What The Beatles can teach us about entrepreneurship
What The Beatles can teach us about entrepreneurship
For example, did you know that in less than 2 weeks since the Beatles arrived to the US for the first time, Americans had bought $2.5 million worth of merchandise One typical item was an ice cream sandwich called “Beatle Nut”, another popular one was a wig in the style of their haircut at that time (one newspaper described them as “75% publicity, 20% haircut, and 5% lilting lament”).
Fine article which mixes what The Beatles did with insightful business lessons for your startup. Also no one misses out a post which “Beatles” and “entrepreneur” in its title (speaking for me).
A test to spot entrepreneurs
Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs are seen as either super cool geniuses or ruthless opportunists. Do they share common traits?
But you don’t have to be like that to be successful,” says Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, an Argentine academic who is professor of business psychology at University College London and Goldsmiths College, who has made the study of entrepreneurialism his business. Self-made billionaire entrepreneurs, he acknowledges, are “by definition unrepresentative. There is very little to be learnt about entrepreneurship from them.”
So he went on to designing a test that would help identify and measure the entrepreneur in you. Disneyland Paris and even the Royal Ballet in London are using this test. (It’s not easy to find a job when you’re a dancer because your career ends when you’re very young.)
“Meta is the next generation of psychometric testing,” he says. After years of research, the developers have come up with a new way of spotting and measuring skills linked to entrepreneurialism that are increasingly important in the modern working environment, he adds.
The Meta test has four broad headings – opportunism, proactivity, creativity and vision. Within that, it looks at what drives an individual – for example, their ambition, sense of curiosity, how innovative they are and how they see themselves working in a structured environment. Proponents claim it has any number of applications.
A fascinating enterprise.