CM 034: Amy Wilkinson on the Secrets of Successful Entrepreneurs

We may believe that successful entrepreneurs possess innate abilities that set them apart, but what if those skills are just the result of practice and experience? That is the conclusion of Amy Wilkinson, bestselling author of The Creators Code: The Six Essential Skills of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs. She performed five years of interviews with the founders of organizations such as LinkedIn, eBay, Under Armour, Tesla Motors, Spanx, Airbnb, and PayPal. The result? She learned that these entrepreneurs share six common skills that made them successful. Perhaps more importantly, she contends that these are things that any of us can learn. Wilkinson is a strategic adviser and lecturer at Stanford Business School. Her career spans leadership roles with McKinsey and J.P. Morgan. She has served as a White House fellow, special assistant to the U.S. Trade Representative, and as a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School. In this episode, we talk about: How successful entrepreneurs seek not to be first, but rather, to be only Why creators hold the key to a new economy The importance of finding the gap between what is and what can be How we can train ourselves to spot problems and see them as opportunities How Starbucks built its success on the concept of lift and shift Ensuring success by looking forward versus looking back Why you might need to fire yourself in order to innovate How nostalgia holds us back What the OODA Loop can teach us about entrepreneurship Why we all need to build a failure ratio into our work in order to grow The power of networking minds to solve big problems How you can be creative, innovative, and entrepreneurial within your current organization Episode Links @amywilkinson AmyWilkinson.com Elon Musk and Tesla and Zip2 Kevin Plank and Under Armour and the University of Maryland and the Terrapins Howard Schultz and Starbucks Nascar Driving School Chris Guillebeau and Born for This: Find the Work You Were Meant to Do Andy Grove of Intel Gordon Moore of Intel John Boyd and OODA Loop and Paypal Billpoint Palm Pilot Youtube Yelp Digg Founders Fund Clarion Capital Palantir Jessica Herrin and Stella and Dot InnoCentive BP Oil AOL If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!