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As every slumdweller knew, there were three main ways out of poverty: finding an entrepreneurial niche, as the Husains had found in garbage; politics and corruption, in which Asha placed her hopes; and education.
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Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
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the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is.
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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...successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends to a large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.
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Edward O. Wilson (Letters to a Young Scientist)
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Lagos is a metropolis of almost twenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so people come up with all sorts of ways to make a living.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (We Should All Be Feminists)
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There is only one way to make money: sell something. You're either selling your time or a product. The secret? Productize your time. That's freedom.
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Richie Norton
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Hypergrowth for a company also requires hypergrowth of the people inside it.
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Eric Ries (The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth)
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While the range of people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved in an entrepreneurial ecosystem are useful to understand, they are not the most critical construct. Instead, the interaction between each of the components is what matters.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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I’m realizing that these are my ways of insisting on something. Living between the mountains and this hyper accelerated, entrepreneurial culture, I can’t help but ask the question: What does it mean to construct digital worlds while the actual world is crumbling before our eyes?
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Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy)
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Gamblers take blind risks. Entrepreneurs take risks while visually impaired and feel their way up and out.
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Ryan Lilly
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Think big. Start small. Scale fast.
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Eric Ries (The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth)
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Remember, mindset is the #1 most important thing as you start your entrepreneurial journey, and it will continue to guide you the entire way.
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Kate Erickson (The Fire Path: A Beginner's Guide to Growing Your Online Business)
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Ideas are easy, implementation is hard. Startups cope with failure to pave the way of future. We must commend this entrepreneurial courage...
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Stephane Nappo
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As I have often said, governments don’t produce economic growth, people do. What government can do is encourage Americans to tap their well of ingenuity and unleash their entrepreneurial spirit, then get out of the way.
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Ronald Reagan (An American Life: An Enhanced eBook with CBS Video: The Autobiography)
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Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model,
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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It's more difficult, you know, to bring about positive change than it is to make money. It's much easier to make money, because it's a much easier way to measure success — the bottom line. When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task. Why not use an entrepreneurial, rather than a bureaucratic, approach. As long as people genuinely care for the people they're trying to help, they can actually do a lot of good.
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George Soros
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The Entrepreneurial Perspective adopts a wider, more expansive scale. It views the business as a network of seamlessly integrated components, each contributing to some larger pattern that comes together in such a way as to produce a specifically planned result, a systematic way of doing business.
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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Successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends to a large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.
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Edward O. Wilson (Letters to a Young Scientist)
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Most people in bad times cut corners in the most treacherous way imaginable—by downsizing human or intellectual capital, the real asset of most businesses today. That is a mistake. You can find no greater upside-leveraging tools than the energy, passion, intelligence, connections, and entrepreneurial spirit of the human beings you surround yourself with.
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Jay Abraham (The Sticking Point Solution: 9 Ways to Move Your Business from Stagnation to Stunning Growth In Tough Economic Times)
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One of the best ways to attract capital is to outperform the competition.
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Alejandro Cremades (The Art of Startup Fundraising)
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Plan for ways to get more enjoyment into your life and you will get more joy out of it.
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Jay Samit (Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation)
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By definition, a remarkable product is something that is worth talking about. Your goal is to create your product in such a way that people want to tell their friends how good it is.
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Daniel Priestley (Entrepreneur Revolution: How to Develop your Entrepreneurial Mindset and Start a Business that Works)
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The simplest way to learn about a market is the old-fashioned way. Get out and talk to people whose opinions you trust: potential customers, industry colleagues, and respected competitors.
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John Bradberry (6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business)
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FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. Nobody in the startup world could have such a mug, I mused; it would be ridiculous. My experience is full of situations where reality proved too unpredictable to avoid failure.
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Eric Ries (The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth)
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Those people with an entrepreneurial spirit are like animals, blessed to have no time and no ability to think about the ways things should be, or how they’d prefer them to be. For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. As though the why matters. Emerson put it best: “We cannot spend the day in explanation.” Don’t waste time on false constructs.
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Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph)
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The Entrepreneurial Model What does The Entrepreneur see off in the distance that The Technician finds so difficult to see? What exactly is the Entrepreneurial Model? It’s a model of a business that fulfills the perceived needs of a specific segment of customers in an innovative way. The Entrepreneurial Model looks at a business as if it were a product, sitting on a shelf and competing for the customer’s attention against a whole shelf of competing products (or businesses). Said another way, the Entrepreneurial Model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important—the way it’s delivered is. When The Entrepreneur creates the model, he surveys the world and asks: “Where is the opportunity?” Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not The Entrepreneur. “How will my business look to the customer?” The Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest?” Thus, the Entrepreneurial Model does not start with a picture of the business to be created but of the customer for whom the business is to be created. It understands that without a clear picture of that customer, no business can succeed. The Technician, on the other hand, looks inwardly, to
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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company is started differently than all the rest. A Mature company is founded on a broader perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, a more intelligent point of view. About building a business that works not because of you but without you. “And because it starts that way, it is more likely to continue that way. And therein resides the true difference between an Adolescent company, where everything is left up to chance, and a Mature company, where there is a vision against which the present is shaped. “But I’m getting ahead of myself,” I said. “The important
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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I remember this event so clearly because it was at this point in my career that I fully realized the value of tenacity. I just had to assume there was a way through any obstacle, and then I’d find it. This is perhaps my most fundamental principle of entrepreneurialism, and to success in general.
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Sam Zell (Am I Being Too Subtle?: Straight Talk From a Business Rebel)
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There is one last way to break with your past and begin a new stage of your career journey, which is to take some advice that appears at the end of the 1964 film Zorba the Greek. Zorba, the great lover of life, is sitting on the beach with the repressed and bookish Basil, an Englishman who has come to a tiny Greek island with the hope of setting up a small business. The elaborate cable system that Zorba has designed and built for Basil to bring logs down the mountainside has just collapsed on its very first trial. Their whole entrepreneurial venture is in complete ruins, a failure before it has even begun. And that is the moment when Zorba unveils his philosophy of life to Basil: ZORBA: Damn it boss, I like you too much not to say it. You’ve got everything except one thing: madness! A man needs a little madness, or else… BASIL: Or else? ZORBA:…he never dares cut the rope and be free. Basil then stands up and, completely out of character, asks Zorba to teach him how to dance. The Englishman has finally learned that life is there to be lived with passion, that risks are there to be taken, the day is there to be seized. To do otherwise is a disservice to life itself. Zorba’s words are one of the great messages for the human quest in search of the good life. Most of us live bound by our fears and inhibitions. Yet if we are to move beyond them, if we are to cut the rope and be free, we need to treat life as an experiment and discover the little bit of madness that lies within us all.
