Year: 2016

A NEW CORPORATE CONTRACT FOR THE DIGITAL AGE
by Nicolas Colin

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A corporation is a contract between four parties with diverging interests: the shareholders, the executives, the employees, and the customers. The value created by the corporate entity is turned into wealth to be divided as laid out in that contract. In some cases, the shareholders get the lion’s share. In other cases, employees have the upper hand. The customers, too, can bargain for lower prices and a greater consumer surplus. It all depends on the industry as well as on surrounding institutions. The object of the corporate contract is to manage that balance of power so as to better align the interests of all parties involved, thus making the business more sustainable. For part of […]

Entrepreneurship is a mindset
by Vlatka Hlupic

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It is commonplace to talk about the need for more entrepreneurial ways of running businesses, not least because we live in a highly unpredictable world. Not only are societies and technology constantly changing, but new business models are emerging. The ‘gig economy’ features services such as the Uber, and Airbnb who hire ‘gigging’ contractors, rather than conventional employees. And it is increasingly recognized that high levels of entrepreneurship are needed for survival in the wider economy. Steve Denning, in his blog in March, made a convincing case that the entrepreneurial firms are outperforming the firms still wedded to the practice of ‘maximizing shareholder value’ and narrow financial measures[1]. But what does an entrepreneurial way of […]

The Tragedy of the Commons: An Emerging Risk to the Entrepreneurial Society
by Johan Roos

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Economist Willian Foster Lloyd described the notion of “commons” in 1833 in reference to the open pastures being damaged by self-interested herdsmen. Biologist Garreth Hardin used the term in 1968 to describe how population growth spoils our shared atmosphere, oceans and rivers. It is the over-utilization of the commons that inevitably leads to the tragedy, causing unhappiness, conflicts and ultimately extinction. Western society in the 21st century is clearly built on the notion of the commons – the very human right to be part of a prosperous culture that values intelligence, tolerance, peaceful lives, and progress. This commons makes up the foundation of our nations, as much as the air and the oceans, and it […]

Toward a society of entrepreneurs
by Joseph Pistrui

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Quick. Name ten entrepreneurs. Those pulling from recent history might easily name Steve Jobs, Jack Ma, Robin Chase, Mark Zuckerberg. Those more historical might mention Henry Ford, Estee Lauder, Carlos Slim, or Coco Chanel. Top 10-50-100 entrepreneur lists abound with many overlapping names. Could it be that such lists are a huge disservice to entrepreneurialism? By tagging only a relative handful of elite “entrepreneurs”, have we demoted the endemic, innate — even genetic — trait shared by most, if not all, humans? Have we allowed the history of entrepreneurism to be defined solely by the few hundred people who practised it so well that profound commercial success became the capstone of their careers? What’s tricky […]

We Need to Expand Our Definition of Entrepreneurship
by John Hagel III

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The great entrepreneurs of the last century — folks like Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison — spawned huge companies that were designed around a model of scalable efficiency. In that model the job of workers was to fit into their roles and perform tightly specified and standardized tasks in a highly reliable and predictable way. The employee society was born. Enormous wealth was created for the entrepreneurs who pioneered this way of organizing business, and enormous value was delivered to the marketplace. And most of us became employees. But the very model of organizing a business is becoming increasingly challenged by what I call the Big Shift — long-term forces, such as the rise of […]

An Entrepreneurial Society Needs Open Learning
by Dan Pontefract

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Over the course of his writing, rather cleverly, Peter Drucker found a way to coin our past, present and future into distinct societies. At its root, a “society” is a group of people sharing traditions and values, organized as a community. He first introduced the emergence of a “knowledge society” with the arrival of the knowledge worker. From there, Drucker insisted the “knowledge society” was beginning to evolve into an “employee society,” so long as management was able to focus on making the knowledge productive and useful. Drucker then envisioned a day where the created, collective wealth of knowledge would advance into an “entrepreneurial society.”  He felt the “entrepreneurial society” would mark a turning point […]

Tomorrow always arrives
by Lucy Loh and Patrick Hoverstadt

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Risk management is important for any company of any size.  Broadly, risk can be categorised into two main types, depending on what would happen if the risk turns into an issue.  Thinking about risk impact in terms of a ship, some risks are operational, in that the emerging issue would damage the ship’s superstructure.  Challenging, costly – but not critical.  The other type of risk is strategic, and these are risks which could hole the ship below the waterline: they are potential sources of business failure. Internal failure can be a source of risk, but it rarely brings down successful companies, so is not often a source of strategic risk.  Overwhelmingly, what kills off companies […]

Change and the “Entrepreneurial Society”
by Walter McFarland

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Although thirty years after the writing of Innovation and Entrepreneurship the entrepreneurial society does not formally exist—the prospect of one still fires the imagination.  As many on this Board have elegantly noted—ideas from the book continue to influence thinking and action.  One such idea—and one of special interest here—concerns the role of change in the entrepreneurial society. I imagine the entrepreneurial society as a vibrant place in which entrepreneurial leaders in government entities, commercial organizations, and not-for-profit institutions work together to “…make innovation and entrepreneurship a normal, ongoing and everyday activity….”[1] . Because of this, the entrepreneurial society is also a place of continuous change—and therein lays the rub.  Continuous change is something that organizations […]