confidence
...f the hat to having financial struggles. He gave a seminar on being prosperous in business and pulled it off with absolute conviction because that was what he felt: absolute conviction." Harshaw's notion of "real" confidence may accommodate a larger tolerance for risk than many people find acceptable. Other entrepreneurs had different perspectives on real and false confidence -- almost as many as on confidence itself. Many drew a distinction between false confidence (which they defined as a serious misreading of one's own abilities) and misplaced confidence (a misreading of a market, say, or of a trusted partner). Some described false confidence as the ultimate fair-weather friend, buoying you when times are good and deserting you when they're bad. The test of real confidence, they said, is if after you lose it, it comes back. "If you're not confident, you can't be a leader, and that's all there is to it." --Mark Burnett By that last standard Scott Earnest has real confidence. Earnest was the kind of kid who had an American Express card at age 17. Three years out of college, he was employed by a software company that put him in charge of a $20-million IBM account and more than 600 employees in five states. "Aren't you afraid you'll fail?" his mother once asked him. "I'm not going to fail," Earnest says he replied. "I am Confidence Man." He brought the same type of conviction with him when he bought his first company: a pool-cleaning outfit. But his confidence made him sloppy. Pool cleaning requires administering a chemical test to determine how much chlorine goes in the water. The results appear as colored bands, and Earnest was color-blind. "I had put everything on the line," he says, "and I was standing there looking at this test result, and I said, 'Shoot, I have no idea what this means.'" With the company collapsing, Earnest's wife staged a "confidence intervention," inviting 15 relatives to confront her demoralized husband and one by one remind him of his strengths. He lost the business but came back soon after with CEO Inc., a successful IT-staffing firm in Boca Raton, Fla. Should confidence be faked? False confidence is a flaw; faked confidence is a tactic. Still, it's a tactic that entrepreneurs disagree about. Certainly, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani became a national hero because he radiated strength yet never tried to mask his human vulnerability during an extremely tough time. But such honesty doesn't always play well in the confidence business. Brent Habig, founder and CEO of Tigris Consulting, in New York City, says that as a consultant he must appear confident at all times. "Otherwise why are they paying me?" he asks. Yet Habig believes that "acting confident when you don't feel that way is a complicated risk that's best avoided. If your confidence isn't based in the knowledge that you can deliver, you risk letting people down." Mark Burnett goes further, arguing that confidence can't be faked. "If you're not confident, you can't be a leader, and that's all there is to it," says Burnett, creator and executive producer of Eco-Challenge and Survivor, television programs that do for confidence what Iron Chef has done for nori and spiny lobster. "I've heard 100 times that you can fake confidence, but you can't. It takes too much of a toll. You waste too much energy." But Habig and Burnett are in the minority. "You can't show doubt," insists Kevin Price of AccuCode. "You've got to portray yourself as absolutely certain that you can do what you say you'll do. Even if you doubt that yourself, you've got to make it seem like you don't." Most entrepreneurs interviewed agreed with that argument, and many acknowledged faking confidence at one time or another -- particularly in their early sales careers. They described the practice as harmless, like using training wheels just long enough to gain psychic balance. That was certainly the case for Price, who started AccuCode because he needed a job. "I wasn't confident," he says, "and in many ways I wasn't qualified." Price admits that for the first three years he often faked confidence in front of customers, "and then one day I realized I was no longer faking it," he says. "I was sitting in a room of people that had more years of industry experience than I did, that were supposed to be more technically qualified than I was, but I knew more than they did. Those years gave me a chance to grow into my expertise so that now I no longer have to fake anything." How do you build confidence? "Both champion athletes and CEOs are good at mentally drawing upon their past successes to step into uncharted territory," says Chris Carmichael, founder and chairman of Carmichael Training Systems, in Colorado Springs, Colo., and the longtime coach of three-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong. "When I'm working with an athlete, I'll have them do a mental recall of what they've accomplished. If you do it right, the athlete starts to swell with confidence." Success, of course, derives from a combination of things: experience, mastery, native talent, propitious external factors, and luck. Most entrepreneurs we interviewed said they develop confidence through mastery and experience, principally in domains that are important to their jobs. They read business books. They attend conferences and seminars. They take classes in negotiating and salesmanship and public speaking (although many CEOs appear to view fear of public speaking as a charming flaw, like not being able to carry a tune). They also consult with peer groups, mentors, and coaches of various stripes. Jeff Sinelli began modeling his leadership