MCCLELLAND 1987 - Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs

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DAVID,C. McCLELLAND
Characteristics of Successful
Entrepreneurs*
FOREWORD This paper is Dr. David C. McClelland's luncheon speech at the
Third Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship Symposium
held in Framingham, MA on May 3D,1986, and is a companion
piece to the Symposium's proceedings. Dr. McClelland has
long been recognized as a leader in the field of Entrepreneur-
ship and entrepreneurial training. This paper is based upon
Dr. McClelland's and McBer and Co.'s latest research on
entrepreneurial training.
INTRODUCTION Many lists of the personal characteristics needed for successful
entrepreneurship have been prepared by individual scholars,
workshops, or institutions. Over 20 years ago Hal Pickle (1964)
reviewed this literature for the U.S. Small Business Adminis-
tration and arrived at a list of some 27 different characteristics
which promote success in small business. Hornaday and
Bunker (1970) presented a somewhat shorter list of 16charac-
teristics, many of them the same as those on Pickle's list. And,
the East-West Center Technology and Development Institute
(1976) prepared an even longer list of 32 traits attributed to
entrepreneurs. In preparation for the research to be reported
below, McBer and Co. collated the findings from seven such
lists to see which characteristics were mentioned most often
and to get as complete an inventory of such traits as possible.
There were 42 different characteristics mentioned by at
least two sources and a large number that were on the majority
of the lists. Some of the most frequently mentioned traits were:
Confidence
"Edited by Dr. George T. Solomon, U.S. Small Business Administration and
Dr. Bruce G. Whiting, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania.
219 Volume 21 Number 3 Third Quarter
220
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
Perseverance
Energy, diligence
Resourcefulness
Creativity
Foresight
Initiative
Versatility: Knowledge of Product and Market
Intelligence
Perceptiveness
It certainly seems reasonable to assume that successful
entrepreneurs would be more self-confident, energetic, crea-
tive and versatile than others, but as one reads over the list
of such desirable characteristics it seems just as reasonable
to assume that they would go with success in any line of work.
Aren't there some traits that are uniquely associated with
success in small business? And, surely not all of these charac-
teristics are needed for success. Otherwise, very few people
would be qualified for such a demanding occupation, and our
personal experience with successful entrepreneurs strongly
suggests that many of them do not possess in large measure
many of the 42 characteristics mentioned.
The fact is of course that there is very little empirical evi-
dence to support the contention that any of these traits are
more characteristic of successful than average entrepreneurs
or than non-entrepreneurs. The lists have been generated
simply by asking experts what traits, in their opinion, charac-
terize entrepreneurs or by asking entrepreneurs what is re-
sponsible for their success. Neither approach can give one
much confidence in the results obtained since no measures
of the traits in question are employed and since neither the
experts nor the entrepreneurs may know exactly what is reo
sponsible for small business success. In fact, reading the lists
suggests that they have simply fallen back on naming desirable
characteristics of all sorts.
In my work and in the work carried out later at McBer, the
emphasis has been on developing measures of some of these
traits and then testing to see if there is a factual basis for
asserting that anyone of them characterizes successful more
than average entrepreneurs. The approach is more elaborate
and has required much painstaking effort over the years, but in
the end its results are more believable than those arrived at
from armchair theorizing. Furthermore they provide a basis
for selecting those most likely to succeed as entrepreneurs,
and for designing training courses aimed at developing the
key competencies demonstrated to be needed for success.
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The Journal or Creative Behavior
As an introduction to the methodology we have employed
it should prove useful to review some of the early work we
carried out which demonstrated the importance of the need
to achieve for entrepreneurial success. The research has been
summarized in three books of which I am the first author: The
Achievement Motive (1953), The Achieving Society (1961)
and Motivating Economic Achievement (1969).1 started with
two beliefs: (1) that we needed a good measure of individual
differences in the strength of various human motives; and
(2) that we could not get such a measure from self-reports
of individuals because they often did not know what their
motives were, and because they would generally consider
themselves to be strong in socially desirable motives and weak
in undesirable ones.
For example, we found that people who described them-
selves as high in the need to achieve did not in fact perform
better. So, we approached the matter indirectly by arousing the
achievement motive in various ways in groups of individuals
and then asking them to write brief imaginative stories in reo
sponse to pictures. We contrasted the content of these stories
with the content of stories written when the motive was not
aroused in order to determine the specific ways in which
an aroused achievement motive influenced thought patterns.
