Entrepreneurs and delinquents

Learning Research News

What's the difference between an entrepreneur and a delinquent?

Answer : Not a lot in terms of biology, but a lot in terms of cognitions!

Abraham Zaleznik, psychoanalyst and Professor Emeritus of leadership at Harvard Business School, has claimed that entrepreneurs were bad boys in suits who did not feel risk or weigh up consequences in the way most of us do.

"To understand the psychology of the entrepreneur," he told The New York Times, "you first have to understand the psychology of the juvenile delinquent."

Anita Roddick (at her website) writes:

"There is a fine line between the delinquent mind of an entrepreneur and a crazy person. The entrepreneur's dream is almost a kind of madness, and is almost as isolating. The nature of the entrepreneur's successful idea is that no one else has had it; by definition, the vision usually isn't shared by others."

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Zaleznik and Roddick are both right in drawing attention to the similarity between the people who initiate, inspire and drive an organization forward and people who hang around shopping malls looking for trouble.

They are wrong however in not understanding the clear differences between someone who is a business success and someone who is going to end up in trouble.

And these are just two ends of a continuum. If we want to understand how to encourage functional learning and discourage dysfunctional learning in most people, then we need to understand the difference between entrepreneurs and delinquents.

What they have in common is that both groups want to learn. They are curious about the world. They seek sensations; they rush in where others fear to tread. This is the biological drive to learn, and both these groups are high scorers in sensation seeking.

But what a successful entrepreneur has which a delinquent does not is the learned strategies and cognitions necessary to direct this urge to learn into successful ways to doing things. These socio-cognitive factors in learning and personality usually come from parental socialization, peer pressure, education, socio-economic opportunities and situational factors. Social-cognitive skills in learning and development are associated with:

Goal setting
Self-efficacy
Delay of gratification
Emotional intelligence
Conscientiousness
Deep learning

The successful entrepreneur is therefore someone who wants to learn new things and who also has these social-cognitive skills. Drive to learn and socio-cognitive control creates business success.

The delinquent is also someone who wants to learn new things and lacks the social-cognitive skills needed to succeed in today's complex social world. The failure to be able to control and direct the urge to explore creates the anti-social 'smash and grab' mentality of the delinquent.

And most of us fall somewhere in between. If you want to create more successful and functional people, then develop and measure their social-cognitive components to learning. This can be at work, in education or in the community.

Until Next Time!

Chris Jackson

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