Entrepreneurship Is About Action
Entrepreneurship is often thought of through stories of a restless employee quitting her job then emptying out her 401k to roll the dice on a dream, or even more romanticized – a 20-year old Stanford dropout who creates the next viral craze from his parents’ garage.
Although it is true that entrepreneurship often takes the form of an entirely new standalone business, it also frequently takes place inside an existing organization.
In the latter case, maybe the most significant example of the past several years is Amazon realizing their cloud computing platform utilized to sell merchandise online may also be of value to customers. Then they took that realization, leveraged their domain expertise, and turned it into a division with a $30 billion annual revenue run rate. That “idea,” Amazon Web Services (AWS), now has a higher valuation than the rest of Amazon.
This kind of dramatic breakthrough is more likely to occur in an organization full of innovators with an entrepreneurial mindset reinforced and encouraged by a healthy, risk-taking culture.
Although that type of culture and mindset are definitely critical for entrepreneurship to become part of an organization’s DNA, most importantly, entrepreneurship is about action. Brainstorming and ideation are necessary, but at some point someone actually has to take a bold step forward.
“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
~ Peter Drucker
Sure, it’s Amazon making that big bet on AWS.
But it could also be you and a couple teammates experimenting on potential solutions to a problem you recognized because nobody in the world is closer to your customers and better understands their challenges and opportunities than you do.
Of course, incremental improvements are important in all businesses, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. If you are going to create a game-changer, you have to take a bigger leap than incrementalism allows. That’s the essence of entrepreneurship.
So dream big. Experiment and tinker. Learn fast. And always have a bias for action!
Looking for real-world examples and practical approaches? Here are a handful of books that may provide you with the inspiration you need to be an entrepreneur right where you are:
The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World (Adam Grant)
Think Big, Act Small: How America’s Best Performing Companies Keep the Start-up Spirit Alive (Jason Jennings)
The Art of Innovation (Tom Kelley), particularly the chapter on brainstorming.
