How I Unleashed my Inner Entrepreneur

You can Harvest your Entrepreneurship in 6 Easy Steps

Entrepreneurship has become so fascinating to the younger generations entering the workforce even as huge corporations dominate work life more and more, and as economic horizons appear dimmer for each successive generation.

As uncertainty and volatility play havoc to naïve expectations of stability and safety, the idea of the solitary tenacious entrepreneur has a hopeful message that life is not a cage but a promise.

Today’s dynamic marketplace realities of permanent turbulent change demand entrepreneurs and organizations to respond with agility by drawing on the imagination and brainpower of their talents, encouraging innovation and improvisation rapidly for the marketplace to reward them for their initiative and entrepreneurial spirit.

Entrepreneurship attracts the exceptional human talent because it promises great satisfaction from the tremendous opportunities to make significant personal impact through reality-learning. Often, the lessons from the inevitable failures during the entrepreneurial journey produce a profound sense of ownership that fuses vision and commitment to produce the ultimate superior performance that exceeds initial expectations. Systematic coaching and mentoring experiences with passionate and visionary leaders can invoke intense curiosity in the entrepreneurial talents through meaningful activities that challenge them to learn co-operatively, share ideas and insights, and to think without mental boxes.

Entrepreneurs can learn valuable lessons from the success and failure of startups and mature organisations before they embark on the often irrational and illogical journey of business ventures expecting easy rewards but instead would encounter mostly nothing but risks, perils, pitfalls and failures, repeatedly. Experience teaches that the entrepreneurial journey quickly becomes its own reward long before profitability and sustainable positive corporate earnings.

There are 6 Steps before entering the road to wonderfully awesome entrepreneurship so as to better grasp its promises of hope and eventual success.

1) Beyond 2 Choices

The corporate graveyards in the past recent decades are full of successful companies and organisations imprisoned by their “inability to escape the past” or the “failure to create a new future”, and both. Trapped in their vainglorious past with no coherent pictures of possible futures, many organizations languished in the self-deluding hope that the new competitive trends of the fourth Industrial Revolution (IR4) powered by rapid advances in new social media, blockchain and information technology, new mobile life-styles and new forms of organizations, will be passing fads that would eventually fizzle out. This is plain denial. And such companies ended in the throes of oblivion as their only certain fate.

The decision facing Entrepreneurs goes beyond these 2 choices. Companies will fail to create a new future by insisting on optimising business systems with time-tested recipes whose past successes confirmed strategy but are now vulnerable to the new realities because they mistook momentum for leadership, and did not re-invent and update visionary leadership for current and continuous relevance.

These companies are often slow-moving and uninspiring places to work because they are obsessed with bureaucratic red-tape and internal politics, and therefore unable to sustainably deliver the high expectations which their past successes engendered.

Today entrepreneurial talents watch in disbelief and bewilderment as uninvolved bystanders when they perceive and experience companies falling heads over heels in grasping ineffectively with the new competitive environment. A new future beckons and awaits those who are prepared to stop living conventionally and reach out beyond their grasp for their future awaiting them. Next, they must also decide to escape the past.

2) Escape the Past

Unable to escape the past, many organizations retreat to the comfort of unparallel track record of successes that enable the accumulation of abundant resources and aligning expectations and performance in the belief that resources will win out. They substitute creativity with more resources and are contented with current mediocre performance.

Lost in the new strategic mega-space, many desperate companies resorted to the “big is beautiful” solution of the 70s’, 80’s and 90’s to repeat the spate of familiar high-stake mergers and acquisitive alliances. Others are stunned into reviewing their “core competencies” and rapidly discarded businesses which they do not consider “core”, never mind profitable or not, according to some meaningless accounting ratios and historical criteria. These measures have limited effectiveness, and they are also grossly misdirected in addressing and engaging the onslaught of the new wave of transformative competitive realities. The helplessness of companies unable to escape the past and failing to create new futures could lead easily to paralysis in talent management.

Painfully watching companies in the death throes of living in their past and dying in the futility of tested management models, entrepreneurs must reach within themselves instead of outwards to define a new paradigm of venture creation. The answer lies in their own entrepreneurism.

3) Embrace your Entrepreneurism

The entrepreneurial psychic does not consider a mere salaried job career even with a wellness life-style balance as meaningful or purposeful life. Entrepreneurs want to nurture their own entrepreneurism by stepping out of their comfort zones and engage the risks of hitherto unconventional solutions. They are often mindfully self-aware of their strengths and passions through introspection, learning and discovery to be emboldened to chart intentional actions toward impactful outcome through corporate venture vehicles.

Entrepreneurs create organizations whose corporate culture embraces the art of continuous innovation. This refers to the capability to constantly discover, create, capture, and exploit new opportunities. The new competitive realities of permanent turbulence demand the exploration of new opportunities vital for repeatable business success, especially with “blue ocean” value innovations that refresh organizations with new products and services for the “non-customers” in unexplored marketplaces.

