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BUILDER PERSONALITY
The Essential Force for Growth
Building for growth is the business imperative for every entrepreneur, leader, manager, and company. So, are you built for growth? Because who you are shapes how you build.
If you’re a builder of a new business—whether you’re running an independent startup or a new venture inside an existing company—you face a unique set of challenges. You must convert your ideas into products, galvanize individual talent for collaborative impact, transform buyers into partners, align financial and executive support, and elevate your business to meaningful scale. And all the while, you’re fighting the status quo—often meeting powerful resistance to your new idea from people who don’t get it.
We’ve been intrigued with these challenges—as advisers and consultants to organizations and startups, as investors in new businesses, as professors, and as business builders ourselves. Over our careers, we have shared with hundreds of management teams and thousands of Princeton and Berkeley students the principles of starting and growing new businesses, and we have made investment decisions on dozens of fast-growing startups across the market landscape. Through each of these vantage points, we are constantly amazed by the variety of paths leaders and entrepreneurs take to build successful, growing ventures.
Probably like you, we wondered if it’s possible to codify the different paths of success. Who succeeds, and how? Are there hidden patterns that determine the success of building and growing a new business? How can someone get better at it?
To answer these questions, we employed a patented research methodology to better understand who builds successful new businesses and how they do so (see “Our Research Approach” and Appendix A for a discussion of our research methodology). In addition, we reviewed the literature on successful entrepreneurs and conducted in-depth interviews with dozens of seasoned business builders.
Our conclusion—and the core idea on which this book is based—is that the personality of the leader or founder is the animating force in building any new business. That is, the particular combination of beliefs and preferences that reflects his or her motivation, decision-making mode, management approach, and leadership style. These factors play out dramatically throughout the startup and scaling of a new business. The Builder’s Personality is the essential engine of shaping the team, product, and overall business—but can also be a formidable obstacle to them. Anyone involved in leading, supporting, or funding new businesses needs to understand how the force of the Builder Personality impacts the growth process.
Of course, many elements shape the success or failure of a new business, whether it’s a stand-alone startup or a new venture inside a larger corporation. Regardless of the setting, both builders are engaged in “the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled,” as Howard Stevenson, the renowned Harvard Business School professor, defined entrepreneurship.1 But unlike the other resources you need to successfully grow a business, personality is the one directly—and quintessentially—in your control.
This book decodes the interplay between the business founder’s personality and the dynamics of growing a business. Our research has revealed four Builder Personalities, and we demonstrate how each one succeeds and fails in different ways in growing a new business. In this practical book, we provide you with tools and examples for assessing your own personality and blueprints to help you apply these ideas to grow your business, build your team, and win.
The Four Business Builder Personalities
Our research has discovered there is no single type of highly successful business builder, but rather four distinct Builder Personalities. We call them the Driver, Explorer, Crusader, and Captain. Each Builder Personality Type builds for growth in markedly different ways, based on four discriminating factors—their motivation to become an entrepreneur and their styles of decision-making mode, management approach, and leadership style. Chapters 2 through 5 discuss each of these builder personalities and give examples and stories illustrating how they work. For now, here are brief descriptions of each personality. Which one sounds most like you? After you have read these summaries of the four types, look for the section “Which Builder Personality Is Most Similar to Yours?” for guidance on deciding which personality you are most like.
Driver:
Relentless, Commercially Focused, and Highly Confident
Drivers can’t help themselves. They have to become builders of business or social ventures of their own as a means of self-validation. Entrepreneurship is almost hardwired into their very identity. They are supremely confident individuals, relentless in pursuing commercial success based on their uncanny anticipation of what markets and customers are looking for.
Drivers often don’t last long as employees in other people’s organizations. They eschew rules and bureaucracy, seeing them as tools to focus the average person, yet often confine the truly gifted, independent-thinking actor. Drivers are willing to do whatever it takes to realize the commercial success inherent in what they believe is their unbounded potential, in fact their destiny.
While not universally the case, the Driver often has something to prove. Perhaps he or she has been thwarted—passed over or even fired—in an earlier job. Or perhaps having grown up in modest circumstances, the Driver is fueled by a desire to apply his or her innate skills to build enormous value and, in so doing, enjoy a better life. Mark Cuban is a famous example. The son of a car upholsterer, he always believed he could and should build a stronger future for himself and, eventually, his family through his drive and innate commercialization skills.2 This chip on a Driver’s shoulder fuels an inner need to prove him or herself to others.
