Startup Leadership: How Savvy Entrepreneurs Turn Their Ideas Into Successful Enterprises

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Motivating Others

Motivating other people to do what you want has long been considered a rare talent—and unless you had it, the only way to get people to do what you wanted was to pay them or force them. Research into the sources of people's motivations now enables businesspeople and entrepreneurs to understand that motivating others is a skill they can master—charisma and other innate personality traits have nothing to do with it.¹ Motivating others is a different skill from relationship building. You build relationships one shared objective at a time;² you motivate groups of people to all share a single objective.

Dean Kamen is a brilliant engineer; all his peers and even his competitors agree on that.³ He started his first company in high ...