Word: mcclelland
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...business entrepreneur is a very special kind of achiever. According to David C. McClelland of Harvard's Department of Social Relations, he is "more concerned with achieving success than with avoiding failure." He sees the world as neither benevolent nor malign but neutral, and he never doubts his power to hold his own in the marketplace. He is as readily bored by routine as he is challenged by risk taking - and he knows how to reckon the odds. Such a man is obviously valu able to any economy, but he is also rare. Is there a way to develop...
...test this hypothesis, which was based on McClelland's psychological studies of the personal characteristics that make a good entrepreneur, the authors decided to go to India. One reason for conducting an experiment there was that Indian commerce, still locked in the patterns and the fatalism of the past, urgently needs entrepreneurs. Another was that Indian small businessmen, who are suspicious of one another, set in their ways and resistant to change, make particularly challenging raw material. In several cities, McClelland and Winter invited local businessmen to join classes in what they called achievement motivation. Eventually, some 80 accepted...
Composing Epitaphs. One of the fledgling businessmen's first assignments, for example, was to compose six different answers to the question "Who am I?" These papers were later openly graded for imagination and what McClelland calls n Ach content, his shorthand for the kind of motivation that distinguishes the entrepreneur. The aim of the course was to plant "a growing conviction on the part of the person that he can change, that he can take control and direct his life." At brainstorming sessions-a Western invention that the Indian businessmen took to with great delight-they courted the notion...
...years following the course, McClelland and Winter periodically measured its effect. Some of the case histories, they report, read like Western success stories. A film exhibitor in the city of Kakinada expanded into the ticket-printing business and now supplies 45 theaters in four states. The owner of a small radio shop opened a branch office which he turned over to a woman manager (an unprecedented delegation of responsibility in India), called in an outstanding loan and established a paint and varnish factory...
...McClelland feels that his experiment has a number of practical as well as theoretical implications. One is that the instant training of potential business leaders may be a quicker and more painless way of bringing economic motivation to an underdeveloped nation than by indiscriminate infusions of financial aid. The Indian businessmen who were stimulated by his course went on to expand their enterprises, thus creating new jobs and earning more money. Another bonus from the plan is the possible application of the n Ach stimulant theory to the black ghettos of U.S. cities. Boston's Behavioral Science Center...