Are You Marked for Greatness?

Are You a Learning Machine?

To succeed as a leader, you have to be a learning machine. You have to let the environment and your team inform you. At the same time, you also need to have a balance between being open to ideas and pushing forward in the face of skepticism. There's one extreme, where lots of people offer lots of different opinions, and the leader winds up utterly confused about what to do next. Then there's the other extreme, where entrepreneurs think that they know it all, and don't allow themselves to be informed and do a course correction. The best entrepreneurs have a strong vision but allow that vision to be affected by other great points of view. I'm interested in people who are committed to an outcome -- and not attached to the ways and means.

Are You Courageous?

Do you have the courage to change course, to stay committed to the outcome, and to do things differently than you anticipated doing them? Are you courageous enough to change the whole plan if you find a better way? When I look at people's commitment, I really want to know what endgame they're committed to. I've seen people who are committed to doing it their way. That doesn't particularly impress me. What are they courageous about? Are they courageous about making the right call? Are they courageous about being wrong? It actually takes a lot of courage to stand up and say, "Hey, the first plan was a bust, guys." If you can't do that, then your ego is in the way of your courage.

Are You Unwilling to Fail?

There's a lot of lore around the words "failure is not an option." That's just a cute phrase. The meaningful way to think about it is, "We said that we were going to make this work, damn it, so how?" If you let yourself think "if'' too much, then you'll create a lot of energy around "if we make it." And when leaders acknowledge failure, they drag a lot of attention away from the "how." A colleague of mine once said that he didn't want any of his employees to worry about "failing elegantly." When I hear an "elegant failure" conversation, I know that people are already trying to make their failure look better -- trying not to get too much mud on their face, to fall gracefully onstage.

Most true entrepreneurs believe, "We're going to win, and if we don't, I don't care." It could be ugly. They could fail miserably. But failure is so uninteresting to them that they don't really care if it's pretty or ugly. Their idea is, "We're going to make it. And we're going to focus on the how. That road's blocked? Let's find another one."

When you absolutely have to land that plane, there will be a runway -- even if you can't see it sometimes. And based on my experience, if you have a highly committed team with a great idea, 99 out of 100 times they will find a runway. It might not be perfect asphalt, but that plane is going to land.

Cheryl Dahle (cdahle@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior writer, is based in Silicon Valley. Contact John Hamm by email (jhamm@internetcapital.com), or learn more about Internet Capital Group on the Web (www.icge.com).