After years of hard labor we developed an objective coding
system which we labeled n Achievement (need for Achieve-
I ment) that captured the unique ways in which people think
when their achievement motivation is aroused. Then we dis-
covered that people who thought this way even when their
achievement motivation was not aroused, l.e., who scored
high in n Achievement under normal testing conditions,
behaved in some very interesting ways. They performed better
when the task was challenging (not routine); they were more
attracted to challenging rather routine or very difficult tasks;
they insisted on taking personal responsibility for their per-
formance; they liked getting quantitative feedback on how
good their performance had been, and they were innovative
in the sense of looking for new and better ways to improve
their performance.
As we looked over these characteristics, it seemed that
many, if not all, of them should promote success in a small
business person, because entrepreneurs by definition must
perform better at challenging tasks (not routine or too risky),
must take personal responsibility for results, and pay close
attention to quantitative feedback on business performance.
222
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
In fact, we found that people scoring high in n Achievement
were more likely to go into small business and to be success-
ful. They also performed better as salespeople (because sales
is much like a small business as far as these characteristics are
concerned). And they are more successful as individual con-
tributors (not managers) in large corporations.
Finally, we found in Ahmedabad, Gujarat State, in India that
persons who were initially higher in n Achievement benefitted
more from a training course for potential industrial entrepre·
neurs. Of the 44 people whose records were followed up after
training, 75% of those above the median in n Achievement
had actually started business within two years. Only 46% of
those below the median in n Achievement actually started
a business. The difference is statistically significant in the
expected direction.
Furthermore, courses designed to develop achievement
motivation through experiential learning have been shown to
improve small business performance significantly in terms of
increased sales,profits, and number of employees (McClelland
and Winter, 1971; Miron and McClelland, 1979). So, a great
deal of empirical evidence of various kinds supports the con-
clusion that the need to achieve, as defined by this research,
is an important component insmall business success.
However, in all of these studies the question keeps arising
about whether there were other key personal characteristics
needed for entrepreneurial success. McBer and Co., with the
assistance of a grant from the U.S. Agency for International
Development, has undertaken a major research investigation
to seek an answer to this question. The approach was em-
pirical. The goal was to see whether successful entrepreneurs
were more often characterized by certain competencies, such
as those listed previously, than average entrepreneurs.
To make sure we were casting as wide a net as possible
to observe these characteristics, McBer identified 12 average
and 12 superior small business people in each of three types
of business (manufacturing, service; and marketing ortrading)
in each of three developing countries (India, Malawi, and
Ecuador). The superior entrepreneurs were identified by a
nomination technique in which knowledgeable people in the
communities were asked to nominate the most successful
entrepreneurs of their acquaintance. In each country McBer
studied 12 of those who were nominated by manyjudges and
12 who were not mentioned as outstanding by any judge (the
average entrepreneurs).
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The Journal of Creative Behavior
The study employed a method developed by McBer called
the Behavioral Event Interview (BEl). Its purpose is to get
detailed accounts from business people on what they were
thinking about and how they acted in certain critical events
or episodes in the life of their business. They were asked
to recall events in which things had gone very well for the -
business and events in which things had not gone so well. For
each event they were asked to' recall in detail how it started,
what they were thinking about, who else was involved and
in what capacity, what they or others had done and how it had
turned out. In other words, they were telling several detailed
stories on the life of the business which, in form, were not
unlike the stories we had found previously to be useful in
identifying the achievement thinking patterns that make up the
n Achievement score.
These interviews were recorded on tape and later typed. The
next step was to develop codes for the competencies dis-
played in these various behavioral event descriptions. As an
initial activity, complete typescripts from several superior and
average entrepreneurs were compared to see what the differ-
ences were in the way they thought and behaved. That is,
several judges read the Indian transcripts first and then pooled
their ideas as to the competencies shown by the superior
as contrasted to the average entrepreneurs. This initial com-
petency model was then checked against samples of tran-
scripts from Malawi and Ecuador and expanded slightly to
cover additional competencies.
As we searched for competencies we tried to relate what
we found to the various competencies that scholars had
attributed to successful entrepreneurs - as discussed earlier.
In other words, we were looking for ways to code character-
istics like persistence, confidence, initiative and creativity.
