Human Capital Continued--a Warrior Way of Thinking

Success as an entrepreneur benefits from thinking like a warrior. A warrior sees threats as problems to overcome. He or she asks how they can pull things together to get past or over whatever barrier they see ahead.

Too many people think like victims do. They see a problem and ask, "What did this have to happen to me?" An entrepreneur can't think that way.

Problems are opportunities in disguise.

My goal here is to help entrepreneurs climb all the way to the top. How am I doing?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my connection strategy.

It makes Sherpa Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my Sherpa Literary. Go to www.timswritingblog.blogspot.com for my ideas on writing and publishing and read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writers go. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.

My goal here is to help entrepreneurs climb all the way to the top. How am I doing?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my connection strategy.

It makes Sherpa Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my Sherpa Literary. Go to www.timswritingblog.blogspot.com for my ideas on writing and publishing and read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writers go. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.

Human Capital--Trust and Leadership and Health

We've talked leadership and trust to death. These are two major forms of human capital the entrepreneur needs in spades. If you're still foggy on them, check out some of my earlier blogs. Just search for them and they'll come up. These bring up the complex of forms of human capital you will need.

But there's other things. For example good health. You have to have good health to start a business. You can't be at the top of your form if you're always fighting an illness. If you do have health problems think again what you are up to. If you have a partner who can help you out, that's to the good.

If you're starting a business, get as fit as possible and practice behaviors that promote good health so you can get in the game and stay there.

My goal here is to help entrepreneurs climb all the way to the top. How am I doing?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my connection strategy.

It makes Sherpa Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my Sherpa Literary. Go to www.timswritingblog.blogspot.com for my ideas on writing and publishing and read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writers go. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.

My goal here is to help entrepreneurs climb all the way to the top. How am I doing?

Entrepreneurship is the life's blood of all my professional activities. It makes them go. It informs my connection strategy.

It makes Sherpa Real Estate , my real estate referral business, go. See www.yourstopforrealestate.blogspot.com.

It powers my Sherpa Literary. Go to www.timswritingblog.blogspot.com for my ideas on writing and publishing and read my mystery for free at wwww.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com or buy it from Amazon.com more cheaply than you can print it out.

It fuels my publishing enterprise, By and for Writers go. See www.byandforwriters.blogspot.com where you can get a poem or a short story published.

Forms of Entrepreneurial Capital

Here are the three forms of entrepreneurial capital you'll need to compete as an entrepreur:

1. Human Capital: your skills, talents, and abilities. Your ability to think, write, communicate, inspire, and listen, your personal health, your creativity, your leadership skills, trustworthiness, etc.

2. Social Capital: the number and types of people you know. The more people you know and the better your "crowd," the more social capital you have. How many people do you know? How much can you rely upon them to share with you information about opportunities in your market or to spread the word about your company.

3. Financial Capital: money or access to money. Do you have investments, savings accounts, checking accounts, CDs, money market accounts, etc. you could use to support the business and pay the lender back.

Ron Burt, Hobard W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, came up with this stuff. You can find his argument in Structural Holes; the Social Structure of Competition(Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, pp. 8-9) or read my blog posting for 7.15.2008.

You will need to assess your capital in each of these areas, then go on to look at what you will need to be fit as an entrepreneur.

My goal here is to promote skilled entrepreneurs. What do you think about this? If you have something substantive to add, post a comment.

This is some of the stuff that will go into my entrepreneurship course. The ideas in it supply the life's blood of my professional activities: teaching, writing, and real estate. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot/com.

Human Capital

Specifically, Ron Burt says:

Second, the player has human capital. Your national qualities--charm, health, intelligence, and looks--combined with the skills you have acquired in formal education and job experience give you abilities to excel at certain tasks.

Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (New York, Random House, Modern Library ed., 2000, p. 306)says:

Fourthly, of the acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society. The acquisition of such talents, by the maintenance of the acquirer during his education, study, or apprenticeship, always costs a real expense, which is a capital fixed and realized, as it were, in his person. Those talents, as they make a part of his fortune, so do they likewise of that of the society to which he belongs. The improved dexterity of a workman may be considered in the same light as a machine or instrument of trade which facilitates and abridges labour, and which, though it costs a certain expense, repays that expense with a profit.

Quants don't like it because it's rather smushy. But if the entrepreneur doesn't have any, the entrepreneur isn't going far. I made a series of blog posts about human capital back in October, so I'm not going to say more about them here.

Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, has an entry on it, too, so go ahead and read that one. Apparently critics claim that advocates of human capital try to explain everything by it. I don't see anyone seriously doing that, not if their sane and/or serious. There are ways of measuring human capital though, and those are helpful to the entrepreneur. I guess some people will oppose anything.

What do you think about this? Are you flush with human capital? Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs all of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com./blog and for entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Creativity

Creativity is key for an entrepreneur. If someone wants to start a business, it's hard to see him or her succeeding if he or she is not creative.

From Wikipedia,

Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. An alternative conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new.

No one know what creativity is for sure or why some people are creative others not, nor why creativity manifests itself the way it does.

How do you know if someone is creative? Two standards I would invoke are originality and fostering of social improvement. Mozart was creative. Einstein was creative. Newton was creative Ibsen was creative. Jonas Salk was creative. Edison was creative. Hitler was NOT creative. Ted Bundy was NOT creative. Joseph Stalin was NOT creative. Saddam Hussein was NOT creative.

If you're interested in the subject start with Wikipedia. Read the entire article and follow its references and links. From there, cyberspace is the limit.

