The ability to think for yourself is an essential skill for any entrepreneur. That is why Professor Virginia Cha, who teaches one of the most popular entrepreneurship courses in Asia at the National University of Singapore, spends so much time teaching her students how their brains work – and how they can make them work more effectively.
“My theory is that we have three interlocking gears in our brain that we can engage when we are processing information, looking at opportunities, and dealing with situations as an entrepreneur: A computing gear, a knowledge gear, and a connecting gear,” says Cha, who in addition to teaching has helped launch a number of successful companies.
Professor Virginia Cha has identified three "gears" every entrepreneur needs to succeed.
The computing gear is the central processing unit, or CPU. It thinks fast, zooms in on gaps, does quantitative reasoning and other mathematical calculations.
“It’s the problem solver in you,” Cha explains.
She compares the knowledge gear to the random-access memory, or RAM, storing everything you have learned and understood about the world. More importantly, it indexes this information and can extract the relevant data when it is needed, efficiently and effectively.
“It’s the librarian in your head,” she says.
The connecting gear is the software. It recognizes patterns, draws lines between related concepts, people, and experiences, and generates useful insights from this.
“It’s the inventor, the innovator in you,” Cha says.
Making up for what you lack
Her study of what she calls “entrepreneurial logic” has led Cha to conclude that each of us has one dominant gear – and it is important for us to recognize which one it is, because each gear brings with it both advantages and disadvantages.
“We all have limited cognitive capacity. If your dominant gear is computing, you tend to have lower capacity in either the knowledge gear or the connecting gear,” she explains. “What does that mean? Well, if you observe a lot of geeks – super geeks, who can really program – they are often not socially adept. They have a hard time relating to people, and they tend to look at situations in ones and zeroes. They tend to speak very fast and very abruptly. They lack empathy.”
Similarly, those whose dominant gear is knowledge tend to think deeply but move slowly, spending more time contemplating and processing information.
“They tend to be very methodical, because they’re going through their vast store of knowledge, making the connections, and then putting forward that information,” she says.
Those with dominant connecting gears tend to be innovative, creative, and adept at making connections between people and ideas. They are able to synthesize what they know and what they have experienced and come up with something entirely new.
“These are the people who invent new things, but I wouldn’t ask them to come up with an actuarial table!” says Cha. “There’s one dominant gear. Therefore, the other two are smaller.”
Recognizing your strengths and weaknesses
Recognizing your strengths and limitations is the key to success for every leader. If you know that your connecting gear is really strong but recognize that your computing and knowledge gears are weaker, you can build a team that includes people with domain expertise and excellent problem-solving skills to overcome your deficiencies in these areas. If you know that you have first-rate problem-solving skills, but have a weak connecting gear, you can work with a rainmaker to make the business connections you need.
Cha says you can also work to improve your weaker gears – in some cases, at least.
“The good news is you can actually train yourself to have better gears, to have bigger gears. For example, in knowledge, you absolutely can train yourself by reading a lot and doing memory exercises, so you can have the ability to index and retrieve information quickly. There are absolutely training programs around knowledge,” she says. “The other good news is that the connecting gear can improve with age and experience – by living life and learning from it. Of course, you can go through certain training programs in patter recognition, learning about community building and so forth.”
The bad news, at least for those of us without a strong computing gear, is that this is the one area that is hard to improve.
“It is very hard to train people who don’t think in numbers to think in numbers, and even if you have that ability, you may lose it over time,” Cha says.
“Some people can do math in their heads. I used to be one of them. My first job was to be an operating systems programmer for Burroughs Corporation back in the 1980s. If you had a bug in your code, the whole system wouldn’t even boot up. In those days, the only way you could de-bug your system was to push a button, and it would regurgitate hexadecimal in this giant print out – and I used to be able to read that raw dump and know what was going on. But, over the years, I explicitly increased my knowledge gear. I got a PhD, stuffed myself with a lot of books, and explicitly made myself more empathetic, learning how to connect with people. Because of that, my computing gear had to take a compromise, which I think is okay because to be a true leader, to really make an impact on this earth, you have to build up people. You can't do that if all you know is how to crunch numbers.”