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Roman Krznaric (How to Find Fulfilling Work (The School of Life))
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One of those was Gary Bradski, an expert in machine vision at Intel Labs in Santa Clara. The company was the world’s largest chipmaker and had developed a manufacturing strategy called “copy exact,” a way of developing next-generation manufacturing techniques to make ever-smaller chips. Intel would develop a new technology at a prototype facility and then export that process to wherever it planned to produce the denser chips in volume. It was a system that required discipline, and Bradski was a bit of a “Wild Duck”—a term that IBM originally used to describe employees who refused to fly in formation—compared to typical engineers in Intel’s regimented semiconductor manufacturing culture. A refugee from the high-flying finance world of “quants” on the East Coast, Bradski arrived at Intel in 1996 and was forced to spend a year doing boring grunt work, like developing an image-processing software library for factory automation applications. After paying his dues, he was moved to the chipmaker’s research laboratory and started researching interesting projects. Bradski had grown up in Palo Alto before leaving to study physics and artificial intelligence at Berkeley and Boston University. He returned because he had been bitten by the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial bug.
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John Markoff (Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots)
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asked him to imagine the following: If I selected an employee of the company at random, from any level or function or region, and that employee had an absolutely brilliant idea that would unlock a dramatic new source of growth for the company, how would he or she get it implemented? Does the company have an automatic process for testing a new idea, to see if it is actually any good? And does the company have the management tools necessary to scale this idea up to maximum impact, even if it doesn’t align with any of the company’s current lines of business? That’s what a modern company does: harnesses the creativity and talent of every single one of its employees. Jeff answered me directly: “That’s what your next book should be about.
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Eric Ries (The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth)
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Creating a symbiotic (more mutualistic) public-private innovation ecosystem thus requires new methods, metrics and indicators to evaluate public investments and their results. Without the right tools for evaluating investments, governments have a hard time knowing when they are merely operating in existing spaces and when they are making things happen that would not have happened otherwise. The result: investments that are too narrow, constrained by the prevailing path-dependent, techno-economic paradigm. A better way of evaluating a given investment would be to consider the different types of ‘spillovers’, including the creation of new skills and capabilities, and whether it led to the creation of new technologies, sectors and markets.
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Mariana Mazzucato (The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths)
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Entrepreneurship itself is an emergent system, where companies create the conditions for experimentation and learning to occur, often symbiotically with customers. In 1978, Eric von Hippel (my PhD advisor at MIT) pioneered the notion of user-driven innovation.10, 11 Back then, the conventional wisdom was that innovation only came from corporate, government, and university research-and-development labs. While some still believe this today, Eric's insight proved to be prescient in many areas, especially in the information age, as the widespread adoption of open-source software and Lean Startup methodologies have demonstrated.12 Twitter is a tangible example since three of the platform's most popular features—the @ reply, the # hashtag indexing, and retweet sharing—were all generated bottom-up by users.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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Contrary to the perceptions of many in the counterculture in the 1960s and of many scholars since, the two worlds had a great deal in common. They shared a celebration of intellectual work, of technology, and of collaborative work styles. Both reveled in the economic and technological abundance of post-World War II America. The research laboratories of World War II, and the military-industrial-academic bureaucracies that grew out of them, were far more flexible, entrepreneurial, and individualistic places than many remember today. By the same token, certain elements of the counterculture embraced the ideas, the social practices, and the machines that emerged inside the world of military research even as they vocally attacked cold war bureaucracies. Even as they sought to find new ways to live psychologically and socially integrated lives, some members of the counterculture turned toward the heart of the technocracy itself in search of tools and models for their work.
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Fred Turner (From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism)
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The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights).
But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the
manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens.
Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.
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Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
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It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragements. I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature. I’d like to remind them that America isn’t the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say no, sorry, no. And it’s always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.
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Phil Knight (Shoe Dog)
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Although I have suggested that American culture tends to favor the side of independence over the side of inclusion (and I would extend that to Western culture in general), it is not a generalization that seems to apply uniformly to men and women in our culture. Indeed, although I have no idea why it may be, it seems to me that men tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for inclusion, tend to me more oriented toward differentiation, and that women tend to have more difficulty acknowledging their need for distinctness, tend to be more oriented toward inclusion. Whether this is a function of social experience throughout the lifespan, the effects of parenting anatomical (even genital) density, or some combination, I do not know. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. Whatever the source of this distinction between men and women, I believe it is also the case that this very distinction is to be found within any one person as well. In this respect constructive-developmental theory revives the Jungian notion that there is a man in every woman and a woman in every man; saying so is both a consequence of considering that all of life is animated by a fundamental evolutionary ambivalence, and that 'maleness'/'femaleness' is but one of its expressions. Similarly, I believe that while Western and Eastern cultures reflect one side or the other of this ambivalence, they project the other. Western cultures tend to value independence, self-assertion, aggrandizement, personal achievement, increasing independence from the family of origin; Eastern cultures (including the American Indian) value the other pole. Cheyenne Indians asked to talk about themselves typically begin, 'My grandfather...' (Strauss, 1981); many Eastern cultures use the word 'I' to refer to a collectivity of people of which one is a part (Marriott, 1981); the Hopi do not say, 'It's a nice day,' as if one could separate oneself from the day, but say something that would have to be translated more like, 'I am in a nice day,' or 'It's nice in front, and behind, and above" (Whorf, 1956). At the same time one cannot escape the enormous hunger for community, mystical merging, or intergenerational connection that continually reappears in American culture through communalism, quasi-Eastern religions, cult phenomena, drug experience, the search for one's 'roots,' the idealization of the child, or the romantic appeal of extended families. Similarly, it seems too glib to dismiss as 'mere Westernization' the repeated expression in Eastern cultures of individualism, intergenerational autonomy, or entrepreneurialism as if these were completely imposed from without and not in any way the expression of some side of Eastern culture itself.
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Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development)
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Most businesses hustle to create revenue, pay out their various expenses, and with any luck, there’s a little profit left over for the owners. Here’s what you’re probably learning in business school: Revenue minus expenses equals profits. Sounds sensible, right?” He paused for the group of nodding heads. “Well, it’s not! It is completely backwards. It should be taught: Revenue minus PROFITS equal expenses.” Our chaperoning professors did their best to hide their cloudy faces, but it was clear Mr. X didn’t mind offending them. “Don’t wait to see if there’s anything left over for a profit. By carving out a margin before you address expenses, you create a constraint on the resources available. This constraint unlocks your creativity to meet customers’ needs, streamline operations, and only spend money on that which truly generates value. There’s no room left for fluff and bloat. Difficult decisions on how you should run your business become obvious. No longer fat, dumb and happy, maybe you make that extra sales call or hold off on that unnecessary expense. Business is very competitive, and the difference between the Hall of Fame and the graveyard can be remarkably thin. Everyone says they want to run a tight ship, but the best way to harness your entrepreneurial verve is to tie your own hands to the yarak mast. It will turn all of your business SHOULDS into business MUSTS. I’ve spent a lot of time finding different places to apply the idea of yarak, and it never ceases to amaze me how helpful it is. So that’s my eighty-twenty secret. Shh… don’t tell anyone,” he whispered.
