The Latest in Business and Personal Development: The Growth Mindset
Essential skills for today’s business leaders
If you’re a company leader looking to develop your talent, or an aspiring leader in your company trying to determine where to invest your time, I truly believe there’s no better investment than developing an entrepreneurial and growth mindset. The challenge with this is these are not the type of hard skills you can learn from an executive education class (or YouTube nowadays). I intentionally used the word “mindset” because learning to be entrepreneurial and growth-oriented transforms your perspective about the vision for the company and your personal career trajectory.
From a company perspective, if you want to learn a framework for finding opportunities and evaluating testing, and executing those opportunities, then you’re looking to develop an entrepreneurial mindset. Likewise, if you want to learn how to build for scale and how to work on your business to help it grow to new levels, then you’re developing a growth mindset. Both are essential for aspiring leaders to possess so they can help their company adapt and grow.
From a personal perspective, our culture and education system fall short in terms of offering context for career advancement. You’re taught to put your head down, study hard, acquire accolades on a resume, and “do what you’re supposed to do”. With an entrepreneurial mindset you begin to inject creativity and strategy that allows you to play chess while culture teaches everyone else to play checkers. This allows you to truly demonstrate your skills and create value for your company that will be recognized.
If this sounds appealing to you, I have one more point that will be of interest. As I alluded to earlier, learning these skills is more analogous to becoming proficient at a sport than studying for the SATs. Let’s assume you signed up for a camp to learn how to play basketball. You’d expect to be greeted by a coach on a basketball court, who would then run you through practice and probably some exhibition games. By contrast, you’d probably feel quite confused if your coach told you to meet in a classroom, lectured you about case studies, and then had you complete a written test afterwards to gauge your memorization. You can’t learn how to be an entrepreneur in a classroom any more than you can to play basketball in a classroom. Higher education and corporate development are generally not designed to teach entrepreneurship (or intrapreneurship) and growth. You need to learn these skills practically and refine them through doing.
The Growth and Entrepreneurship Training Program was created for this exact purpose. Participants learn by working on a real entrepreneurial or intrapreneurial opportunity that can range from exploring new markets, new products, and new business models to personal side hustles. Whether it’s the idea you care most about or the idea you end up with at the end, it doesn’t matter; entrepreneurship is an iterative journey. In the course, you’ll learn best practices for startups and receive coaching on your specific venture along the way. At the most surface level, you’ll be introduced to the growth mindset and equipped with the knowledge to leverage it to the extent it proves valuable. At best, you’ll not only have gained a new mindset for current and future opportunities but also have proven a viable new business model which could become an incredibly valuable venture.
If you’re looking to transform your perspective about the vision for your company or your personal career trajectory, reach out to me directly at [email protected] to arrange a short call.
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You might also be interested in learning more about James’ upcoming training sessions:
Growth and Entrepreneurship Training
Class Dates and Times: This program runs for 13 weeks. The group will meet on Zoom each Thursday between 03/10 and 06/09 from 3:30 – 5 p.m. (with the exception of 04/14).