ENTREPRENEURSHIP LEADER - Part 5

9. Proactive

Successful entrepreneurs should have a feature proactive and effective. This characteristic is a smart entrepreneur business opportunities. Every entrepreneur should have a proactive attitude to forge ahead in the business. According to the Sunday Times newspaper dated November 9, 2014, the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said, "With our proactive use common sense to develop competitiveness, we do not quickly give up and must be the generation that dared to face the challenge,''. This generation must make everything aspired to become a reality with bold experiment and use common sense to develop the competitiveness of yourself.

The entrepreneur who is being proactive is Dato’ Jimmy Choo. Dato’ Jimmy Choo is a Malaysian fashion designer based in the United Kingdom. He is the one recognized of world famous shoemaker and shoe designer. Since childhood, he has been exposed to the technique of making shoes as his father’s a full time shoemaker. While studying Dato’ Jimmy Choo worked part-time at restaurants and as a cleaner at a shoe factory to help fund his college education. After graduation Dato’ Jimmy Choo stared working in a shop in Hackney which he opened in 1986 by renting and old hospital building. His craftsmanship and designs were soon noticed and his creations become featured in eight pages in 1988 issue of Vogue. Patronage from Diana, Princess of Wales from 1990 further boosted his image. Proactive attitude shown by Jimmy Choo is that he is responsible for making decisions about the direction of his company Jimmy Choo Ltd. He will think what the best for his company and knew how to attract the attention to his customers by maintaining the quality of shoes that he designed. He personally becomes personal shoemaker for Princess Diana during her lifetime.

He also acts as distributor to allocate the resources either for marketing or management section and other parts in the company. Jimmy Choo also acted as an informer for his company. He became a diffuser for the new designs in his boutique, make promotions, offer special discounts, special servicing and so on to attract customers. He is also a spokesman for the release of his shoes in the media society. His role as a leader and founder of his company is really important and he has proved it to society when he is the first Malaysian to be awarded OBE awards “Order of the British Empire” from Queen of England, Queen Elizabeth II.

A proactive entrepreneur usually has a mature personality to adopt an intentional action in the face of potential influence in the situation as well as in the environment of business. Jimmy Choo is the one who is already set in their mind to take control of the environment around them. He is very proactive because he always get all the things done without waiting for instruction. 

Dato’ Jimmy Choo 

Mark Zuckerberg is the co-founder of social media Facebook 

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is the chairman, chief executive officer and co-founder of social networking website Facebook. His net worth estimated to be 44.6 billion as of November 2016.  He is the top six of the world billionaires ranking in 2016. He was born in May 14, 1984. He won prizes in science and classical studies in his junior year of high school. He like to developing computer programs specialize in communication tools and games. He created a software named ZuckNet that allow the computer between house and the dental office could get to communicate with each other easier. In his college years, he also created a program called CourseMatch. This program allowed user to choose classes that also help to form study groups. In January 2004, Zuckerberg have the idea start to write program code for a new social networking website. He launched Facebook on February 4, 2004 from his Havard dormitory room. He dropped out of Havard in his sophomore year and move to Palo Alto, California so that he can have more free time to focus on the development of Facebook. At the ealier time when Facebook have just startup, many company have tried to buy Facebook. But Zuckerberg and his group declined all the offer. To Zuckerberg and his group, Facebook is not just an amount of money. They have the goal of create an open information flow for people that allow people can gather together. He continued the effort to expand Facebook. There is an obstacle when the Winklevoss twins, the former classmates and business partners of Zuckerberg have state that Zuckerberg stole the idea of social networking site from them. In the end, two sides settled the lawsuit by exchange shares and cash. After this lawsuit, Zuckerberg and his team still continued to succeed in the development of Facebook.

