The six-fingered hand

1 November 2001

Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? Read on and find out.

I'm sorry, but Carter Holt Harvey is not the first place I would have picked to set up a leading business incubator and entrepreneur mentoring programme.  CHH is an old economy company — it does something with trees, right? Well actually, CHH wants to triple its return to investors in the next few years, and there's only one way to do that when you're an "asset heavy, capital light" company: build new businesses. It set up its $15 million New Ventures Fund last year; its New Ventures division runs an annual entrepreneurial development programme known as i2B (ideas to business) to consider ideas from its 11,000-strong workforce.

Out of the process itself has come a business opportunity. CHH has developed a way of identifying entrepreneurs it believes will help drive new business in other companies.

"We did some research on what makes an entrepreneur, how they think and so on. Then we put it all together with our own experiences and came up with a way of explaining it that we hope makes sense," says CHH New Ventures division chief executive Craig Knox. The result? The six-fingered hand.

"We ended up with six broad categories and wanted a simple, straightforward way to describe them. Hands are very much action items, they're about doing and building, and we wanted to use that image for our programme."

In its first year CHH's i2B programme generated 500 ideas, which Knox and his team whittled down to five business cases. This year they've received 1500 ideas. The six-fingered hand approach has been so successful CHH is now developing it for commercialisation. It hopes the prototype — once it is tested a bit longer within CHH — can be sold to others who want help setting up similar programmes to get their employees thinking in an innovative way.

The six fingers represent six attributes that all great entrepreneurs have. Their names reflect the general thrust of each attribute: "true grit", "chameleon", "extreme sport", "half-full", "follow me" and "hunger".

"Extreme sport", for example, is the idea of taking risks by pushing the idea forward, but making sure you have minimised the risks you know about. "Take bungy jumping. On the face of it, you're throwing yourself off a platform to certain death. But the experts have measured the distance and checked your weight and so on. You minimise the risks you know about," Knox says. 

But don't expect to find an individual that demonstrates all six fingers by themselves. Knox encourages his participants to build a team of people based on the model instead.

"No one person excels at each of the six. We ask them to rank themselves in each category and then to look at the team as a whole, to work out which areas they are weak in. "Instead of looking at a team from a purely functional point of view ("We need an accountant"), this process allows the team to work out what kind of accountant it needs.

Knox reckons inside every Kiwi beats the heart of an entrepreneur — that Kiwis have the attribute he calls "true grit", assigned to the thumb. "Without true grit you don't even get a chance to put your case forward. You don't even get in the door. Kiwis are this way naturally. We hang on in there and try things and keep trying, so we're well disposed towards entrepreneurship." 

Most Kiwi employees aren't given an environment that encourages entrepreneurial spirit, so they never know just what they can achieve. That's something Knox hopes to change.

"Follow me" is the battle cry of many an entrepreneur, though this obvious attribute can lead to imbalance. Who wants to be in a team made up of "follow me's" when there's nobody to do the actual work? Knox says that ability to be a self-starter is something Kiwi entrepreneurs need, if they're going to build a winning business.

"Half-full" speaks of staying positive, even when things are falling apart. There will always be failures but the entrepreneur realises failure is a signpost on the pathway, not the destination itself.

"Chameleon" means being all things to all people — a jack of all trades. Entrepreneurs must be able to talk numbers with a bank manager as well as overall concept with potential investors, or branding with marketing people.

And "hunger"? Just look at the Australian netball team, which has dominated world netball for three decades. "Game-breaking ideas within the team and within the organisation flourish," Knox says. The sporting metaphor is important to him. Hunger is something both business folk and sports folk share, he says. "Entrepreneurs are like sports people: they have an extreme desire to win. It consumes them."

One of the big problems with New Zealanders is their belief that participation in an event is enough, he says. "We have to learn to win and lose and to do so gracefully, but you have to know that you're there to win, not just to take part."

Reprinted from UnlimitedNet