Why mastering entrepreneurial skills trumps technical skills in business success?

If you are running a business, what is better to learn:

Marketing, accounting, financial management, and human resource management or

The mindset of taking personal initiative, goal-setting, and overcoming obstacles?

In 2014, a group of researchers conducted a study in Africa, recruiting entrepreneurs to test the effectiveness of different skill sets. The business owners were divided into two categories: those receiving traditional business training and an experimental group.

The traditional business training treatment group was invited to receive the Business Edge training program, which is an internationally accredited program developed by the International Finance Corporation. The content of the training focused on four core topics: accounting and financial management, marketing, human resource management, and formalization.

The experimental group was offered a new personal initiative training program. This program's content was very different from that of traditional business training programs, focusing on teaching a mindset of self-starting behavior, innovation, identifying and exploiting new opportunities, goal-setting, planning and feedback cycles, and overcoming obstacles.

The training was for four weeks, with a total of 36 hours for each. Tracking business results over two years showed that entrepreneurial training outclassed technical training—while the former increased profits by 30%, business training produced only an increase of 11%, which the study authors termed statistically insignificant.

The study authors argue that their results show how a psychological mindset training approach can lead to innovation and improved entrepreneurial success compared to traditional business training, which consists of technical skills.

Three studies with a total of 408 African micro and small-scale business owners conducted in South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Namibia between 1998 and 2001 found that personal initiative and proactive action planning substantially correlated with business success.

The study authors recommend that taking personal initiative and doing detailed planning are essential skills to be taught. They, however, suggest a few caveats. Bad plans don’t work; planning should not be too detailed to stop execution. At one point, one has to move ahead, experiment, and adjust according to feedback. Thus, business success rests on personal initiative, detailed planning, experimentation and course correction based on feedback.

Of course, this does not mean that technical training is useless. It shows the vital importance of meta-skills: the skills that enable other skills. When you become adept at meta-skills such as entrepreneurial skills and other skills we have been discussing so far, you can get better at learning other skills, including technical skills; you become skilled at deciding what other skills are required for your growth.