As a successful entrepreneur, Mark Zuckerberg applies one of the entrepreneurial trait which is outcome oriented in his business. Mark Zuckerberg is an outcome oriented entrepreneur as he creates things that he wants to create. For Zuckerberg, it is just not about getting the job done but also about being innovative and building and improving new products. When he was young, he created a computer game that his friends had drawn. Mark also created Facemash in Harvard University that used to choose the hottest person by comparing two pictures of the students but it was shut down by Harvard executive. After that, he continued with his invention by create a social study tool with his friends as a project which they came up with “The facebook” on 4th February 2004 with the aim to have one billion users from the day one. The purpose at the beginning was only connecting the Harvard university students but then Mark intended to extend it to the other universities. This shows that from the young age, he adapted him with the technology skills and techniques that enable him to compete with other social websites such as Friendster and MySpace. Facebook at the beginning had limited function but as time passes, the team always come up with new ideas to keep people connected all around the world and never get bored with the Facebook such as inserting the News Feed, timeline design, ability to tag friends, games, birthdays, pictures, videos and so on. Mark started with the aim of 1 billion users in 2004 and today the number of active users is 1.49 billion. (NY Magazines, 2012) In short, Mark Zuckerberg started by a simple idea with a goal that he took action to carry out the idea and finally successfully achieved his goal by making Facebook as the main social networking between the peoples to separate the information with easy and quick around the worlds. Mark Zuckerberg as an outcome orientated entrepreneur, we can clearly see that outcome orientation for Zuckerberg is about setting goals and winning to achieve them.

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Mark Zuckerberg 

Mark Zuckerberg is an entrepreneur who is open culture. Mark Zuckerberg create a more open culture and leads a better understanding of lives between each other in his company as Zuckerberg says: “We have a very open culture at the company, where we foster a lot of interaction between not just me and people but between everyone else. It's an open floor plan. People have these desks where no one really has an office. I mean, I have a room where I meet with people. But it has all glass, so everyone can see into it and see what's going on.” This shows that Mark Zuckerberg is an open culture entrepreneur. Mark Zuckerberg does not have a special room as his personnel office in the Headquarter of Facebook. His working environment is as usual as the employee in the office. A normal table which link with another 3 tables to form a rectangle, is the working environment of the founder of Facebook. He said, he like to work together with his employee like this, so that it allows him to direct interact with his employee to get the latest information from the world. Every workers can just straight talk to him by just pass by his table, this make him to have more understanding not only the needs of the employees, but also the needs from all the user of Facebook. He is always tend to change to suit all these needs to make sure the company can run as long as it can.(Business Alligators, 2010) In general, strong culture in company is very important factor to encourage entrepreneur succeed because it can influence the motivation of the employees in the company.

Mark been chosen as Person of the Year by TIME Magazine.

Mark zuckerberg is a proactive entrepreneur. He is proactively pursuing his vision in the creation and the launch of network and he takes action immediately in order to achieve his vision. No matter how challenging the situation is, he still be able to move forward in transforming his creative vision into a successful reality. Zuckerberg has always passionate about using technology to connect people and put in the hard work to achieve it. However, Zuckerberg has gone through hardships during his beginning stage of Facebook. For examples, he faced lot of criticism for getting the blame of having stolen the idea of Harvard connections and building a competing product. Besides,The Winklevoss twins, the former classmates and business partners of Zuckerberg also claimed that Zuckerberg sabotaged their project and betrayed them.(Fortune, 2010) Whereas Zuckerberg and Facebook still continued to succeed, in spite of the criticism. This shows that Zuckerberg is a proactive entrepreneur as he is very adaptable and flexible towards problems faced and tend to take immediate action to solve the problem in order to achieve success. Futhermore, Zuckerberg tries to do on a daily basic is to use his time proactively rather than reactively. He think that there are enough things that happen during the day that you could spend all your time on whatever comes up during the day.  He think that the most important thing is to make sure that put time into the things you want to see happen rather than other folks pushing what you want to do. He want to be responsive to the whole community and he proactively spend a lot of time on that goal. He explained, one has to be responsive and communicate but it's important as an entrepreneur to be proactive and know what you want to accomplish each day. ( Eli Langer, 2014 ) Instead on dwelling on a past mistake, he choose to spending time to focus on being a proactive leader instead the reactive one.  "There are enough things that happen throughout the day that that I can spend all my time reacting, but I choose instead to proactively work on the things I want to see happen," he said. ( Oscar Raymundo, 2014 ). 

