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When some left-leaning activists of the 1970s and 1980s were challenged about the inconsistency of fighting nuclear power in Germany, the United States or the west in general, but ignoring the policy of the Soviet states, their response was that Soviet nuclear power stations were safer than their western counterparts because of better welding practices. Their rationale: Workers in the western hemisphere were exploited by capitalism and alienated from their work. This did not apply to Soviet workers, who in contrast to the west were not exploited or alienated, thus being more motivated, better skilled, more conscientious, and more professional.

Motives are action-founding applied values. They have an emotional charge that keeps us going. They are the lasting individual reasons with which we explain why we do what we do, and they express the individual values that are the incentives for our actions or non-actions. David C. McClelland (1987) identifies several basic motives for human actions: the pursuit of achievements, of power, and of affiliation and the opposite wish to avoid uncomfortable situations (cf. Lewin 1935). Growing from these basic motives, our actions reveal a wide range of other types of motives, which we can determine with the typologies of personal dispositions that researchers have identified and validated (Reiss 2008).

But, as the great entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, Bill Gates, the Albrecht brothers, Max Grundig, Erich Sixt, Hasso Plattner, Peter Dussmann, Adolf W€ urth, or G€ otz Werner show, we can neither copy their personalities nor their successes. Every one is unique, a “one of a kind” constellation. , follow Hamel’s mantra of rule breakers (Hamel 2000) that revolutionize markets or products. There is no set-in-stone rule for success. There are, however, rules that make failure more likely.