Empowering Your Manager

What is Entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of value.With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values than simply economic ones.  

 “So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.”

– Peter Drucker

Types of entrepreneurship

Ethnic

The term "ethnic entrepreneurship" refers to self-employed business owners who belong to racial or ethnic minority groups in the United States and Europe^{[citation needed]}. A long tradition of academic research explores the experiences and strategies of ethnic entrepreneurs as they strive to integrate economically into mainstream U.S. or European society. Classic cases include Jewish merchants and tradespeople in large U.S. cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as Chinese and Japanese small business owners (restaurants, farmers, shop owners) on the West Coast.In the 2010s, ethnic entrepreneurship has been studied in the case of Cuban business owners in Miami, Indian motel owners of the U.S. and Chinese business owners in Chinatowns across the United States. While entrepreneurship offers these groups many opportunities for economic advancement, self-employment and business ownership in the United States remain unevenly distributed along racial/ethnic lines.Despite numerous success stories of Asian entrepreneurs, a recent statistical analysis of U.S. census data shows that whites are more likely than Asians, African-Americans and Latinos to be self-employed in high prestige, lucrative industries.

Institutional

The American-born British economist Edith Penrose has highlighted the collective nature of entrepreneurship. She mentions that in modern organizations, human resources need to be combined to better capture and create business opportunities.The sociologist Paul DiMaggio (1988:14) has expanded this view to say that "new institutions arise when organized actors with sufficient resources [institutional entrepreneurs] see in them an opportunity to realize interests that they value highly".^[59] The notion has been widely applied.

Cultural

According to Christopher Rea and Nicolai Volland, cultural entrepreneurship is "practices of individual and collective agency characterized by mobility between cultural professions and modes of cultural production", which refers to creative industry activities and sectors. In their book The Business of Culture (2015), Rea and Volland identify three types of cultural entrepreneur: "cultural personalities", defined as "individuals who buil[d] their own personal brand of creativity as a cultural authority and leverage it to create and sustain various cultural enterprises"; "tycoons", defined as "entrepreneurs who buil[d] substantial clout in the cultural sphere by forging synergies between their industrial, cultural, political, and philanthropic interests"; and "collective enterprises", organizations which may engage in cultural production for profit or not-for-profit purposes.

In the 2000s, story-telling has emerged as a field of study in cultural entrepreneurship. Some have argued that entrepreneurs should be considered “skilled cultural operators”  that use stories to build legitimacy, and seize market opportunities and new capital.Others have concluded that we need to speak of a ‘narrative turn’ in cultural entrepreneurship research.

Feminist

A feminist entrepreneur is an individual who applies feminist values and approaches through entrepreneurship, with the goal of improving the quality of life and well-being of girls and women.Many are doing so by creating "for women, by women" enterprises. Feminist entrepreneurs are motivated to enter commercial markets by desire to create wealth and social change, based on the ethics of cooperation, equality and mutual respect.These endevours can have the effect of both empowerment and emancipation.

Social

Student organizers from the Green Club at Newcomb College Institute formed a social entrepreneurship organization in 2010.

Main article: Social entrepreneurship

Social entrepreneurship is the use of the by start up companies and other entrepreneurs to develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. This concept may be applied to a variety of organizations with different sizes, aims, and beliefs. For-profit entrepreneurs typically measure performance using business metrics like profit, revenues and increases in stock prices, but social entrepreneurs are either non-profits or blend for-profit goals with generating a positive "return to society" and therefore must use different metrics. Social entrepreneurship typically attempts to further broad social, cultural, and environmental goals often associated with the voluntary sector in areas such as poverty alleviation, health careand community development. At times, profit-making social enterprises may be established to support the social or cultural goals of the organization but not as an end in itself. For example, an organization that aims to provide housing and employment to the homeless may operate a restaurant, both to raise money and to provide employment for the homeless people.

