The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

478 Pages·2000·3.79 MB·English

by  Rita Gunther McGrath

Copyright
Copyright 2000 President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
First eBook Edition: August 2000
ISBN: 978-0-8758-4834-1
There was homework and hockey and horseback riding
And the book
There was ballet and swimming and baseball
And the book
There was family and music and travel
And the book
There were friends and gossip and dishes
And the book
For Anne, John, and Matt,
Who good-naturedly lived with a book in the midst of our domestic
bliss
RITA GUNTHER MCGRATH
To Jean, whose sacrifices of time and whose emotional investment to
make this book happen cannot be measured.
IAN MACMILLAN
CONTENTS
Copyright
Preface
CHAPTER 1Needed: An Entrepreneurial Mindset
CHAPTER 2Framing the Challenge
CHAPTER 3Building Blockbuster Products and Services
CHAPTER 4Redifferentiating Products and Services
CHAPTER 5Disrupting the Rules of the Game
CHAPTER 6Building Breakthrough Competences
CHAPTER 7Selecting Your Competitive Terrain
CHAPTER 8Assembling Your Opportunity Portfolio
CHAPTER 9Selecting and Executing Your Entry Strategy
CHAPTER 10Putting Discovery-Driven Planning to Work
CHAPTER 11Managing Projects with Uncertain Outcomes
CHAPTER 12The Most Important Job: Entrepreneurial Leadership
CHAPTER 13The Entrepreneurial Edge: When Strategy is Discovery
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
PREFACE
THIS BOOK SUMMARIZES THE PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS OF OUR accumulation of
experience, research studies, and active teaching and working with business
organizations attempting to deal with uncertainty and with entrepreneurs
learning to launch and grow their businesses. MacMillan’s early interest in
entrepreneurship stemmed from his experience as an entrepreneur, when he
worked with John Foggitt to create a global travel business based on novel travel
concepts. McGrath also spent time as an entrepreneur, creating first a political
consulting business, then a prototype of what one might recognize as a Kinkos
type of operation called Unworried Words. Neither venture proved sufficiently
attractive to stick with for the long haul, although they were great learning
experiences. She began her academic career after closing these businesses to
pursue an exciting opportunity in the world of information technology design.
We thought that you, our readers, might be interested in the origins of some
of the ideas in this book. The primary thrust of the book—that uncertainty can
yield tremendous opportunity when looked at in the right way—has long been a
topic at the heart of the academic study of entrepreneurship.1
Chapter 2 stems from our experiences with teaching entrepreneurship and
helping would-be entrepreneurs. One of our most consistent challenges was to
get entrepreneurial wanna-bes to make sure that their proposed venture ideas
were worthwhile. Accepting proposals for any old venture inevitably generated
lists of viable, but basically boring businesses (like dog-walking services). So,
we challenged them to think of business concepts that would be worthwhile in
comparison with the opportunities they could have working for a large company.
Without further ado, the insufficiently profitable ideas vanished. The business
equivalent is to make sure at the outset that your ideas have the potential at
maturity to contribute in a worthwhile way to your company. This is what we
call framing the business.
In chapters 3 and 4 we examine ways of seeing existing product and service
offerings in a new light. The material is extensively drawn from fieldwork in
which we have analyzed patterns of opportunity recognition by independent
entrepreneurs and by managers pursuing corporate ventures. We are particularly
fortunate to have worked with Citibank (now Citigroup), Chubb & Son,
American Reinsurance, DuPont, and other companies that showed us how new
opportunities emerged and how these organizations used them as the basis for