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Jacob Taylor (The Rebel Allocator)
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The best way to determine the Values you will enforce in your business is to clarify your personal values.
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Doris P. Johnson
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using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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Here are some tips on finding a mentor:
1. Identify who could be a good mentor for you. Remember, you don’t need to aim too high; somebody simply a couple of years ahead of you on their journey might be enough.
2. Get their attention ‒ break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of messages asking for help and advice, and offers to meet for lunch or coffee so that their brains can be picked. Naturally, they put most of these long emails (they’re often really long) straight in the junk folder to protect the most valuable thing for them ‒ their time. Bear that in mind. To break through the noise, you need to be straight to the point and you need to do Step 3…
3. Seek to add value. Just because potential mentors are successful or higher status, this doesn’t mean you can’t add value to them. Have faith that you have some way of helping them. Study what they’re doing. Are they involved in any philanthropy or social impact causes? How can you help? That’s a great way to get their attention.
4. Act normal. This applies wherever there’s an imbalance of status. For example, when you meet somebody that you’re interested in romantically, and you feel as if they’re probably ‘out of your league, you have to not let that make you behave strangely. If you are too deferential, too reverent, and basically tripping over yourself to do stuff for them because you perceive them to be on another level, then they are unlikely to feel attracted to you. And conversely, sometimes acting ‘not normal’ means you go the other way, and behave like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of the girl he fancies, going too far in overcompensating. Again, that is not good. Be pleasant to be around.
5. Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feedback to them on the outcome of the action. This feedback loop will generate and strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship in the fastest possible way, because entrepreneurial mentors love coachable people who take action. And they feel more and more
responsibility when they’re the ones directing your action and you’re coming back to them to report what happened. It’s like an interesting and fun game for them, and they want to know that they’re helping you in a tangible way. Be coachable.
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Hasan Kubba (The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed)
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Site Speed I’ll be brutal here. There’s absolutely no excuse why your web pages should be loading in more than 5 seconds. Google users will simply vote with their ‘back’ button. They have no loyalty to your site over the nine other organic options on the first page and they couldn’t give a rat’s ass about your entrepreneurial aspirations. If a web page is slow, they’ll bounce off that website quicker than said rat up a drainpipe. And you remember what we said about RankBrain monitoring your site’s bounce rate? And the ramifications of it being poor? “No Bueno” my friend. As you may be able to tell, I get very worked up about site speed. I think making your website lightning fast is one of the most undervalued marketing tactics you can perform on the Internet; not just for your SEO, but for increasing website conversions. People don’t realise how strict the correlation between site load speed times and customer sales really is. it’s often the case that website owners don’t realise they behave online in exactly the same way their potential customers will. Do you yourself wait for a website to load for ages, or do you just skip to the next option? Precisely.
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Will Coombe (3 Months to No.1: The 2025 "No-Nonsense" SEO Playbook for Getting Your Website Found on Google)
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At its heart, neoliberalism is a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual—not collective, please note—individual entrepreneurial freedoms defined in very particular ways, and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, so-called “free markets,” and so-called “free” trade. If I could just have my hands doing air quotes, I’d be doing it continuously, but you can see that in your imagination. The role of the state under neoliberal philosophy is to create and preserve an institutional framework that’s appropriate to these kinds of practices. It must guarantee the quality and integrity of money. Also set up those military defense, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights, and to guarantee, by force if need be (and we’ve seen some of this already in the conversation about militarism; we’ll see more of it), by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. That’s the role of the state. If markets do not exist in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution, then they must be created by state action if necessary. You can see these things immediately as either prior public goods or public resources, these are all to be brought under the rubrics of the market through privatization, an essential feature of neoliberalism. Any other actions by the state are deemed then to be illegitimate, but you can tell already that the state has a very significant role to play here, even though proponents of neoliberalism and their rhetoric constantly downplay both the role and the necessity of the state. It should also be quite clear, immediately and despite this rhetoric, that neoliberalism is not really an unencumbered, non-state-mediated enterprise.
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Noam Chomsky (Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance)
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We must consider the way that neo-subjects, far from being left to their own devices, are governed in the performance/pleasure apparatus.
To perceive nothing but unhindered enjoyment in present social conditions, identified sometimes with the 'internalization of market values' and sometimes with the unlimited expansion of democracy', is to forget the dark side of neo-liberal normativity: the increasingly heavy surveillance of public and private space; the increasingly precise traceability of individuals' movements in networks; the increasingly punctilious and petty evaluation of individuals activity; the increasingly significant impact of fused information and advertising systems; and, perhaps above all, the increasingly insidious forms of self-control by subjects themselves. In short, it is to forget the overall character of the government of neo-subjects which, in and through the diversity of its vectors, combines the obscene display of pleasure, the entrepreneurial injunction of performance, and the cross-linkage of generalized surveillance.
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Christian Laval, Pierre Dardot
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James points to the way in which selfish capitalism stokes up both aspirations and the expectations that they can be fulfilled. ... In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s – a person born in 1958 was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the systematic encouragement of the ideas that material affluence is they key to fulfillment, that only the affluent are winners and that access to the top is open to anyone willing to work hard enough, regardless of their familial, ethnic or social background – if you do not succeed, there is only one person to blame.
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Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
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The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it’s really all about the people. Sure, there are plenty of stories in the press about the industry’s young geniuses, but surprisingly few about its management practices. What the mainstream press misses is that Silicon Valley’s success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees. Here, talent really is the most valuable resource, and employees are treated accordingly. The most successful Silicon Valley businesses succeed because they use the alliance to recruit, manage, and retain an incredibly talented team of entrepreneurial employees
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Reid Hoffman (The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age)
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In all, the next big things of the early nineteenth century—enabling man to travel through and over nature in new ways, with steamboats, canals, and railroads—began as intricate public/private partnerships. The government activities of setting in place the infrastructure, reconciling federal and state laws, permitting limited liability, and defining and balancing the conflicts of property rights, evolved into the operating system of its economy, upon which was placed the dynamic layer of free-market creativity and the vibrant applications of entrepreneurial activity.
