Entrepreneurs Rule The World
Entrepreneurs transform thoughts into businesses that create jobs and pay taxes. But entrepreneurs also work in charities, schools, government departments, the health service and countless other organisations.
Entrepreneurs are everywhere
Entrepreneurs operate wherever people craft new products, new services or new ways of doing things that enrich people’s lives. But enterprise belongs to everyone and lives in all of us, regardless of whether or not we start a business.
Such natural entrepreneurial flair, however, is often crowded out by traditional command and control organisational structures that have dominated management theory and practice since the Second World War. Management today, however, has reached a point where it is vital to embrace an entrepreneurial approach to deal with economic uncertainty and digital disruption.
Traditional management focussed on the need for firmly defined hierarchies to the exclusion of informal entrepreneurial networks of influence and action. Today’s business climate, however, requires a flexible approach regardless of a businesses size, market share or industry, as the best leaders appreciate the importance of mixing the old with the new.
Managers and entrepreneurs must complement each other to maximise organisational performance and efficiency. The traditional tightness of management needs to meld with the more fluid flexibility of entrepreneurship to ensure fit for purpose organisations for an ever more uncompromising environment.
Entrepreneurs are the future
The missing link in much of today’s management practice, particularly in large organisations, is the need to be more enterprising internally – to stay flexible and fresh, and externally – to stay competitive and relevant. The need for businesses to invest in entrepreneurship is intensifying as competition escalates across all industries.
Using traditional management practices alone will not deliver sufficient results to sustain profits, as market disarray destroys a too structured approach. Today’s organisation needs to be well managed and entrepreneurial to cope with a marketplace dominated by rapid iterations of products and services.
Management was once defined as planning, organising, leading and controlling but must now include the need to be enterprising at every level of operation. Otherwise, the efficiencies gained through best practice are negated, as response times are too slow in a digitally dynamic world.
The predictability of short-term goals has given way to the unpredictability of long-term visions that guide organisations towards new entrepreneurial leadership rather than old-fashioned management. Businesses will always demand direction from the top but entrepreneurship is essential too in a world where change is a core currency.
Organisations of all types and sizes in the private sector, public sector, community sector and voluntary sector, must learn the lessons of entrepreneurship to succeed in their chosen field.
So, entrepreneurs have always started new businesses but their presence in all manner of organisations and in all areas of society has never been more urgent.
