8 Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs by Brent Bowers

8 Patterns of Highly Effective Entrepreneurs by Brent Bowers

Author:Brent Bowers [Bowers, Brent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48108-5
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-06-19T16:00:00+00:00


CHAPTER 4

Turning on a Dime

Entrepreneurs are nimble. They dodge and weave, backtrack and plunge ahead, make stupid moves and mount surprising recoveries. They are famous for turning on a well-known American coin.

But what really defines them is less their agility than the cast of mind that experts call a “tolerance for ambiguity ”—a willingness to plunge into the marketplace and weave their way through its confusions, contradictions, and blurred boundaries.

“You can spot it every time,” says William D. Bygrave, who teaches courses on entrepreneurship at Babson College in Massachusetts and who has a long small-business history of his own. “They see angles in every messy situation. They have untidy desks, whereas the accountant type has to have everything completely wrapped up. Tolerance for ambiguity is the one thing I look for in my students. They have that flexibility and opportunity, recognition that is going to save them and set them back upon their horse.”

Dr. Bygrave recalls teaching a course a few years back to students with backgrounds in science and engineering and observing how they waited expectantly for him to provide the correct answers to the problems that cropped up in case studies.

“But in really great case teaching you deliberately leave them with what I call ‘ambiguity space,’” Dr. Bygrave says. “You don't spell out everything for them. You let them wrestle with it. We want to see how far they can go wrestling with this ambiguity and develop their own models.”

Dr. Bygrave began his professional life as a physicist in Britain and says he was discombobulated when his “Newtonian universe” of precise calculations gave way to quantum mechanics and its claim that the most physics can do is predict the probability of outcomes. Einstein himself found quantum theory so unsettling that he fought it for years.

“I think physics is great training for being an entrepreneur,” Dr. Bygrave says, “because suddenly there is no absolutely right answer.”

He tells the story of two students, Ross and Mario, who started a travel agency on the Babson campus. One Saturday night, Ross called him to announce in a voice quivering with anger that he was bailing out of the business. He just couldn't take it anymore, he said; here he was in his room, trying to catch up with all the paperwork, and Mario was out partying! “He wanted everything tied up and neatly packaged, and so he went off and got into production management with a big corporation,” Dr. Bygrave notes.

Mario, by contrast, stuck with the business, saving it from disaster time and again by superhuman bursts of activity, then neglecting it for a while until a new crisis arose. On one occasion, government safety regulators grounded a charter airplane that Mario was using to ferry students south during the spring break, and the young man told his mentor he would never recover from the financial setback and bad publicity. “I said, ‘Mario, you're going to bounce back like a rubber ball,’” Dr. Bygrave remembers. “‘I've seen you do this over and over again.



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