Entrepreneur:

Opportunity-driven Growth

Entrepreneurial Organization

Promoting Entrepreneurial Activity Inside Established Organizations

"The purpose of an organization is to realize its potential. Realizing its potential lies in the strength of its purpose."  

– Colin Turner 

Entrepreneurial Organization Defined

Entrepreneurial organization promotes entrepreneurial activity adapting structure, management, and processes accordingly in order to gain the required agility, speed, creativity and drive to act profitably upon specific opportunities.¹

Entrepreneurial organization is any organization that meets these two criteria:

1. It is structured so that its members are given the information and tools necessary to allow each to pursue solutions and take advantage of opportunities at their level, based on the stated objectives of the organization.

2. An atmosphere exists that encourages individual initiative, and mistakes and failures that occur in the process of taking initiative are actually viewed as progress in the personal and organizational quest for excellence.

9 Signs of a Losing Organization

1. Discouraging Culture: lack of trust; blame culture; focus on problems, not opportunities; diversity is not celebrated; failures are not tolerated... More

The Seven Dimensions of Strategic Innovation

The Strategic Innovation framework weaves together seven dimensions to produce a range of outcomes that drive growth.

A company's Organizational Readiness may drive or inhibit its ability to act upon and implement new ideas and strategies, and to successfully manage operational, political, cultural and financial demands that will follow... More

Opportunity-driven Business Development

In today's era of rapid change, you cannot lay out a detailed plan for realization of your strategic intent. Changes in strategic direction come from the pursuit of opportunities rather than from strategic planning.

Developing  Entrepreneurial Staff

There are two phases in developing an entrepreneurial workplace. Phase I creates the environment necessary to support and encourage it. Phase II is building your staff's entrepreneurial skills... More

 Best Practices  Google: 10 Golden Rules

• Encourage creativity. Google engineers can spend up to 20 percent of their time on a project of their choice. There is, of course, an approval process and some oversight, but basically we want to allow creative people to be creative. One of our not-so-secret weapons is our ideas mailing list: a companywide suggestion box where people can post ideas ranging from parking procedures to the next killer app. The software allows for everyone to comment on and rate ideas, permitting the best ideas to percolate to the top... More

10 Ways To Murder Creativity

7. Ask for a 200-page document to justify every new idea... More

Entrepreneurial Leadership of Transformational Change

One of the most striking attributes of leaders of successful transformational change efforts is their entrepreneurial spirit and behavior. These individuals think and act like heads of their own businesses and are able to inspire and direct others to act in the same manner.  Entrepreneurial leaders are part visionary, part role model for the new values and behaviors and part crusader. They frequently emerge from lower levels of the organization, from the business, or from other organizations.

Change Management

One of the keys to dealing with change is understanding that change in never over.

"Change brings opportunity to those who can grasp it, and the discontinuities of the new economy offer unlimited opportunities."⁶... More

Eliminating Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy makes work and creates climate in which the customer comes third – well after the management and the company's other employees.

How much of your energy is expended on purely internal activities? if you spend less than 20% of your energy on external customers, than bureaucracy has taken hold... More

 Case in Point  General Electric (GE)

Jack Welch, the legendary former CEO of GE, wrote in 1989, "The competitive world of the nineties will make the eighties look like a walk in the park. To win we have to find the key to dramatic, sustained productivity growth... We have to turn in the nineties to the software of our companies, to the culture that drives them... We have to move from the incremental to radical, toward a fundamental revolution in our approach to productivity and to work itself – a revolution that must touch every single person in the organization every business day."⁴

Welch summed up his prescription for winning in three words:

• Speed

• Simplicity

• Self-confidence.

References:

1. "Lead to Succeed", Colin Turner

2. Relentless Growth, Christopher Meyer

3. Jack Welch, interview, July 22, 1997

4. Jack Welch, speech, The Bay Area Council, San Francisco, California, September 2, 1989

5. "Managing New Products", Thomas D. Kuczmarski

6. "Every Business is a Growth Business", Ram Charan and Noel. M. Tichy

7. The Leader's Guide To Lateral Thinking," Paul Sloane

8. "Are you building an entrepreneurial organization?", Jim Blansingame