Manager-Entrepreneur

What are you?

An entrepreneur is an innovator who sees opportunity, sizes up its value and finds the resources to make the most of it. Entrepreneurs are usually thought of as people who start businesses. However, entrepreneurs can exist in other environments. Entrepreneurs can be found in large, complex, bureaucratic business firms and in all other types of organizations (government, academic, non-profit). In such organizations, entrepreneurs often make many other employees uncomfortable because they are looking for new ways to do things and new things to do. Entrepreneurs also push their organization to follow up on new ideas.

Because they are much less constrained by organizational bureaucracies, entrepreneurs are commonly found in small businesses. All owner-operators of small businesses, however, are not entrepreneurs. Many people who run small businesses took them over from someone else (purchased or inherited them). Such individuals may be very content to manage their business with little significant innovation or change. The lives of such business managers, and the lives of their families, are likely to be less stressful than the lives of entrepreneurs and their families. However, entrepreneurship will become important in such a business when markets change and the business declines. Then, new ideas will be necessary to keep the business viable. Management is the process of identifying and implementing strategies to make a business productive and profitable. Managers direct the use of a business' physical, financial and human resources to accomplish the goals toward which a business is directed.