Salesmanship (sales) and HR Management — two critical attributes to success
Over last two months I did case studies of 45 companies from India to know what critical skills/qualifications/attributes or inherent abilities, the founder(s) possessed to make them successful or fail in their ventures.
41 were successful (till date) and 4 had failed. Two critical abilities that I observed in the successful entrepreneurs were their ability to sell ( sales before even solutioning a problem ), ability to hire, attract and retain resources ( this again is a sub-attribute of sales ).
So in short, SALESMANSHIP is the critical ability that differentiates successful entrepreneurs from the failed ones. The other skills that were definitely associated with successful founders/CEOs were; clarity of their thoughts about the problem(s) they were solving and their limitations, persistence (just passion is not enough), confidence in their venture and ability to scale up quickly ( again an attribute of HR/SALES )
So in summary two critical and essential management skills or inherent attributes for success in a venture are SALES, SALES, SALES and HR management
