Appendix A
OUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
How We Decoded the Secrets of Entrepreneurial Builders
Over the thirteen years during which Chris and his team founded, built, and scaled Rosetta, they conducted thousands of Personality-Based Clustering assignments for many Global 1000 companies around the world. In this work, the Rosetta team analyzed over one million respondents across billions of observations. It served market leaders in health care, such as Johnson & Johnson, Genentech, Pfizer, and Bristol-Meyers Squibb; financial services companies like Chase, Fidelity, Capital One, and Citibank; consumer technology firms such as Samsung, Microsoft, and Activision; nonprofits like NPR and the Special Olympics; and hundreds of other companies. These insights were then used to define and execute personalized marketing campaigns based in markets around the world.
And the approach works. The results were dramatic—with an average improvement in marketing effectiveness (incremental revenue per dollar of marketing spent) that ranged from 75 percent to 150 percent more effective, and more. Those campaigns proved far more effective in driving consumer purchases and thereby marketing return on investment.
Rosetta’s Personality-Based Clustering technique works in marketing because the tool separates consumers for each industry into distinct groups according to their motivations and preferences. With this understanding and a set of typing tools to target each group, the product, the message, and the offering can be personalized to the buying hot buttons of each group.
The Builder Typology
Having proven that Rosetta’s Personality-Based Clustering methodology could decipher the mysteries of who buys what brands and why in marketplaces around the world, we worked with Rosetta to adapt that analytical engine to address the threshold issue of who builds those businesses in the first place, why and how. We focused on answering three questions: Which factors form and define distinct Builder Personalities? Who are the resulting Builder Types in terms of how their preferences drive their building behaviors? Finally, when we applied the Builder Personality Discovery (BPD) quiz to individual builders and then interviewed them intensely on the details of how they built their businesses, did we hear stories and examples consistent with the preferences of each type?
The Four Factors That Create Our Builder Typology
The ten-question BPD quiz we used in our interviews for this book represents the distillation of results from a more extensive survey instrument sent to several larger groups of successful business founders. That original instrument, comprising over one hundred questions, was completed by more than 450 respondents within a panel of builder CEOs who had achieved at least $3 million in annual revenue and had been in business for at least three years.1 We further supplemented this group with members of the Young Presidents’ Organization, the Women Presidents’ Organization, and other professional groups containing large numbers of founders who met our criteria.
By applying Rosetta’s patented clustering algorithm to the respondent data described above, we were able to isolate the four factors and their ten underlying dimensions that categorize the builder population into four distinct types. The factors and dimensions are as follows:
Motivation and Self-Identity
- Does the person feel he or she was always destined to be a business builder, or did it occur more by happenstance?
- To what degree does the person ascribe his or her success to luck and market timing?
- Does the person prefer to focus on selling or delivering the product or service?
Decision-Making Mode
- Does the person tend to rely more on intuition or the facts?
- Does the person encourage experimentation?
Management Approach
- Does the person consider his or her management team key to the venture’s success?
- Does the person tend to be hands-on or laissez-faire?
- Does the person consider tough decisions personal or just part of business?
Leadership Style
- Does the person inspire people through empathy and compassion?
- Does the person consider the company “my company” or “our company”?
These factors and dimensions are reflected in the ten-question BPD quiz (see chapter 1 sidebar “Which Builder Personality Is Most Similar to Yours?”), powered by our algorithm on the www.builtforgrowth.com website.
Limitations of the Builder Personality Discovery (BPD) Quiz
Our BPD instrument shares the same limitations as those of other psychometric instruments (the fancy term for questionnaires that compare you with others and place you in a descriptive group, known as a type). Let’s look at these limitations.
Consistency
The BPD tool, like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Hogan Personality Inventory, and other assessments, depends on your accurate and honest responses to the questions. Because people’s answers may vary, depending on their mood, a person’s frame of mind can change the results. This variation in typing is a limitation inherent in all these instruments, including our BPD tool.
Accuracy
Like consistency, accuracy in any instrument based on self-reported data depends on your honest responses and is vulnerable to how you might be feeling when you complete the instrument. Therefore, we encourage you to take our BPD quiz several times over the course of a week to ten days, under different situations—especially if you feel your initial typing isn’t quite accurate. Repeating the survey will help you determine if there is a dominant type that emerges.
Another idea to consider is to ask two or three confidants whose opinion you value how they think you would probably answer the ten questions. After they have done this for you, quietly consider how close your respective answers are to theirs. In this way, you can check the objectivity of your own assessment.
Hybrids: Builders Who Are Blends of More Than One Builder Type
Few of us fit neatly in any personality box; nor is personality necessarily fixed in concrete. Some of us are blends, and our Builder Personalities are no different. People are inherently adaptive, watching and taking on qualities of others they work with or were mentored by. Of course, this adaptive approach can be a highly effective way to hone and diversify your building repertoire. We refer to this kind of adaptive blending as nurture-driven (you picked it up from your environment). The other kind of blending we call nature-driven, that is, your blended personality is psychologically hardwired in you. Think of the current discussions on gender and the emergent hypothesis that perhaps we should think of it as a spectrum, rather than just two points, male and female.
