About this item
Many factors shape the success or failure of a new business, whether it's a stand-alone start-up or a new venture inside a larger corporation. But the most important and least understood of these factors is the personality of the builder -- the founder or leader's particular combination of beliefs and preferences that drives his or her motivation, decision making, and leadership style. And it's the one factor you, as a business builder yourself, can directly control.This book decodes the interplay between builder personality and new business success or failure. Using a patented analytic methodology, authors Chris Kuenne and John Danner discovered four distinct types of highly successful "business builder" personalities -- the Driver, the Explorer, the Crusader, and the Captain -- each displaying special gifts and predictable gaps or shortcomings in growing their companies and new ventures.Built for Growth blends exclusive research findings, personal interviews, and experienced analysis to illustrate how each type handles the five dynamic challenges of building businesses of lasting value: converting an idea into reality, recruiting inspired talent, transforming buyers into partners, aligning financial and other supporters, and scaling the business.With vivid stories and practical tools, this book gives you unprecedented insight into the personalities of each Builder Type and how you can use that insight to assess yourself and others and improve your odds of success.Built for Growth is the ultimate guide for how to play to your strengths, complement and compensate for your gaps, and build successful businesses -- from start-up to scale-up.
About the Author
CHRIS KUENNE, founder of Rosetta and Rosemark Capital, is a highly successful entrepreneur, member of Princeton University's faculty and growth capital investor. For more than 30 years he has been fascinated by the question of what motivates people to act as they do in a commercial context. He has devoted his career to translating insights about customer motivation into personalized sales and marketing techniques that accelerate enterprise growth.
He is now focused, with his colleagues at Rosemark, on applying these growth techniques to investments in partnership with leading private equity firms. Chris is a frequent speaker to various business leadership audiences, including the Young President's Organization (YPO) , venture capital associations, in addition to the American Council for Growth (ACG) and the CFO Roundtable, among many others. He is an active contributor to Forbes and a range of other leading industry magazines and journals such as Advertising Age, Banking Strategies and Pharmaceutical Executive. He has also appeared on CNBC Street Signs, Forbes podcasts and other media outlets.
Prior to founding Rosetta, Chris co-led the retail marketing practice at First Manhattan Consulting Group, following 10 years in marketing management at Johnson & Johnson, where he led the Band Aid® and Tylenol® brand franchises. Chris serves on various corporate and nonprofit boards. He received his MBA with Honors from Harvard Business School, and his BA from Princeton. He lives in Princeton, NJ, and Shelburne, VT, with his wife Leslie and their three sons, Peter, William and Matthew.
