Pages: 10

What is a successful business? What do you consider a successful business looks like? If you close your eyes and think of a successful business you use, sell to or buy from, what image comes to mind? Which names pop into your head?

Pages: 11

I mentioned in the previous chapter that the golden thread for this book in one sentence is I give a value to a human action and discuss why and how that value can and should be recognised. In order to explain how the recognised actions of an entrepreneur may be the very skills that are sought after in non-businesspeople, some discussion of definitions and terms is required. Here, I introduce the term entrepreneur, explain what that person looks like, and bring in the terms enterprise and entrepreneurship. I feel these terms have become intertwined, and the definitions have become blurred, so I offer some recent developments. I then talk about the value of a business in terms of profit and loss and also about the human value in terms of attributes and behaviours, or human actions, skills, and experiences, and how those actions are present in almost all jobs and not just for entrepreneurs.

Pages: 11

In the previous chapter we looked at entrepreneurial attributes and which attributes are noted to be valuable in different careers and sectors. Here, I want to bring those attributes together to become someone’s accumulated knowledge, skills, talent, and experience, and then discuss how those accumulated skills and experience contribute to the success of the company you work for. The accumulated knowledge, skills, talent, and experience are collectively known as your human capital, and these hold an intangible value, which is a qualitative asset that is a combination of elements that include educational attainment, skills and competencies, work experience, and training. Intangible value refers to the worth or importance of an asset – in this case, knowledge, skills, talent, and experience; these contribute to the overall performance of an individual but are challenging to measure quantifiably.

Pages: 10

I stated earlier that the golden thread for this book in one sentence is to give a value to a human action. These actions are the accumulated knowledge, skills, talent, and experience of a person, and we then discuss why and how that value can and should be recognised. I want this book to be useful in terms of how you view value in yourself and others. I feel this value held in the accumulated knowledge, skills, talent, and experience of a person is currently unrecognised, and I will discuss that more later. However, in this chapter I want to show some case study examples of individuals engaged in common occupations and how the skills and attributes we value and recognise in entrepreneurs are present in almost all of the jobs we see every day. These skills are hidden in the main, or unrecognised, but they are still there and still valid. In this section I draw out the skills and knowledge that the UK government’s National Careers Service website notes are required for each job and map that against the entrepreneurial attributes and behaviours we have already discussed. I then talk about each role and show how there is a remarkable similarity between the two. In other words, I put the skills and attributes each person is using and displaying in the context of their job. I show how there is value in that human action, the action being things such as a person being self-confident or innovative, able to pay attention to detail, or being flexible and open to change. I do this as these are the skills that provide value in these roles, not necessarily the time you have been proud to go back to my interview experiences I mentioned earlier – that in the past I have been asked questions in interviews which required me to give a standard stock response, such as ‘tell us when you’ve been proud’. I feel the value in attributes and behaviours which align with the role they are applying for or undertaking has a higher prominence and meaning than a time I felt an emotion such as pride.

Pages: 6

In 2005, Singh et al. examined the entrepreneurial activities of homemakers in the United States, noting very little literature on the homemaker entrepreneur, while focusing on homemakers who intend to start businesses, and not on the accumulated skills and experiences that those homemakers accumulate through the tasks they perform. In 2006, Williams noted a ‘hidden enterprise culture’; Williams looked at ways in which definitions can be applied to entrepreneurial actions for tax purposes; the study reviewed the way skills and experiences are defined to assess if tax is appropriate on them. However, in this piece of research, Williams focused on the monetary value of entrepreneurial actions and not the intangible value of those actions. Tan (1996 p. 8) offered a definition of ‘entrepreneurism’, one based on the premise that ‘society should organize its economic activities not solely on the basis of the profit motive, but also on the value to society’. Then in 2017, Culkin and Jones looked to understand the motivation in engineers to innovate; this research noted that the value added in terms of the accumulated knowledge, skills, talent, and experience by the individual is often overlooked. The knowledge and skills Culkin and Jones referred to are the ones we are discussing in this book, such as interpersonal skills, adaptive learning, perseverance, innovation, strategic skills, and opportunity seeking. Culkin and Jones note that the reason why these skills are often overlooked is that in this research they were only viewed through the corporate lens or the lens of the business owner. This corporate entrepreneurship follows the traditional approach of recognising and giving monetary worth to value; individual added value from human capital is noted as often remaining concealed.

Pages: 12

At the start of this book, I asked you to stop and think for a minute or two about what a successful business is to you: what it looks like to you. I asked you to think about a business you interact with in some way, buy from, sell to, work with. I asked you to have an image in your mind at the start, in the middle, and now at the end of this book to see if anything has changed. I added a Reflections Section to the end of each chapter and asked you to make any notes if you wished to. So, if you think back at the image of that business, and you think now about a business you want to work for or engage with, has anything changed?