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Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
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Entrepreneurial innovation comes in three flavors: 1) new business models, as with Rent the Runway offering apparel for rent rather than sale; 2) new technologies, as with Solyndra, a failed maker of cylindrical solar panels built with a proprietary thin-film material; and 3) combining existing technologies in new ways, as with Quincy Apparel using a measurement system akin to that used for men’s suiting to offer better-fitting clothing for women.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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the complexity posed another problem: There is no way to run a lean experiment to prove, in advance, that a planned production process will work. You must fully develop the process and then run it in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. Producing apparel in sample quantities, which Quincy’s founders did successfully after their trunk show tests, is a completely different ball game compared to manufacturing it in volume.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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Founders who fear that they may not be able to amass the resources required to pursue an attractive opportunity should also consider ways to constrain that opportunity. They can do this by reducing the scope of their effort—at least initially, until proof of concept is established and it becomes easier to mobilize resources. This approach is somewhat counterintuitive because startup dogma holds that growth is the prime goal for a new venture. Instead, with this contrarian approach, a startup should start small in order to get big.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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The best way to synthesize all of this convergent thinking is to develop personas—fictional examples of archetypal customers used to focus product designs and craft marketing messages. Personas often have memorable names—say, “Picky Paula,” for a hard-to-satisfy dater—along with imagined photos, specific demographic and behavioral attributes
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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False positives unfold in two ways. With both patterns, entrepreneurs mistakenly assume that the behavior of early adopters will be matched by that of mainstream customers. With the first pattern, an entrepreneur tailors a solution for early adopters, commits resources to this solution, and then learns that the solution doesn’t meet the needs of the larger mainstream market. Without mainstream customers, the venture won’t earn enough revenue to survive. By the time the entrepreneur recognizes the need to pivot, he’s amassed resources of the wrong type, and a cash-constrained startup lacks the wherewithal to replace them.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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when entrepreneurs are pleasantly surprised by the positive responses from early adopters after the venture has launched, they should consider the possibility that the broader market may not respond in the same way.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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Cultures in scaling startups can fracture in two ways. First, “old guard versus new guard” conflicts may arise if early team members resent the growing power of specialists or some new employees’ lack of initiative and commitment. Recent hires, in turn, may be jealous of early employees who’ve amassed enormous stock option gains (“That engineer in the next cubicle does the same thing I do, and she just made $5 million”). Second, as specialists are added to the staff and their units expand, functions can develop their own subcultures. Employees may feel a stronger sense of attachment to their functional unit—say, marketing or warehouse operations—than to the venture overall.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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Of the four opportunity elements, an early-stage startup’s customer value proposition is without question the most important. To survive, a new venture absolutely must offer a sustainably differentiated solution for strong, unmet customer needs. This point bears repeating: Needs must be strong. If an unknown startup’s product doesn’t address an acute pain point, customers aren’t likely to buy it. Likewise, differentiation is crucial: If the venture’s offering is not superior in meaningful ways to existing solutions, again, no one will buy it. Finally, sustaining this differentiation is important. Without barriers to imitation, the venture is vulnerable to copycats.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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having access to boatloads of capital can be a competitive weapon if a startup has to confront aggressive rivals. But raising a big round can damage a startup, too, if it allows management to spend in profligate ways. Marc Andreessen suggests that a startup that has raised too much money can “become infected with a culture of complacency, laziness, and arrogance.” Resulting dysfunctions can include 1) over-hiring, with a commensurate slowdown in decision-making as too many managers get involved; and 2) schedule slippage, as employees say, “What’s the urgency? We have all this cash.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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In fact, it wasn’t even designed to help anyone at all, at least not the way we normally think of “help.” It was just a plain old entrepreneurial development, called television.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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Ecosystems require organizations that are constantly on the lookout for new possibilities, constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities to make cross-sectoral plays and forge cooperative partnerships with others. Organizations can only be open to those possibilities and opportunities when their employees are curious and open minded. And employees are most likely to be curious and open minded when their leaders are holistically looking out for their best interests and actively searching for ways to provide them with everything they need. This is clearly most relevant to those within the senior ranks of your organization, but it really applies to everyone who serves in key roles. Above all, servant leadership helps organizations adopt all of the ideals that the ecosystem economy demands: openness, entrepreneurialism, decisiveness, a fail-fast mindset, long-term thinking, and more.
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Venkat Atluri (The Ecosystem Economy: How to Lead in the New Age of Sectors Without Borders)
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You can make it to the big time like they did and still lose your way by trying to replace the entrepreneurial soul of the company with a corporate soul.
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Colin C. Campbell (Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs' Secrets Revealed!)
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The U.S. culture is individualistic, competitive, optimistic, and pragmatic. We believe that the basic unit of society is the individual, whose rights have to be protected at all costs. We are entrepreneurial and admire individual accomplishment. We thrive on competition. Optimism and pragmatism show up in the way we are oriented toward the short term and in our dislike of long-range planning. We do not like to fix things and improve them while they are still working. We prefer to run things until they break because we believe we can then fix them or replace them. We are arrogant and deep down believe we can fix anything—“The impossible just takes a little longer.” We are impatient and, with information technology’s ability to do things faster, we are even more impatient. Most important of all, we value task accomplishment over relationship building and either are not aware of this cultural bias or, worse, don’t care and don’t want to be bothered with it.
