Sir Richard Branson: The Development of an Entrepreneur

1) To me, business isn't about wearing suits or pleasing stockholders. It's about being true to yourself, your ideas, and focusing on the essentials to achieve your ultimate goal. Branson had a high internal locus of control means higher job satisfaction, and a preference for participative management. He began building his entrepreneurial empire in his teenage years. At age 17, being frustrated with the rules and regulations of schools and brimming with activism, Branson and a friend, Jonny Gems, started a magazine called Student. The magazine tied many schools together and focused on the students themselves rather than the schools. After publishing the first issue of Student, Branson receive a note from the headmaster of the school that he and Gems attended. The headmaster wrote: "Congratulations, Branson. I predict that you will either go to prison or become a millionaire." Another characteristic of Sir Brandon is self-efficacy, one could say as the people's beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives. "People with high assurance in their capabilities approach difficult tasks as challenges to be mastered rather than as threats to be avoided. Such an efficacious outlook fosters intrinsic interest and deep engrossment in activities. They set themselves challenging goals and maintain strong commitment to them. They heighten and sustain their efforts in the face of failure. They quickly recover their sense of efficacy after failures or setbacks." That explains the fact that Branson dropped out of school and continued to pursue his entrepreneurial interest. His next venture was a discount music business called Virgin Records. Another characteristic was high self-esteem, "what our unconscious believes to be true about how worthy, lovable, valuable and capable we are. In other words, our self-esteem is very dependent on factors within our environment. It is formed as a result of our years of experiences (especially the early ones). It could be said that one's eyes and ears record the messages they receive from others, especially those most important to them. Because one's unconscious accepts all words and emotions as facts no matter how legitimate or based in reality, one's self-esteem is being continuously constructed and reconstructed by what is encountered in the mirror of others verbal and non-verbal messages."