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

by Ian MacMillan and Rita Gunther McGrath

Book Overview

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. The authors present simple but powerful ways to stop thinking and acting by the old...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875848346
• ISBN13: 9780875848341
• Release Date: August 2000
• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Best business book I have have ever read!!

If you are looking for structure in building/discovering new opportunities for a new or existing product or want to help in validating your current product offerings, this is the book for you. The insight it brings in helping you gain a better grasp of not only your products and services but also your business is invaluable. I highly recommend this book to anyone that wants to establish a well thought out strategy to ensure future success and open their eyes to new possibilites. Out of all the business book that I have read in getting my MBA and working in the real world, this one is the best. Great Job!!

Actionable advice for entrepreneurship

MacMillan and McGrath put together one of the most actionable management books I have read in years. Each chapter is replete with how-to information: frameworks, tools and methodologies to implement their strategies and build-out new ventures.The first 7 chapters provide tools to identify and define opportunities. Chapter 2, for example, details exactly how to set up a database to capture new business opportunities, with fields that describe the product/service and forces that affect its success, such as competition and company position. Chapters 3 through 6 provide usable frameworks which will fill your database with opportunities. The frameworks cover everything from redesigning products and services and redifferentiating for customers to resegmenting and restructuring markets and creating new competencies. The rest of the book covers execution: developing and timing entry strategies, managing uncertainty through discovery driven planning, and creating an entrepreneurial culture.As a consultant, I have been able to use many of MacMillan's and McGrath's frameworks with my clients. Specifically, chapter 8's opportunity options frameworks have been invaluable to categorize new venture opportunities for our clients in the high-tech and financial services industries, and have aided in determining "go" and "no-go" decisions for further investment. Additionally, as I am an aspiring entreprenuer, I personally use their tools for opportunity assessment to inventory and rate my own business ideas.I highly recommend The Entrepreneurial Mindset to corporate venturers and entrepreneurs alike. While the book covers a lot of ground, it is able to do so in an easy to read fashion. The tools and frameworks throughout the book keep the reader engaged and turn the theoretical into the applicable. The Entreprenuerial Mindset is an essential desk reference for new venturing and a highly worthwhile read.

Essential Reading

Bottom line first: Buy this book. Not only can you immediately implement the tools described, but it will also serve as an excellent reference tool. It is well worth the time invested to read it. Consider it an option on your career with limitless upside. The Entrepreneurial Mindset illustrates the process for rationally generating, choosing among, executing, and monitoring strategic opportunities in the face of uncertainty. Starting from the premise that no market is so mature that you cannot further differentiate your offerings, the authors offer action-oriented, simple tools that help to assess opportunities for launching new products and entering new markets. And those tools aren't just simple, they're also smart and unconventional, providing insight into the minds of habitual entrepreneurs who have honed their skill in creating value time and again. McGrath and MacMillan publish the checklists, questions, quizzes, and models it took them years to develop while working with management teams in established firms to discern original responses to business challenges. You can start applying the principles and tools in each chapter immediately, getting some good quick hits even before finishing the book. For example, Chapter 11 alone contains 8 tools for developing leading indicators of the business to help tell if a project is heading in the right direction, long before the results become available. Chapter 10 is a gem too. It is based on one of Harvard Business Review's most popular articles, "Discovery Driven Planning" (written by the authors of this book), which was then developed into a course at Wharton's Executive Education Programs for several years. Anyone who reads and implements the principles, strategies, and tools outlined in this book is sure create value, regardless of their corporate title, and it is a must-read for any strategy professional or executive manager. If you think your industry or business is too mature to benefit from this book, consider one of McGrath and MacMillan's many case studies that are fresh and actually worth studying: Blyth Industries boosted sales from $3 million in 1982 to nearly $500 million in 1996 by exploiting a mature industry. How mature? More than 5,000 years old: Blyth Industries sells candles. Creating and nurturing an Entrepreneurial Mindset is a lot of fun and carries a lot of rewards, both professionally and personally. To quote the authors at the end of their first chapter: "If nobody knows what the future will hold, your vision of how to navigate it is as good as anyone's. The future may well belong to you." -Sean Nevins, The Zermatt Group

