Now, let's move up a little bit to

the top part of the model from passionate toward pragmatic.

Now, we'll stay on the left hand side which means that we're still

talking about public activities but now we're becoming a little bit more pragmatic.

There's two really important aspects of being

an entrepreneur that become really important at this stage,

building a team and networking.

Now, the team building part is important

because if you have a project that starts to get a lot

of action and starts to make impact and you're

starting to get more and more customers and your business is growing clearly,

at some stage that growing venture is going to become

more than just one person can keep track of or manage.

So the team building implications are very clear here.

But it's important at this stage to make

a very pragmatic decision about who you let join your team or who you hire.

You typically don't want somebody exactly like yourself because it is good to get

a different perspective or a different point of view or to hire

somebody who is complimentary to you in terms of their skill set.

They should be strong where you're weak and vice versa.

That's a really good way to round out a team.

But as you think about that sort of thing,

if you think about team building from

that perspective you can see it's a pretty pragmatic enterprise.

Now, building trust and connecting with people is

somewhat personal and it also might even involve

passion if you're if you're excited about working with somebody but

the decision itself is a public and pragmatic affair.

It's a business decision,

it's a management decision.

And it's important to think about it as such.

And this is something that usually happens later on in

the entrepreneurial process when a venture has real potential for growth.

That's when an entrepreneur needs to start bringing on team members.

The networking piece is also very important.

And networking is something that entrepreneurs do like nobody else.

They are always really interested to meet

the people who are in a room and find out what kind of skill sets or projects

that they're working on because you never know who you might meet because

they might have something that could be really

valuable to your own entrepreneurial project.

And so networking is important.

But I would only add to this notion of networking that it's important

to understand that it's not really who you meet directly that is most important.

And I say that because it's highly unlikely if you as an entrepreneur

go to a networking event and meet say 30 people,

it's highly unlikely that you're going to meet somebody who can help you directly.

However, it's much more likely that one of those 30 people at least knows

somebody who can indeed help you directly in terms

of being a needed contact or having a needed skill set.

We call that the power of weak ties in the research literature.

You can think about it as being the second level of

your network but what that means for the entrepreneur who undertakes

networking is that when you meet people

at business meetings or at conferences or at events,

it's important to make your pitch in a way that's memorable and

to make an impression on them so they remember who you are.

That way, when they go on and go live their life and

do their work and meet people and talk to their friends eventually

they may meet somebody or talk to somebody and whoever they meet may have

some really compatible aspect of their professional experience that relates to yours.

And so at that moment that person who you met is going to say,

"Hey, there's somebody you really need to meet," and

then you may hear from them and they'll make an introduction.

Networking is funny in that way because social networks,

they really grow in terms of these weak ties, these indirect connections.

And so if you remember that networking really turns on

these indirect weak ties and that's how a lot of opportunities come to you,

you can think of networking in a much more strategic way.

And it's clearly public,

that's why it's in this part of the model.

It's also a very pragmatic process.

There are very practical ways to think about who you meet,

who you want to meet and who you need to meet to help your venture grow.

Let's move over to the top right quadrant.

This is the last part of the model

of personal entrepreneurial experience and it's still pragmatic,

but we're getting a little bit more personal again because

as you work through a project over

a short time cycle or a long time cycle eventually

the environment around you is going to send signals to you.

And the signals may be a threat and they may be an opportunity.

But no matter what they are,

we're talking about environmental change

that will call upon you to adapt as an entrepreneur,

to adapt your project,

to adapt your venture,

to grow in a particular way and to make key entrepreneurial decisions that

effectively adapt your venture to the environment in almost an evolutionary sense.

And many times when this happens,

it's clearly a practical issue but it calls upon

an entrepreneur to reflect back on why they started all of this in the first place,

to look at their values,

to look at the core values of their company and

even the culture of the company if one has developed.

That becomes a kind of personal enterprise for a lot of entrepreneurs.

You have to do a lot of soul searching and really think

about how much you are willing to change and how much you need to change.

And again, that becomes very important because as these ventures grow they can

also crest and they can also decline just like

anything that grows and has to adapt to the environment.

And this is something that an entrepreneurial leader needs to

recognize that eventually that they're probably going to have to deal with.

The other part of that quadrant is,

I call it irrelevance.

And I put that there only because if you don't change and if you don't grow,

it's very likely that your venture will move toward irrelevance.

And so the challenge for the entrepreneur is to continually adapt and evolve,

to be ready to adapt and evolve and to challenge theirselves

as leaders to know when they should maybe step aside,

when they need to or maybe hire a leader who has a different kind of skill set.

It's usually a highly personal decision and it's something that

pretty much every entrepreneur if they run

their business long enough will have to deal with.

And so that talks us through the entire model.

It has four quadrants,

two dimensions. You can see them there.

And as you think about your own ventures and plan for

your own futures please reflect on that and think about what stage you might be at,

what elements of the model are important for you to think

about depending on the stage where you're at and then

think about your own progress as your entrepreneurial project evolves and grows.

The Personal Development Aspects of an Entrepreneurial Journey - Part 3

Entrepreneurship I: Principles and Concepts

Meet the Instructors