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What Quality Must An Entrepreneurial Employee Have?



To me being entrepreneurial, the foremost quality is to be resourceful. Then comes the risk-taking nature and innovative mindset, in this order, respectively. You might think that the first and foremost quality of an entrepreneur is to be innovative. Many people are innovative, in fact, I read somewhere that creative and innovative people are usually the lazy ones, because they are able to think of a faster, perhaps better and easier way to get a job done. Hence the creativity. But the question is how many of these ideas are put into execution.     

Now if you act on your innovative idea you are already a one in a million to do that (*give yourself a pat on the back). But still, it does not mean you are entrepreneurial. The bigger the idea the bigger the risk, the bigger the risk, the more the resources you need to acquire and manage. Accepting the fact that resources are scarce and knowing how to acquire them, or able to just make-do with passable resources to still achieve the expected outcome, is entrepreneurial. If not, you are just a corporate executor. There is a huge difference between the two. 

In my career I have worked with colleagues who were good at coming up ideas with the team, validate, strategise, and execute the ideas. But many a time I noticed the entrepreneurial ones standing out among the rest. For example, there was once our marketing team needed a poster to be done in short notice, but designers were occupied with their existing jobs that had their dateline to meet. It was here I saw two different reactions from two managers in the team; one just came back to me saying designers were not free, we would have to wait. That's it, no alternative solution recommended. The other manager went on to check with an executive who happened to use Adobe Illustrator and InDesign for T-shirt designing as a hobby, she briefed the executive the concept, they went Googling some stock photos, put them together, played with the effects and filters, voila! The job was done in one evening. It is a simple incidence that happens to us everyday, but one waits for resources, and the other looks out for resources. Who is entrepreneurial?     

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