style on Genghis Khan after launching the Genghis Grill restaurant chain in Dallas. He supplements the wisdom of the Mongolian marauder with advice from his pastor ("he's very business savvy"), a business coach ("he found out what makes me dynamic and what my gifts are"), a psychologist ("we talk on the phone once a month about business, family, girlfriends, everything"), and a growing gallery of mentors that includes restaurant magnate Norman Brinker. Some people seek to develop expertise in numerous disciplines, intent on becoming a human Swiss Army knife that can handle any task the business world throws at them. The confidence that helped Brent Habig launch Tigris Consulting "was in my ability to do a variety of things," he says. Proficient at programming, project management, recruiting, and accounting, he knew that whenever a problem arose, he could "jump in and solve it myself," he says. Psychologist Ros Taylor, founder of London-based consultancy Ros Taylor Ltd., has created a whole grab bag of exercises for developing confidence. Many of those techniques received widespread exposure in England when she served as the key presenter and adviser on Confidence Lab, a popular BBC program in which 12 shrinking violets set out to reinvent themselves in seven days using tools such as art therapy and salsa lessons. Taylor believes that a wide-ranging confidence can be built virtually from scratch -- and that it can be built quickly. "People learn to drive within a week," says Taylor. "They learn French in a week if they're rushing off. They live and breathe these skills. I think it's exactly the same with confidence." The skills that Taylor promotes are in such areas as making good first impressions, improving posture, and thinking positive thoughts. She asks clients to concoct 30-second commercials about themselves, to compile lists of self-descriptive adjectives, and to practice asking open-ended questions for conversation starters. It may sound a little too easy, but Taylor points to the Confidence Lab graduates who, within just nine months of the show's airing, had asked for and received promotions, landed prestigious new jobs, and -- in two cases -- launched companies. "Psychologically, action precedes change," insists Taylor. "If you start doing things in a more confident fashion, it feeds back to your nervous system that you might actually be confident. All these people went through profound cognitive shifts about what they could do internally." Is there such a thing as general confidence? No, there is not. For Kagan, that point is the postulate for everything else he has to say about the subject. "Individuals have confidence in specific domains," he says flatly. "I am very confident about my knowledge of child development. I have no confidence in my knowledge of how computers work. You don't have general confidence." Yet some factors that contribute to confidence have nothing to do with particular talents or fields of expertise. A belief in God is one. Environment is another: many entrepreneurs stress the salutary effects of familiar, controllable surroundings. That's one reason that Stephen Rosa, founder and CEO of Advertising Ventures, in Providence, purposely built his business just across a bridge from the street where he was raised. "It keeps me grounded," says Rosa. "It's comforting to see the rooftop of the house I grew up in." Can't confidence gained in one area carry over into another? Some people believe it is possible to accumulate a kind of capital of confidence by stretching physical limits and conquering their fears. That capital, they believe, can then be drawn upon to meet the challenges of their business and personal lives. A full 10% of the entrepreneurs interviewed for this story have jumped from planes; another 10% either have climbed or are preparing to climb mountains. Don Preston, founder and CEO of Loss Mitigation Services, in Paris, Tex., jumped out of a plane six weeks after leaving a secure job to launch his first company, a carpet retail business. "We went out in a little Cessna, and I had to actually climb out on a wing before I jumped," says Preston, who has since sought confidence by walking on hot coals. "I'm afraid of heights, but I figured if I could sky dive, I wouldn't be scared of anything." If you lose your confidence, how do you get it back? Auction company CEO Deborah Weidenhamer expects to suffer occasional emotional ebbs and has something approaching a system for weathering them. She hoards successes, refusing to savor them when they happen so that in downtimes they can be pulled from her mental drawers and experienced afresh. She beefs up her mentoring and coaching of employees to remind herself of what she has to offer. And when things get really bad -- as they did five years ago -- she seeks help from friends and business associates. Hundreds of them. On February 24, 1997, Weidenhamer mailed -- by regular post, no less -- a letter to 350 friends, relatives, customers, vendors, and other associates. "This is a hard letter for me to write, because I don't like asking for help," the message began. She went on to describe working 15 to 17 hours a day, seven days a week, at a company that was teetering on the brink of failure. "I am not able to work any more hours in the day," Weidenhamer continued. "I can't afford to hire an administrative person right now, and I can't afford to pay a salesperson anything other than commission.... I can't borrow money for the interim on my contracts, because I have put everything into the company.... I need your prayers and support. If you have any ideas, please call me or write.... " Admitting that she needed