Rita Gunther McGrath

Ian C. MacMillan

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.

Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

The Entrepreneurial Mindset

Based on extensive research and the authors' combined thirty years of experience, Discovery-Driven Growth provides a breakthrough system for managing strategic growth. You will learn how to identify and prioritize your company's full portfolio of opportunities - from new product lines to entirely new businesses. The authors then show how to best execute specific initiatives, test major project assumptions, and develop a culture that values disciplined experimentation and learning over meeting mindless and unrealistic goals. Tools for dealing with each challenge are backed by examples from companies, from small firms to global giants, that have successfully put these methods into practice.

A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity

Discovery-driven Growth

James D. Thompson

Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Entrepreneurship Program, provide a tough-love approach that significantly increases the likelihood of a successful social enterprise launch in the face of the high-uncertainty conditions typically encountered by social entrepreneurs.

Pressure Test, Plan, Launch and Scale Your Social Enterprise

The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook, Expanded Edition

Clayton M. Christensen

Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Rita McGrath

Michael Overdorf

Stefan Thomke

Designed to bring today's managers and professionals the fundamental information needed to stay competitive in a fast-moving world, this review includes landmark ideas from leading minds that have established the "Harvard Business Review" as required reading for ambitious business people in organizations around the globe.

On Innovation

An African fable (written in English) about a little girl elephant that starts off agonizing about other animals' teasing of her appearance. In an encounter with a Magic Baobab Tree she is told she can earn respect of others by giving helpful advice to them. After finding out that advice is not at all easy to give, she learns how to do this. Over time she advises other baby animals: A girl giraffe worried about her lankiness, a girl hippo worried about how fat she is, a boy baboon worried about his beady close-knit eyes, and a boy hyena worried about his ungainly looks. She finds ways of showing the animals that the feature they are unhappy about actually carries advantage. In the end of all the animals assemble and appoint her as the wisest of animals. The animals that she advises or interacts with are named in various African languages: elephant (Zulu), owl (Xhosa) giraffe (Wolof), hippo (Swahili), baboon (Shona), hyena (Hausa). Prounications of the African names and where the languages are spoken are provided in a short glossary. 18 pages, each page a mini-story (with its own illustration) is suitable for a short five-minute reading session. Suitable for kids age three to eight.

An African Fable

Khala Maninge - the Little Elephant That Cried a Lot

Terence A. Oliva

Wharton School. Marketing Department

A Generic Model of Competit[i]ve Dynamics

Max H. Boisot

Kyeong Seok Han

With the rise of the knowledge economy, the knowledge content of goods and services is going up just as their material content is declining. Economic value is increasingly seen to reside in the former - that is, in intangible assets - rather than in the latter. Yet we keep wanting to turn knowledge back into something tangible, something with definite boundaries which can be measured, manipulated, appropriated, and traded. In short, we want to reify knowledge. Scholars have been debating the nature of knowledge since the time of Plato. Many new insights have been gained from these debates, but little theoretical consensus has been achieved. Through six thematically linked chapters, the book articulates the theoretical approach to the production and distribution of knowledge that underpins Max Boisot's conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space. In this way the book looks to provide theoretical and practical underpinnings to Boisot's book Knowledge Assets (OUP, 1998). Following an introductory chapter, how knowledge relates to data and information is first examined in chapter 1, and how different economic actors - entrepreneurs, managers, etc - use knowledge as a basis for action is explored in chapter 2. Chapter 3 looks at how the heterogeneity of economic actors arises naturally from their respective data processing strategies in spite of any similarities in the data that they might share. Chapter 4 argues, contra much transaction-based economics, that an organizational order must have preceded a market order, something that should be reflected in any knowledge-based theory of the firm. Chapter 5 discusses the cultural and institutional significance of different kinds of knowledge flows. Finally, chapter 6 presents an agent-based simulation model, SimISpace, that illustrates how the I-Space might be applied to concrete problems such those of intellectual property rights. A concluding chapter proposes a research agenda based on the theorizing developed in the book. The approach the book sets out is used by a whole range of organizations to issues of knowledge management, policy, economics, and organizational and cultural change.

Knowledge, Agents, and Organization

Explorations in Information Space

Wharton professor Ian C. MacMillan and Dr. James D. Thompson, director of the Wharton Social Enterprise Program, provide aspiring social entrepreneurs with critical frameworks and tools to start their ventures with minimum risk and maximum potential for impact. Filled with inspiring stories, The Social Entrepreneur's Playbook is a must-read for entrepreneurs, philanthropists, foundations, and nonprofits interested in doing more with less.

Ian C. MacMillan

About

Books

Join the club