I’m reposting this comment I wrote in response to Eric Ries’s stimulating blog post on Harvard Business Review online, with the title “Is Entrepreneurship a Management Science?” Feel free to share your thoughts on it there as I think it’s worth thinking about whether Entrepreneurship can eventually learned or whether it is an art-form. My thoughts on that are below.

Having both studied a Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and working in my 3rd startup (trying to apply the lean techniques that Lessons Learned made me aware of), I can say that my ideal is that entrepreneurship is a science. In reality, it’s a collection of Sciences as well as the act of Imagination AND Guts AND Agility, none of which are particularly scientific.

It’s a collection of sciences because no entrepreneur or team of entrepreneurs is undertaking just one activity, he, she, or they are doing many in parallel, some of which are business related and some of which are technological. Both have scientific foundations behind them.

Why the Business of Entrepreneurship is scientific is simple to explain. Businesses, starting or existing, can’t operate in a vacuum (for long). We have to obey financial restrictions, sell the idea to our investors, who themselves employ scientific means to measure whether the return on their investment justified, communicate to the market in effective ways, study the market, and project manage all the activities and people in the company. For most of these “wheels” already exist, so there isn’t always a need to reinvent them.

BUT, there is no replacement or science for guts, imagination, and agility in starting a business. You have to ignore many rules, you have to play dirty, and you have to be quick & flexible if you want to succeed. Maybe a management scientist can eventually plug those dirty variables in a formula somewhere. But I doubt it can be applied to any two startups successfully.

Vincent

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I know I wrote about rebooting the entrepreneurial brainstorming sessions. I kind of prefer an informal style of ‘idea generation’ though… Today, the subject is literature, of which there arguably is way too much. Sometimes it’s nice to read a ‘thin book,’ like The One Minute Manager or even The Alchemist.

What those books have in common is that they give you lessons in a very compressed space. But it works, because rather than doing a dry, point-by-point summary of the content published in much longer books, they do so in story-format. The One Minute Manager is about a man trying to learn about management and he goes on a kind of exploratory adventure to uncover the secrets. According to the book there’s only really three elements to effective one-to-one management [there's another book in the series, I'm reading now, on one-to-many management also], but I won’t bore you with them. The only thing to note is that I REMEMBER the lessons in the book perfectly!

The Alchemist is not a management book, it’s a self-help book about finding happiness and the meaning to your life. It’s again about an adventure and you follow this kid across the desert. Very simple principles, clothed in the format of an entertaining and exciting story.

No wonder these two books are best-sellers!

These last decades have seen a tremendous rise on various fronts involving the mass-education of mankind. From MBAs, to millions of published books, to billions of informational websites, it’s understandably overwhelming. As a result, you now get books teaching you (supposedly) “MBAs in a nutshell”, you get websites that sell you books in audio-format. And you also get websites that sell you book summaries for the busy executive.

Having read several of these, I have to say that I’m not impressed. Sure, I can read Crossing the Chasm in 5 pages, but what have I actually learned? How do the lessons that I read in bullet-point format translate into a language that my brain understands and remembers?

The answer is, if you ask me, to start a business that translates (boring / long) books into shorter books and doing so in story-form. Nothing is as exciting to business-folk like me, than reading a Harvard Business Review case-study. Because, it’s a (nearly) living example. I place myself into the antagonist’s point of view and learn about the challenges he/she has to face!

So this is my first “entrepreneurial brainstorming” topic: start a business that translates longer books into shorter entertaining stories and sells them to executives!

What do you think?

Vincent

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