Drivers are not dreamers caught up in the world of ideas; they are doers, willing to outwork, outthink, and outsell anybody in their path. As Ben Weiss of Bai Brands, a new fast-growing healthy beverage company, said, “There’s a tenacity to who I am, that gave birth to this product . . . I’m the most persistent guy in the world. I don’t pretend to be the smartest guy in the room. Everyone has ideas—I just take them a little further than most people. And then when they fail, I don’t get disillusioned. I just pick up the pieces and keep going.”3
However, the Drivers’ intensity and focus come at a cost. They can burn out their teams, depriving them of both the nurturing and sense of ownership that deepen their skills and form the basis for scaling the enterprise.
The Explorer:
Curious, Systems-Centric, and Dispassionate
Builders who are Explorers are not necessarily motivated to build a new business from scratch, but they are inveterate problem seekers and solvers. Whether the problem is designing better pantyhose (Sara Blakely of Spanx) or unlocking the potential of e-commerce (Jeff Bezos at Amazon), their solutions may focus on product or process, or both. These men and women become stand-alone entrepreneurs or builders of new ventures inside existing corporations because building new businesses seems the best way to solve and commercialize their solutions.
Once hooked by the problem, they fixate on execution, at least until the next intriguing problem emerges in search of solution. Their management style is hands-on to the point of being overly controlling at times.
Explorers are systems thinkers who like to tinker with how a system works to develop a better approach. As a result, they tend to be quite empirical in their decision making, relying on the relevant facts and underlying logic of the issue, rather than emotion or intuition.
These builders attract similar problem solvers, who build their own confidence after demonstrating their particular systems-thinking chops. Explorers can be rather dismissive of areas in their companies that don’t relate directly to their primary passion for solution design. For example, they may feel that sales and marketing are necessary nuisances (after all, their brilliant solutions should practically sell themselves).
The Crusader:
Audacious, Mission-Inspired, and Compassionate
Crusaders are primarily motivated by an intense desire to make the world a better place—by solving problems that matter to markets and society. The crusade may be ice cream with Ben & Jerry’s socialmission, a designer dress made affordable for a special occasion by Jenny Fleiss and Jenn Hyman’s Rent the Runway, or a more responsible approach to managing garbage, as it is for Nate Morris’s Rubicon Global—the Uber of the waste management business. Anchored in a deep-seated ability to empathize with others, Crusaders create mission-based companies with bold, long-range vision.
They have a clear mission, and appreciate—indeed, even look forward to—the opportunity to invite others to help bring it to life. In that sense, Crusaders have an unusual mixture of both sensitivity and humility, combined with a confidence in their animating vision for their business. Unlike Explorers, their decision-making mode is highly intuitive and anchored in their almost instinctive sense of what is right.
Crusaders are guided by their founding mission; however, they can struggle with tough people issues. While they are quite effective in attracting dedicated followers inspired by the company’s mission, they frequently avoid conflict, allowing devoted underperformers to languish rather than removing them from the business. On the operational side, Crusaders often find themselves out of their element and don’t always provide the clear direction that other Builder Types do.
The Captain:
Pragmatic, Team-Enabling, and Direct
Captains are as much team assemblers as catalysts. These builders are intent on creating a company culture around values and mutual accountability. Comfortable with leading from behind, they trust their colleagues and culture to fulfill the vision for the company whose future they share. Unlike Explorers and Drivers, they find gratification in the we rather than the me.
But these men and women are Captains nonetheless, with a clear notion of where they want the ship to go and what needs to be done to get there—although they are more willing than their three builder counterparts to hear ideas from others first. They are motivated to build enterprises of enduring value through unleashing the productive potential of the individuals and teams around them.
As leaders, Captains believe in setting clear goals and expectations, then delegating responsibility for execution. While they prefer consensus-rooted decisions, they sometimes manifest an iron fist in a velvet glove when their teams underperform.
Their decision-making style tends to be unemotional and focused on growth, while they are careful to be consistent with mission, vision, and prior personal commitments. Captains are arguably the most fully developed leaders in terms of direct, honest, and consistent communication among the individuals and teams they manage. But their more consensus-based approach can lead to a form of incrementalism that may miss the necessity or opportunity for more dramatic, disruptive innovation in their markets.
Which Builder Personality Is Most Similar to Yours?
While the descriptions you read on the preceding pages are the simplest way to identify which Builder Personality Type you are most like, here we will show you a bit more about how our typing process works.