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Edgar H. Schein (Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling)
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We are living through an unprecedented worldwide entrepreneurial renaissance, but this opportunity is laced with peril. Because we lack a coherent management paradigm for new innovative ventures, we’re throwing our excess capacity around with wild abandon. Despite this lack of rigor, we are finding some ways to make money, but for every success there are far too many failures: products pulled from shelves mere weeks after being launched, high-profile startups lauded in the press and forgotten a few months later, and new products that wind up being used by nobody. What makes these failures particularly painful is not just the economic damage done to individual employees, companies, and investors; they are also a colossal waste of our civilization’s most precious resource: the time, passion, and skill of its people.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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We don’t simply have a problem when it comes to the amount of tax collected. We have a huge problem when it comes to the way we collect taxes. Take corporate taxes as an example. We impose taxes at the second highest rate in the rich world (35%), yet the corporate tax code is riddled with incentives, subsidies, exemptions, and loopholes.13 The result is crazy. We give firms a huge disincentive to earn money at home (because our basic tax rate is so high), while giving them huge incentives to play the system. And remember: the United States boasts some of the world’s most innovative and entrepreneurial companies. If we give those guys an incentive to find ways around our tax code, they’ll turn out to be world-beaters. World-beaters like General Electric, for example.14 GE earned $14.2 billion of profit in 2010, of which $5.1 billion was generated in the US. I’m guessing that you earned less than $5 billion that year, but I’m damn sure you had a more painful settlement with the taxman. In 2010, GE’s net corporation tax obligation to the US government was sub-zero. The firm actually derived a net benefit from the government. In the five years to 2010, GE accumulated $26 billion in American profits and booked a net benefit of $4.1 billion from the IRS. That’s completely insane. You don’t, however, need to be GE to outperform in this way. Big Oil can play the same game to almost equal effect. According to a Citizens for Tax Justice report out in 2011, ‘Over the past two years, Exxon Mobil reported $9,910 million in pretax US profits. But it enjoyed so many tax subsidies that its federal income tax bill was only $39 million—a tax rate of only 0.4%.’15
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Mitch Feierstein (Planet Ponzi)
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In the 1950s Detroit was undergoing changes in the city and factories with enormous political consequences. When I arrived in Detroit the city had just begun Urban Renewal (which blacks renamed “Negro Removal”) in the area near downtown where most blacks were concentrated. Hastings Street and John R, the two main thoroughfares that were the hub of the commerce and nightlife of the black community, were still alive with pedestrians. Large sections of the inner city, however, were being bulldozed to build the Ford Freeway crisscrossing the city from east to west, the Lodge Freeway bisecting the city from north to south, and the Fisher and Chrysler Freeways coming from Toledo and proceeding all the way north to the Upper Peninsula. These freeways were built to make it easy to live in the suburbs and work in the city and at the same time to expand the car market. So in 1957 whites began pouring out of the city by the tens of thousands until by the end of the decade one out of every four whites who had lived in the city had left. Their exodus left behind thousands of houses and apartments for sale and rental to blacks who had formerly been confined inside Grand Boulevard, a horseshoe-shaped avenue delimiting the inner city, many of whom had been uprooted by Negro Removal. Blacks who had been living on the East Side, among them Annie Boggs, began buying homes on the West Side and the North End. The black community was not only expanding but losing the cohesiveness it had enjoyed (or endured) when it was jammed together on the Lower East Side. New neighbors no longer served as extended family to the young people growing up in the new black neighborhoods. Small businesses owned by blacks and depending on black customers went bankrupt, eliminating an entrepreneurial middle class that had played a key role in stabilizing the community. By the end of the 1950s one-fourth of the buildings inside the Boulevard stood vacant. At the same time all Americans, regardless of race, creed, or national origin, were being seduced by the consumerism being fostered by large corporations so that they could sell the abundance of goods coming off the American assembly lines. All around us in the black community parents were determined to give their children “the things I didn’t have.
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Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
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Entrepreneurship is not a career choice, its a way of life!
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Jasleen Kaur Gumber
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...successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends on large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.
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Edward O. Wilson (Letters to a Young Scientist)
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Summary of Rule #3 Rules #1 and #2 laid the foundation for my new thinking on how people end up loving what they do. Rule #1 dismissed the passion hypothesis, which says that you have to first figure out your true calling and then find a job to match. Rule #2 replaced this idea with career capital theory, which argues that the traits that define great work are rare and valuable, and if you want these in your working life, you must first build up rare and valuable skills to offer in return. I call these skills “career capital,” and in Rule #2 I dived into the details of how to acquire it. The obvious next question is how to invest this capital once you have it. Rule #3 explored one answer to this question by arguing that gaining control over what you do and how you do it is incredibly important. This trait shows up so often in the lives of people who love what they do that I’ve taken to calling it the dream-job elixir. Investing your capital in control, however, turns out to be tricky. There are two traps that commonly snare people in their pursuit of this trait. The first control trap notes that it’s dangerous to try to gain more control without enough capital to back it up. The second control trap notes that once you have the capital to back up a bid for more control, you’re still not out of the woods. This capital makes you valuable enough to your employer that they will likely now fight to keep you on a more traditional path. They realize that gaining more control is good for you but not for their bottom line. The control traps put you in a difficult situation. Let’s say you have an idea for pursuing more control in your career and you’re encountering resistance. How can you tell if this resistance is useful (for example, it’s helping you avoid the first control trap) or something to ignore (for example, it’s the result of the second control trap)? To help navigate this control conundrum, I turned to Derek Sivers. Derek is a successful entrepreneur who has lived a life dedicated to control. I asked him his advice for sifting through potential control-boosting pursuits and he responded with a simple rule: “Do what people are willing to pay for.” This isn’t about making money (Derek, for example, is more or less indifferent to money, having given away to charity the millions he made from selling his first company). Instead, it’s about using money as a “neutral indicator of value”—a way of determining whether or not you have enough career capital to succeed with a pursuit. I called this the law of financial viability, and concluded that it’s a critical tool for navigating your own acquisition of control. This holds whether you are pondering an entrepreneurial venture or a new role within an established company. Unless people are willing to pay you, it’s not an idea you’re ready to go after.
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Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
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I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally. None of these things are fun, but they also don’t matter. What matters is that companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets.
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Eric Ries (The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth)
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A common refrain among the prophets of penurious retirement is the belief that the rising number of old folks will drain the economy of its dynamism. The ranks of workers fifty-five and older are projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to rise from nearly 20 percent in 2010 to some 25 percent in 2020. The fear is the appetite for risk taking that fuels new products and new markets will diminish with a dramatically aging work force, victims of aching joints, bad backs, and faltering vision. Older workers are hardly considered stalwarts of entrepreneurial ambition and productive energy. They have a reputation for being set in their ways, unwilling to challenge the established order, little interested in the latest technologies and organizational innovations. They
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Chris Farrell (Unretirement: How Baby Boomers are Changing the Way We Think About Work, Community, and the Good Life)
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There's really no such thing as an overnight success. It takes time, and undoubtedly there will be a lot of No's along the way. “No” is never the end of the story in the business world. “No” is merely an obstacle in the road to maneuver around. As entrepreneurial legend Lillian Vernon, CEO and founder of Lillian Vernon Corporation, a leading national catalog and online retailer, said, “You must have a vision and passion. You must persevere. You must be optimistic, and you must never give up.
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Susan Solovic (The Girls' Guide to Building a Million-Dollar Business)
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Culture is the lifeblood of successful endeavours. Everything you do and everywhere you go creates opportunities to communicate in impactful ways. Great communication becomes a part of a company’s culture. The more deeply it’s embedded, the larger the company grows. The larger the company grows, the deeper the culture.
