The Power of Single-Mindedness  | Wed Feb. 9, 2011 11:03 AM GMT
Via Tyler Cowen, Inc. magazine has a piece in its current issue
about how entrepreneurs think. It's based on research from Saras
Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden
School of Business, and here's one bit:    This reminds me of a
study that I read about years ago. (No link, unfortunately,
since I don't remember where I saw it.) The gist of it was that
a team of researchers tried to figure out what made
entrepreneurs different from ordinary corporate executives. Were
they less risk averse? It turned out they weren't. Did they have
different kinds of social and/or analytic skills? Not really.
Were they more energetic? More visionary? Better able to
understand new markets? No, no, and no.  So what was it? They
discovered there was one metric on which entrepreneurs scored
far higher than other executives: self confidence.
Entrepreneurs, it turned out, weren't right about things any
more often than other executives. But they