Managing Leadership^®

The word “entrepreneur” is one of those that sends pulses racing and sets hearts a-fluttering among management gurus and organizational “leaders” around the world. It sparks images of boldness and creativity, daring endeavors and world-changing innovation.

And so this term, which specifically refers to those who venture to launch new businesses, has become yet another superlative describing yet a new larger-than-life quality of the ever-celebrated hero-leader. But Peter Drucker made it clear many years ago that entrepreneurship is a straightforward component of management, intended to indentify change or the potential for it, and to address it in ways that are meaningful to today’s markets today.

“Bootstrapping,” by Sramana Mitra, is also a down-to-earth description of entrepreneurship as a mechanism for unleashing managerial productivity and energy. The second in a series entitled “Entrepreneur Journeys,” this book is specifically intended to advise entrepreneurs why they should fund their own ventures by bootstrapping them.

This both tends to keep their attention properly engaged, and enables them to choose their own outside growth funding once they’ve established greater control and leverage over terms. This is offered to counter the widely held traditional view that the aim of an entrepreneur should be to obtain as much outside venture capital as possible as soon as possible, and then just compete to create the coolest Super Bowl halftime ads.

In order to build the case for this rigorous and demanding approach, the author interviews a broad collection of successful entrepreneurs who have been able to attribute much of that success in their initial and subsequent endeavors to their employment of this approach. The result is a refreshingly engaging – and immensely informative – journey into the experiences of these really very thoughtful, reflective, and insightful business people.

That’s good enough – but here’s the best part for the rest of us: In the course of eliciting the methods that enabled these entrepreneurs to self-fund for long enough to retain ownership and control upon finally obtaining outside investment for growth, the author (herself a highly successful entrepreneur) causes her subjects to uncover in real-world and grippingly comprehensive detail the actual managerial core of entrepreneurial innovation. Or, perhaps more relevantly for our purposes, the entrepreneurial core of management.

As you read this book – and you should, even if you never intend to become such an entrepreneur as it describes – you will be able to see the power, forcefully described in numerous and diverse examples, of key management practices applied to the discovery and exploitation of market opportunities. You will observe how basic managerial insight and discipline were deployed to make these businesses, and these business people, successful.

This marvelous book spends little time inflating the character and unique attributes of its subjects. What it does is far more useful both to new entrepreneurs just hanging out a shingle and to senior managers struggling to remember what, exactly, it is that they do for a living: find the value that’s missing, understand it from the customer’s perspective, and use all of your focus and determination to build your business activities around providing it.

“Bootstrapping” by Sramana Mitra is a thoroughly enjoyable, insightful, and highly recommended read. Get your copy now!

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Today’s tip: Speaking of a term that sets pulses pounding, how about “crowd-intelligence?” Please see this NY Times piece about how the idea is misused – and how it can be effective.

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