The instrument appearing on the next page represents a simplified version of our Builder Personality Discovery™ (BPD) quiz. For each question, we invite you to circle the response that best captures your view. You can then draw a line down through each answer, as shown in the sample below.
In Appendix B, we have plotted the response pattern for the archetype of each Builder Type so you can compare yours to each type and discern which is most like yours.
For this paper-and-pencil simulation, we have collapsed the potential answers for seven of the questions from a seven-point scale to three answers (disagree, neutral, and agree) to facilitate your ability to see the pattern that best matches your responses.
There is a reasonable amount of variation within and across questions for each Builder Type. As you would expect, the archetype for a given type does not capture this variation, so we strongly encourage you to visit our website at www.builtforgrowth.com. There, our algorithm converts your set of answers along the full seven-point scale to an accurate assessment of your type.
You may be wondering why an algorithm is needed. There are over one billion potential answer patterns to these questions, so this analysis is not the work of the traditional pencil-and-paper approach.
The Dynamic Challenges Every Business Builder Faces
In this book, you’ll see how each of the four Builder Personalities handles the challenges and opportunities in creating long-lasting, large-scale business value for customers, investors, employees and themselves. Regardless of the setting in which the builders work, they all face a set of recurring dynamics that test their ability to succeed. Whichever Builder Personality you are, you are likely to encounter five dynamic challenges that stand above the rest. Each deals with transforming a particular resource or aspect of the business: its solution, team, customer, sponsor, and scale. We call them the growth dynamics (figure 1-1).
These five growth dynamics will both demonstrate and expose your personality’s strengths and weaknesses. Some will be conquered easily; others will challenge you to your core.
We use the term dynamics for several reasons. These challenges continuously change, as the nature of the business, its stage of maturity, and industry setting vary. They also happen not necessarily sequentially but often simultaneously. And they recur throughout the business-building process. In the hands of the strongest builders, these dynamics can transform business value.
The term growth dynamics also captures the essence of what’s involved in building a business. In broad usage, dynamics are defined as “the forces or properties that stimulate growth, development, or change within a system or process.”4 That is dead on. Physicists use the term to refer to the branch of mechanics concerned with the motion of bodies under the action of forces—also a pretty accurate, if analogous, description of what happens to emerging ventures as their builders struggle to survive and achieve scale.
This book focuses on the interplay between each Builder Personality (the who) and the five growth dynamics (the what). This interplay is where value is created, transformed, or destroyed.
The Interplay of Who and What: How Builders Engage the Growth Dynamics
In these pages we do not simply define and describe the four Builder Personality Types. We look at these builders in action—how their behavior and preferences are reflected in why they are builders, how they make decisions, and how they manage and lead through the rigors of the key growth dynamics.
No single Builder Personality Type holds the key to success: each builder fashions his or her own blueprint for building. Some builders’ strategies work better than others’ strategies, reflecting the gifts and gaps of each Builder Type. But together, the strategies of all four types offer a portfolio of pragmatic lessons you can apply to leverage your own particular strengths, address the challenges your business faces, and—in the process—become a stronger builder.
With stories and examples drawn from our personal interviews and other sources, we will show you how each Builder Personality Type handles these challenges in many business settings. Regardless of your Builder Type, you can learn from each of the other three. Armed with these powerful insights, you can improve your own odds of building business success—whether you’re in an independent startup, creating a new business within a larger corporation, considering starting a new business, or otherwise engaged in society’s imperative agenda of new-venture creation.
How This Book Can Help You
We’re not the first authors who seek to understand the phenomenon of building successful businesses from scratch or to understand personality, for that matter. You can find clues to such success in biographies of legendary entrepreneurs—from Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, and Larry Ellison to Mary Kay, Arianna Huffington, and Oprah Winfrey. These stories can be fascinating, educational, and even inspiring. You can learn much about what it takes to launch, grow, and sustain a business that way.
This is not a book about the mechanical steps of launching a startup or another venture, product-market fit, or the keys to innovation. Lots of other books do that. But great recipes don’t make great restaurants—great chefs do. While each of these books can be useful, they miss the most important element: specifically, who the builder is and how his or her personality engages with the dynamic challenges every entrepreneur faces.
By understanding the gifts and gaps that go along with your Builder Personality, you can better tackle the fundamental challenges of business survival and growth to scale. We’ll offer you practical suggestions for how you can become a stronger builder, using the patterns of success and failure of each personality in addressing the various growth dynamics.
