Hello,

I think both of those definitions get at the same qualities - taking initiative, figuring out how to do some task outside of your comfort zone rather than following a blueprint, being creative and hardworking in your approach. I tend to view Entrepreneurial Drive as basically synonymous with taking initiative, if that's easier. But to answer your question, both approaches would fit.

Great question!

In order to have a good answer to entrepreneurial drive, your story should ideally fulfill the following criteria :

• It should be a challenging problem - The emphasis here is on both the nature of the problem that makes it tough and your creative approach to solving the tough problem
  • Ensure that the problem is indeed tough – some of the characteristics of such a problem include
    • Has not been solved before in the same environment (cannot just copy paste a solution)
    • Typically requires multiple people to be solved 
    • Typically requires a lot of time to be solved
    • May require many different teams to work together

• It needs to show that you are independently driven – i.e., not relying on a manager/external source to ask you to do a task but doing it because it needs to get done
  • This is where the element of taking the initiative comes in. I always encourage people that in their entrepreneurial drive stories, they do not talk about solving a problem they have been told to solve but to think about when they have noticed an existing problem (others can also have noticed the same problem) and how they went about solving it.

Feel free to PM me with any questions, I have helped many candidates refine their PEI stories to the level expected by McKinsey.

Best,

Udayan

Hello, 

Both definitions are the same. What a recruiter wants to understand is your “drive”. The main question the he is trying to solve for is: "if this candidate is in my team and I give him a task, will he:

• Only do the task without thinking about it - bad answer
• Understand the hypothesis that the team is trying to prove, perform the task / analysis, add some thinking on what extra analysis is needed, potentially what additional dataset is missing and who could have it - good candidate

cheers,

Armine

It's both!

Please be careful here…the odds that you get asked either of those questions is low!

Remember that the Entrepreneurial Drive category is a category. There are dozens of questions they might ask.

Learn to be flexible in your answer….you can't predict the question but you can learn to react/adapt to any question that comes your way!

Hi!

I see the Entrepreneurial Drive in both questions. 

I would suggest preparing 2-3 stories in this category and then tailor them to the specific question you get (i.e. to the specific shade of Entrepreneurial Drive of the question).

Hope this helps.

Best,

Anto

Both work. The two definitions are complementary, one focusing on developing the ‘entrepreneurial’ component, and the other one the ‘drive’. 

For anyone else who is preparing for the PEI component, I've created a video course with my 6-step storytelling framework that has helped my candidates get distinctive feedback on the McKinsey PEI. You can find out more about it here:

• Video Course: Master the McKinsey PEI

Best,
Cristian

If you want to shine on your entrepreneurship PEI stories I recommend you focus on showing:

• How you can drive change outside of your immediate area of influence
• How you can take fast 80/20 decisions
• How you set up challenging goals to achieve
• How you come up with new a creative ideas and execute them
• How you push to achieve something not very common

I hope this helps.

Best,

Alberto