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Ronnie Screwvala (DREAM WITH YOUR EYES OPEN: AN ENTREPRENEURIAL JOURNEY)
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Develop flourishing schools … The purpose of the education system should be to create capable and emotionally well-rounded young people who are happy and motivated. At its heart, education policy must acknowledge that the best way of enabling people to realize their potential is to value them for who they are rather than their measuring their performance against exams and targets. Children have multiple intelligences and all schools should have a strategy to develop pupils’ overall well-being. The curriculum needs to be broadened to include more opportunities around sports, arts, creativity and other engaging activities. An education system which promotes flourishing would lead to higher productivity, a more entrepreneurial society and greater active citizenship.
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Nic Marks (The Happiness Manifesto)
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The best way to protect yourself from attachment to a nonviable business idea is to scrutinize your concept through a market lens. The
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John Bradberry (6 Secrets to Startup Success: How to Turn Your Entrepreneurial Passion into a Thriving Business)
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If this book has shown anything, it is that becoming a force in technological innovation or disruption far beyond Silicon Valley has never been easier than it is today—but unimpeded access to the internet is essential. New entrepreneurs worldwide are creating ways to collaborate and solve local, regional, and even global problems. And governments should note that while these innovators are passionate about their homes and culture, they have also never been more mobile. If pushed, they can seek out other countries that embrace their talent. In addition to losing their best and brightest, emerging nations will have trouble competing if their legal environments squelch innovation.
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Christopher M. Schroeder (Startup Rising: The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East)
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I started the restaurant because I thought having a good, entrepreneurial idea was enough to make serious money in business. Some people call this an ‘entrepreneurial seizure.’ In my case it was more of an ‘entrepreneurial burp.
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Than Merrill (The Real Estate Wholesaling Bible: The Fastest, Easiest Way to Get Started in Real Estate Investing)
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There are three clear benefits of being a part of a mastermind: Growth. By surrounding yourself with folks who can provide you with informed advice, qualified referrals, and critical constructive feedback on your failures in a safe space, you are setting yourself up with the resources and guidance you need to focus on growing your business. Hopefully there’s at least one other person on each call who has more experience in a specific area than you do. There are some things in my business that I’m pretty damn confident I’m good at. But I know I have blind spots in other areas. I can bring those things to my mastermind because they don’t have the same blind spots. Accountability. As many solo founders know, keeping yourself accountable with no outside forces can be challenging. During most mastermind meetings, there is a point in time when each member is in the hot seat, discussing past goals and their progress, setting new goals and tracking them, and reporting back to the other members with updates along the way. By asking your group to keep you accountable to your business, you’re also committing to holding them accountable. A good mastermind also forces you to look at your weaknesses. You can bring your weakest attributes in front of this small group of trusted individuals who know your story, your revenue, your growth rate, and all your foibles—personally and professionally. Your mastermind will tell you things that if your spouse said them, you’d ignore them. (Ask my wife about that.) Support. Humans are social beings. Napoleon Hill says that the convergence of two individual minds creates a third, invisible force that combines the strength of both of its components. When you share your vulnerabilities and successes with others, you magnify your own experience and make it the experience of those around you. The power that comes from those shared experiences can be just as compelling and empowering as your individual success. Three of my favorite entrepreneurial communities are Indie Hackers, the Dynamite Circle, and of course, MicroConf.
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Rob Walling (The SaaS Playbook: Build a Multimillion-Dollar Startup Without Venture Capital)
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We entrepreneurs like to be hands-on, but sometimes the best way you can Repeat success with your new venture is to identify the people who can run something for you. The great thing about finding those DIY-ers back in Start is that they’re generally people with an entrepreneurial spirit. If they have never been entrepreneurs before, now may be the time you help them become one.
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Colin C. Campbell (Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.: Serial Entrepreneurs' Secrets Revealed!)
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On inauguration day, April 30, the people filled the streets leading to Federal Hall. The crowd’s enthusiasm was in no way lessened by the absence of pageantry common to similar celebrations for the Crown of England and other heads of state in the Old World: No purple sashes, gold braids, or plumed helmets appeared anywhere in the President-elect’s entourage. He himself wore a simple dark-brown suit made of broadcloth sent to him as a gift by a mill in Hartford, a pointed demonstration of America’s newfound industrial capability after years of British-imposed prohibition on domestic manufacture. His jacket had steel buttons embossed with eagles, and his only concession to the occasion
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Cyrus A. Ansary (George Washington Dealmaker-In-Chief: The Story of How The Father of Our Country Unleashed The Entrepreneurial Spirit in America)
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most people who go into business don’t have a model of a business that works, but of work itself, a Technician’s Perspective, which differs from the Entrepreneurial Perspective in the following ways: • The Entrepreneurial Perspective asks the question: “How must the business work?” The Technician’s Perspective asks: “What work has to be done?” • The Entrepreneurial Perspective sees the business as a system for producing outside results—for the customer—resulting in profits. The Technician’s Perspective sees the business as a place in which people work to produce inside results—for The Technician—producing income. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective starts with a picture of a well-defined future, and then comes back to the present with the intention of changing it to match the vision. The Technician’s Perspective starts with the present, and then looks forward to an uncertain future with the hope of keeping it much like the present. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective envisions the business in its entirety, from which is derived its parts. The Technician’s Perspective envisions the business in parts, from which is constructed the whole. • The Entrepreneurial Perspective is an integrated vision of the world. The Technician’s Perspective is a fragmented vision of the world. • To The Entrepreneur, the present-day world is modeled after his vision. To The Technician, the future is modeled after the present-day world.
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Michael E. Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It)
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The researcher who led that work went on to study thousands of businesses. She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable. Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
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David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
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The processes that you put in place to do that, they have to be very deliberate. It doesn’t happen by itself. What happens [naturally] is entropy. You have to leverage scale in a way that doesn’t disable entrepreneurialism, business ownership. It’s integrative. It’s not centralized. Centralized is a very different thing. This scale work is bringing the leaders of the businesses to work together towards a plan that not only optimizes the company, but in its best form, optimizes their category as well. As we approach a market, for instance, with multiple categories, the chance for success for each of them increases.
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A.G. Lafley (Playing to win: How strategy really works)
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Entrepreneurship isn't about starting an existing business or working on an existing idea or concept developed before but Entrepreneurship is all about understanding emerging challenges and providing solutions in a way that inspires innovation, creativity, and critical thinking.