What do you think about this? I'd like to know. Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing and publishing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Human Capital #7--Knowledge

Dictionary.com, the free, on-line dictionary give 10 meanings of the word knowledge, the following of which are relevant here:

Acquaintance with facts, truths, or principles, as from study or investigation, or familiarity or conversance with a particular subject or branch of learning, as in a knowledge of accounting or Knowledge of human nature, the body of truths or facts accumulated in the course of time, the sum of what is known.

The entrepreneur must have knowledge of his or her industry, of the story of that industry, of all the particular threads that are interwoven into that story, of how they are changing, unraveling, becoming more tightly woven together, or finding new threads becoming woven into the tapestry. Knowledge the entrepreneur does not have has to be sought from outside. And knowledge the entrepreneur does have must be constantly and consistently updated. For a fuller treatment of "knowledge" read the entire dictionary entry.

I'm interested in your opinion. What do you think of this? Post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs my every aspect of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing, go www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Human Capital #6--Trust

This is a revision of my post from 9/19. Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia says:

Trust is a relationship of reliance. A trusted party is presumed to seek to fulfill policies, ethical codes, law and their previous promises....Trust is a prediction of reliance on an action, based on what a party knows about the other party. Trust is a statement about what is otherwise unknown -- for example, because it is far away, cannot be verified, or is in the future.

Our current economic crisis is a crisis of trust. Investors believed that mortgage-backed derivatives were based on mortgages which were backed up with colateral. They weren't. Now, that the sh*t has hit the fan, no one trusts anyone anymore. That's because trust which has been built up over a long period of time can disappear in a heart beat. Now banks don't trust each other; people don't trust the government; people don't trust each other; the government doesn't trust banks; other countries don't trust us; and so on.

The good news is that trust can be rebuilt. We have to start somewhere. I think John McCain's proposal to buy up home mortgages is a constructive idea. I'd like to learn more about it. Somewhere, we have to start trusting each other. Until we do, we will never repair the damage.

What do you think? Go back and read my post from 9/19. And read the whole Wikipedia article and follow the links. If something resonates with you, post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com

Human Capital #5--Character

A person's character is another aspect of human capital the entrepreneur brings to the table. Dictionary.com, the free, on-line dictionary, gives a range of meanings for the word "character" germain to this discussion:

The aggregate of features and traits that form the individual nature of some person or thing; Moral or ethical quality, [as] a man of fine, honorable character; Qualities of honesty, courage, or the like; Integrity, [as]: It takes character to face up to a bully. Reputation [as] : a stain on one's character; Good repute.

For an entrepreneur, the issue of character is central. People are less likely to follow anyone who does not have integrity and character. less likely to partner with him or her, less likely to buy their products. In every endeavor, the person without character is swimming upstream in a repids. Entrepreneurship is no different than other aspects of life.

I'm interested in what you think. If this resonates with you, post a comment. And if you're interested in character, go read the whole entry and follow the links.

Entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For my entrepreneurial real estate blog, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for my publishing blog go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Human Capital #3--Intuition

Dictionary.com, the free, on-line dictionary, gives 6 different meanings of the word "intuition." Among them are:

direct perception of truth, fact, etc., independent of any reasoning process; immediate apprehension; a fact, truth, etc., perceived in this way; keen and quick insight; the quality or ability of having such direct perception or quick insight

Insight is part of the human capital that the entrepreneur brings to the competitive arena. Learn more about it by reading the full article.

Intuition is important to entrepreneurs. They are helped if they can look at a situation and get a good intuitive grasp of the essential truth of a situation or possibility. Those who can do it have a leg up. Still, though even strong intuition has to be backed up by research and data. Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in his book, Blink; the Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2005), a follow-up to his very successful and very excellent Tipping Point.

If anything I say grabs you, post a comment.

Entrepreneurship informs all my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.hatman.com

Human Capital #2--Experience

Dictionary.com, the free, on-line dictionary, gives us eight meannings for "experience". Among those:

'the process or fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing something: business experience';'the observing, encountering, or undergoing of things generally as they occur in the course of time'; 'to learn from experience; the range of human experience; knowledge or practical wisdom gained from what one has observed, encountered, or undergone: a man of experience; philosophy';'the totality of the cognitions given by perception; all that is perceived, understood, and remembered.'

Experience comprises some of the human capital the entrepreneur brings to the competitive arena. Any area where the entrepreneur lacks experience will have to be supplied by someone else. My uncle, for example, got $50,000 from his father back in the 1950s. Uncle was an actor, so he dumped all of it into producing a broadway show. He lost it all because he had no experience producing anything and therefore didn't know what he was doing.

If you like what I say, post a comment. And consult the whole Eictionary.com article.

Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For my entrepreneurial real estate blog, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for my entrepreneurial writing blog go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com.

Human Capital #1--Ability

Ability is one form of human capital. Human Capital, from Ron Burt, is one of the weapons that the entrepreneur brings to the competitive arena. Dictionary.com defines "ability" as:

[The] power or capacity to do or act physically, mentally, legally, morally, financially, etc.; competence in an activity or occupation because of one's skill, training, or other qualification [such as] the ability to sing well; abilities, talents, special skills or aptitudes [as in] 'Composing music is beyond his abilities.'

If the entrepreneur does not have the superior abilities to support what he or she wants to do, they're going to have a bit of tough sledding. And if you're interested in looking at the derivations and different meanings of the word, read the whole entry.

If you like what I say, post a comment. And subscribe to my blog so you can have my posts sent to your email every day.

Entrepreneurship informs all of my professional activities. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com./blog and for entrepreneurial writing, go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com