Uncertainty, Technological Turbulence, Competition: What's a Manager to Do? Thrive on It (page 1 of 3)

This is the kind of uncertainty that eats conventional companies--and traditional management strategies--for breakfast. But Wharton management professor Ian MacMillan has a no-nonsense message for executives: "Instead of continuing to whine about it, what are you going to do about it?"

MacMillan and co-author Rita McGrath offer managers some answers in their book, The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty (Harvard Business School Press). MacMillan, who is also director of Wharton's Sol C. Snider Entrepreneurial Research Center, and McGrath, a management professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Business, set out a very specific plan of action for managers in established businesses, who they say can no longer fall back on traditional strategic management in the face of rapid, unexpected change.

"It used to be that only sectors affected by de-stabilizing events or new technologies needed to continuously re-invent themselves, but today no one is immune," warns McGrath. Asserting that executives need to start thinking like entrepreneurs, the authors emphasize that uncertainty, looked at in the right way, can yield tremendous opportunity: "Once entrepreneurial thinking becomes second nature, you will be able to continuously identify uncertain yet high-potential business opportunities, and exploit these opportunities with speed and confidence. Uncertainty becomes your ally instead of your enemy."

As a model for today's managers, the authors identify people they call "habitual entrepreneurs." Habitual entrepreneurs have made careers out of starting businesses either within existing firms or independently. McGrath and MacMillan define several key characteristics of this breed: They passionately seek new opportunities and pursue them with enormous discipline. Furthermore, they pursue only the best opportunities, and avoid exhausting themselves and their organizations by chasing every option. They focus on execution and change direction if necessary. And they engage the energies of everyone who works with them. While this may sound easier said than done, the authors present a detailed plan, based on these qualities, for managers to apply to their division or entire company. The basic outline is:

• Create the entrepreneurial frame - define in advance the criteria that would make a business opportunity worthwhile

• Stock the opportunity register - begin a list of ideas for improving or re-inventing your current business model

• Target the best opportunities - establish your strategy and structure an opportunity portfolio that supports it

• Employ adaptive execution - consider market strategy and competitors' likely response;
redirect and "learn your way" to the real opportunity; assess progress

• Lead with an entrepreneurial mindset - engage the energies of everyone in your domain.

These steps are accompanied in the book by examples from dozens of companies in widely different industries, from General Electric to Citibank to Visible Changes (a chain of hairdressing salons). Many of them are drawn from the authors' own considerable experience as consultants to both new and established businesses, and as teachers of entrepreneurial skills. "What we've done," says MacMillan, "is provide very simple, very powerful tools that managers can use to mobilize their entire workforce to look for inventories of opportunities.