subject: Entrepreneurs: Are you Betting on A Sure Thing? [print this page] If you're not, you may never reach the ranks of "successful entrepreneurs," according to Malcom Gladwell.
Gladwell writes that successful entrepreneurs are:
businessmen whose insights and decisions have transformed the economy, but their entrepreneurial spirit could not have less in common with that of the daring risk-taker of popular imagination. Would we so revere risk-taking if we realized that the people who are supposedly taking bold risks in the cause of entrepreneurship are doing no such thing?
As a new venture coach and market researcher, I felt close enough to this topic to post the following comment:
Gladwell chooses examples of entrepreneurs who no doubt invested a tremendous amount of their own time or their own money to gather market intelligence and transform that intel into innovative business opportunities.
I doubt we would be talking about them at all if their gut insticts had not panned out.
There are a number of lesser known businessmen and women who do this exact same thing everyday. I challenge everyone who has made a post here to visit their local business incubator. Or better yet, do a Dun and Bradstreet search for the companies in your town that added greater than 5% new employees last year. These will be guaranteed examples of success- savvy, charasmatic, penny pinching risk takers.
While lesser known than Paulson, Turner, and Walton, these folks are also reassuring examples that there is always room to innovate... always a need to make a better shovel, in the words of the late Peter Drucker. And isn't that the role of the entrepreneur. It better be, after all aren't we betting on the small fish in this big pond to turn our economy around.
Next week I'm blogging about an entrepreneur who took some major risks last year by starting a business despite the economy.