Work Our Research Is Based On
Our book is anchored on two foundational pillars, one in personality and one in business growth. The first is the decades-old tradition of personality research, which you may be familiar with through widely used instruments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the DiSC Profile, and Hogan Assessments.5 The second is Geoffrey Moore’s classic work, Crossing the Chasm, which laid out the fundamental challenges companies face in scaling across five customer segments, from innovators and early adopters to early and late majority and, finally, to laggards.6 Moore’s work greatly influenced our thinking. In the same way he found that businesses encounter a different set of challenges across the different customer segments (an insight that led to the original Rosetta methodology), we show how leaders and founders encounter a different set of challenges across the core activities of launching and scaling a business.
Builders of new businesses work inside and outside existing corporations. In these pages, we examine both types of builders. The role that Builder Personality Type plays is similar no matter where a venture is being pursued. Along the way, we will, however, highlight some of the contextual nuances in different settings.
If you’re thinking of becoming a builder, we can help you learn the patterns of success that lead to achieving scale. You can easily determine which Builder Personality is most like yours and how to benefit from your counterparts’ hard-earned insights in handling the challenges ahead.
If you’re already working in, or considering joining, a new venture team, we’ll help you understand the builder at its center and figure out how to collaborate most effectively with his or her growth agenda. And if you’re a funder or sponsor of new ventures, you’ll see how to spot and support each Builder Personality to improve his or her odds of growing a business of meaningful scale.
We know from personal experience that change is difficult. So the advice you’ll find in these pages will range from easier approaches that enhance your natural strengths to changes that are far more difficult because they may require confronting some of your deepest misgivings or even fears. You can then decide which strategy is right for you.
While building a new business from scratch can be intensely lonely, our message is you are not alone. You can take comfort and wisdom from those builders—famous or not—who share your Personality Type, and you can learn from them. Likewise, other Builder Personality Types can show you how they leverage their strengths and buffer their weaknesses—insights that may help you as well.
How Built for Growth Unfolds
In part 1, we profile the four Builder Types in detail, devoting one chapter to each. Through our personal interviews with extraordinary men and women who exemplify each Personality Type, we examine how their approach has enabled them to make their mark across the business landscape. We share the stories of well-known entrepreneurs like Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (of ice cream fame) and Jack Dorsey of Twitter and Square, in addition to lesser-known founders like Nate Morris, Grace Choi, and Steve Breitman, who have built noteworthy value in their own endeavors—in sanitation, cosmetics, and apartment laundries, respectively. We include corporate entrepreneurs such as Chris Pinkham, the inventor of the underlying technology that enabled Amazon Web Services; the late Charlie Cawley, who built MBNA, the credit card behemoth, out of a small department within Maryland National Bank; and legends like Norbert Berta, who created the caplet dosage form that helped the Tylenol brand recovery from the notorious 1982 poisonings.
Using many of these examples, we illustrate how each Builder Type approaches the dynamic challenges at play in building a highly successful business—where does each create value, and where does each risk destroying it? What makes these men and women tick? How do they make decisions, manage, and lead to grow their businesses? We conclude each chapter with a blueprint offering practical advice you can put into action immediately to become a stronger builder by leveraging your innate strengths and buffering your weaknesses by delegating to others the activities that constitute your weaknesses.
In part 2, we pull the lens back from the Personality Types to examine three key kinds of crews builders must assemble to build for growth. In chapter 6, we examine the deeply personal decision of whether to join forces with a cofounder, and if so, which Builder Personality Type of collaborator may fit best with your Personality Type. Chapter 7 discusses how you can recruit a team that works best with you, and chapter 8 focuses on attracting the financial investors or executive sponsors that best match your Builder Personality.
Part 3 constitutes a single chapter. By this point in our book, you will have learned there is no single successful Builder Personality Type. Each builder can be successful in his or her own way. We suggest two strategies to becoming a stronger builder. With the first, the expert builder strategy, you concentrate on your talents—or, as we term it, elevate your gifts—and delegate the tasks and responsibilities that are not your strengths. With the more ambitious approach, which we call the master builder strategy, you borrow and adapt some of the gifts of the other Builder Types—making them your own through practice over time.
The path to becoming a master builder will challenge you to examine some of your longest-held assumptions and tendencies, both of which may stem from your deepest aspirations and apprehensions. In this final chapter, we arm you with the knowledge and practical steps to begin truly expanding your builder repertoire beyond the confines of your own Builder Personality. In so doing, you are not becoming another builder. Rather, like all master craftsmen or world-class athletes, you are learning strategies that work for your counterparts and—with effort—can be translated to work for you, too.