help was "a life-changing experience," says Weidenhamer, who received more than 100 responses, including ideas that improved her operations and support that improved her morale. "I think when people see you as self-confident, they don't even bother to say anything. They think you've got it under control. They assume you don't need even a word of encouragement." Three months later the company was back on track, and Weidenhamer knew it would be viable. "What really helped most was my customers who called and said, 'You're the best we've ever worked with,'" she says. "That's when I said, 'I can keep doing this. I can keep pursuing the goal.'" Why is confidence like sex? Because for both, the most important organ is the brain. Confidence is by definition about action, but many entrepreneurs boost theirs using popular mental exercises or idiosyncratic sleights of mind. The technique most commonly mentioned was visualization. Carmichael says that detail is key to effective visualization. "You can't say, 'Oh, you'll go to the race, and it'll feel great, and you can feel yourself crossing the line and winning,'" he explains. "You've got to say, 'OK, there are four hills in that race. The first is only three kilometers long. It's not that hard. The average grade is about 6%. But the second hill. You know that hill. That climb is long, it's 12%, and you know after the third switchback it pitches up to 14%.' You have to get that detailed." Other techniques are less structured and more a matter of managing perspective. Take for example, Arkady Maydanchik, founder of Arkidata Corp., an information-integration company in Downers Grove, Ill. The supremely confident Maydanchik has challenged a friend to a game of golf at Pebble Beach next August. The friend has been playing for 30 years and has a 12 handicap. Maydanchik has been playing for five months and has yet to make it off the practice range. Maydanchik believes in his triumph on the links for the same reason he believes in Arkidata's continued success and in the success of pretty much every other endeavor he's embarked upon. That is, he is able to mentally defang the odds. "When you talk about something being a 1 to 10,000 chance, at the end of the day either it happens or it doesn't," says Maydanchik, a former researcher in probability and statistics. "And it might happen. Most people who started to play golf could not beat an experienced player in one year, so you might assign a 1 in 10,000 chance to that outcome. But every endeavor is unique. If I have the talent of Tiger Woods -- seemingly long odds, but nobody knows in advance whether or not I do -- I would argue that it is a sure bet that with significant practice and a good teacher I will beat my friend next year." And who has the confidence to argue with that? The Innovation Factor: Built to Invent Part 1 of a three-installment series on hypercreative organizations and the strategies behind them. From: Inc. Magazine, Aug 2002 | By: Leigh Buchanan The Innovation Factor Article Tools Interactive Directory · Connect with leading Market Research Firms on Inc.com's NEW Interactive Directory. A free service. GO! Featured Services · Find Online Degrees · Incorporate Now · Search for Software · Create a Business Plan · Research Companies Innovation and entrepreneurship may not be perfect synonyms, but semantically the two are at least kissing cousins. "Entrepreneurs innovate," writes Peter Drucker. "Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship." Having emerged largely unsullied from its ill-fated tryst with the new economy, innovation remains a thing universally revered. You can never be too rich, too thin, or too creative. Call me anything; just don't call me derivative. But innovation is no mere vanity plate on the nation's economic engine. Technological innovation trumps capital accumulation and allocation of resources as the most important contributor to growth, say Harvard economists John McArthur and Jeffrey Sachs in the Global Competitiveness Report . That report doesn't even mention nontechnical innovations by the likes of Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and Dell, companies that famously moved and shook without inventing much more than a strategy. For business the imperative is clear: eschew the tussle for incremental market share in favor of new wealth created by new customers drawn by genuinely new products and services. This month Inc launches a three-part series that explores innovation as it applies, in turn, to organizations, leaders, and markets. In this issue we focus on continuously inventing organizations, companies designed expressly to churn out ideas. The 50 small businesses considered here -- all of which have amassed at least 30 patents in the past five years -- are tearing up turf in many of today's riskiest and most competitive industries. "Companies living off a single great insight are the corporate equivalent of dead stars," write innovation experts Gary Hamel and Peter Skarzynski in their essay for On Creativity, Innovation, and Renewal . "In spite of their sparkle, they're cold at the core." We hope this special section provides you with a wealth of ideas that set your own cores boiling. The Innovation Factor: What's Your Innovation Quotient? So you think you're inventive? Take our 20 question quiz and see how you rate. From: Inc. Magazine, Sept 2002 | By: Ilan Mochari Innovation: Part II Article Tools Interactive Directory · Connect with leading Market Research Firms on Inc.com's NEW Interactive Directory. A free service. GO! Featured Services · Find Online Degrees · Incorporate Now · Search for Software · Create a Business Plan · Research