Innovations are driven by the synergy of thinking that is empowered by the interaction of people with diverse knowledge, disciplines, experiences, and values. The continuous sharing of new knowledge defines the heart of most innovations, through the essence of collaboration and learning. This is a unique value preference of the entrepreneur.

True entrepreneurism in the entrepreneur defines and leads cultural changes in the way his/her organizations (and startups) develop, share, interact and engage innovations for the transformed marketplace as he/she lives the future in the present.

4) Live the Future

Living the future equips the entrepreneur to de-couple the permanent turbulent change from time. Change happens. It has nothing to do with time. Time did not cause or initiate them nor is time a part of the solutions in change management response. Change is the natural business socio-environmental characteristic. Absence the immaterial and irrelevant time element, change is therefore captured by the astute entrepreneur in any of its permanent forms to be readily grasped and managed. In today’s VUCA conditions, change manifests and mutates rapidly to produce the permanent turbulence on the road to entrepreneurial satisfaction and happiness.

To the entrepreneur, the future is what is happening, and not what will happen as the past, present and future are concurrent and non-existent. This awakening leads entrepreneurs to a unique self-awareness in their change management action. They consciously leave “behind” all and every past baggage as they engage the ever-present in the future without them. This is the secret of their effective method for “escaping the past” as described above.

The entrepreneur welcomes the future daily. Yes, the future is today … and tomorrow is, well, already yesterday! Sounds confusing? You are not alone. The permanent turbulent environments of the new competitive landscape have in effect created widespread paradoxical conditions inside the old mindsets. One paradox is “The Red Queen” effect, after the Red Queen in the Alice in Wonderland story, where one has to run increasingly faster just to stay put or maintains one’s current position.

A special entrepreneurial mindware is need to embolden and empower successful navigation into entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur sees time as permanent and eternal; meaning it has no beginning or ending. Yesterday, today and tomorrow are just markers on a time horizon which is common to everyone. If yesterday were a different day, and tomorrow yet another, is the future therefore in front or behind us? The “passage” of time is a misnomer; it is actually a space metaphor like the “distance” of space.

5) Change your Mindware

The entrepreneurial mindware conceives of technology as an environment, instead of a tool, that can impact relative competitive advantages by disrupting the “time-space” value canvas in that environment before creating “space/time/savings” value propositions using new mobile apps, information tools and social media apps against the backdrop of a new strategic value canvas.

The competitive marketplace has become a series of races to overcome the next hurdles and invent the evermore-better-and-useful product. The focus of management is on the dynamic core competency of inventing new products faster or better than others or at a rate faster than most. Or better still, to side-step the competitors in the “red ocean” and create a non-competing “alternative” product/service in the “blue ocean” where competition does not yet exist, as advocated by the “Blue Ocean Strategy” school.

Truth is, the most stable delivery vehicle platform to generate uninterrupted streams of total customer satisfaction value is culture. Culture is the mindware package of ideas, sentiments, values, insights, skills and instinctive behaviours that make up the soul of the company core identity. Entrepreneurship is the cultural extension of the entrepreneurial mindware in the application of human talent and materials in the marketplace.

6) Grow your Agility

Entrepreneurial agility develops from reflective and reflexive learning to excite and accelerate the creative energy flows in entrepreneurship to generate the unusual, unfamiliar and uncommon intelligent entrepreneurial response to opportunities.

Entrepreneurs are often intuitive and thrive on hunches, instincts, speculations and a nagging feeling in their gut. The entrepreneur is comfortable setting out on his venture journey without knowing exactly how he/she is going to get to his destination. Driving entrepreneurship is a conscious agility that will engage and embrace the competitive realities and empower the ability to innovate, respond, engage and grow.

Entrepreneurs do not mistake motion for action, nor substitute resources for creativity. They derive no lasting contentment with current performance since change continually re-opens and widens the gaps between expectations and performance. Change produces wide fluctuations and unacceptable dissonance in the expectation-performance gap like a runaway yin-yang pendulum where non-action would surrender to the chaos of oblivion whilst conventional action would definitely accentuate the gap.

Successful entrepreneurs reinvent themselves continuously so as to reimagine, reconfigure and recalibrate their strategic moves without adherence or conformance to any particular management ideology, known models and hitherto successful prescriptions. They do not target change itself but the capricious environmental vectors in the opportunity environment. Their entrepreneurism reflects and unleashes implications, consequences, and possibilities from their insights of the trending happening in the opportunity environment.

Through these 6 Steps, entrepreneurial leaders, imbued and driven by the entrepreneurial spirit and quality of entrepreneurism, can infuse a sense of hope and future purpose to appeal, inspire and motivate this 21st-century workforce.

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