It seems to be the week to discuss the idea of "adaptative ability" and its importance to the Bootstrapper.

I was re-reading Warren Bennis' book, Geeks and Geezers, a book on leadership. Bennis argues that leaders are made by entering a "crucible" and once there, by their adaptive capacity to deal with the challenges the crucible poses. This seems very similar to Joseph Campbell's "Belly of the Whale" concept within the Hero's Journey archetype; it is here that the hero must use their abilities to get out of a tough situation. It is also where they discover their own unrealized powers. Amar Bhide's notion of "opportunistic adaptation," which I mentioned in a previous post, is very similar.

Taking an informal check of the Bootstrappers I have studied - Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Scott Cook, Anita Roddick, Michael Dell, Larry Ellison and others - this indeed rings true. At critical times, each of them reacted in a way that adapted to the unexpected situations. One example: when IBM came knocking at Microsoft inquiring about an operating system, Bill's initial reaction was to connect them with CP/M, the then dominant PC OS company. Microsoft was, after all, in the computer language business, not the operating system business! But when CP/M rejected IBM, Bill showed his adaptive capability by purchasing Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Tim Paterson, and then licensing it to IBM. Similarly, Virgin got into the Record Store business when their music mail order business was threatened by a postal worker strike.

It seems that "adaptive capability" would be the key defining "skill" to teach Bootstrappers. Indeed, business plan writing or functional areas such as Marketing, Finance, etc., which are the traditional purview of a business school curriculum, really seem quite irrelevant to the bootstrapper's success; and perhaps even counterproductive. Is it any accident that most of the very successful Bootstrappers never went to business school?