Companies Are you innovative? Do you run your company in an innovative fashion? If you've read the first two special sections on innovation in Inc , then those are two questions you may have been asking yourself. The following quiz should help you find the answers. Some of the questions, we realize, will seem rangy and random. That's intentional. To design the quiz, we relied on a wide variety of information about innovative minds -- both in the business world and out of it. One source, for example, is a book called How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, by Michael J. Gelb. Another is the Tom Peters opus The Circle of Innovation . So buckle up, gentle reader, and get ready: you'll be able to calculate your innovation quotient in a matter of minutes. And if you wind up displeased with your score, don't worry. True innovators often don't do well on standardized tests. 1. If I were in school today, I might be diagnosed with which one of the following: a) attention deficit disorder b) chronic fatigue syndrome c) anger-management issues d) separation anxiety 2. Which of the following can you honestly say is a true statement about yourself (check all that apply): a) I know the color of all my friends' eyes b) I am comfortable with ambiguity c) I know what all the controls on my stereo system are for d) I often adjust the controls on my stereo system and can tell the difference when I do 3. True or false: a) In 1993 two executives from Rubbermaid toured an exhibit of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum in London. They came away with 11 specific product ideas, including some derived from Pharoah's kitchen utensils. b) A 3M employee came up with the idea for Post-it Notes after using bits of paper to mark the hymns he sang in his church choir. c) The first woman known to become a millionaire for one of her inventions was an African American named Madame C.J. Walker. She created hair straightener for black women in 1905. d) The actress Hedy Lamarr, an innovator of on-screen nudity (in the 1932 Czech film Ecstasy), received a patent in 1942 for helping to invent a radio-controlled torpedo. 4. Complete the following quote from management guru Tom Peters: "Leadership has been implicit in every page of this book. Now we get explicit: a deep and sustaining commitment to innovation means leader-as-dispenser-of-____________." a) enthusiasm b) solutions c) Pez d) creativity 5. In trying to hire an innovative employee, which of the following Japanese words describes the quality Sony looks for: a) setsu (eager, earnest, ardent, kind, keen, acute) b) seizen (orderly, regular, well-organized, trim, accurate) c) netsuretsu (ardent, passionate, vehement) d) neyaka (optimistic, open-minded, intellectually diverse) 6. If I wanted to learn about the anatomy of a frog, the first thing I would do is a) go to the library b) call a biology professor c) check the Internet d) catch and dissect one 7. When working on a project for a client, I rely on the perspective of at least _____ outsiders. a) 0 b) 1 c) 2 d) 3 8. When asked to remember the most delightful aroma I've ever known, I a) have to think for a minute or so b) know instantly c) consider who's asking d) blush 9. Match the items in the left column with those in the right column: a) burrs _____1. the tabs on aluminum cans b) conch shells _____2. Velcro c) bananas _____3. spiral staircases 10. Fill in the blank in this quote from management czar Peter Drucker: "Above all, the innovative company organizes itself to _______ the old, the obsolete, the no longer productive." a) ignore b) subsidize c) abandon d) compete against 11. If I were stranded in the desert, the question I'd be most likely to ask myself is: a) How do I get to water? b) How do I get water to come to me? c) What is the meaning of (my) life? d) How can I make (my) life more meaningful? 12. Every day you take a walk outdoors. You carry with you a notebook and pencil. After a month, your notebook is most likely to be filled with a) thoughts and opinions b) several "to-do" lists c) drawings and doodles d) phone numbers and E-mail addresses of people you meet 13. The graph (please refer to page 92 of a hard copy of Inc magazine) depicts what's typically known as an S-curve. The vertical axis measures the performance, in sales, of a particular product. The horizontal axis measures the investment and labor that your company puts into that product. At which point along the curve would you begin an effort on a next-generation product? a) Point marked "1" b) Point marked "2" c) Point marked "3" d) Point marked "4" 14. Below are four statements. Number each statement 1, 2, 3, or 4, depending on how true the statement is: "4" means the statement is absolutely true and "1" means the statement is absolutely false. ____a) I would just as soon steal a good idea as think of it myself. If it's a good idea, who cares about its source? ____b) My organization puts each and every process and product on trial for its life every 18 months to two years ____c) Employees at my organization openly share their ideas for improving our products and processes ____d) My organization has a process in place for actually implementing changes 15. At left is a sketch from one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks (please refer to page 92 of a hard copy of Inc magazine). Your first impression is: a) They call this guy a genius? b) I see lots of cats. Is that one in the middle a dragon? c) My, what terrific use of chiaroscuro, that is, the interplay of dark and light for dramatic emphasis d) All the animals are curved 16. Which of the following innovations was not initially rejected