The first thing I think of when I hear someone referred to as an entrepreneur is a business person who has successfully built a business from scratch, inevitably a wealthy executive. However, in a Wall Street Journal article by Sue Shellenbarger, Raising Kids Who Can Thrive Amid Chaos in Their Careers, she goes at entrepreneurialism from a more generic perspective. It is the ability to take "initiative and risks to put new ideas into play." In short, entrepreneurialism is the squishy skill of finding useful and/or profitable solutions to problems.
Studies from as recent as the turn of the 21st century found entrepreneurs in all kinds of organizational settings: product design firms, business model inventors, knowledge traders inside consulting firms and knowledge brokers inside multi-national firms. Although the business markets and settings were diverse, the study by Hargadon and Sutton showed that the entrepreneurial process was remarkably similar across all companies and industries:
- capture good ideas
- keep the ideas alive
- imagine new uses for old ideas
- put promising concepts to the test
All of this is best summarized by Thomas Edison who once said, "To invent you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." One myth about Edison needs to be dispelled: he worked with teams of people, not alone. Thus, contrary to conventional wisdom, he was not a singular creative genius. In fact, the Bell laboratories were the result of Edison's entrepreneurial process of using groups to develop and commercialize his products.
The simple marketing practice of enlarging market share by a product line extension (adding to a product line by changing one ingredient or process) is what the entrepreneurial spirit is all about. For example, since Cheerios is very successful, perhaps we can build on that success by developing Cheerios with nuts and honey. Anyone who has ever worked around product development knows that it is the entrepreneurial contribution of many hands.
What's most striking--and encouraging--about who fails and who suceeds, is that there is no entrepreneurial personality type. Smart entrepreneurs surround themselves with colleagues who have complementary skill sets. The entrepreneurs who succeed are actually very risk averse and look to hedge their bets with skilled partners and multiple investors to spread their risk. High-risk goals rarely get you very far.
One of my long-term acquaintances is Manny Villafana, the "Cardiac Kahuna," who was among the founders of Cardiac Pacemakers, St. Jude Medical and GV Medical. He is certainly not a guy who has always hit home runs: exceedingly risk averse, a penny-pincher, networked to an immense base of world-class physician-scientists from the Mayo Clinic and the possessor an extensive Rolodex of future colleagues. Yet in spite of those built-in success factors, he was always spreading the risk. He's far more representative of the entrepreneur than those bloated images of billionaires floating around the ether.
There are millions of those with an entrepreneurial attitude who will never be millionaires, but who are characteristically entrepreneurial and consistently work to develop practical solutions to complex problems. One of my clients has two locations in the Midwest, one with a sterling marketing program and the other with superb organizational smarts. After trying out their model for more than a year, they found organizational weaknesses in the marketing branch, and marketing weaknesses within the other organization. Because of the size and needs of each organization, permanently moving employees around was not a feasible solution. How did they resolve the problem? They trafficked organizational smarts to one organization, and marketing smarts to the other. The 300 mile distance between branches was surmountable. In doing so, their willingness to pursue unique solutions was indicative of an entrepreneurial spirit and resulted not only a solution to a problem, but eventually to a more financially profitable organization.
One of the things we know about entrepreneurs is that they are good "noticers." As Shellenbarger says, they notice "unmet needs and imagine ways to fulfill them." A Gallup survey released last week, found that "more than 60% of 1,100 employees and managers say entrepreneurial attitudes are important for workers of all kinds."
President Obama like President Bush has touted entrepreneurialism as the "tonic our economy needs." In the 21st century, nearly all professionals will need to add entrepreneurialism to their toolkit. Like adaptability, entrepreneurialism is grown, not born.
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