"It Usually Takes At Least a Couple of Decades to Become An Overnight Sensation."

--An excerpt of the interview between Winning in Business hosts, Patrick Sweeney and Herb Greenberg, and their guest, Dr. Gene N. Landrum, founder of Chuck E. Cheese and author of "Entrepreneurial Genius: The Power and the Passion."

Excerpted from Caliper's radio show, WINNING IN BUSINESS, aired on WOR.

Patrick Sweeney shares, "Dr. Landrum is a hi-tech, start-up specialist who teaches and lectures on innovation and the creative personality. He is also the founder of the restaurant chain Chuck E. Cheese! In his ninth book, Entrepreneurial Genius: The Power of the Passion, he presents his 12 Laws of Entrepreneurial Genius as well as a self-assessment exercise so you can see how you stack up compared to some of the greatest entrepreneurs.

"Hello, Dr. Landrum," said Patrick Sweeney in welcome. "Let me introduce you to Herb Greenberg, You two certainly have a lot in common – and not just the "Doctors" in front of your names. Both of you are authors of books that are highly respected books in your fields, and each of you is especially intrigued by what makes people really succeed."

"Welcome," Herb said. "First, you have to tell us about starting Chuck E. Cheese."

"Oh, that’s a good one, all right," Dr. Landrum said, laughing. "I was a hi-tech marketing guy out in the Silicon Valley and had launched Atari’s first cartridge-loaded video games. My boss came to me with a problem in market targeting: cities and towns all over the country had ordinances banning games in places where food is served. I assumed these restrictions grew out of panic prompted by pinball-playing juvenile delinquents, so I proposed going to the other extreme. What could be more noncontroversial than a Disneyesque "fun" approach? I did a lot of painstaking research and planning, (talking to the mechanized critters in Disneyland’s Bear Country Jamboree, for instance), and came up with a detailed set of design specifications. Word of my ideas got around, an investor put up a million dollars, and it worked. I still have some mixed emotions, however, because I put a "ball crawl" out front for the kids when the first Chuck E. Cheese opened in 1977, long before anyone else thought of it, and then was ripped off coast to coast by Ronald McDonald himself!"

"We’ve just had an object lesson in entrepreneurial launching and product branding," Patrick observed.

"As well as a perfect example of being willing to risk failure, of not being afraid to fail," Herb added.

"Exactly," said Dr. Landrum. "An entrepreneur is someone who works sixteen hours a day for himself – to avoid working eight hours a day for someone else. The risk/reward principle is an essential part of the sense of independence required to go for it and, as the saying goes, try and try again. And it doesn’t hurt to start young – Michael Dell started his own mail-order business at 12 and quickly made $2,000."

"And yet, Sam Walton was 44 when he opened the first Wal-Mart," Herb countered.

"And Colonel Sanders was a senior citizen before he enjoyed more than regional renown," said Patrick.

"Oh, this is not to say they weren’t hard at work all the time" Gene replied. "On average, it seems to take about ten years to get really good at something and another ten to become really great, after which, who knows?" It usually takes at least a couple of decades to become an overnight sensation. In addition to Sam Walton, I studied the careers of Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, and Henry Ford, among others. The test I developed can show people how they compare in such areas as communication style, world-view, creativity, critical thinking, self-image, intensity and self-sufficiency."

"On the other hand," Patrick noted, "you cite some people who without question could be called overachievers, but are not usually thought of as ‘entrepreneurs,’ at least not in the business sense."

"Not in the business sense if you mean Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi," Gene said. "But think about it this way: there are overarching characteristics like "out-of-the box" thinking to be found in virtually all entrepreneurs in whatever area of endeavor. Every day in his classroom right here in Princeton, Einstein would write on the blackboard – ‘Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.’ Was anyone ever more of an out-of-the-box thinker, more of an entrepreneur of the mind? As to Gandhi, most people don’t know he was trained to be an attorney but was too introverted to actually practice law. But here’s where the unifying theme of my book – passion - comes into play. Although so personally unassuming that he was unable to interrogate or cross-examine, he brought the British Empire to its knees with the power and passion of his words – certainly an entrepreneur of the spirit!

This has been a brief snippet of one of the many thought-provoking interviews with some of the most successful people in business featured on our nationally syndicated radio show, Winning in Business.