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Entrepreneurial Thinking
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The last few years have seen entrepreneurship come back down from the frothy clouds of unreal business plans. As we leave that historical hiccup behind, we can see that entrepreneurial thinking continues to power the growth both of new and established businesses. If anything, entrepreneurial activity is taking intriguing new forms, particularly within and between large companies.
Leaders continue to figure out how to harness the entrepreneurial engines of their businesses: the rich pools of human capital consisting of skills in spotting trends and opportunities, weak points in the armor of competitors, and alternative ways of organizing internally and by means of strategic relationships. All these and other kinds of entrepreneurial activity feed and in turn are fed by intellectual entrepreneurs – the business writers whose reputational capital depends on their ability to construct and communicate new ideas to those who can adapt and implement them.
You will find numerous aspects of entrepreneurial thinking in this topic. Start with the couple dozen or so pieces of content that we have featured here, then dig deeper into the hundreds of other items in this subject. You can also search more broadly into associated aspects by expanding into the Related Interest Areas. To form a better understanding of entrepreneurial personalities and how they relate to managing and leading, for example, you might check out our reviews of “The Entrepreneur on the Couch” and “The Entrepreneurial Mindset” then compare them with the insights in “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale” and “A Test for the Faint-Hearted”. If you see your middle managers as dead weight waiting to be flattened, see what we say about “What Makes a Good Entrepreneurial Leader? Ask Middle Managers”. After all, your own entrepreneurial talents are all about discovering value where others have overlooked it.
Large companies, once thought of as the realm solely of followers, can act as fertile breeding grounds for entrepreneurial thinking. Not only is this now commonplace, as Enron showed, it can go too far. Stoking the fires of entrepreneurial zeal while governing the results requires a thorough grasp of the organizational context of entrepreneurship. You’ll find a good start by checking out “Monomaniacs with a Mission” and “The Conductor-less Orchestra”. Corporate venturing (as well explained in “Rebuilding Business Building”) forms another part of the puzzle of organizational entrepreneurship.
Good entrepreneurs learn from their mistakes but, even better, you can learn from the mistakes of others (“Top Ten Mistakes Made by Entrepreneurs”). Or find inspiration in the successes and experiments of entrepreneurs as different as Richard Branson and Nathan Myhrvold. If you prefer the analytical to the inspirational or the cautionary, you might look into the recent surge of interest in finding value in unlikely places, as is well represented in “Serving the World’s Poor, Profitably”. Or look into the latest ideas and disagreements about devising disruptive business models, or strategy and tactics for tackling powerful incumbents (“Mastering Balance: How to Meet and Beat a Stronger Opponent”). If you think we’ve missed any facet of entrepreneurial thinking, we’d like to hear from you.
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