There are four distinct types of entrepreneurs in the world: the visionary, the tinkerer, the misfit and the autocrat.
The visionary entrepreneur is the one who sees the future. Like a seer, visionary entrepreneurs gaze into their proverbial crystal ball and then tap into their uncanny ability to identify glaring gaps in the marketplace for specific new products and services, even entirely new industries.
Henry Ford and Steve Jobs are the poster children for visionary entrepreneurs.
Long before anyone else, Ford recognized the market opportunities for making the automobile affordable to the masses. Because of this, he essentially created an entirely new industry where one didn’t exist before and became its early master. Further, the process Ford developed to make this happen — the assembly line — was a transformational idea, which was subsequently applied to nearly every industry to create scalable efficiencies.
While not quite as impressive as liberating the masses to travel more freely — and farther — across the country, Jobs accomplished similar breakthroughs for the personal electronics and animated filmmaking industries.
Through his company, Apple, Jobs created a viable market for personal computers, first through the original line of Apple desktop computers, then with the Macintosh. Using the same company, Jobs then reinvented the marketplace for music delivery through the iPod and its truly visionary iTunes platform. As if that weren’t enough, Jobs took a hiatus from Apple to found Pixar Animation Studios, where he reimagined the world of animated filmmaking.
Visionary entrepreneurs are not afraid to try new things and fail. In fact, sometimes, their ideas are too far ahead of the market, so they’re unable to fully capitalize on their creation.
There are dozens, if not hundreds, of cases of visionary entrepreneurs not just reaching the marketplace first but also finding out they’re standing there alone — without enough potential customers to start the momentum toward critical mass.
Often, visionary entrepreneurs create the niche where they play, sometimes going months or years without direct competition. At their core, visionary entrepreneurs see unrealized potential and know how to effect change to realize that potential.
Then there’s the tinkerer, the one who takes ideas from mind to market, but, because he or she is never satisfied with the status quo or previous successes (even if that success just occurred yesterday), is compelled to either improve upon the existing idea or develop a new one.
Two well-known entrepreneurs who are characterized as tinkerers are Bill Gates and Howard Schultz.
Throughout his career at Microsoft, Gates was never satisfied with the products and services that the software giant developed and marketed, even when they were successful. He was always tweaking and poking and prodding Microsoft’s products.
Despite his visionary external appearance, Schultz is more of a tinkerer. The key to his successful career at Starbucks has been his ability to keep looking at his market and asking himself, “What else?”
While vision led to Starbucks’ original business model, a premium-priced cup of coffee or coffee beverage, what makes Schultz a tinkerer is his drive to keep adding, subtracting, fine-tuning and improving the products and services of Starbucks, while at the same time remaining true to his core product and market audience.
Not as illustrious as the visionary or tinkerer, the misfit entrepreneur is just as important. They are misfits because they tried — and hated — working in the corporate world for someone else. Misfits eschew bureaucracies and the corporate rules they contain. They believe those rules are made to be broken — but won’t do so by compromising ethics or engaging in something illegal.
Two high-profile examples of the misfit entrepreneur are Donald Trump and Oracle’s Larry Ellison. Can you imagine either one of them working for someone else?
Finally, there’s the autocrat, the take-no-prisoners, my-way-or-the-highway entrepreneur.
An autocrat, while seeking harmony within an organization, believes the best way to lead a company forward is to develop the strategy and then hire the smartest people he or she can find to execute it. The autocrat leads not by consensus building but by setting out a decisive direction.
Autocrats aren’t afraid to put it all on the line and, if the idea fails, take the blame themselves and focus on creating the next strategy for the team to execute.
Each of the four types of entrepreneur is a power in his or her own right. They all think big, create jobs, better the communities where they live and work, and, more important, comprise the engine that is the U.S. economy.
“Innovation and entrepreneurship are crucial to the way forward,” Howe says. “In this kind of environment, companies need to be innovative and think differently. And entrepreneurs are the ones leading the way.”
How to reach: Ernst & Young LLP, www.ey.com