by the business world? a) photocopying b) the VCR c) the original Star Wars movies d) the built-in car seat for toddlers e) Velcro 17. Below are four statements. Number each statement 1, 2, 3, or 4, depending on how true the statement is about you: "4" means the statement is generally true and "1" means the statement is generally false. ____a) In conversation, I frequently use the words "totally," "always," "must," "never," and "absolutely" ____b) I frequently end conversations with an unanswered question ____c) I frequently use the words "maybe," "perhaps," "depends," "sometimes," and "relatively" ____d) I frequently end conversations with a definitive statement 18. Below are four statements about you. Rank them in order from most true to least true, with "4" being the most true and "1" being the least true. ____a) I have recently changed a belief because of a practical experience ____b) Every once in a while, I find some truth in the whole zodiac/horoscope/astrology thing ____c) I learned a foreign language after the age of 22 ____d) I jump to conclusions 19. "If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person. You don't get innovation as a democratic process." That is a quote from: a) Max DePree, former CEO of Herman Miller Inc. b) Martha Stewart, CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. c) George Steinbrenner, controlling partner of YankeeNets Inc. d) Judy George, CEO of Domain Inc. 20. "As a CEO, it's my job to make sure my organization places a high value on change and makes it part of the organization's culture with respect to product development." Coming from your lips, this statement could best be described as a) humorous b) patently false c) what Plato, in The Republic, would call a "useful falsehood" d) accurate, I hope Answer Key Compute your final score based on the answer key provided below. For a thorough explanation of each question and answer, and a full bibliography of sources, go to www.inc.com/IQ . 1. a -- 2 points 2. Give yourself 2 points for each statement that you checked off 3. All four statements are true. Give yourself 2 points for each correct answer 4. a -- 2 points 5. d -- 2 points 6. d -- 2 points 7. The more the merrier. Give yourself one point for each outsider whose perspective you sought 8. b -- 2 points 9. c1, a2, b3 -- one point for each correct answer 10. c -- 2 points 11. b -- 2 points 12. c -- 2 points 13. If you picked a -- give yourself 2 points; b -- 1 point; c -- 0 points; d -- subtract a point from your total 14. Add up the numbers you gave to each statement. Divide the total by two. That's how many points you get 15. d -- 2 points 16. b -- 2 points 17. Add up the two numbers you listed for b and c. Divide the total by two. That's how many points you get 18. What numbers did you assign to statements a and c? Add them together. Divide the total by two. That's how many points you get 19. a -- 2 points 20. d -- 2 points Innovation impresario -- 29 points and up Make no mistake about it -- innovation is your byword. Ideas attack you while you sleep. You keep a pad and paper by your bedside to record such nocturnal epiphanies. In science class, you abhorred textbooks, preferring to learn through experimentation. In the real world, you see a process, any process, and burn, burn, burn to improve it. Well, here's to you, innovation impresario: You make the world a better place. Innovation intermediate -- 13-28 points You lack the impassioned stargazing of the innovation impresario. But you're not exactly the eyes-on-the-road, hands-on-the-wheel type either. It's crossed your mind, every now and then, to stop what you're doing and switch into another industry entirely -- or at the very least, take the ceramics class that your right brain has been hankering for since high school. You daydream at work, but your left brain never abandons you for too long. And that's just fine with you. Innovation ingenue -- 0-12 points Is there anything more annoying than someone using the term "creative temperament" to justify behavior that's just plain irresponsible? Sure, innovative thinking has its time and place. But it's hard to see just when and where. What with your employees, family, investment portfolio, and life's other obli- gations, it's tough enough finding the moment to exercise. What a shame to have wasted 10 minutes on some lame little magazine quiz. For explanations of the answers behind the questions, please go to www.inc.com/IQ . Courage: Tap Greater Potential and Thrive Through Challenges Now is the time to act in a way that creates the positive momentum needed for a dynamic 2002. Now is the time for courageous leadership and conscious action. From: Ivy Sea Inc. | March 2002 By: Jamie Walters The economic realities that began in 2001 and trickled into 2002 have been dissected and studied by the pundits; lived by business owners, executives and employees; and speculated on by market players. Now is the time to act in a way that creates the positive forward-momentum needed for a dynamic 2002. Article Tools Interactive Directory · Connect with leading Market Research Firms on Inc.com's NEW Interactive Directory. A free service. GO! Featured Services · Find Online Degrees · Incorporate Now · Search for Software · Create a Business Plan · Research Companies Enough with the waiting for someone else to make a move or hoping that the tide will change on its own. Now is the time for courageous leadership and conscious action. Some of the benefits of this proactive approach include the potential for: • Increased momentum toward a revitalized vision and renewed sense of purpose; • Higher morale among employees through confidence in t...