Dilbert’s Lessons in Entrepreneurship

April 19, 2011

Here’s a good read by Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert – (“How to Get a Real Education“). In it, Adams describes how he went through college jumping from one entrepreneurship initiative to another… and how those experiences shaped his eventual career. Adams’ perspective is that colleges need to be more proactive in teaching students business and entrepreneurship, and to do so through real life experiences.

As a graduate from Northeastern University’s Co-Op program, I can’t agree more. At Northeastern, I went through a five-year undergraduate program in Computer Engineering. I graduated with lots of technical knowledge, the vast majority of which I did not apply in real life. But I also graduated with two years of full-time technical work experience. And it was the latter that helped me get a jump start on how to become an effective entrepreneur.

Adams then lists a number of characteristics that an aspiring entrepreneur needs to develop:

Combine Skills. The first thing you should learn in a course on entrepreneurship is how to make yourself valuable. It’s unlikely that any average student can develop a world-class skill in one particular area. But it’s easy to learn how to do several different things fairly well.

Fail Forward. If you’re taking risks, and you probably should, you can find yourself failing 90% of the time. The trick is to get paid while you’re doing the failing and to use the experience to gain skills that will be useful later. Students should be taught that failure is a process, not an obstacle.

Find the Action. Move to where the action is. Distance is your enemy.

Attract Luck. You can’t manage luck directly, but you can manage your career in a way that makes it easier for luck to find you. To succeed, first you must do something. And if that doesn’t work, which can be 90% of the time, do something else. Luck finds the doers.

Conquer Fear. People can be trained to replace fear and shyness with enthusiasm. Every entrepreneur can use that skill.

Write Simply. Simplicity makes ideas powerful. Want examples? Read anything by Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.

Learn Persuasion. Students of entrepreneurship should learn the art of persuasion in all its forms, including psychology, sales, marketing, negotiating, statistics and even design. Usually those skills are sprinkled across several disciplines. For entrepreneurs, it makes sense to teach them as a package.

Ultimately, my belief is that entrepreneurship can’t be taught; rather it’s an acquired skill. And the only way to acquire the skill is to try something new and fail at it. Then try something else, and fail at it. And on and on, where you learn from each failure and in the process you become a better and better entrepreneur. In my role mentoring software CEOs, I find that most of my preaching comes from my own early stage experiences. And my best experiences were learned by making mistakes. The best lessons are gained from our mistakes not our successes.

The Chief Executive Officer

Firas was previously a venture capitalist at Openview. He has returned to his operational roots and now works as The Chief Executive Officer of Everteam and is also the Founder of <a href="http://nsquaredadvisory.com/">nsquared advisory</a>. Previously, he helped launch a VC fund, start and grow a successful software company and also served time as an obscenely expensive consultant, where he helped multi-billion-dollar companies get their operations back on track.