Teaching Business Success

The business entrepreneur is a very special kind of achiever. According to David C. McClelland of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, he is "more concerned with achieving success than with avoiding failure." He sees the world as neither benevolent nor malign but neutral, and he never doubts his power to hold his own in the marketplace. He is as readily bored by routine as he is challenged by risk taking -- and he knows how to reckon the odds. Such a man is obviously valu able to any economy, but he is also rare. Is there a way to develop him? In Motivating Economic Achievement, to be published this month by The Free Press of Manhattan, Psychologists McClelland and David G. Winter of Wesleyan University argue that the seeds of entrepreneurship can be planted with almost ridiculous ease.

To test this hypothesis, which was based on McClelland's psychological studies of the personal characteristics that make a good entrepreneur, the authors decided to go to India. One reason for conducting an experiment there was that Indian commerce, still locked in the patterns and the fatalism of the past, urgently needs entrepreneurs. Another was that Indian small businessmen, who are suspicious of one another, set in their ways and resistant to change, make particularly challenging raw material. In several cities, McClelland and Winter invited local businessmen to join classes in what they called achievement motivation. Eventually, some 80 accepted.

The course was held at India's Small Industries Extension Training Institute in Hyderabad and lasted two weeks. Everything in the crash curriculum--including games, written assignments and films--was calculated to correct the self-image of men who saw themselves as pawns rather than agents of change. This was, the authors write, "in great contrast to the traditional strategy of trying to show how some ways of doing things are better than others in the hope that indirectly and slowly [the businessmen] will decide on some rational basis to do the better things."

Composing Epitaphs. One of the fledgling businessmen's first assignments, for example, was to compose six different answers to the question "Who am I?" These papers were later openly graded for imagination and what McClelland calls n Ach content, his shorthand for the kind of motivation that distinguishes the entrepreneur. The aim of the course was to plant "a growing conviction on the part of the person that he can change, that he can take control and direct his life." At brainstorming sessions--a Western invention that the Indian businessmen took to with great delight--they courted the notion, almost heretical in Indian commerce, that ideas can be traded, like commodities, to the benefit of all. They were required to write their own epitaphs--a statement of self-esteem related more to accomplishment in this world than in the next.

In the two years following the course, McClelland and Winter periodically measured its effect. Some of the case histories, they report, read like Western success stories. A film exhibitor in the city of Kakinada expanded into the ticket-printing business and now supplies 45 theaters in four states. The owner of a small radio shop opened a branch office which he turned over to a woman manager (an unprecedented delegation of responsibility in India), called in an outstanding loan and established a paint and varnish factory.

McClelland feels that his experiment has a number of practical as well as theoretical implications. One is that the instant training of potential business leaders may be a quicker and more painless way of bringing economic motivation to an underdeveloped nation than by indiscriminate infusions of financial aid. The Indian businessmen who were stimulated by his course went on to expand their enterprises, thus creating new jobs and earning more money. Another bonus from the plan is the possible application of the n Ach stimulant theory to the black ghettos of U.S. cities. Boston's Behavioral Science Center has exposed a number of adult Negroes to a similar course and has had similarly encouraging results. "The tendency in India, and to a certain extent among black businessmen," says McClelland, "is to think: 'Things are beyond me. There is so much working against me. I can't make it anyhow.' "

Not for Accountants. Not everyone will make it, of course, and McClelland is careful to note that n Ach is not a quality that can be or even should be instilled in everyone. "Most people think that high achievement in life is caused by high need to achieve," he says. "That is clearly untrue. There are all kinds of achievers in life. The need to be a general is not a need to achieve in the way we define it. And you wouldn't want your accountant to have high n Ach." Politicians, like generals, hunger for power rather than achievement, he says. He has now embarked on a study of that need, which he will doubtless call n Pow.

"If there is one general conclusion that we hope will be drawn," write McClelland and Winter, "it is that man is not as predetermined in what he can do as social scientists and historians sometimes think. He has greater freedom to act, to change the structure of his response, and find opportunities in his environment than the traditional forms of social analysis would lead him to believe. Somehow, by thoroughly understanding how we are determined, we gain the confidence to act so as to transcend determinism."

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