To reflect this concept of the blended personality, we use your responses to create a measure of the likelihood that you are a combination of two types and, if so, which two and in what proportions. This blended insight is only available on our website, because of the underlying statistics we must run to compare your responses with the test population. While we cannot distinguish between nurture- and nature-driven blends, we can tell if you are most like one of our Builder Types or a blend of two. So if you’re curious, please visit our site at www.builtforgrowth.com.
You may be wondering about the difference between hybrid Builder Personalities and our concept of master builders. Hybrids are composites of two or more Builder Types, in which their Builder Personality is wired in a manner that shares core elements of more than one type. This is quite different from a builder who starts out as a distinct personality type with the gifts and gaps of that type. But as that builder develops professionally, he or she begins to understand how his or her preferences and biases create gaps. It is with this deeper understanding of self that the master builder can study his or her polar complement and deliberately take on that type’s preferences, but do so by authentically making them his or her own.
An Overview of Personality Testing, and Where Personality-Based Clustering Fits
Although all of us may want to believe we are absolutely unique, there is actually a finite amount of variation in personality. The Rosetta Personality-Based Clustering technique borrowed conceptually from the seminal work of Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers.
In the early 1940s, Briggs and Myers developed a psychometric questionnaire known as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. This instrument was designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. The original work by Myers and Briggs was used to help women during World War II find the jobs that best fit their temperament. Since its creation, this instrument has been administered many millions of times.
The insights gained from that pioneering work have since spawned an entire industry of personality testing, and Rosetta’s Personality-Based Clustering technique has a specific place in this landscape. Although there are many ways to characterize them, you can classify psychometric personality typing tools based on the scope and nature of the populations they address. Figure A-1 depicts this as a funnel. At the wide end is general personality testing, a set of tools that can be applied to all people and explains significant variations in personality across the broad population. In the middle of the funnel are tools focused on more discrete, domain-specific populations, such as people who work in businesses or are considering entrepreneurship. The narrowest part of the funnel has even more highly specialized personality tools. Let’s look at these three types of tools in more depth.
FIGURE A-1
Examples of Personality Typing Tools
*These tools identify the specifi c beliefs, motivation, and preferences critical to success in the indicated context.
General Population Personality Tools
At the wide end of the funnel, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the best-known example of this kind of broad tool. Based on the theories of Carl Jung, Briggs and Myers’s work postulated that all potential human personalities could be profiled along four dimensions (introverted versus extroverted, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judgment versus perception), resulting in sixteen personality variations (the various combinations of four dimensions). For example, if you’re an INTP, you tend to be more introverted (I), rely on your intuition (N), are more prone to thinking (T) than feeling, and approach life in an open-ended, perceiving (P) way, rather than judging (J). Figure A-2 describes the four dimensions and the spectrum of potential responses for the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Broad, Domain-Specific Personality Tools
In the middle of the funnel are broad, domain-specific psychometric tools. They are built on a construct similar to Myers-Briggs in that they identify factors that separate individuals within a specific domain, such as people in business or, even more specifically, those who might be interested in entrepreneurship.
In 1998, Chris and his team at Rosetta developed the idea of applying psychometric tools to specialized consumer populations. They created a process of building industry-specific tools to explain how and why individuals in various consumer categories ranging from credit cards and cell phones to pain relievers and clothing make purchase and brand choice decisions. Their initial hypothesis was that each of us, as consumers, brings a set of beliefs, motivations, and preferences that influence our category and brand-purchasing behavior.
For example, will I buy a new cell phone or not? If I will, what combination of beliefs (I think Apple makes better cell phones), motivations (the brand and style project what I want to my friends), and preferences (mix of voice and data functionality, price, service coverage, etc.) drive my cell phone purchasing behavior? Rosetta called this particular domain the Cell Phone Personality Typology and, over the years, used it to enhance the marketing effectiveness for AT&T Wireless, Sprint, and several well-known handset manufacturers. Rosetta built similar models to describe consumer choice across hundreds of categories around the world.
Another of these domain-specific tools is the StrengthsFinder tool from the Gallup Organization.2 StrengthsFinder has been applied to hundreds of thousands of individuals to help them and their employers identify the test taker’s innate strengths. With this information, employees can be placed in the most appropriate jobs and are sometimes helped along their professional-development path. In the last several years, Gallup adapted this tool to the question of who might be best suited to become an entrepreneur, as laid out in its Entrepreneurial StrengthsFinder book.3 The book provides valuable insights to those trying to sort out whether they may have what it takes to become an entrepreneur.
Targeted, High-Impact Personality Tools
At the narrow end of the funnel is a set of highly specialized personality tools that are applied to unique populations to separate people into subgroups according to how their beliefs and preferences explicitly drive their choices and behaviors in very specific domains. The BPD tool we developed with Rosetta’s methodology—and then applied to the high-impact group of successful entrepreneurs—is just such an instrument. It is specifically designed to discover the underlying personality profiles of the builders of successful new businesses.
It does so by creating a broad spectrum of potential responses, as shown in figure A-3, to the BPD tool. Most of the questions are measured on a seven-point scale, and the others with yes-or-no answers.
FIGURE A-3
The Four Factors and Underlying Dimensions of the Builder Personality Discovery (BPD) tool