We welcome you to this journey of self-discovery. In the pages that follow you will likely see yourself or perhaps fellow builders you work with or are inspired by. Most importantly, we hope that as you close the final page, you will feel equipped to become a stronger builder for growth.
A Builder Personality Tour through Silicon Valley
Let’s see these personalities in action by taking a quick spin through the heart of Silicon Valley. Take a look at how each Builder Personality has shaped the structure, growth trajectory, and culture of four iconic companies.7
Apple’s Driver
Our first stop is on everybody’s short list of startup-to-standout success stories. Leaving aside how revolutionary Apple 1.0 was in transforming the computer industry when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs got started, consider the stamp the prodigal Jobs himself left on this company after his return in 1997 to spearhead the stunning revival of the company. His personality—born to build, an intuitive decision maker, with a controlling and often abrasive management style—shaped that company’s entire destiny. Jobs was a Driver’s Driver—relentless in lashing his company to his singular vision of “insanely great products” he knew the world (and his customers) needed, even before they did. This kind of market-sensing capability, propelled by an obsessive drive to launch the perfect market-fitting product, typifies the Builder Personality we call the Driver.
Apple under Jobs’s direction was not a “we’re a big family” organization. It was—and is—a proud, defiant, and famously secretive place under the spotlight scrutiny of its brilliant, if sometimes mercurial, founder-CEO. Its fusion of beautiful design simplicity, functional technology, and innovative business models continues to reflect the transformative power a Driver can have—even when he or she sees way beyond everyone else’s headlights.
Facebook’s Explorer
In building Facebook into the global phenomenon it is today, Mark Zuckerberg revealed his Builder Type’s defining curiosity, systems thinking, and fascination with an interesting challenge: how can I attract, engage with, profile, and then connect with my friends or people I’d like to date? Zuck, as his friends know him, epitomizes the Explorer personality.
Although Facebook’s headquarters are just up the road from Apple’s, you’d think you were in a different world altogether if you roamed the halls of Facebook and talked with its employees. Attracted by the fluid problem-solving atmosphere, people are encouraged to align themselves with projects that excite them. The workplace environment is filled with handwritten signs and team notes on almost any available surface. Facebook’s chief people officer says: “We’re intentionally trying to mold roles around people rather than people around roles. That puts people in a place where they can do their very best work.”8 Not exactly the kind of crew Jobs would have commanded.
Google’s Crusaders
“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”—it’s hard to imagine a more ambitious initial company mission than that (except perhaps Google’s other one: “Don’t be evil”). But that’s the crusade Google’s cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, embarked on in 1998. Since then, Google has redefined how we use the web, redesigned concepts of the workplace, and refined its business model—separating its wildly successful advertising business from its “moon shot” initiatives like self-driving cars. The open, shoot-for-the-moon culture of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, reflects the comparably creative but looser management approach that characterizes the Crusader personality.
Both of Google’s businesses are essentially search engines: one for what is, and the other for what might be. And each reflects the more accomodating style of their Crusaders, builders who are comfortable with a great deal of experimentation. Their Crusader visions are bold and broad.
HP’s Captains
We end our tour where Silicon Valley arguably began, not far from the famous one-car garage where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard launched their eponymous company with $568. They had a vision for not just their technology, but also for the kind of company they wanted to build. Their combination of technical wizardry and leadership wisdom put a distinctive stamp on their creation for more than half a century. Both Hewlett and Packard were Captains, builders focused not only on producing great products but also on creating a great team-based culture.
Their Captain personalities translated into what is commonly referred to as “the HP way.”9 It reinforced the importance of teamwork and acted as a guide to tough business decisions as well as an inspiration for what the company stood for in the hearts and minds of its people and its customers. Although HP has lost its own way in recent years, its history suggests a proud heritage that may be tapped again for future success.
Our Research Approach: Applying a Proven Methodology to Discover Builder Personality
We used the same proven, patented research methodology that one of us (Chris) and his team at Rosetta (the digital marketing and consulting firm he built) developed to decode how different consumer personalities operate in hundreds of markets around the world. Rosetta’s Personality-Based Clustering technique has been used for nearly twenty years in service to leading companies in health care, consumer technology, financial services, and retail. Among its many clients were Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Genentech, Capital One, Fidelity, Citibank, Microsoft, and Samsung.