Nascent

A nascent entrepreneur is someone in the process of establishing a business venture. In this observation, the nascent entrepreneur can be seen as pursuing an opportunity, i.e. a possibility to introduce new services or products, serve new markets, or develop more efficient production methods in a profitable manner. But before such a venture is actually established, the opportunity is just a venture idea.In other words, the pursued opportunity is perceptual in nature, propped by the nascent entrepreneur's personal beliefs about the feasibility of the venturing outcomes the nascent entrepreneur seeks to achieve.

Project-based

Project entrepreneurs are individuals who are engaged in the repeated assembly or creation of temporary organizations.^[94] These are organizations that have limited lifespans which are devoted to producing a singular objective or goal and get disbanded rapidly when the project ends. Industries where project-based enterprises are widespread include: sound recording, film production, software development, television production, new media and construction.^[95] What makes project-entrepreneurs distinctive from a theoretical standpoint is that they have to "rewire" these temporary ventures and modify them to suit the needs of new project opportunities that emerge. A project entrepreneur who used a certain approach and team for one project may have to modify the business model or team for a subsequent project.

Millennial

The term "millennial entrepreneur" refers to a business owner who is affiliated with millennials (also known as Generation Y), those people born from approximately 1981 to 1996. The offspring of baby boomers and early Gen Xers, this generation was brought up using digital technology and mass media. Millennial business owners are well-equipped with knowledge of new technology and new business models and have a strong grasp of its business applications.  

There have been many breakthrough businesses that have come from millennial entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook. Despite the expectation of millennial success, there have been recent studies that have proven this to not be the case. The comparison between millennials who are self-employed and those who are not self-employed shows that the latter is higher. The reason for this is because they have grown up in a different generation and attitude than their elders. Some of the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are the economy, debt from schooling, and the challenges of regulatory compliance.

                                          ABOUT ENTERPRENURESHIP

Managing is often equated with controls rather than leading and developing a business. The manager feels more comfortable and secure when they are able to put in strict controls on everything that happens in a business organization. This is so especially of Senior Managements where the controls and directing becomes so severe that it erodes any creative freedom for the middle managers to work towards achieving the goals set out for them.

Here are a few simple prescriptions to get the best out of your managers.

Avoid Centralizing Decision Making

This is perhaps one of the best ways to achieve totals control. You feel by centralizing decision making you will be able to avoid wrong decisions. While this may be so to some extent who is to prevent your own wrong decisions. Unless your managers are able to make mistakes and learn from them you will never be able to develop expertise through experience. Centralizing decision making is also the surest method to kill your business growth.

Provide Working Space

The top management often entrust tasks and responsibilities to their subordinate managers. More often than not any specific time frames which are comfortable to achieve the given responsibilities or tasks are discussed. However in their anxiety or aggressiveness and sometimes over enthusiasm you start chasing your subordinate for action and results. If you do it too soon and too often you are severely limited the working space of your managers. They may be spending more time in complying with your commands rather than focusing on operational priorities and important tasks.

If you are not providing sufficient working space for your managers you are surely heading towards disaster as important tasks may be getting neglected to escape from your frequent and aggressive follow ups.

Listen to Your Managers

While experience is an asset it also makes one arrogant and conceited. Sometimes one tends to believe because he is the superior, he always right. The Boss Is Always Right principle looks good only on posters. It doesn’t work if you want to build a Professional organization.

Cultivate the ability to listen to the voice of your managers. Most times they know better as they are more familiar with the ground realities. If you decide on their behalf and just issue orders, you will have clerks in the guise of managers as you have killed their initiative.

Don’t Get Into the Nitty Gritties

Once broad goals and objectives are set with specific time frames and key results are outlined leave your managers to perform. If you get into too many details and meddle with the execution at every stage, you may be sure to mess up the entire process and ultimately the results.

The key to managing effectively is to empower people across the management structure so that they feel part of the responsibility and ownership.