A great book for launching new products/services

I love this book! I agree that this is one of the best books I've read on entrepreneurship. It's also true that nearly all the examples and case studies in the book revolve around larger companies. The focus is upon launching new products without risking the corporate piggy bank, moving your company into new areas where your company doesn't have much experience and knowledge, managing people's creativity and your company's opportunities.McGrath and MacMillan suggest entrepreneurs view their endeavors as a portfolio of options. Entrepreneurs create "opportunity portfolios." Each option is pursued or abandoned as conditions warrant and resources allow. Habitual entrepreneurs ruthlessly weed out unprofitable endeavors and are willing to move in new directions. They should also map out their projects to be sure they aren't trying to do too much.McGrath and MacMillan tell us that the goal is to learn as you go and effectively convert assumptions to knowledge at low cost. For example, via Stepping-Stone Options, McGrath and MacMillan write: "You start with small, exploratory forays into less challenging market niches and use the experiences gained there as steppingstones to build competencies in increasingly challenging and attractive market arenas that you discover as you go.""The Entrepreneurial Mindset" gives the example of The Kyocera Company, which entered the industrial ceramics business by focusing upon lower-end, niche-based, ceramic products, such as ceramic scissor blades. Using the knowledge of ceramics acquired making scissor blades, the company successfully moved into more profitable ceramic markets, such as semiconductor-chip substrates. This moving-ahead-as-you-learn-and-learn-as-you-move-ahead is a key to becoming a successful entrepreneur.The authors highly recommend the use of key ratios to benchmark company performance. They give a great example with G.E. Financial Services (another ultra-small start-up :)). Something must happen to improve your ratios. McGrath and MacMillan define this "something" as "entrepreneurial insight." Entrepreneurial insight is the crucial ingredient behind entrepreneurial success. Entrepreneurial insight is seeing something about an industry or a market that others miss or fail to understand and finding a way to convert that knowledge into a powerful market position.The authors astutely observe that while it is relatively easy to reverse-engineer a product, products bundled with services are much more difficult for competitors to replicate. McGrath and MacMillan strongly emphasize carefully examining the features of your own products and services.McGrath and MacMillan describe the process of "attribute mapping," which divides a product's features into the customer's perception of the desirability of the feature. Attributes could range from "nonnegotiables" (features expected by the customers) through "differentiators" (features that positively differentiate your product from the competition) and "exciters

Superb Book About Cutting Edge Strategy Tools

The Entrepreneurial Mindset is a truly remarkable book and, I believe, an extremely useful one. However, it is not the book that, in my opinion, the reviews that have been posted here imply it is.For one thing, it is not about entrepreneurs. In fact, the cast of characters is dominated by managers in relatively large organizations. Nor is it about the kinds of coalition-building activities that Gifford Pinchot described in Intrapreneuring (although the topic of political obstacles is addressed). What it is about is strategic innovation. It is a detailed description of an elaborate and exhaustive process for rationally generating (and choosing among) strategic alternatives in the face of uncertainty. This is not a process that the authors have observed while studying entrepreneurs. It is, rather, a description of the tools the authors have developed to work with management teams in established firms to discern original responses to business challenges. Said another way, the book has to do with the process of discovering new things to do - things for which there are no precedents and about which there is very limited data/information - in established businesses.In some respects, this book constitutes a synthesis (and an impressive one) of themes that have been at work in the strategy literature in recent years. The majority of these themes reflect concerns about how to respond to a business environment in which products rapidly become commodities and (therefore) in which new options are much more strategic hypotheses to be investigated than they are plans to be formalized and funded. Much of the authors' attention is devoted to unearthing new hypotheses from the available data and sorting through them to settle on future courses of action.The Entrepreneurial Mindset, while easy to read, is not a light narrative by any means. It is, at base, a technical book about a specific approach to strategy development and implementation. It views strategy first as a creative activity and then as a resource allocation problem that terminates in resource allocation decisions first to classes of opportunities and then to specific projects. The search for options ("opportunities" in their terms) occurs at the product/market segment level, not at the business level. Areas considered in search of novel approaches include product features, delivering more value at specific stages of the so-called Consumption Chain, market resegmentation, and radical redesign of the value chain.There are a few cases in which the authors' actual practice around a task or topic does not become clear until 20 pages or so after their initial presentation of it. Thus, it is hard to derive full value from this material without taking detailed notes and without giving it a second read. (The authors themselves seem to anticipate the need for a twice-through reading, advising us on several occasions that it is OK to skip the next section if this is the first time you've read the book.)There a