The Critical 50 Percent : Part 2

Instinct: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial DNA to Achieve Your Business Goals
by Thomas L. Harrison, Mary H. Frakes

(Page 2 of 8)

Where does that come from? To begin to get at that question, it helps to think about the difference between entrepreneurial behavior and the entrepreneurial personality. My dad ran a neighborhood grocery store; that's entrepreneurial behavior. People who exhibit entrepreneurial behavior may or may not be successful, and entrepreneurial behavior isn't necessarily passed on. The entrepreneurial spirit can be expressed in many ways that have nothing to do with starting a business.

"Nobody's yet found [a specific genetic link], but anecdotally you sort of see it. Even though children of entrepreneurs tend to regress to the average, they probably are more entrepreneurial than the standard average, at least for a few generations," says Kinnear. "Of course, if they get too rich, then they become Paris Hilton."

Where biology may play a role is in creating a genetic foundation for personality. Instinctively pouncing on opportunity, being unstoppable in pursuit of a vision, being able to persuade others of the value of your idea - those are some of the marks of thinking like an entrepreneur. They're also the qualities that help make you successful today, whether you run a grocery store, lead the development and launch of a major product or division, need to revive an ailing corporation, or spearhead a community project.

At this point, no one can provide a definitive answer to the nature-versus-nurture question - certainly not me. But scientific research is beginning to confirm what I've suspected for a long time, based on my exposure to hundreds of entrepreneurs and other highly successful people over the years: that it's not all learned behavior. In the 1950s, many scientists thought we were simply a product of our environments - little rats in boxes being trained to press a lever for rewards. However, there is more and more evidence that some aspects of personality are partly genetic. Even if you didn't come from a family of entrepreneurs, you may still have basic personality traits that give you a head start in entrepreneurial thinking.

It shouldn't come as a big surprise that genes play an enormous part in our personalities. After all, the basic genetic code we all share controls everything from eye color to our risk of having certain diseases. It only makes sense that those genetic instructions might also affect how each individual brain absorbs and responds to what's going on around it.

The Science behind Inheriting an Entrepreneurial Personality

To understand how the entrepreneurial spirit might get inherited, let's step back and look at how genes affect us generally. Genes contain the recipe for how every cell in our bodies develops. Every cell has a copy of all the information necessary to produce an entire human being; that's why Dolly the sheep could be cloned from a single cell. Genes don't just affect hair color, height, and whether we go bald. The role of genes in increasing the risk of diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease is becoming clearer every day.

It's easy to see that genes influence physical problems and traits. However, scientists are now discovering that our genes affect how we behave, too. The success of the Human Genome Project has enabled scientists to begin to connect what happens in our cells and what happens in our brains. They have found links between genes and increased risk of alcoholism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obesity, depression - even smoking.

We've only begun to explore just how our genes create a predisposition to such behaviors. Some scientists believe it's because genes direct how our brains develop, before and after we're born. Genes may program some of us to develop more circuitry in certain parts of our brains than others. For example, women have been found to have more connections between the right and left sides of their brains than men do. Others believe mechanical processes are more important than developmental ones. Genes guide our brains in producing and processing the chemicals, such as dopamine, that affect our moods. Some believe it's a combination.

Whatever the process, the most important point is this: Our understanding of just how important our genes are and how they shape our day-to-day behavior is in the infant stages. With the decoding of the human genome, we've just started to unlock these secrets. Companies are already marketing genetic tests to consumers who want to know how vulnerable they are to illness, or how well their bodies process nutrients, drugs, or environmental stresses. I believe by the time my yet-unborn grandchildren are my age, we'll all know parts of our genetic code and what they mean for our lives in the same way we now know our cholesterol levels.

Genes and Personality

I heard a story a while back that reminded me of the mystery of genetics. A man was watching his four-year-old son do what kids do: show off. As the father watched, something seemed strangely familiar about the dance the little boy was doing. Suddenly he realized that the boy's movements were exactly the same as the dance the man had watched his own father do as an elderly man. Since the boy's grandfather had died thirty years before the child was born, he couldn't have somehow learned the steps.

Copyright © 2005 by Thomas L. Harrison

About the Author

Thomas L. Harrison is chairman and CEO of Omnicom Group's Diversified Agency Services, the world's largest holding group of marketing services companies.

Mary H. Frakes is an award-winning writer and editor, and the author of Mind Walks: 100 Easy Ways to Relieve Stress, Stay Motivated, and Nourish Your Soul.