In today’s fast-changing, complex and uncertain world, those with an entrepreneurial mindset succeed by being nimble as they react to market changes. This mindset is key in combating competition—especially from well-established competitors—and moving your business ahead with agility and confidence.
Entrepreneurial thinking is all about harnessing passions, skills, experience, knowledge and insights, resources and networks to spot and take advantage of opportunities at the right time and in the right way.
Generally, the entrepreneurial mindset is more like a state of mind that opens your eyes to new learning opportunities and helps you grow in your role.
There are competing beliefs on what knowledge and skills could make an entrepreneur succeed. Many programs, for instance, are founded on the belief that business management skills will be conducive to entrepreneurial success. Several evaluations of these trainings, however, have not found sustained impacts or have suffered from methodological challenges.
Some others believe that entrepreneurial success is determined by innate traits such as personal initiative as well as other traits associated with better entrepreneurial performance. However, few programs have attempted to instill these personal attributes in entrepreneurs, let alone compared the impact of such training to traditional business training. This research contributes evidence on whether the personal attributes that are considered to drive success can be taught, and if so, whether teaching these skills improves the business performance of microentrepreneurs.
The importance of the entrepreneurial mind
If you’re starting out in the business world, you might feel a little overwhelmed with all of the information out there. For this reason, it’s important to know why entrepreneurial mindset is important for business. Firstly, thinking like an entrepreneur will help you right from the beginning. It will help you to know where you would like your business to lead you, and what risks you’re willing to take to succeed. Being willing to take risks and accept failure is a unique skill that isn’t relevant solely in the business world. Incorporating an entrepreneurial mindset into your everyday life will help you to minimize the importance of failure and rejection in your life. It will also help you to keep moving forward even when things are difficult. Moreover, having an entrepreneurial mindset will encourage creativity. Critical thinking is the key to a successful business, and being willing to find creative solutions even if it might mean more work will help your business greatly in the long run.
Entrepreneurial Characteristics
Here are some of the qualities and skills that lead to being a successful entrepreneur:
- Creativity: A successful entrepreneur needs to be an out of the box thinker. Entrepreneurship starts with a creative idea. It is present throughout entrepreneurship’s life cycle, due to the need for constantly improving the business idea and response to threats.
- Passion: Being passionate gives meaning to your work. Therefore, someone needs to love the business he/she is trying to build, be confident and proactive.
- Motivation: Being an entrepreneur, you are the boss of yourself. You are the backbone of your business, and your hard work determines its success. For this reason, self-motivated people are best for becoming entrepreneurs.
- Optimism: Engaging in business is always stressful and encumbering. It is an essential trait, especially for successful entrepreneurs who break the industry’s status quo. A new venture faces multiple risks and threats, and an entrepreneur needs to be relentless to their response.
- Persuasion: An entrepreneur always has a good idea. Realizing this idea requires the capital, be it human or financial. Early-stage entrepreneurship requires convincing investors to buy in your company.
- Flexibility: At an early stage, entrepreneurs need to fulfill many different roles. Thus, they need to have an open mind, be flexible to learn doing new things and improve them.
- Adventurous: Entrepreneurship, successful or not, is a guaranteed adventure. Risks and challenges are a daily reminder of the difficulty of the task at hand.
- Decisiveness: In business, time and decisions share a very delicate relationship. Making the right decision on a split second when a dilemma arises, could prove a matter of life and death.
The difference between the critical thinking and entrepreneurial thinking
Entrepreneurial thinking recognizes that solutions to problems aren’t always found by picking apart analyzing ideas. Solutions lay in the investigation of the external world. By its nature, entrepreneurial thinking is outward facing, not inward facing. Entrepreneurial thinking requires humility — the realization that what one already knows is just a base of knowledge. And that base can only be built by understanding and talking to potential customers. To succeed as an entrepreneur, you have to know what your customers want. That can only be done by experience and that’s called critical thinking. Critical thinking is a skill that can be honed and developed with practice, real-life experiences and time. The skill encourages self-reflection as well. It helps facilitate the examination of our own beliefs in comparison to those held by others. When we examine new ideas with a logical, objective eye, we open ourselves to entirely new worlds of beliefs, concepts and perceptions. To practice this means to step away from your beliefs and do what’s best for the business. Only with critical thinking can one organize and digest important information and ideas.
View 6 Steps to better critical thinking here
Entrepreneurial thought and action
To successfully lead in both uncertain and unknowable situations, we need leaders who rely upon a fundamentally different rationale for the existence of business and are leveraging a different logic of business decision making. While criticism of managers and management education has been widespread, clear solutions to creating a new path for leaders has not been articulated. Actions, such as the introduction of an MBA oath, increased emphasis on ethics, leadership, and corporate social responsibility, and the use of design thinking, are all important steps in the right direction—but they are just that: steps. Leaders need to be taught a revolutionary new model of thinking which begins with a fundamentally different world view of business, and engages a different decision-making logic. Entrepreneurial Thought and Action, evinced and practiced by entrepreneurial leaders, is this new mental model.
The characteristics of entrepreneurial mindset
Regarding to entrepreneurial thinking, it all comes down to mindset. First and foremost, entrepreneurs are extremely passionate about what they do. They have to be, because they give their whole selves to it. They build their businesses from the ground up, often at great personal sacrifice. That passion needs to be there because it takes a lot of work to get a business up and running. Without passion, the work will feel tedious and you won’t find any joy in it. Entrepreneurs invest a lot of time and energy into their business, blurring the line between work and home life. Entrepreneurs are extremely focused on their goals and do not stray from what they have set out to do. Being disciplined comes naturally to entrepreneurs. Just like anyone else, entrepreneurs often make mistakes, but instead of giving up, they learn from them. They don’t let failure keep them from continuing their work. Of course, entrepreneurs accept other’s advice, are exceptional listeners and understand the value in a perspective other than their own.
Development of Entrepreneurial Thinking
Becoming your own boss and an entrepreneur is the new coveted career choice of the 21st century. However, is a procedure that requires a set of actions to bring someone into building a successful business. Firstly, Creativity is a very important ability to see things differently and to provide solutions where there are gaps. Creativity can happen if someone try to do something new.
The Big Short is a movie that depicts how several opportunist entrepreneurs and investors managed to profit from the 2008 financial crisis by going against popular opinion.
Take a look at the official trailer at this link
Of course, there is nothing like real-world experience. Whether you run a business on the side or full-time, you get the opportunity to grow your skills such as business planning, negotiation, sales and marketing. Entrepreneurial Thinking requires the ability to lead a team and stay organized and understanding basic finance. Nobody has to be an accountant, but you should at least be able to understand the basics around cash flow, assets, and profit and loss. The best entrepreneurs have learned how to communicate their passion and dreams in an engaging way, both online and offline. Whether it’s attending entrepreneurial events, conferences or seminars, spending time with other entrepreneurs will help someone grow in his own entrepreneurial skills.
