But when the going gets tough, the smart entrepreneur picks markets with these four characteristics.

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Strategic human capital management seeks to enhance all four characteristics, in addition to clarifying precisely what talent inventory is needed to execute short-term strategy.

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Not every entrepreneur fits neatly into a single bucket, says Tjan, but a successful founding team will have leaders with strengths in all four characteristics.

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At Vanderbilt, our message is that we have four characteristics: an opportunity to get a world class education, an opportunity to play in the greatest football conference in America, living in Nashville and playing time.

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But what such living companies do share, believes Mr de Geus, are four distinct characteristics.

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To find these stocks, I created a simple screen in our Stock Investor Pro stock screening program that looks for stocks with four specific characteristics.

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An advantage of the resource-based view is its clear analytical framework, where human capital is understood as having four important characteristics: it is valuable, scarce, not easily imitated, and lacks substitutability.

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For their studies, the team studied the characteristics of word order in four language families: Indo-European, Uto-Aztec, Bantu and Austronesian.

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These are the four basic types of advisors and the key characteristics for each.

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