The Rosetta research methodology answered a fundamental question: who buys what products and services, and why? For this book, we applied the same methodology to answer a question further upstream: who builds the businesses that sell those products and services in the first place, and why?
Whom We Focused On
Building a successful business and growing it to large scale is a marathon effort. We do not focus here on the general personality characteristics that might differentiate the runners of that race from the public at large—things like risk tolerance, comfort with ambiguity, ambition, a sense of independence, and personal initiative. You can read elsewhere about those traits that are shared by most entrepreneurs the world over, whether they are successful or not.
We concentrate instead on the winners of the marathon—the successful men and women who have built businesses that have survived and grown. These entrepreneurs are, and have, built for growth. Their companies have withstood the test of both time and market. Some of their enterprises are valued at over $100 billion, while others have annual revenues a small fraction of that. But virtually all of the entrepreneurial builders in our study have defied the odds in building businesses that have achieved longevity, impact, and scale that distinguishes them. While there is obviously no guarantee the builders we’ve selected and their ventures will survive indefinitely, they have nevertheless outlasted most other runners in this marathon.
How We Did It
Our first task was to discover the factors that separate builders into groups in which their motivations, beliefs, and preferences explicitly drive their approach to building for growth. We designed a quantitative, one-hundred-question survey instrument based on our combined experience as consultants, investors, and professors and on Rosetta’s proven methodology for developing questions that isolate the personality dimensions that drive different behaviors. Next, we fielded the resulting survey to a national pool of successful entrepreneurs, builders of companies whose survival and scale have defied the odds.
Using Rosetta’s methodology, we then analyzed billions of potential respondent-answer combinations to discover and ultimately profile the four distinctive Builder Types. Our algorithm looks at every combination of question and response to identify the smallest number of Builder Types so as to simultaneously maximize the similarities within each type and the differences between that type and all others, using the fewest number of questions. This method allows us to categorize successful builders into one of these four personality types, but also accommodates the occasional hybrid builder who, while predominantly one type, also shares characteristics from one or more of the others.
The factors that distinguish each Builder Personality from the others (motivation, decision-making mode, management and leadership approach) also provide the basis for what we call the polar complement of each type. We coined this seemingly contradictory term to signify the type who is the polar opposite on these defining factors, which in turn drives opposing preferences and thereby, behaviors. But, within each type’s opposite lies both the mindset and corresponding skill from which the other type can learn, hence the opportunity for being one’s complement.
This concept of accelerating one’s personal growth through understanding and then accessing certain aspects of one’s opposing preferences is based on the work of Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Briggs, which in turn drew upon Carl Jung’s work on psychological types.10 We explore these opportunities for cross-type learning in detail in chapter 9.
Our modeling also enabled us to distill the original instrument into the ten-question BPD quiz introduced earlier. We then administered the BPD to successful builders across a broad business landscape, from independent startups to internal new business initiatives. Thousands of successful builders have now taken this questionnaire.
To expand our understanding of each Personality Type, we conducted in-depth personal interviews with dozens of builders of each type. In addition, we reviewed published insights on other prominent successful entrepreneurs, many of whose stories you will read in these pages. (See Appendix A for additional explanation of our methodology.)
A Disclaimer
Since we explicitly studied successful entrepreneurs, this book does not attempt to explain the causal difference between the winners and losers of the marathon of building new businesses for growth. We believe more can be learned from them than the wannabes.
We designed this book as a practical resource for independent and corporate entrepreneurs, their teams, and sponsors. Our research seeks first to understand how Builder Personality shapes the growth path of the business and, second, to offer practical advice on how you can become a stronger builder.
We consider this book the beginning of a collaborative journey to understand the dynamic interplay between Builder Personality and the building process. Our research is exploratory and the insights it has revealed will no doubt be refined as others examine this critical intersection. We welcome that. Further, our advice to each Builder Personality is based on our own extensive work as consultants, investors, and professors, but it, too, is hardly the last word in explaining entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurship is far too complex a phenomenon for that.
So we invite you as readers and others in the field to build on our initial research in mapping this intersection between Builder Personality and the growth dynamics of building great businesses. We hope as our ideas take hold, a body of new insights and advice will be developed and shared among builders and those who support their quest for growth.
Finally, for a more detailed explanation regarding the issues of accurately determining Builder Personality Types consistently and the question of hybrids of two or more Personality Types, please see Appendix A.