How Does an Entrepreneur Think?

You don’t have to own a company to think like an entrepreneur. Anyone can adopt this mindset, and those who do usually find it professionally and personally rewarding. Most people associate the word entrepreneur with a few high-powered, high profile names. What’s behind those names? What’s the difference between an entrepreneur and a businessperson? Is entrepreneurial thinking exclusive to the corner office, or can it be applied at any level of an organization?

All entrepreneurs share certain qualities – ones that everyone can apply to various degrees and to considerable advantage. These include:

• vision – insight into how a product or service can improve your customers’ personal or business life;
• commitment to fulfilling that vision;
• fierce determination to succeed;
• the ability to successfully sell the vision to others;
• an ability to recognize the need for help, when appropriate;
• willingness to adapt to economic and competitive realities; and
• strong commitment to hard work.

A New Way of Thinking
Most people don’t have the fortitude, brilliance or stamina to come up with an idea, borrow the kids’ college fund and build a company. That’s fine, because the world can only accommodate so many bleeding-edge ideas and thinly financed businesses.

Opportunities to apply creative new ideas abound. Even within more traditional working lives and the constraints imposed by employers, each person can – and should – be more entrepreneurial.

There is definitely an entrepreneurial way of thinking. A willingness to take risks is part of it. For instance, those brick-and-mortar companies that are early adopters of e-business are behaving in an entrepreneurial fashion. Someone recognized the trend’s potential, had the courage to recommend a strategy involving bet-the-business re-engineering of the supply chain, distribution channels, investment and marketing – and pushed for technology to support it.

Redefining the basic business is another entrepreneurial activity. Consider travel agencies. A few years ago, airlines learned that they could lower the fees paid to travel agents and still fill planes. The airlines also discovered they could use their massive investment in technology to bypass the agent and go directly to the consumer.

Most agencies toughed it out, but a few realized that upscale consumers would pay for specialized services, such as planning exotic itineraries or providing detailed advice on hotels based on personal experience. As it turns out, these are the very travelers most coveted by the airlines, so these agents (now called “travel consultants”) applied their new leverage to get higher commissions from the airlines. As a result, the agents can now collect fees from the airline and the customer.

The objectivity to make decisions that may counter traditional norms or reflect a new way of thinking is also part of the entrepreneurial mindset.

Today, corporations want their business strategy to support rapid change, such as an acquisition or product introduction, and scalability – all at minimum cost. Impact, not the size of the company, is often the measure of the chief executive’s worth. This trend also helps explain the growth in use of temporary workers, outsourcing, telecommuting, renting web-enabled software and other strategies that optimize fixed and variable costs and resources.

Another key entrepreneurial characteristic is the ability to persuade others to share a vision. Some senior executives tend to be tacticians rather than strategists. They’re good at achieving reliability, but poor at selling a common vision or integrating their division with a corporate one. It is important to conceptualize a vision of where certain senior executives can take a company and sell that vision – and keep selling it – until it becomes the CEO’s and the board’s vision as well.

There are other qualities you can ascribe to entrepreneurs, but the most important thing is to think about your job in creative, strategic and visionary terms. Entrepreneurial thinking may not come naturally to you, but the effort can be extremely satisfying – both professionally and personally.