PR for People Monthly November 2013 The Entrepreneurial Mindset | Page 18
Mogul Entrepreneurs:
The Appetite of
Genghis Khan
by Patricia Vaccarino
Some entrepreneurs have the vision and drive
to build an empire with the same force and determination as Genghis Khan. Nearly 800 years after his
death, scientists from the Russian Academy of Sciences believe Genghis Khan spawned the 16 million
male descendents who carry his DNA, which means
during his lifetime he must have fathered thousands
of children.
If Genghis Khan had interviewed for a job
and was asked: ”What is your greatest strength?” he
would have said: “I want to conquer the world and
take no prisoners.” This is the primary reason, why
mogul entrepreneurs steer away from job interviews
and build their own business empires.
21st century mogul entrepreneurs, Jeff Bezos
of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle and Steve Jobs
of Apple, share three characteristics in common that
are also core traits of Genghis Khan. First, as children they were abandoned by one or both parents.
Second, they are never satisfied with the status quo.
Third, they are driven by a great egoicneed to remake the world according to their own vision.
Jeff Bezos’ mother was a teenager at the
time of his birth and the end of hershort-lived
marriage left her a single parent. She later remarried, but Jeff grew up without knowing his natural
father. Described in an article on Portfolio.com,
Jeff Bezos “is at once a happy-go-lucky mogul
and a notorious micromanager:an executive who
wants to know about everything from contract
minutiae to how he is quoted in all Amazon press
releases.” Sounding very much like he is a fan of
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s great essaySelf Reliance,
Jeff Bezos himself describes his business acumen
as,”Invention requires a long-term willingness to be
misunderstood.”(Emerson said, “To be great is to be
misunderstood.”)
Larry Ellison, born in New York City to an
unwed mother, was nine months old when he contracted pneumonia and his teenage birth mother was
unable to care for him. She arranged to have him
adopted by her aunt and uncle who lived in Chicago.
Larry Ellison did not meet his birth mother until he
was 48 years old and already a success in the business world. In Ellison’s own words about the drive
for success, “Great achievers are driven, not so much
by the pursuit of success, but by the fear of failure.”
Given up for adoption by his birth parents,
Steve Jobs said, referring to his biological parents,
“They were my sperm and egg bank. That’s not
harsh, it’s just the way it was, a sperm bank thing,
nothing more.” Fortune Magazine wrote that he was
Steve Jobs “considered one of Silicon Valley’s leading egomaniacs.” In Jobs’ own words, “I want to put
a ding in the universe.”
As for the mighty Genghis Khan, when he
was a young boy and called Temüjin, his father was
murdered. He tried to claim his father’s place in his
tribe, but they would not be led by a boy. Abandoning the boy, his mother, and his siblings, the tribe
left them all to die. The following quote is attributed
to the great Genghis Khan: “The greatest joy a man
can know is to conquer his enemies and drive them
before him. To ride their horses and take away their
possessions, to see the faces of those who were dear
to them bedewed with tears, and to clasp their wives
and daughters in his arms.”
When they start out in life, mogul entrepreneurs aren’t given the best set of circumstances in
which to thrive. If anything, their first encounter with
the world is harsh. They aren’t rich kids with trust
funds and private tutors. Many of them come from
relatively inauspicious and humble beginnings. Maybe the loss of one or both parents gives them an early
sense of dissatisfaction with the world and a burning
desire to create a vision that reshapes reality into a
world that satisfies them on their own terms. For
more than three and a half decades, Larry Ellison’s
Oracle has been the leader in database software.
Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs have not sired 16 million
descendents, but, to date, over 3 million Kindles
have been sold and there are over 300 million iPhone
users. It could be asserted these men have conquered
the world, metaphorically speaking, one electronic
device at a time.