Earlier photo of Mark Zuckerberg when he in high school 

Mark Zuckerberg had shown that he is a team oriented entrepreneur. The definition of team oriented means that a group of people organized to work together and the leader will concern members and willing to receive all suggestion by all members. Team oriented is important to a company because it is a key function in a company where it can organize work nicely and can maximize employee performance. Zuckerberg is known to have a goal-oriented mindset and is fully focused on leading his team to produce the best social media platform in the world. To him, the definition for a good team is a group of people that makes better decisions as a whole than would individually make as a sum of the parts. ( E.C. & Associates, 2014 ) Zuckerberg realized that he needed an excellent team to help him together to achieve the goals of expanding and maintain Facebook. He will spend time with employee to influence and inspire them. Great leaders know how to recognize the weakness and strength of their employee and apply it on the company task. He hires people based on their initiative to do their own task. Zuckerberg hire engineers for their professional skills and their vision of the company’s future. Zuckerberg believe that he can lead company to a better future by develop a smart hiring strategies with bring the right people to the company. Zuckerberg encourage it’s worker work in a form of teams that they have passionate about. This is because Zuckerberg know that worker will come out an excellent result if they are received task that they passionate about. The right people are not those who have the right competency; they are those who have the right attitude. ( McGraw-Hill Professional 2013 ) Some of the most successful businesses have a non traditional, strengths-based approach to hiring, hire the best talent first, then worry about finding the right role for him.  As a big company, Zuckerberg need employees help to maintain the company’s daily operations. This is because Zuckerberg don’t have the ability to do the daily operation task with only him alone.  Mark Zuckerberg needs a team to help and learn from him. He recruited and hired Sandberg in 2008. ( Elijah Clark, 2014 ) Sandberg joined the company and Facebook has successfully reach a period of hypergrowth. Sandberg has focused on building the business, expanding internationally and cultivating relationships with large advertisers that bring the growth of Facebook. 

Mark Zuckerberg said " Our mission is to make the world more open and connected. "

The open risk taker traits is a must for entrepreneur. Risk taking is almost the same meaning with entrepreneurship. Risk for entrepreneur means that you have to put your career, personal finances and mental health at sake. Zuckerberg is not afraid to take risks show that he is an open risk taker. Mark Zuckerberg took a few significant risks. He took risk when he decided to dropped out of college to provide himself with more free time to  focus on expanding Facebook and help the project grow. As Facebook's popularity exploded, Zuckerberg packed up his bags and relocated the fledgling company to Palo Alto, California, forever leaving behind Harvard's hallowed halls. ( Joseph Lin, 2014 ) Besides that, he took risk when he decided to declined the offer of Yahoo to buy Facebook. In the summer of 2006, Yahoo decided to offer Facebook for 1 Billion. ( David Kirkpatrick, 2010 )  But Zuckerberg declined the offer because he figured that the company would be worth more than 1 billion. Yahoo continue the effort to buy Facebook in the fall of 2006. Yahoo offer it would pay 1 billion or more to buy the company. But Zuckerberg and his team once again declined the offer from Yahoo. Besides than that, Tim Armstrong, a Google’s top ad salesman try to convinced Google to let him pursue Facebook a deal that Google would serve Facebook international ads in fall 2007. Based on Kirkpatrick, “ the board even approved talks about buying Facebook, if it made sense. ” In the end, Google never really got the deal, but it’s offer 15 billion to invest in Facebook. In 2007, for the reason to keep Facebook away from Google, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer offered 15 billion to buy the company. But the deal never happened.  While most people would have been too scared of missing out on an opportunity, Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team take risk and believed in their product enough to wait it out. Besides that, Zuckerberg had take a risk when he decided to require registration using a university email address. When we are trying to introduce a product to the audience, we want as many people as possible to use that product. As we want that product to grow quickly, we will try to design the registration part as easy as possible. Many people would reject to sign up to Facebook as they feel it’s complicated that have to use an email address to sign up. Zuckerberg said about risk, “The biggest risk that you can take is to not take any risks.” (  Ekaterina Walter, 2013 )