The coding did not involve ratings of large amounts of
material as the goal was to make them so objective that
two judges reading the same protocol would come to the
same conclusions. So, the codes were actual descriptions
of thoughts or acts exemplifying a particular competency. As
a result, interjudge agreement on the number of instances of
a particular competency in a record is very high for the corn-
petencies included in the final list.
The longer list of competencies that developed from the
pilot study was then analyzed and compiled into a shorter final
list. For, when all the competencies were scored on more
protocols, some were eliminated because they did not appear
often enough to yield significant results, while others showed
224
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
no promise of distinguishing between superior and average
entrepreneurs. A final set of 20 promising and reliable com-
petencies was scored for all countries and types of business
by coders who had no knowledge of who were the successful
entrepreneurs and who were the average entrepreneurs:
In the interviews we also obtained factual information on the
background of the business persons and the performance of
their businesses over the past few years. We did this to ensure
that the nomination technique would in fact identify a group
of outstanding entrepreneurs. This turned out to be the case.
As compared to the average entrepreneurs, those nominated
as more successful showed a significantly larger percentage
gain in profits, and a greater percentage increase in sales over
the past three years. The successful entrepreneurs also oper-
ated in significantly more business locations.
The distribution of the various competencies among the
groups (by country, by type of business, and by successful
vs. average performance) was analyzed statistically in many
different ways using factor analysis, discriminant analysis,
multiple regression, and multivariate analysis of variance. The
details are contained in a very complete technical report
prepared for USAID by McBer and Co. (1986). For our limited
purposes here we will consider only the competencies that
were or were not more common among the successful as
compared to the average entrepreneurs across all countries
and types of business.
Of the final set of 20 competencies, Table 1 lists the nine
competencies which were significantly more characteristic
of successful than average entrepreneurs, overall. The list
contains the maximum number of such competencies, be-
cause more stringent, multivariate analyses show that some
of them overlap so much (e.g., Initiative with Sees and Acts
on Opportunities) that one or the other drops out when the
influence of the other is statistically removed.
There appear to be three groups of competencies that are
more characteristic of successful entrepreneurs regardless of
country and type of business. First, they seem more proactive
- they do things before they have to and they don't let things
slide. Second, they show several characteristics that are part
of the previously identified achievement motivation syndrome,
or are closely related to it. In seizing unusual opportunities,
they have obviously taken moderate risks. They are concerned
about doing things better and about high quality of work, both
of which are part of the scoring definition for n Achievement.
The Journal of Creatlve Behavior
TABLE 1 Competencies which are more characteristic of successful
than average entrepreneurs in India, Malawi, and Ecuador
PROACTIVITY
1. Initiative.
2. Assertiveness.
Does things before being asked or
forced to by events.
Confronts problems with others di-
rectly.Tells others what they have to do.
ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTATION
3. Sees and acts on
opportunities.
4. Efficiency
orientation.
5. Concern for high
quality of work
6. Systematic
Planning.
7. Monitoring.
Seizes unusual opportunities to start a
new business, obtain financing; land,
work space, or assistance.
Looks for or finds ways to do things
faster or at less cost
States a desire to produce or sell a top
or better quality product or service.
Breaks a large task down into subtasks,
or subgoals, anticipates obstacles,
evaluates alternatives.
Develops or usesprocedures to ensure
that work is completed or that work
meets standards of quality.
COMMITMENT TO OTHERS
8. Commitment to
work contract.
9. Recognizing the
importance of
business
relationships.
Makes a personal sacrifice or expends
extraordinary effort to complete a job,
pitches in with workers or works in their
place to get job done.
Acts to build rapport or friendly rela-
tionships with customers, sees inter-
personal relationships as a funda-
mental business resource, places
long-term good will over short-term
gain.
225
From Entrepreneurship and Small·Enterprise Deuelopment. second annual
report by McBer and Company to the United States Agency forInternational
Development. March 25.1986.
226
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
Systematic planning is related to achievement motivation in
the sense that the person is defining a series of sub-goals and
means of reaching them so that he or she will have concrete
feedback on the progress being made. Monitoring involves
holding people to high standards of work quality, although it
also contains elements of assertiveness in dealing with others.
The third group of competencies involves commitment to
others - a distinctly different set of competencies, emphasiz-
ing the importance of customer satisfaction. Successful
entrepreneurs are more concerned th •• t work gets done when
it is promised, thus maintaining good relationships with cus-
tomers over the long run. It is not enough just to be proactive
and achievement-oriented. One must also be concerned
about customer satisfaction.
