Cuneo

Successful entrepreneurs are made, not born, with demonstrable leadership attributes that all too often are lacking in people seeking positions of power in business today, Peter Cuneo said April 16 at Entrepreneurship at Cornell’s Celebration in a roundtable talk hosted by the Samuel Curtiss Johnson Graduate School of Management’s Smith Family Business Initiative.

Cuneo – a business turnaround specialist behind several high-profile success stories in rescuing firms, including Marvel Entertainment and Remington Products – touched on the dramatic changes in corporate America since earning his MBA from Harvard University 40 years ago and a new international family business initiative he helped launch.

“Today, there are 1,000 billionaires in the world, some of whom are 25 years old. That’s a far cry from when I got my MBA and entrepreneurs were few and far between,” he said. Big corporations dominated back then, he noted, and operated at a snail’s pace compared to the real-time, 24/7 business activity ushered in by the digital revolution.

Swift advances in technology have provided some positive developments for entrepreneurs, Cuneo said, such as enabling instant communications that essentially shrink the world and allow a business to start anywhere. “It’s a very different world; there are great opportunities now, more than ever before,” he said.

Still, there is a downside to this reliance on technology. “Younger people are glued to their screens – phones, computers; they are locked into online social media,” Cuneo said. “There is little face time, which is the best way to communicate, especially when there is conflict or bad news.”

In fact, he said, many among the new generation of business leaders can’t deal with conflict or failure, or learn from it, because they lack exposure to meaningful misfortune that builds character and a willingness to accept criticism. That, in turn, makes them avoid risk, a critical component of entrepreneurship. “You cannot become a great leader without experiencing great difficulty in life,” Cuneo said.

Most MBAs today don’t know how to lead; they’re smart, but they can’t work effectively in a corporate setting, he said. “They rely on what others tell them defines success rather than focusing on what makes them happy. We have 30-year-olds seeking venture capital who have big dreams of striking it rich and retiring when they are still young, which rarely happens. Dreams are good, but you can’t be delusional about your professional goals.”

Leadership skills are the single most important thing young people can obtain to achieve success, said Cuneo, who maintains that leaders are made by experience and by mentors.

Cuneo left Marvel Entertainment five years ago to form a consulting business with his two sons. He hopes to point future leaders of family enterprises and entrepreneurs in the right direction via iLEAD (Intergenerational Leadership Entrepreneurial Accelerated Development), an educational program he helped establish that links Johnson with the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in China.

He describes iLEAD as a foreign exchange effort, creating new opportunities in China and worldwide through networking and collaborative learning. Among the key components, he said, are the transfer of cultural values and maintaining family wealth, particularly in China, where a one-child mandate makes establishing and maintaining family businesses very difficult.

Cuneo shared a few lessons he learned from his own family business. “You have to keep an open dialogue. Working together means being open about both family dynamics and professional dynamics. Be open about family wealth and how that wealth is shared,” he said.

His talk was followed by a discussion with Rhett Weiss, executive director of the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Institute, moderated by Daniel G. Van Der Vliet, Smith Family Business Initiative executive director. The three agreed that problems arising in failing businesses start with failed or failing leadership, and anyone taking a leadership role in a family business must be especially clear about roles and sensitive to the family culture.

Jay Wrolstad is a freelance writer.