What's Best Next

You are here: Home / Archives for 2 - Professional Skills / b Hard Skills / Entrepreneurship

Business is Art

by

workbench

This is a great perspective from Work the System by Sam Carpenter:

Who says art must include a canvas, sculpture, or musical instrument? Art is creativity, and is there a better example of a creative endeavor than the machinations of building a successful business? Indeed, business is art in its purest form! The painter and the musician shouldn’t scoff at the entrepreneur or corporate chief who must take hard, cold life – sights, sounds, events, things, people – and stir them into an efficient enough mixture to produce a successful business. Business is art. It’s a heroic undertaking, and with it lies two superb by-products: tangible value to others–employees and customers–and personal income for the creator.

Creating a Business Plan that Actually Works

by

Thanks to the many of you who have been so encouraging as we announced the launch of What’s Best Next. You emails and shares have been meaningful.

We hope you’ll stick around to benefit from the things we have planned, and to help us refine the resources and services. None of this makes sense if people like you aren’t inspired and helped.

Creating a Business Plan that Actually Works

One of the things we’re looking to do, in addition to developing many free resources, is to publish, over time, focused books for helping Christians be more effective in their work.

Creating_A_Business_Plan_COVERThe one we started with, which seemed to make sense given what we were already working on, is a short digital book called Creating a Business Plan that Actually Works: Especially, But Not Only, for Faith-Based Organizations.

With a title like that, and given that What’s Best Next is a mere three days old, I would expect at least a snicker or two! But here’s the deal: this e-book is not about guaranteeing a level of success, however you measure it. It’s about a process that does what it’s intended to do—a framework that can make a significant difference as you plan any kind of real-world endeavor.

Whether you’re launching a new business, starting a ministry, planning an event, or managing a project of a certain size or scope, this short e-book can help guide you in thinking through your plans. Matt originally wrote this a few years ago and we’ve updated several sections in light of working through the vision for What’s Best Next.

 Here’s what you’ll find in Creating a Business Plan that Actually Works: 

  1. How Do You Think Biblically About Business Plans?
  2. Making Business Plans Useful: A Brief Overview
  3. The Elements of a Business Plan (And Getting Them Right)
  4. Further Resources

This focused book is especially for those who are making plans from a Christian perspective—whether in churches, ministries, other non-profits, or anywhere else. While you don’t have to operate from a specifically Christian perspective to benefit, it will be especially helpful for those looking for a resource that makes the integration of faith and work explicit.

Available for download from WhatsBestNext.com or Amazon.com

Millennials: Bringing Back Entrepreneurship in America

by

This is a great post at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics on how Millennials are rejuvenating the entrepreneurial spirit in America after 30 years of decline, and how entrepreneurship is very much in sync with Christian values.

It begins:

Entrepreneurship has been in a slow decline over the past thirty years in America, according to a recent study by the Brookings Institution. Today, more businesses are failing than being created, as this graph shows.

But Millennials may be the generation to change this decline.

The National Journal reports that in 2011, 29% of all entrepreneurs were between twenty and thirty-four years old, and Millennials launched nearly 160,000 start-ups each month that year.

Is it possible that Millennials might bring back the entrepreneurial spirit?

Read the whole thing.

Entrepreneurs Must Save America

by

That’s the title of an excellent interview at the Gallup Management Journal with Jim Clifton on his book The Coming Jobs War.

Here are a few excerpts that are especially worth noting:

The U.S. has no shortage of great ideas and innovations. What the country needs now are highly motivated entrepreneurs who can turn those ideas into great businesses, says Gallup’s chairman. [But]…by concentrating on innovators and neglecting entrepreneurs, we may be making it harder to create the jobs the world wants and needs.

…The country that invents the future wins the jobs war, and inventing the future is what great entrepreneurs do.

…Businesses like the one Steve Jobs created and businesses like Intel and Microsoft and Amazon and Groupon and Facebook and eBay — nobody else sees that stuff coming. Nobody else says, “Hey, we need a site where we can post pictures from the weekend. We need a site that’s basically a 24/7 garage sale.” That wouldn’t have market tested well. But look at Facebook and eBay — they’re multibillion-dollar companies that created jobs for thousands of people.

We’ve got to accelerate that. To imagine that we’ll compete with China and those manufacturing jobs will come back is hallucination — or at best, wishful thinking.

…Engagement is a precondition for the state of mind that creates entrepreneurs. Miserable workgroups chase customers away. Miserable workforces don’t create any economic energy, so those companies are always cutting jobs. America will not come back and win the world unless we have the most spirited workforce. Spirited workforces create new customers. New customers create new jobs.

