As a business school professor, I am asked all the time: “What skills do I need for my future as an entrepreneur? Should I focus on artificial intelligence, coding, bitcoin, and fintech? Should I work on communication, negotiation, and people management?” In other words, everyone wants to know what “soft” and “hard” skills they should have.
But what if the skills of the future are not “soft and hard,” but “smart and sharp”?
In 2019, I published an article proposing that “smart skills” replace soft ones and “sharp skills” replace hard ones. Smart skills are the skills required to work with people, sharp skills are required to work with machines. And one might ask, don’t we already call these skills soft and hard?
Yes, we do. But do you know why?
The terms “hard and soft skills” were coined in 1972 by the US Army to differentiate the abilities of people who were good at machine operations from those of people who did well supervising others.
But since then, we have learned that there is nothing soft about managing people, or dealing with office politics, nor that hard skills, from engineering to finance, AI, and machine learning should be defined as firm, rigid, and resistant, given constant technological change.
Most of my research interest is related to how entrepreneurs can scale their ventures, and in my work, I have identified an evolutionary lifecycle that I call “Nail it, Scale it, Sail it” in order to map this journey and equip entrepreneurs with the tools to succeed in each stage of this arduous trek.
But along with scaling tools such as processifica-tion, professionalisation, automation, and so on, entrepreneurs themselves need to invest in the development of their own skills.
Or simply put, they need to get really smart and sharp, or like my co-author, ASB’s founding President, CEO, and Dean and MIT Sloan Professor Charles Fine says “shmart”.
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So here are my top five smart and sharp skills that entrepreneurs need:
Humility
I think of humility as the recognition that “the more I know the less I know”. It’s very easy for organisations to comfort themselves with the success they have had so far and develop what Charles Fine calls “strategic blindness”.
Entrepreneurs need both a healthy dose of confidence along with a big pie of humility, to acknowledge that success was built on learning along a path that is highly unknown and scary.
Entrepreneurs should know that to be humble is a practice and that arrogance and ignorance are best of friends.
Emotional maturity
Emotional maturity refers to your ability to understand and manage your emotions in a professional and personal setting. Why is that important for entrepreneurs?
Building a new venture is extremely stressful, not just for the founders but for their teams as well and they have to recognise and be prepared for the emotional stress that their organisation is going to act on; help the organisation to stay in the moment, to be present while being non-reactive or non-judgmental, to validate (see next) their work and present an array of multiple perspectives to help the organisation move forward productively.
Cognitive readiness
Cognitive readiness is the mental preparation (including skills, knowledge, abilities, motivations, and personal dispositions) that an individual needs to establish and sustain competent performance in our complex and unpredictable environment.
Easier said than done, right?
Entrepreneurs and their teams have to be prepared to face the ongoing dynamic, ill-defined, and unpredictable challenges of their new venture and recognise that this will not be a linear process, but rather one of “nail it, scale it, sail it”.
They need to prepare the organisation for the insidious path ahead and realise that cognitive readiness is part of the advanced conscious processing (slow thinking), enabling entrepreneurs to confront whatever new and complex problems they might face.
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Digital literacy
I think we all need to become digitally literate, which it’s defined as the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills.
Entrepreneurs must invest in constantly educating themselves and their organisations. This doesn’t mean that we all need Ph.D.’s in computer science, but rather that we understand how to use, find, evaluate, etc. information for organizational goals.
System dynamics
One of the most popular concepts coming out of MIT is System Dynamics, which is defined as the analysis of how actions and reactions cause and influence each other, and how and why elements and processes in the system change.
Nailing and scaling a successful business requires a deep understanding of actions and reactions and entrepreneurs will invest in bringing this higher level of understanding not only in their organization but in their boards and stakeholder and shareholder engagement.
And speaking of what successful nailing and scaling requires, at Asia School of Business, we invest a lot in developing an entrepreneurial mindset in our future graduates, a skill that is both important for entre- as well as intrapreneurs.
Supporting the entrepreneurial ecosystem in SEA
One of the initiatives of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at ASB, led by Sarmaji Sarma and me, is the new 101k Entrepreneurship Competition, designed to equip and gear up future-ready startups.
This upcoming event is set to take place in December 2021 (unless the global pandemic messes with our plans) and will attract entrepreneurial ventures from all over Southeast Asia.
Along with capital support of MYR101,000 (US$23,000) for the winners, participants will also benefit from two training boot camps that will teach the future leaders of Southeast Asia important smart and sharp skills, including business model design and development, as well as our signature entrepreneurship framework mentioned above: “Nail it, Scale it, Sail it”.
The reason why we are investing so much effort in this process is that we believe entrepreneurship can be taught, like MIT Sloan professor Bill Aulet says (who also teaches his “24 Steps of Disciplined Entrepreneurship” at ASB); but more than teaching it, we have to nurture it.
ASB itself is a scaling startup that was launched in 2015 by the Central Bank of Malaysia and MIT Sloan, and because we are a startup we are better equipped to understand the challenges, dimensions, and difficulties required in the world of nailing, scaling, and sailing a new venture.
And we also know, that just like our students who have to get smart and sharp every day, the world of entrepreneurship demands just that: “smart and sharp entrepreneurial leaders”.
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