
Over more than 14 years of Real Business, the team has interviewed with hundreds of outstanding leaders. From bullish salespeople to technical wizards, they are a diverse breed. However, beneath the surface, a few vital characteristics emerge, which they share in common.
- Implacable self-belief
- A single core technical skill or ability (it could be marketing, selling, or a specialist scientific capability).
- High resources of personal energy that enable you to work often brutal hours
- You will be unafraid, indeed relish, talking about money. You are definitely not diffident and English about this.
- You won’t sit on problems or difficult situations, you’d rather deal with them and get them out of the way.
- At the right moment, you love to party. Sol Kerzner, the iconic hotelier and founder of Sun City, is one of the world’s great hosts.
- You will have something about you – call it charisma – that inspires loyalty in others.
- You are fired by powerful competitive instincts, even anger, that drives you to win over your competitors.
- Personal resilience. Entrepreneurs will have setbacks. The true winners will absorb them, learn from them and rebound.
- They love what they do, at times at the expense of your family and friends
- And you really will believe that your business, product, service, is better than what’s come before or is offered in their market now (even when it patently isn’t!).
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