six primary characteristics of the entrepreneurial instinct

1) Independence: The first is a burning desire for independence. Ashok Rabheru of Genisys admitted to us, "If I had the choice of a suburban detached house with a BMW working for a corporate; or a one-bedroomed flat and be self employed, I would choose still to be self-employed. It's within our blood, within the family blood and within the blood of the Gujurati." The need to be special and unique is a driving force of the entrepreneurial instinct. Any company wanting to get more entrepreneurial has to be prepared to accentuate its differences and its peculiarities. In other words it has to assert its individuality.

2) Passion: The second characteristic concerns the passion that emerges from the personal vulnerability of the entrepreneur. In his article - 'The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship' - Manfred Kets de Vries wrote, "Some entrepreneurs I have known hear an inner voice that tells them they will never amount to anything.

But regardless of who put this idea into their minds, these people are not retiring types who take such rebuke passively; they are the defiant ones who deal with it creatively through action."

The arrival of systems, managers and consultants when a company hits adolescence is an accident waiting to happen. The few companies that survive adolescence with their original creative spirit intact are those who succeed in positively channelling their entrepreneurial passion rather than suppressing it.

3) Determination: Dogged determination and irrepressible energy is the third characteristic. Pret a Manger owes its breakthrough to Julian Metcalfe's refusal to sit back. It was a good business with high quality product and customers who kept coming back, but something wasn't quite right. At least for Metcalfe it wasn't quite right. For all the other sandwich shop owners around Victoria everything was fine, they were all able to make a reasonable living out of it. What bugged Metcalfe though were the queues. The quality of his sandwiches and the loyalty of his customers meant a line of them snaked through the shop every lunchtime, all waiting in turn for their sandwich to be made up. It was annoying because it limited the amount of customers they could serve, but what really got to him was that each of his customers had to wait so long.

"And then suddenly it occurred to me that, if they trust us, why don't we just put it in a box? I'll never forget it, one Monday morning we put everything in a box and I said to our staff - just see if you can get every customer to take it from the box. That was the most extraordinary Monday, there were no queues at all in the shop, and when we looked in the tills we had taken twenty percent more than we had ever taken before. It was like a light comes on; it was quite incredible. That was the greatest day". It may have been the greatest day, but it also demonstrated what Julian Metcalfe is all about. Way before he got to his eureka moment he had explored a number of different ventures including a delicatessen and a wine shop. And all the time there was something in him that compelled him to find better ways of doing things. The fat lady never sings for the entrepreneurial company.

4) Creativity: The fourth characteristic is creativity. Entrepreneurs are creative people who bring something into being out of nothing. "What I couldn't bear in the advertising business was the frustration of having an idea, not necessarily my idea, but a creative idea, and watching a group of people destroy it," complained Tim Little of Tim Little Shoes. "Now if I have an idea I implement it." It's not so much the idea that matters to the entrepreneur; the important thing is to bring it into existence. Whereas bureaucratic companies tend to be old, slow and reactive entrepreneurial companies are young, energetic and creative.

5) Motion: The adrenaline of entrepreneurial companies establishes a rhythm of perpetual motion. This is the fifth characteristic. One of our interviewees, Richard Wheatly, illustrated this by describing an early crisis that he faced with Jazz FM. Despite all the positive things he was doing with Jazz FM, the company was burdened by offices that were too large and too expensive and by the weight of another radio station that he had inherited - Viva. Something had to happen, the company was three weeks from closure.

As Wheatly now says, "You've got to have a crisis to refocus a business. I guess the key issue is really being in shit-street so you have to focus." And as crises go this was a pretty big one. Wheatly's response had an air of desperation about it, he went out with a radio station to sell. And he got lucky, he found Mohammad Al Fayed.

Not only did Al Fayed want a radio station and was prepared to pay for it, but he also wanted the building. Wheatly was out of jail. Entrepreneurial companies live on adrenaline; mature organisations crave certainty and want to control their environment. Entrepreneurial companies not only go with the flow; they thrive on the excitement of it all.

6) Femininity: The sixth characteristic concerns femininity. There's a trend, led in part by female entrepreneurs, towards a more collaborative and feminine model of business that places emphasis on relationships and 'soft' values. Hannah Brown exemplified this for us when she described the spirit at Kendall Tarrant. "What is amazing is the closeness and the personal nature of the relationships between all the individuals. The mutual respect, the mutual caring, genuine caring. That doesn't mean we're all best friends because of course we're not, it is a commercial relationship, but there is a blurring that goes on that is very real and very mutual. We wouldn't do anything intentionally to annoy, irritate or upset the person over there because we have the respect for them and that's all about the personal relationships. I can't emphasise that enough. It's hugely female." Those companies that are in touch with their entrepreneurial instinct are often in touch with their feminine side, giving lie to the Arthur Daley caricature of the entrepreneur. Those that aren't will increasingly find that they need to develop it.

Uniqueness, passion, energy, creativity, rhythm and femininity: these are the distinguishing qualities of the entrepreneurial instinct. These are the dimensions that you need to attend to if you and your company want to get more entrepreneurial.