In a sense the core competencies associated with entrepre-
neurial success will come as a surprise to no one. One might
even wonder whether it was necessary to go through such an
elaborate empirical study to demonstrate the obvious. But, the
point of the study becomes clearer in examining Table 2 which
lists the competencies which did not distinguish between
more and less successful small business persons in three
different developing countries in three types of business. Here
are some real surprises. Self-confidence is one of the favorite
characteristics which scholars have attributed to the success-
ful entrepreneur; yet in this study it was not significantly more
characteristic of the successful than the average entrepreneur.
And what about persistence? Nearly everyone, including
most entrepreneurs, would insist that perseverance is an
important part of success in business. Yet,once again, it failed
to discriminate between better and poorer small business
persons in our study. An explanation may lie in the fact that
it is better to persevere only when there is a reasonable chance
of success.
In our laboratory work we showed long ago that it is often
those with low n Achievement who persist longer at difficult
or impossible tasks.
In addition, successful entrepreneurs do not appear to
possess more influence skills, or more expertise, or a greater
tendency to acquire expertise than average entrepreneurs. So,
this study does not provide empirical support for believing that
a number of well-known characteristics contribute to entre-
preneurial success. However, the study does have some limita-
tions. It is possible that the method of measuring these
competencies was inadequate in some way,either through the
use of the BEl method, or through poor coding definitions.
The Journal of Creative Behavior
TABlE 2 Competencies which are not more characteristic of success-
ful than average entrepreneurs in India, Malawi, and Ecuador
1. Self-confidence.
2. Persistence.
3. Persuasion.
4. Use of influence
strategies.
5. Expertise.
6. Information
seeking.
Expresses confidence in his or her
own ability to complete a task or meet
a challenge.
Takes repeated or different actions to
overcome an obstacle.
Convinces someone to buy a product
or service, or provide financing. As-
serts own competence, reliability, or
other personal or company qualities.
Acts to develop business contacts,
uses influential people as agents to
accomplish own objectives.
Had experience in the same area of
business, had skill in finance, account-
ing, production, selling before starting
business.
Does personal research on how to pro-
vide a product or service, consults
experts for business or technical
advice.
227
From Entrepreneurship and Smell-Enterprise Development. second annual
report by McBer and Company to the United States Agency for International
Development. March 25. 1986.
All that can be said is that the researchers had no bias for
or against particular competencies, that they tried hard to
develop reliable and valid codes for them, and that using this
methodology some competencies dearly were associated
with success and some were not. Furthermore, some theoreti-
cal explanations come readily to mind for the failure of some
competencies such as self-confidence and persistence to dis-
criminate between the superior and average performers.
Another potential limitation of the study lies in the fact that
McBer did not study any non-entrepreneurs. Thus, it is entirely
possible that all of the competencies in Table 2 might be
more characteristic of entrepreneurs than non-entrepreneurs.
Here we are talking about what McBer refers to as threshold
competencies.
For example, it may take a certain amount of self-confidence
to even consider becoming an entrepreneur, but not take
228
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
added self-confidence to be more successful in business. And
one might well suppose that it takes a minimum or threshold
amount of expertise to get into any particular business. What
Table 2 shows is that even more expertise or information-
seeking is not associated with greater success.
Finally, we have made no attempt to examine whether certain
of these competencies contribute to more success in a par-
ticular line of business such as trading in a particular country
like India. Our concern has been with the core competencies
across different countries and different types of business. And
while it is legitimate to think that some of the competencies
in Table 2 may still show up as important in other types
of analyses, the burden of proof is on showing that this is so
in such further analyses. One certainly has reason to be skep-
tical about their importance, based on the findings of the
McBer study.
One may still question, on other grounds, whether all this
elaborate study of personal competencies is really necessary
to determine the types of people who are likely to succeed
at small business. Certainly, economists and sociologists are
likely to argue that external variables, not personality charac-
teristics, would be of greater importance for success. What
about such factors as education, access to capital, previous
experience in the same line of business, for example? Would
they not do just as good a job of differentiating between those
who perform better or worse as entrepreneurs?