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Aiyaz Uddin
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Within the entrepreneurial world, failure is the means by which businesses find their way. Harnessing this concept as a driver of innovation and growth can seem difficult at first, but it can be developed through key activities. »
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Ken Colwell (Starting a Business QuickStart Guide: The Simplified Beginner’s Guide to Launching a Successful Small Business, Turning Your Vision into Reality, and Achieving ... (Starting a Business - QuickStart Guides))
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Entrepreneurship is management. And yet, imagine a modern manager who is tasked with building a new product in the context of an established company. Imagine that she goes back to her company’s chief financial officer (CFO) a year later and says, “We have failed to meet the growth targets we predicted. In fact, we have almost no new customers and no new revenue. However, we have learned an incredible amount and are on the cusp of a breakthrough new line of business. All we need is another year.” Most of the time, this would be the last report this intrapreneur would give her employer. The reason is that in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness. In the Lean Startup movement, we have come to realize that these internal innovators are actually entrepreneurs, too, and that entrepreneurial management can help them succeed;
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
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The audacity of Elon Musk to ask for $100,000 to reserve a yet‐to‐be built Roadster, or a more modest sum for a new Model 3. The courage of John Erceg to keep spending every spare euro to buy more AdWords. The personal conviction of both that they were on sound paths. The trust that Jay Gupta built with his suppliers. The self‐belief of all three that, in the end, they would do what it takes to survive and succeed, no matter the prior odds. It's your own personal attributes—your mindset—that make this kind of “ask for the cash” funding possible. These attributes—audacity, courage, trustworthiness, faith in oneself—are not part of everyone's personality, to be sure. Setting forth on an entrepreneurial path, whether from your garage or within an established business, is not for everyone, either. But if the entrepreneurial path is one you wish to pursue, in one way or another, there's no better or more hospitable way to finance your journey than by finding a need that's so compelling for your customers that they'll pay you up front, and finding suppliers that will take payment later, if only because they trust you and they believe you'll bring value to their business, too.
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John Mullins (Break the Rules!: The Six Counter-Conventional Mindsets of Entrepreneurs That Can Help Anyone Change the World)
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A learning curve—measured as the percentage unit cost reduction realized with each doubling of cumulative production volume—is typically steepest when labor and machinery add significant value in the production process, as with aircraft assembly or semiconductor manufacturing. Value-added refers to the difference between a product’s final cost and the cost of raw material inputs; this difference consists mostly of labor and equipment costs. Learning-by-doing—for example, finding a way to cut setup times for a new production run—often yields labor and equipment cost savings.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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Market research professionals routinely assume that survey respondents will overstate their purchase intent relative to their true plans, and researchers have elaborate ways to adjust projections downward to compensate for this bias. But these methods are much less effective with radical new products, since respondents find it difficult to express preferences regarding products with which they’ve had no direct experience. A quote attributed to Henry Ford makes the risk clear: “If I had asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses.
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Tom Eisenmann (Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success)
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In a way, positioning is fake for a brief period of time. You’ve noticed just enough patterns to gain some credibility. Then you make the most of that driver’s permit to keep exploring, keep learning, and keep articulating insight. Eventually it feeds on itself and then you step into your expert clothes and really fill them out.
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
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Before further developing this idea of the two paths (innate confidence or bumping into opportunity), I want to pause and explain more fully what I mean by “not believing in the value of your work.” Some of you probably read that but don’t see yourself on that path when in fact you are. You feel like you have confidence in how you value your work, but the evidence doesn’t support it. There are certain business practices that stand as clear evidence of that lack of belief: Discounting your fees. Modifying your terms. Allowing unusual invoicing procedures. Providing advice before an engagement is crafted. Letting clients determine the problem while just looking to you for transactional solutions. Presenting multiple equally viable solutions and letting clients choose, ceding your expertise. Changing your positioning to fit what prospects want to hear (in presentations and proposals). The list above is truly “business as usual” for experts who see themselves in the service business, but it doesn’t have to be that way. While most follow that path (the ones who try to rub shoulders with more opportunity), some do not (the ones who have a strong innate belief in the value of what they do).
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
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First, articulate the kernel segments for which you don’t have a thoughtful point of view. Just knowing what you don’t know gives you permission for that confidence about the things that you do know, and in the process allows you be honest about what you don’t know. Heck, just whip out the list when a client asks a question about anything on it. They are fine with advice-givers who are human, and merely saying “no” from time to time can give real meaning to your “yes” statements. “Honestly, I’ve been asking that same question and I don’t think I have it figured out yet. [Reaching down] Here are my notes so far, and this will provide that opportunity to finally figure it out. Any thoughts along the way would be welcome. Thanks.” Second, determine all the methods that would motivate you, as a unique individual, to develop a given position. This might include a public speaking engagement, a repeatable section to include in proposals, an article you can place for publication, an interview with a journalist seeking expertise, a seminar you will teach, some internal training to prepare for, or a handout to be used at predictable conversation intersections when talking to clients in person. Third, group the topics by platform, order the topics in each group by descending level of importance, and assign a date to each item. About that: You cannot fully explore one of these topics and then craft the language to present it in less than two weeks; typically it requires a month or two. Fourth, ignite the research (less than you’ll guess) and insight generation (more than you’ll guess) by articulating a compressed 2,400–3,600 words for each topic. Fifth, begin what academia calls the peer review process. Release it to the brutal public for feedback, disagreement, and “this strikes me as right” commentary. If nobody reads your blog, that’s like winning a race with no opponents; you can just skip that and cast it far and wide instead. Email it to everyone not already tired of you and wait. Or just let that one cynical employee eagerly make you wince as they’ve always dreamed of doing. Sixth, over the following years, strip out what later seems like filler and replace it with more substance. Work on it long enough each time to make it shorter and shorter.
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
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There’s a time and a place for confidence, but your army (confidence) can’t march too far forward of your supply lines (expertise) or you’ll be caught without what you’ll need in order to win the war. There’s a healthy stretching that always pulls you forward, but you have to know enough about your field of impact. Crafting a positioning should tend toward the honest and boring side of this balance. Start by detailing your successful experience, and you can define that in two ways. As you list these instances, concentrate where you’ve been effective on behalf of a client and also made money yourself. I suppose you could add the element of where you’ve enjoyed the work, too, but the truth is that you’re not likely to even list these instances unless that happens to be true. So concentrate on impact and revenue. Eliminate any where both weren’t true. Don’t worry too much about recency, either. Prospects aren’t going to write you off if a particular demonstration of your expertise is more than three years old, for instance. They don’t look that deeply at the claims you make, and you, the expert, are far tougher on yourself than they will be. As we talked about in Foundation Chapter B, you’re attempting to craft a positioning where you are less interchangeable so that withholding your expertise carries some meaning. Think of the options as a spectrum, with the right side depicting a completely undifferentiated firm (I’m an accountant) and the left side depicting the most focused firm you could imagine (I’m an accountant who works with U.S.-based multi-location casual dining brands). At the beginning of this exercise, you are toward the right, wanting to move toward the left and be more differentiated than you are now. You’re aiming for fewer competitors so that your expertise supports a price premium in your work. As you march from right to left, you want to make a complete journey and make really smart positioning decisions. As you work out the intricacies of the positioning journey, there are two forces that slow your progress: one good and one bad.
