MOST Analysis

Mission Statement

Similar to the planning phases you have completed already, the final phase in the Process Planning Stage will continue to build on what you have already accomplished thus far in the program. In the last phase you worked closely with your mentor to prioritize your future development, implementation, and testing of processes and systems; specifically focusing on taking your business to the next level while improving on your work-life balance. The objective of the All-Star Identification Phase is to place emphasis on taking calculated actions to better align passion and expertise; in the process, planning the shedding or delegating the activities that are a threat to your healthy work-life balance. Planning this repositioning and leveraging of available resources will be critical to run a process driven business that works around your ideal lifestyle, not the other way around. During this phase you will use newly identified priorities from the previous phase as the framework while you are guided through additional steps to help you begin to identify and plan how best to utilize in-house staff and outsource partners to better leverage your time and resources. This is a precursor for the steps you will take in the future program phases to shed your load and also streamline the creation of tested, repeatable systems and processes. At the conclusion of this phase you will have successfully completed each phase of the Process Planning Stage and be ready to move into the second stage of the program, the Process Development Stage.

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Objectives

01. Talent Acquisition: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
02. Big 5: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
04. Managing Teams: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
05. Personality Traits: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
06. Power Motivation: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
07. Goals & Aspirations: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. 1 Month
08. Environmental Factors: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
09. Growth & Success: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
10. Risk Attitudes: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month
12. Values & Experience: departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development. Time Allocated: 1 Month

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Strategies

01. Talent Acquisition: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
02. Big 5: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
03. Entrepreneurs vs Managers: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
04. Managing Teams: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
05. Personality Traits: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
06. Power Motivation: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
07. Goals & Aspirations: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
08. Environmental Factors: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
09. Growth & Success: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
10. Risk Attitudes: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
11. Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.
12. Values & Experience: Each individual department head to undertake departmental SWOT analysis; strategy research & development.

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Tasks

01. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Talent Acquisition.
02. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Big 5.
03. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Entrepreneurs vs Managers.
04. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Managing Teams.
05. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Personality Traits.
06. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Power Motivation.
07. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Goals & Aspirations.
08. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Environmental Factors.
09. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Growth & Success.
10. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Risk Attitudes.
11. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Self-Efficacy & Innovativeness.
12. Create a task on your calendar, to be completed within the next month, to analyze Values & Experience.

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Introduction

Entrepreneurial All-Star Personality Traits: A Review of Recent Literature

Entrepreneurial companies and their founders are all the rage these days. New incubators and accelerators are springing up all around the United States, as well as programs to attract inventive talent. Foreign countries are also involved, with countries ranging from China to Chile experimenting with novel approaches to encourage the establishment of new businesses. Of course, the interest with entrepreneurs is not new, and literature dating back to the 18th century investigates what motivates entrepreneurs and if their characteristics influence the success of their businesses. This literature currently covers a wide range of topics and has developed a variety of concepts and methodologies for analyzing entrepreneurial all-star qualities. We collect and integrate the most recent research on the prevalence of various personality types among entrepreneurs and their impact on venture performance in this review.

Many studies look into “entrepreneurial qualities” or “traits that make entrepreneurs successful.” Frank Knight’s book Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit was published in 1921, marking a watershed moment in thorough and detailed research on the personalities of entrepreneurs that distinguish them from typical company managers. In the decades afterwards, researchers have continued to look into the precise personality qualities that drive people to become entrepreneurs, as well as the personal motivations and preferences that keep them on track. These studies have frequently focused on high-growth environments or enterprises backed by venture capital (VC), when entrepreneurs face a significant risk of their businesses failing, a tiny chance of exceptionally positive outcomes, and a potentially low average return on their monetary and time inputs. To explain such a goal, standard economic theory must be supplemented, and many scholars have attempted to comprehend the “homo entreprenaurus” (a moniker introduced by Uusitalo, 2001).

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However, the term “entrepreneur” is used in academic studies to refer to a wide range of people other than Silicon Valley company founders. The research we include in this review cover a wide range of definitions of entrepreneurship, from “Main Street” small business owners to young college students taking an entrepreneurship class. While all of these groups are linked to entrepreneurial activity, recent research has shown that these subpopulations behave very differently, and that individuals’ typical personality traits will vary greatly depending on the type of entrepreneurial activity they engage in.

Today’s applied researchers have access to data for gauging entrepreneurship that would have been impossible even a decade ago. Most notably, researchers can now analyze entrepreneurial transitions using large-scale administrative datasets based on employer-employee relationships. In the United States, for example, researchers are increasingly using comprehensive panel data on individuals like the Linked Employer-Household Database to model entrepreneurial transitions, whereas cutting-edge work in the 2000s often used firm-level entry rates measured in datasets like the Census of Manufactures or Venture Xpert. Other countries also have frontier administrative datasets that integrate foundational behavior with everything from an individual’s prescription medicine history to their stock assets. Researchers are now creating their own specialized datasets in addition to administrative datasets, such as tracking cohorts from entrepreneurial training programs, accessing gig economy transactions from a leading online platform, crafting from LinkedIn profiles of entrepreneurs receiving venture capital, conducting customized surveys of entrepreneurs in co-working spaces, and much more. Because of the abundance of opportunities, there has been a boom in research that examines career histories and individual-level characteristics that predict entrepreneurial all-stars.

While these cutting-edge datasets allow researchers to raise novel questions, they also present new challenges. When considering individual-level characteristics that favor admission, the question of when and how founder personalities should be regarded arises. Some people are explicitly interested in the phenomenon, for example, studying the risk tolerance of high-growth business founders. Others have a different study question in mind, but they are concerned that personality is a key omitted aspect that distorts empirical results. Others believe that personality is the conduit or mechanism via which some of the events analyzed have short- and long-term impacts. While previous research has looked at how personality factors affect transitions to self-employment, this workshop looks at a considerably broader and more diverse range of topics, from small-scale service firms to high-growth entrepreneurship. As the number of possibilities for modeling individual- and team-level entrepreneurial all-stars grows, it’s becoming increasingly vital to understand the personality traits linked with entrepreneurship and how they affect the research being done.

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Gartner (1988) questioned the study of entrepreneur personality qualities in a seminal article three decades ago, proposing instead for a focus on how firms develop. Gartner was critical of the various definitions for entrepreneurship, preferring to focus on one that highlighted the functional creation of new businesses. Gartner also questioned the validity of survey methodology for determining a “ideal” personality for entrepreneurship performance. The specter of this criticism has hung over the literature for a long time, and it’s far from apparent that these new attempts will overcome the obstacles identified by Gartner (1988), as we’ll see throughout this review. However, given the increased acknowledgement of entrepreneur heterogeneity and the availability of powerful new data sources, it may be worthwhile to revisit some of these topics 30 years later. After all, many people are now concentrating on articulating how personality influences the formation of new companies, which addresses at least some of Gartner’s concerns.

This workshop focuses on three main themes: (1) entrepreneur personality qualities and how they compare to other groups; (2) entrepreneur risk attitudes; and (3) the overall goals and aspirations that entrepreneurs bring to their endeavors. These themes span the majority