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

Front Cover
Harvard Business Press, 2000 - Business & Economics - 380 pages
A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations

Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete.

Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs.

The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to:
* Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile
* Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs
* Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future
* Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk
* Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization

The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.

 

Contents

An Entrepreneurial Mindset
1
Framing the Challenge
9
Building Blockbuster Products and Services
23
Redifferentiating Products and Services
49
Disrupting the Rules of the Game
79
Building Breakthrough Competences
109
Selecting Your Competitive Terrain
131
Assembling Your Opportunity Portfolio
163
Putting DiscoveryDriven Planning to Work
231
Managing Projects with Uncertain Outcomes
267
Entrepreneurial Leadership
301
When Strategy Is Discovery
337
Notes
345
Bibliography
355
Index
367
About the Authors
379

Selecting and Executing Your Entry Strategy
197

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