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
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Third, vertical positioning benefits from common venues that spread the word about your firm, like conferences, awards, trade publications, and shared vendors. Your prospects want to learn from each other, so they network in different ways. The more effective your work, the more they talk about you, efficiently spreading the word about you. All this cross-pollination follows vertical positioning, translating into great organic referral growth, which is a significant source of new business in every field of expertise.
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David C. Baker (The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth)
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Hierarchies are best suited for situations that require tight control of production, information, or resources, such as manufacturers or large bureaucracies that exist in universities, governments, and militaries. Hierarchies are robust and inflexible, requiring formal rules, standard operating procedures, and a chain of command. In contrast, networks are resilient and adaptable, requiring flexibility and horizontal flows of information. Healthy startup communities rely upon unencumbered information flows organized in network-based structures. Conversely, they suffocate under hierarchical control.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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Social capital, or “networks of trust,” are rooted in relationships based on a common set of norms and values that bind a group of individuals together and enable them to collaborate more effectively. Networks of trust are critical in complex systems that demand high performance under fast-paced, ambiguous, and evolving conditions. Successful outcomes in military special forces, modern aviation, championship sports, and hyper-growth startups all require teamwork that is grounded in trust and a shared sense of purpose.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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Like all best supporting actors, the state may also step centre stage, taking entrepreneurial risks where the market and commons can’t or won’t reach. The extraordinary success of tech companies such as Apple is sometimes held up as evidence of the market’s dynamism. But Mariana Mazzucato, an expert in the economics of government-led innovation, points out that the basic research behind every innovation that makes a smart phone ‘smart’—GPS, microchips, touchscreens and the Internet itself—was funded by the US government. The state, not the market, turns out to have been the innovating, risk-taking partner, not ‘crowding out’ but ‘dynamising in’ private enterprise—and this trend holds across other high-tech industries too, such as pharmaceuticals and biotech.42 In the words of Ha-Joon Chang, ‘If we remain blinded by the free market ideology that tells us only winner-picking by the private sector can succeed, we will end up ignoring a huge range of possibilities for economic development through public leadership or public-private joint efforts.
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Kate Raworth (Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist)
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The complex nature of today's innovations requires teams of people with diverse skills. As Victor Hwang and Greg Horowitt describe in their book, The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, we are in need of diverse teams more than ever, but we are unfortunately hardwired to distrust people who are different from us. The ability to consistently overcome this limitation of human nature separates vibrant innovation systems from the others.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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Many entrepreneurial successes are built on platforms. A platform allows the business to grow in multiple markets against multiple competitors. It allows the company to adjust to changing times, technologies, and trends. A platform offers a company a way to change the rules of the game and to develop a competitive edge. Perhaps most important, it allows entrepreneurs to build a stronger competitive position against incumbent companies than just using evolutionary advances.
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Dileep Rao (Nothing Ventured, Everything Gained: How Entrepreneurs Create, Control, and Retain Wealth Without Venture Capital)
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Many large corporations have companies of one hiding within them. If the skills and passion for innovation and autonomy of these employees are fostered, it can greatly benefit the entire business as a whole. But if they are stifled in their creativeness and freethinking, they tend to move on quickly to other employment or entrepreneurialism. They’re rarely motivated solely by money or salaries and lean more toward reinventing their job and role in a way that works best for them.
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Paul Jarvis (Company Of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business)
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A contemporary example of holistic thinking is found in the approach Mark Suster and his firm Upfront Ventures took in helping evolve the Los Angeles startup community. A decade ago, many perceived LA as a small, relatively unimportant startup community. Mark and his partners at GRP Partners rebranded the firm Upfront Ventures in 2013 and began a concerted effort to amplify, publicize, and evolve the LA startup community. Mark was unapologetically bold about the awesomeness going on in LA. He started an annual Upfront Summit that was inclusive of all LA entrepreneurs, bringing venture capitalists and limited partners from around the country to LA for a two-day event showcasing everything going on in the region. By approaching the problem holistically, rather than attempting to solve one particular issue or to control things, Upfront dramatically accelerated the LA startup community while at the same time building an international brand for the firm.
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Brad Feld (The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem (Techstars))
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Like the team at the FDA, the EIR team enlisted entrepreneurs familiar with the obstacles, including SoftLayer senior executive Paul Ford, to work alongside the USCIS personnel committed to removing or clearing them. “You get fresh thinking, you get a very low-cost way of trying to impact the situation because the people doing this are committed to try to find what’s not working and propose solutions, rather than take a partisan or political or hierarchical or structural view to the environment,” Feld said. “They’re short-timers, so they’re committed for a period of time to come do something, but they’re not here for career advancement, so they are going to speak their mind.” Feld also believed that the presence of Ford and other outside entrepreneurs made the participants feel more comfortable to speak freely than if they had been working with government officials alone. In the spring of 2012, the team began building a prototype of an alternative application process for entrepreneurs and by fall had achieved a significant breakthrough: the launch of the Entrepreneurship Pathways web portal, designed to close the information gap between USCIS and those in the entrepreneurial community, by letting them know which visa may be most appropriate—including the O-1—for their situation.24 While the results of this exercise were not empirically conclusive at the time of an interview for this book, Feld did offer his anecdotal assessment “that there’s an increased number of people who I know have been able to get into the country and get valid visas who are entrepreneurs. I’ve definitely heard a decrease in the negative.
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Aneesh Chopra (Innovative State: How New Technologies Can Transform Government)
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As we boldly enter the new decade, we need to make sure that we do so in a way that fosters individual talents and preserves the entrepreneurial spirit rising in Africa; as young people are rising as risk-takers, inventors, disruptors and thought leaders.
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Nicky Verd (Disrupt Yourself Or Be Disrupted)
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Sandeep Aggarwal’s Top 10 Rules
1. Do not take no for an answer
2. If you can dream it, you can fulfil it
3. When there is a will, there is a way
4. When regret of not doing something is bigger than anything you are willing to give up, you have the answer
5. Fortune follows the brave
6. Power of prototyping and leaning from mistakes have to hard wired in entrepreneurs
7. Better to put efforts and fail but not putting efforts or fear of failure is not acceptable
8. Entrepreneurism is real test of once conviction
9. Time and tide wait for none, so speed to market is imperative
10. Entrepreneurialism is the most lonely choice of profession
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Sandeep Aggarwal