Bill Gates, Luke Johnson, and John Caudwell

The case study is about three entrepreneurs, which are Bill gates, Luke Johnson, and John Caudwell.  Over the past 20 years, these entrepreneurs had accumulated wealth and prestige. There are four stages of the entrepreneurial process; identifying and evaluating the opportunity, developing the business plan, determining the required resources, and managing the resulting enterprise.

To be a successful entrepreneur, the following characteristics are key; ability to focus on the task and opportunity, hard work in relation to the many hours needed, intrinsic motivation to get started without support, resilient against the probable setbacks, confident and assertive in making proposals, information seeking from people and eager to learn from those able to contribute, attuned to seeking business opportunities, and receptive to technology. These three entrepreneurs were assessed using the 10 characteristics of a successful entrepreneur and a 1 to 10 scoring sheet was created with 1 being poor and 10 being very good. Bill Gates, Luke Johnson, and John Caudwell scored 91,79, and 90, respectively. The main characteristics which made them be successful were the ability to stay focused, confidence, resilient, hard work, and seeking business opportunities.  

Leadership lessons which could be learned from these three entrepreneurs are that you should be ready to take risk, refuse to accept that you had failed and  use your past failures to reach greater heights, you should be able to cope with change (which could be brought by politics, environment, social, technological, economic, and legal) , be passionate about your ideas, spend some time researching about your competitors (so that you know their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), be ready to get out of your comfort zone by doing something you had never done before, and communicate your vision clearly to the team which will help you in achieving it.