If so, it is much cheaper to obtain such information. But
in this study none of these factors correlated significantly
with business success. Specifically, no significant differences
between more and less successful entrepreneurs emerged
when the data were aggregated across the three countries for
the following variables:
• Number of previous jobs held
• Number of businesses previously started
• Number of other family members who own busi-
nesses (related to access to capital) .
• Number of hours worked per week
• Highest level of education
• Father's occupation
• Mother's occupation
• Whether hours worked now is less, the same,
or more than before becoming an entrepreneur
These findings strongly suggest that it is not a person's
229
The Journal of Creative Behavior
position in life, or the initial advantage they have, that con-
tributes most to their success in business, but, rather, certain
personality characteristics or competencies.
The ultimate goal of this research enterprise was to develop
a means of selecting promising entrepreneurs for support
by examining the extent to which they showed the personal
characteristics associated with success in small business.
So, McBer developed a variety of ways to measure the com-
petencies shown to be associated with small business success
as illustrated in Table 1.
McBer did not develop measures of only these nine compe-
tencies for a variety of reasons. McBer included several corn-
petencies that had shown promise in some countries or types
of business, and excluded some that potential entrepreneurs
would not have had the opportunity to displaysuch as monitor-
ing the work of employees.
They were also guided in selecting which competencies
to measure by theease of scoring that competency in inter-
views. This criterion was particularly important because the
plan in the follow-up studies was to have the scoring done
locally rather than by expensive McBer coders situated far
away in the United States.
The first follow-up study was carried out in Malawi. Thirteen
competencies were measured in a simplified version of the
Behavioral Event Interview and in a number of questionnaires.
The picture-story exercise was also administered to get a meas-
ure of n Achievement. The purpose of the questionnaires was
to see ifvalid measures of the competencies could be obtained
without the expensive necessityof interviewing, recording, and
scoring the results.
All the measures were administered orally in Chichewa, the
local language. Forty-five average and forty-eiqht superior
entrepreneurs were nominated and assessed. Once again
business information provided in the interview confirmed the
fact that the superior entrepreneurs were in fact better business
people. They were significantly higher in sales, profits, and
number of employees. On average, the more successful
entrepreneurs employed about 9 people vs. 2 people for the
less successful entrepreneurs. Otherwise, the groups were
quite comparable in education (about 7 years on average), age
(averaging in the early 40s) and social background. Sources
of capital in both groups came overwhelmingly either from
their own savings or from family members.
Unfortunately, none of the measures in the questionnaire
distinguished between themore and less successful entrepre-
230
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
neurs. That is, the more successful ones did not score signifi·
cantly higher on any of the 13 competencies measured in vari-
ous objective tests. This result was not unexpected, because
there have been many published and unpublished reports
of questionnaires and inventories which have similarly failed
to show significant differences between more and less success-
ful business people. The reason researchers keep trying to use
such instruments is obvious - they are so easy to score quickly
and do not require trained scorers. As in previous studies, the
measures we obtained from such tests simply were not valid
indicators of greater or lesser success in small business.
On the other hand, the interview data yielded somewhat
better results, that is probably because it elicited spontaneous
behavior from the entrepreneurs rather than relying on their
choices among preset answers. A theoretical explanation of the
importance of this distinction has been advanced by McClel-
land (1980). Of the nine core competencies for successful
entrepreneurship listed in Table 1, seven were assessed in the
second study of Malawi entrepreneurs. Five of the seven had
shown the largest differences in favor of more successful
entrepreneurs. The remaining two (Sees and Acts on Oppor-
tunities and Concern for high quality of work) had shown only
small differences in favor of the more successful entrepreneurs
in the first study.
Accordingly, it seems appropriate to examine whether over-
all scores on the following five competencies distinguish sig'
nificantly between more and less successful entrepreneurs
both in the first and second Malawi studies:
Initiative
Assertiveness
Efficiency orientation
Systematic planning
Commitment to work contract
The mean score on these five competencies for the success-
ful entrepreneurs in the first studywas significantlyhigher than
for the average entrepreneurs, but to some extent that might
be due to a post hoc choice of the competencies showing the
largest differences between' the two groups. However, the
results from the second study are more believable because
they were predicted from the results of the first study. The
successful entrepreneurs in the second study scored 4.85
on these five competencies' as compared to 4.04 for the
average entrepreneurs, a difference which is significant at the
.05 level in the expected direction.
