I’m currently reading How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas by David Bornstein. There was a particularly interesting paragraph regarding the need for achievement and its relation to entrepreneursip that  was heavily influenced by findings by David C. McClelland (the author of The Achieving Society) I wanted to share.

McClelland, found that individuals with a high need for achievement tended to be less influenced than others by suggestions as to what they should do, think, or believe. They were “orientated forward in time toward longer-range goals, even when that means foregoing immediate pleasures.” They were less conforming and cared less about public recognition. What influenced them most in engaging problems were facts. They preferred the counsel of experts to friends. They were not gamblers. They tended, in fact, to be conservative in games of chance and daring in games of skill, at which they usually overestimated their chances of success. While others viewed entrepreneurs as risk takers, McClelland noted that they did not see themselves this way. They typically accepted challenges only when they perceived that there was an acceptable chance of success and when the main determinant of success was their skill. And, contrary to common assumption, McClelland asserted that entrepreneurs were motivated primarily by the sense of achievement rather than the desire for money. Profits were important  because they gave the entrepreneur “definite knowledge”of his or her competence. But real satisfaction for the entrepreneur came from making the world conform in a very specific way to his or her will.

If you relate to this as well as I do, chances are very good that you’re a entrepreneur — so, are you?

You  can learn more about David Bornstein and his book at Howtochangetheworld.org.

Tomorrow morning, I leave for the Dominican Republic for a needed vacation. Sure, I’ll be pouring some concrete floors, learning more about microfinance, and visiting with some cute kids while I’m there — but relaxing on the beach under the sun is also certainly long overdue.

I’m going to try to get a post or two up on myKRO while I’m gone, but I can’t promise I’ll post anything here. If not, look for something in mid December.

Thanks to Elvis, I have to answer the bookworm meme! The rules:

1. Grab the nearest book (cannot be the bible)
2. Open the book to page 56
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the text of the next two to five sentences
5. Don’t dig around for your favourite book, or the one you think people will think is cool, or show that you’re an intellectual.  Pick the closest one.. we’ll know if you cheated
6. Tag five other people, and make them do the same.

The book I found is When a Crocodile Eats the Sun by Peter Godwin (the book I’m currently reading). Here are the 6th through the 10th sentences on the 56th page:

Fertility is prized above all, because, hard as it is to believe today, the continent’s historic curse was underpopulation, which hinders centralized rule and state building.

To early white visitors, much of Africe seemed almost empty. For the most part, “an unpeopled country,” said the bellicose explorer and correspondent Henry Morton Stanley as he strolled through East Africa.

This impression of emptiness was accentuated by the Africa system of shifting agriculture. Bush was cleared, land prepared mostly by hand, crops planted, and rain relied on to water them.

So, now to meme 5 others….here are my victims:

• Alreth
• min36
• Sunnyview
• pinksandbaby
• azrob

I have no clue, but it looks like Barack Obama is going to have to figure it out as President of the United States. There’s a good article in the New York Times that gives some good background.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t imagine wearing a flying suit and going extreme base jumping. Talk about crazy — it’s about as close to flying as you can get.

This is awesome. Obama is going to put the weekly radio address on YouTube once in office. I love transparency and the government needs a lot more of it — and it seems Obama will give it to us.

Tomorrow @ 5:30 at Spitfire — more details over at SeaMo.

I’m off to Orlando tomorrow for the NAR conference. If you’re in the Orlando area (either live there or in town for the conference), shoot me an e-mail if you want to meet up.

Should be a fun weekend with some nice weather!

I could not be more thrilled that Barack Obama will be our next President — it’s great to have a President that I believe in and trust to do the right thing. And, perhaps more importantly, a leader who can — and will — inspire the people in this country to do better. There are tons of very tough choices ahead for this country (social security, economy, Iraq, medicare, etc), but I finally have confidence we have a leader in place who can get us out of this mess.

Congratulations Barack.

That’s right — CURSE THE THUNDER!!!

And thank goodness for Gary Payton’s effort to bring an NBA team back in Seattle!

Fred has another gem you need to read, this one about the broken education system in this country — Hacking Education.

I think many of the ideas discussed can be applied to improving education in the developing world as well.

Salesforce is a company I’ve been a huge fan of for a few years (I use the web site on a daily basis at work). If you like what they are doing or want to learn more about their model, here’s a interview with CEO Marc Benioff in the San Francisco Chronicle. In my mind, they have done a superb job of building a product that their customers evangelize for them — and Marc realizes that is a critical part of their success.

Q: One criticism that’s come up is that some smaller customers may be leaving Salesforce.com, that people feel like they are lost in the shuffle in some way. How do you address that kind of criticism?

A: We monitor our attrition very, very closely and our attrition has remained at an extremely low percentage over the years. It’s less than 1 percent per month. That’s something that we’ve talked about now for a number of years, and we have to constantly manage that and monitor that. And we also constantly are surveying our customers and listening to them. Salesforce has the highest customer satisfaction of any company that I have ever been associated with. And our customers are evangelists – in many cases the reason that we’ve ended up with our customers is because of other customers referring them.

I’ll be the first to recommend Salesforce as a customer relationship management platform to anyone that asks me about it.