What is an Entrepreneur?

by

I love this quote from Godin:

An entrepreneur is an artist of sorts, throwing herself into impossible situations and seeking out problems that require heart and guts to solve.

How Successful Entrepreneurs Act – It's Not What You Think

by

“Successful entrepreneurs realize that in a world where you can’t predict the future, what do you do? Act. If you can’t predict the future, create it. Creation-oriented action. There is an academic, real correlation between entrepreneurs and this belief; that is, studies show this is how most entrepreneurs think.

“Indiana Jones is actually a good example here. He’s thrust into the dark. Can’t see. What does he do? You ask: What do I have on me? Where are my feet? Not going to jump around. I’ll take a small step. OK, does it feel like I can take another step? Oh, on my belt I have a flashlight. Maybe that can help me a bit. You, playing Indiana Jones, know exactly how to get out of a dark hole. And these are exactly the rules you need to understand to take entrepreneurial action.

“In the face of unknowability, what does rational behavior look like? Action. You can’t think your way into an unknowable future, so your only way forward is to act. How? Take small steps–not big leaps. Small steps. [Prior point: It is a myth that entrepreneurs are inclined to take huge risks; they are inclined to minimize risk.] Take a small step with what you have in hand. Limit the risk with each step. Then build off what you actually find from taking that step, whether good or bad, and would be nice to have some friends and resources standing by to help.

“Successful entrepreneurs also start with things they care about. The question is not where do you find opportunity, but what is it you would like to do? We start with you. Entrepreneurs are always doing what they want to do, or think will get them what they want. In the face of unknowability, taking any other action is simply foolish. So, given who you are and what you want, what step should you take? Sometimes you might see someone else with an idea, and partner up. 50% of entrepreneur partnerships in their study started simply because the people liked each other — not even a big idea. This works.

“Now we get to the part where the bankers and financial experts in the room will be deeply offended. They have all developed ways to measure risk. We live in a world of affordable loss. To put more numbers on that just makes things more depressing and doesn’t work. How do you decide what to do? Well, how badly do you want to do it. Then you act. Then you bring some other people along. Willow Creek is a good example here actually — take a look at what they’ve been doing.

“Now, what keeps people from doing this? First, they get completely caught up about what they’re trying to do. So how about not worrying about that, but instead thinking about what you’ll do next. Stop worrying about what you want to do, and instead worry about what you should do next. [Sounds familiar — what’s best next!] Second, people fear failure. They think ‘we can’t fail.’ We’ve been educated to believe that failure is a dirty word. That when people fail, we send them away and they disappear. ‘If you fail you go to the desert and don’t come back.’ But in reality, if you take a step and it doesn’t turn out how you expected, quite likely you just learned something that nobody else knows. So for those uncomfortable with calling it failure, call it ‘an exercise in learning what nobody else knows.'”

Solving big problems:

  1. Baby steps
  2. Small wins

Multiple simultaneous ventures.

With action trumping everything, you get more at bats in the same elapsed time. And greater aggregate number of ventures for society as a whole, taking us all on a journey towards solutions.

Tim Keller on the Passion of An Entrepreneur

by

Here is a short, good video of Tim Keller speaking on passion and entrepreneurship. Interestingly, he points out the the last of the seven deadly sins — sloth — doesn’t refer to laziness but rather passionless.

In other words, living a life without passion was traditionally considered to be one of the seven deadly sins.

(Sorry for not embedding the video — technical difficulties; the above link will take you right to it, though.)

Are Management and Entrepreneurship at Odds?

by

Sometimes there is a tendency to think that managers are slow and controlled, and entrepreneurs are exciting and progressive. The manager thus hinders the entrepreneur and makes everything boring.

And this can happen. But that is bad management. And in the same way that bad management makes things too controlled, bad entrepreneurship makes things unsustainable. We need both good management and good entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship is a key component of the managerial task.

Here’s how Peter Drucker puts it:

One important advance in the discipline and practice of management is that both now embrace entrepreneurship and innovation. A sham fight these days pits “management” against “entrepreneurship” as adversaries, if not as mutually exclusive.

That’s like saying that the fingering hand and the bow hand of the violinist are “adversaries” or “mutually exclusive.” Both are always needed and at the same time.

Any existing organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, goes down fast if it does not innovate. Conversely, any new organization, whether a business, a church, a labor union, or a hospital, collapses if it does not manage.

Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures. (The Essential Drucker, p 8.)