For most of business history, management has meant management of a growing business. From now on, managers will not only manage existing business, they will have to be entrepreneurial innovators building new organizations as technology continues to change all markets and all organizations. This means to survive and grow, money and people must be invested in today to ensure the organization will be here in the next two or three years. Yes, it’s changing that quickly.
The main resource of entrepreneurial management is knowledge and the knowledge worker – the problem traditional managers have is that most productivity is measured in terms of work in process, profit per job and so forth, whereas the knowledge workers’ productivity is not measurable in the same way.
There is nothing as useless as paying for designing, estimating and proposal writing that turns out work for an unsaleable or unprofitable service or product. Entrepreneur management, along with a knowledgeable staff, creates new business by creating new customers. Markets are not created by traditional managers, but by entrepreneurial managers who create innovation and action by marketing, advertising, and salesmanship.
They may have discovered an underserved market, or there may have been no need at all until the entrepreneurial manager developed it. The fact is that the customer determines what to consider as value, not the business that produced it. Focusing on just the business today is the definition of incompetence because today is no longer good enough and without innovation, tomorrow’s success will never come.
Success lies in getting answers to questions like “What does the customer want to buy?” So marketing’s job is to know and understand the customer so well that the service or product sells itself. The most successful marketing process delivers a customer who is ready to buy.
Innovation’s job is to provide increasing economic advantage so the business doesn’t just grow sales but grows profits. Profit is the only true test of success in business. The difference between profit today and profit tomorrow is through strategic planning to consider risk and to ensure that profits grow tomorrow because knowledge and analytical thinking were applied. The problem is that accurate forecasting is not possible in new business ventures because there are too many unknowns.
The entrepreneurial manager’s job is to develop a continuous process of risk-taking decisions, systematically, organizing resources to complete the tasks and measuring the results of the decisions versus objectives through systemic feedback. The best entrepreneurial plan is only a plan. The test of a plan is the commitment of knowledge people and resources which will bring the result. If existing management thinks “I can’t spare my best people now because they have to finish what they are doing” and this manager doesn’t hire knowledgeable entrepreneurial managers to implement the process, the plan will fail and so will the business. Human resources and capital are required, not just wishes.
In the end, the truth is that most businesses have similar resources, service and products; the only true difference is in the different manager and today that’s the entrepreneurial manager, period.
For entrepreneurial management consulting, team building and coaching, contact Holt Marketing and Management Services, Inc. today.
So do you have entrepreneurial management in place? What have you learned from this article? We’d like to hear any questions or thoughts you have on the subject in the comment section below! If you liked this post, please subscribe by clicking the button below for weekly updates.
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