231
The Journal of Creative Beha~or
In addition, the successful entrepreneurs scored higher on
n Achievement, as expected, and the difference is not due
to greater verbal fluency among the better entrepreneurs,
because they also scored lower in two other motives (the needs
for power and affiliation) than the average entrepreneurs. If n
Achievement is included in the overall score along with the five
competency scores, the difference between the more and less
successful business people becomes even more significant
(p less than .03 in the predicted direction).
The result is important not only because it provides a further
check in a particular country on the validity of the core cornpe-
tency model and its three components - proactivity, achieve-
ment orientation, and commitment to others. It is also
important because it shows it is possible to get valid results
in a developing country in another language using relatively
inexperienced interviewers and coders. Thus, the method-
ology has promise for use in identifying entrepreneurs locally
who have greater potential for success. In fact, if a cutting
score is employed with the present data set, a higher percent·
age of those scoring above the cutting point would be in the
successful group as compared with the percentage of those
scoring below the cutting point. So, it would seem to be useful
to select people for training or loan assistance programs who
score above the cutting point on the grounds that they would
be more likely to succeed.
.However, much remains to be done. It is still possible that the
successful entrepreneurs score higher in the five competen-
cies as a result of having been successful. So, it is necessary
to get the scores on a group of potential entrepreneurs and
wait 2-3 years to see if scoring high on these competencies
in advance predicts which ones will be more successful. That,
in fact. is part of the research project still being carried out
in Malawi.
We also need to know whether training people in these
or other core competencies in Table 1 will facilitate entrepre-
neurial success in developing countries. That was part of the
original research plan in the contract with USAID, but unfor-
tunatelya new project manager in AID, combined with budget
cuts, led to a forced curtailment of the original plan for exten-
sive entrepreneurial training focused on the core competen-
cies that were discovered.
Still, we should not be discouraged. We have come a long
way from the lists of supposed characteristics of successful
entrepreneurs based on armchair analyses. Wehave gone into
the field in three very different developing countries and for
232
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs
the first time arrived at a group of approximately nine com-
petencies for which there is considerable empirical evidence
showing their association with success in small business.
Furthermore. we have taken the first step toward developing
a method of identifying in advance people who have the
needed competencies. It employs an expensive methodology,
but such an investment in selection seems likely to payoff
in terms of being able to give assistance to those who are more
likely to succeed.
We know a great deal about how to provide motivational and
competency training for small business people that increases
the degree to which they succeed (McClelland and Winter,
1971 ; Miron and McClelland, 1979; Report by Management
Systems International to USAID. 1986). So if we want to pro-
mote economic development we should immediately set to
work to use these improved methods for selecting and training
entrepreneurs. There is no better way to provide a broad basis
for rapid economic growth than to increase dramatically the
number of active entrepreneurs in a society. They represent
a very small segment of the population, but their impact
is crucial as they gather resources to produce goods and
services, create jobs, and decrease dependency on govern-
ment. Small business also provides a means of economic
developmentthat is considerably less expensive and more
efficient than the massive infusion of capital, advanced tech-
nology and highly trained manpower needed for developing
large businesses.
We know what to do to promote economic development.
So let's do it. Let's devote the relatively small amounts of private
and/or public resources needed to select and train better
entrepreneurs in impoverished sectors of our country and
abroad. There are few better or surer ways to increase the rate
of economic growth. We have had ample experience in pro-
viding money and other resources to people without the
motivation or other competencies needed to use them effec-
tively - with disastrous results that have discouraged many
into thinking it's not really possible to help many underde-
veloped areas. For once, Jet'sapproach the problem the other
way around - starting with people rather than resources,
making sure that there is a critical mass of competent, highly
motivated entrepreneurs who will, on their own initiative,
develop an area economically. It will turn out, I feel sure, that
they will find the resources needed for development, and that
they will need less in the way of resources than people who are
provided with resources but who do not have the personality
233
The Journal of Creative Behalllor
characteristics which we now know are crucial for entrepre-
neurial success.
The Bible reminds us that "Without vision the people will
perish." I like to paraphrase that to say "Without motivation the
people will perish." I would now say more pedestrianly that
without achievement motivation and certain core competen-
cies, efforts to promote economic development are not going
to succeed. So we should see that this vision is presented
clearly and convincingly to authorities responsible for pro-
moting economic development.
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David C. McClelland.
Address: Boston University, Graduate School, Center for Applied Social
Sciences, 195 Bay State Road. Boston, Massachusetts 02215.