When It’s Time to Stop Thinking--and Start Doing
Sure, you need to spend time
thinking through your decisions. But too many entrepreneurs get trapped in
their own heads.
If
you run a start-up--whether it’s for profit or a social enterprise--one of the
big questions that you face every day is whether to spend more time thinking
about your venture’s problems or just make a decision and take action.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve
been through an educational process that puts a tremendous emphasis on getting
you to think hard before acting and record your thinking in exhaustive detail.
Many of America’s greatest
entrepreneurs, from Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos, have been through that kind of
cerebrally-intensive education at Harvard and Princeton, respectively. To be
sure, both institutions have evolved more to encourage their students to get
real-world experience than they did when Gates and Bezos were attending them.
But over-thinking a problem can be
disastrous for a start-up. In technology-based start-ups, engineers left to
their own devices will keep refining their product to impress other engineers
and never think it is ready to be put in front of a customer. That’s why such
start-ups usually burn through their investors’ money before getting any
revenues.
As a teacher of strategy and
entrepreneurship at Babson College--U.S. News & World Report has
ranked its undergraduate entrepreneurship program tops in the U.S. every year
for the last 20--I have concluded that aspiring entrepreneurs must know when to
stop thinking and start acting.
So,
You're Ready to Take Action
How to teach them this became a real
problem for me this spring when Babson asked me to create a new course to be
called Foundations of Entrepreneurial Management (FEM).
FEM is based on one of Babson’s best
ideas: that aspiring business leaders should both think and act
entrepreneurially. And in my mind, Babson’s approach, dubbed Entrepreneurial
Thought & Action (ET&A), emphasizes the importance of both thinking and
doing, as described in 2011’s The New Entrepreneurial Leader co-authored
by Danna Greenberg, Kate McKone-Sweet and H. James Wilson.
In a sense, ET&A springs from
the motto of MIT, the alma mater of the college founder, Roger Babson. MIT’s
seal includes the Latin words--mens et manus--which translates as Mind and
Hand. I interpret MIT’s philosophy to be that students should analyze a
problem, think of a solution, build and test a prototype, see how well it
solves the problem, learn from the experiment, and apply that learning to the
next iteration of the prototype.
What does this mean for you as an
entrepreneur?
You should build your company by
pairing up two logics -- creative -- where you come up with a
business idea, try it, and see what happens; and predictive -- set a
long-term goal and develop a clear progression of steps to achieve the goal.
How
It Works
For example, if you were engaged in
resource planning for your venture, the predictive mindset would make you ask
yourself: “How much capital do we need? Who do we know? and How do we pitch to
get them interested?” whereas the creative one would lead you to say “Let’s
start with the means at hand, what do we have? who do we know? and how can we
make something happen with what we’ve got?”
An important ET&A theme is that
these two ways of thinking about entrepreneurship co-exist. If your goal is to
create economic and social value, you can apply ET&A to a variety of
business situations you might encounter during your career, including:
· Starting
and leading a new for-profit, non-profit or social venture;
· Joining
the team of a growing enterprise; or
· Infusing
an established organization or family business with entrepreneurial vigor.
What does this mean for you?
Thinking is important--but don’t overdo it. On the other hand, acting without
thinking clearly can create too-high tuition payments that yield little
learning.
You must figure out where your
thinking should leave off and action should take over. And your ultimate goal
as an entrepreneur should be to learn faster and better than your competition.
That learning should help you win new customers and turning them into repeat
buyers; hire the best people and make them act as an effective team; and
attract the most helpful investors and learn from their insights.
Strategy consultant, start-up
investor, teacher, corporate speaker, pundit, and author PETER COHAN http://www.inc.com/peter-cohan/action-trumps-thinking.html
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