The Hindu Business Line : The yin and yang of business

Missionaries and mercenaries provide contrasting but often complementary attitudes and skills. The missionary embraces faith while the mercenary wants facts. The missionary sees the light on the mountain top, the mercenary is obsessed with bridging the crevasses along the way.

ENTREPRENEURS seem to fall into two major categories: the Missionaries and the Mercenaries. We have historically seen both in abundance, going all the way back to Chrisopher Columbus's discovery of America. The venture capitalist who funded him, Queen Isabel of Spain, recognised these archetypes and bet on Columbus and another Spaniard Hernando Cortes, who were each accompanied by Franciscan friars, missionaries who were just as entrepreneurial as their mercenary leaders.

Now just as it was then, the missionaries want to change the world with their ideas. They are fired by their beliefs and a passion to make a lasting impact. In doing so, missionaries attract dedicated followers; their passion is infectious and elevating.

As a result, missionaries make for credible salespersons, proficient as they are at converting people to their vision. They also tend to be willing to make personal sacrifices for their mission and for their teams, thus creating organisations with focus, zeal, and loyalty.

The good news about missionaries is that they do not give up — not until the world is converted or they are martyred. And, since success is often about staying the course, this is a great strength.

The bad news too is that missionaries do not give up. They are notoriously inflexible and will not compromise on their vision. Markets have an inconvenient tendency to frequently collide with their missions. Success is almost equally often about tacking to the wind and changing one's path as needed.

Not all missionaries will make the necessary course corrections, seeing them as defeats. Thus they win big or fail big.

Mercenaries, on the other hand, are motivated by the bottomline of value created, most often calculated in monetary terms.

They calculate, measure, avoid unnecessary risks. Unlike the missionaries, they are relatively detached about the products or services they deal in and can easily change course. If they cannot sell shoes, they will sell skates or whatever the market demands.

Their goal is simply to make money, creating wealth for themselves and their organisations.

Passion here is of a different kind. Some mercenaries are artists, maestros in their understanding of business. Their mastery can often create and inspire a following, as can their track record.

While missionaries sell a vision of the future, mercenaries sell themselves based on their past. Yet, interestingly, it is the mercenary's curiosity about mapping successful business and business models that often drives them.

While missionaries seek the new and the untested, mercenaries thrive on the predictable. They eschew unnecessary challenges and prefer the more boring but potentially more certain path. This aversion for risk is often good for investors and for enterprise survival and success.

Of course, given the mercenary's strong focus on personal bottomline, a team member or investor needs to be mindful of the alignment of his personal goals with that of the mercenary entrepreneur's. A misalignment can be cause for disappointment and grief.

The key for a truly successful venture, however, is not to focus necessarily on the differences between these two types of entrepreneurs, but to work to find both. Missionaries and mercenaries provide contrasting but often complementary attitudes and skills.

The missionary embraces faith while the mercenary wants facts. The missionary sees the light on the mountain top, the mercenary is obsessed with bridging the crevasses along the way. They are the yin and yang of business success.

Mercenaries, for example, can follow missionary founders and take the venture forward once the missionary runs out of steam, often by simply executing the missionary's strategies more effectively. For instance, when a board of directors brings in a CEO from the outside for a company, the candidate is more likely to be a mercenary.

Missionaries, meanwhile, are generally considered more inclined to starting companies rather than getting hired to run them.

There are also cases where some entrepreneurs change their patterns themselves, starting out as missionaries and acquiring necessary mercenary strengths.

In the Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs can be seen as the archetypal missionary, out to change the world with his vision.

Yet he has learned balance in his business practices, evidencing significant mercenary prowess since his return to Apple.

On the East Coast, Computer Associates founder Charles Wang, had created a reputation as the technology mercenary, again in the positive sense.

Looking to India and elsewhere, we can see examples of these types there as well. Ratan Tata has been a tireless missionary in a host of industries; his vision of an Indian car for the masses is just the latest example.

Emphasising the Tata group's values, he has generated unprecedented cohesiveness within his once disparate group even as he has challenged his companies to become global players on multiple fronts — in areas spanning steel, consultancy services and hospitality.

We also have the example of L.N. Mittal, now the largest producer of steel in the world, who is truly a consummate "mercenary", finding under-performing and undervalued assets and finding ways to generate wealth through them.

He has devised a powerful business model that he executes with great skill.

Both missionaries and mercenaries can make outstanding entrepreneurs, depending on the situation and opportunity at hand.

The characteristics of both are required to build enduring companies. A management team with a balance of missionaries and mercenaries in roles that play to their strengths will maximise the chances of success.

(The author is a management consultant based in Silicon Valley.)

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