, and Luck. We were soon persuaded to go with Guts instead of Balls (our publisher said no way to the latter), and I introduced Smarts, Guts, and Luck as the core building blocks of the DNA of great entrepreneurs in a blog post for Harvard Business Review Online in March 2009. As we did more research, reection, and interviews, though, it became clear that another character trait needed to be included: Heart. Without Heart, few businesses ever become truly successful; passion and purpose are crucial instigators and guides. That brought us to Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, or HSGL for short. Every entrepreneur and business-builder we know possesses every one of these four qualities, though the mix varies from person to personand company founders lean toward one trait in particular (hint: it begins with H). We call a persons unique mix of Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck an HSGL prole, and weve devised a survey, the Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test, to

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help you gure out what your prole looks like. Theres a short version of this E.A.T. survey in chapter 10, and a complete survey online at the books companion site, www.HSGL.com, which we encourage you to take. Throughout the book, we also share the results of an E.A.T. survey we conducted with approximately 350 entrepreneurs and business-builders, plus anecdotes and insights collected from dozens of interviews. There are more survey results, plus video interviews, at www.HSGL.com. Figuring out which traits drive you and your decisions is the most important thing you can do to enhance your business leadership. Greater awareness of what youre best at, and how and when you might need to turn up or turn down the volume of the other traits, is what separates the best business-builders from those who are very good. From an organizational perspective, knowing your own HSGL prole allows you to better understand what kind of people best complement you during specic points of the business-building growth cycleand, equally important, what type of person you might need to supplement (almost everyone needs a kindred spirit) or even succeed you. An HSGL prole is akin to ones leadership personality. Just as a genetic screen can be an indicator of future health outcomes, so do the levels of your capabilities within each HSGL trait foreshadow prospective areas of triumph and trial during the business-building process. Are you ideally suited to starting a business, or to building and developing one? Do you see yourself as being the best, the biggest, or both? Are you self-aware enough to know when each of these qualities is relevant to a particular situation or growth phase? How does your prole impact how you interact with the team members you have today and those you will need tomorrow? The E.A.T. survey does not tell you whether you have enough Heart, Smarts, Guts, or Luck to be successful in business. It is designed, like the psychometric tests that inspired itMyers-Briggs Type Indicator, Predictive Index, and Relative Strength Index, among othersto suss out which traits are relatively stronger within you. This is very useful knowledge, but for true self-awareness you also need to have some sense of how you stack up in an absolute sense. We dont have a test for that, but many of the examples, questions, tools, and analyses in the book are meant to help you further think aboutreally think aboutwhere youre strong and where you might fall short. Do you have what it takes to start a business? How genuine is your vision and purpose for that business? Do you recognize the

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likely future challenges and crossroads youll face? What happens if youre below par in one of the four traits? As you read this book, think about which parts resonate most with you and why. What parts seem more obvious and natural, and which passages a little more obtuse and challenging? It may be the latter that you want to focus on. Businesses seldom test individuals or their leaders for self-awareness, and people seldom take the time to assess themselves. Yet self-awareness is not a soft organizational behavior concept to be dismissed. Rather it is the concrete foundation for improving your leadership and business-building capability. It is about intellectual honesty. It is about being aware of what you know and what you dont. It is key for spotlighting the areas where you could stand to improve and to know where another persons strengths could t the bill better than your own. Simply put: self-awareness motivates great business-builders to get better because they are better able to understand decisions they make. With that in mind, chapters 1 through 5 explore the HSGL traits to help you build self-awareness. Theres a chapter for each of the traits, and advice, exercises (including a few diagnostic True North questions), and stories along the way. Chapters 6 and 7 comprise two short chapters that discuss what to do with this awareness by exploring common (and less common) business-builder archetypes and how the different HSGL traits t into different stages of the business growth cycle. The remainder of the book is all about practical wisdom, case studies, tools, and habits to help you move forward. The True North question sets in chapter 8 are meant to stimulateyou guessed itself-awareness and also ignite debate, while the Wisdom Manifestos in chapter 9 amount to a greatest hits of business principles and frameworks that we have encountered in our research and in our careers. Finally, theres the abbreviated E.A.T. survey in chapter 10 and a wrap-up section with a few more interesting highlights and concluding thoughts. Who is all this meant for? Given what we do for a living, we wrote the book with people planning to start, build, or run a businessor those already playing a key role in starting, building, or running somethingin mind. But its also meant to be useful for those in school or in some other job who are wondering whether entrepreneurship or business-building is

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right for them. Starting, running, and advising businesses has been an immensely fullling careerway of life, reallyfor all three of us. Wed love to convince more people to try it.

A Couple of Final Notes

We use the words she and her in our Heart and Smarts chapters and he and him in our chapters on Guts and Luck (and do a similar gender division among the business archetypes in chapter 6). We do this to dodge gender bias while staying on the right side of the laws of grammar. Throughout this book, we use the terms entrepreneurship and businessbuilding. They are related but different. Entrepreneurship refers to the rststage founding of a business and connotes the classic Silicon Valley notion of a start-up and the innovative spirit required to launch one. In contrast, business-building is broader, encompassing the founding stages but also the growing, scaling, and extending of a business following its inception. Since entrepreneurs and business-builders often need to share similar traits, we sometimes use the terms interchangeably when describing the skills, habits, and characteristics of a successful individual. Also, readers will note that this is not a traditional-looking business book. We wanted to make something digestible, practical, to the point and fun to look at. We hope readers will not only nd this a useful and timely read for their present-day initiatives, but also an ongoing reference guide that theyll mark up and dog-ear or even tear pages out of. Wed love nothing more than for our readers to actively read and cross-reference back and forth between pages, chapters, and our online resources. Of course, we welcome you to send us e-mails with questions or comments while or after you read this. Our most current contact information can always be found on this books companion site, www.HSGL.com. As business-builders turned advisors and venture capitalists, we applaud all of you who are already actively building businesses while trying to push yourselves to the next level. Not only are you the source of big ideas and innovations, you serve as an inspiration for all to continue pushing to our next level of potential. Coincidentally, as I prepare the nal draft of this books introduction for the publisher, a colleague e-mailed me a Wikipedia

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excerpt on one of the most expressed Greek values, Aret: Translated as virtue, the word actually means something closer to being the best you can be or reaching your highest human potential. We hope in its own small part that this book can help you toward that aspirational journey and goal. Anthony K. Tjan