{"id":29,"date":"2022-03-17T13:55:34","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T17:55:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.ryerson.ca\/ecld\/chapter\/chapter-1-introduction-to-practising-revolutionary-entrepreneurial-principles-and-attitudes-in-your-career-and-life\/"},"modified":"2024-09-06T16:14:50","modified_gmt":"2024-09-06T20:14:50","slug":"chapter-1-introduction-to-practising-revolutionary-entrepreneurial-principles-and-attitudes-in-your-career-and-life","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca\/ecld\/chapter\/chapter-1-introduction-to-practising-revolutionary-entrepreneurial-principles-and-attitudes-in-your-career-and-life\/","title":{"raw":"Chapter 1: Introduction to Practising Revolutionary Entrepreneurial Principles and Attitudes in Your Career and Life","rendered":"Chapter 1: Introduction to Practising Revolutionary Entrepreneurial Principles and Attitudes in Your Career and Life"},"content":{"raw":"
\r\n\r\nThe field of entrepreneurship is fairly young. Historically, it came out of economic theory and was all about trying to understand how small businesses got started. Entrepreneurs were seen as risk-takers that started new companies and stimulated the economy. It was originally all about new company start-ups, why certain individuals did it, and the methods by which they did it successfully.\r\n\r\nThen the entrepreneurship field started to discover that entrepreneurs had certain traits, skills, attitudes and behaviors in common such as high proactivity, curiosity, alertness, creativity, passion, grit, perseverance, resilience, internal locus of control (self-directedness), adaptability, motivation and self-efficacy (belief in themselves and their own skills). Finally, these attitudes and behaviors were observed in innovative employees (\u201cintrapreneurship\u201d) social changemakers (\u201csocial entrepreneurship\u201d) and others.\r\n\r\nEntrepreneurship, it turns out, is not just about what you do (such as starting new things). It\u2019s also about who you are (how proactive, curious, adaptable, resilient\u2026) and how you do it (by interviewing, experimenting, prototyping, pivoting, learning\u2026). More importantly, we discovered that entrepreneurs are NOT BORN THAT WAY, they LEARN TO BECOME THAT WAY THROUGH PRACTICE!\r\n\r\nSome aspects of being entrepreneurial can be taught through books and lectures, but significant fundamental personal change and growth cannot be taught \u2013 it must be learned and habituated through practice!\r\n\r\nThat\u2019s why this is a WORKbook. I cannot \u201cteach you\u201d to have entrepreneurial attitudes and mindsets. But you can \u201clearn these\u201d through conscious practice. You can practise being more entrepreneurial while on the job, out on a date, going to school, or just taking a walk. But it takes hard and conscious work \u2013 just like playing the guitar, you need to practise with intent to grow and improve!\r\n\r\nYou don\u2019t become more entrepreneurial by reading about it or doing homework. You become more entrepreneurial by practising it every day, as often as possible, and in every situation. Regardless of whether you are a waiter, cashier, mom and\/or student, you can practise being more empathetic, curious, resilient, action-oriented and creative!\r\n\r\nEntrepreneurship is the science of designing to co-create the future under conditions of extreme uncertainty, spotting opportunities to create new values and discovering what works to achieve success and happiness. The goal of this book is to help you apply these new and radically different entrepreneurship theories, principles and attitudes to not only design your career and life, but to live your day-to-day life more entrepreneurially in order to become more entrepreneurial<\/em>.\r\n\r\nThe ideas and assignments in this book condense revolutionary entrepreneurial and design thinking principles validated in the business and start-up world and apply them to YOU and your career and your life.\r\n\r\nThe specific assignments include being more mindful and journaling; discovering your skills, attitudes, core beliefs, values, and interests; spotting opportunities for achieving new values in your life; using design thinking visualization methods; experimenting and testing alternative job, career and life choices; applying time management principles, SMART goals, positive habits and self-talk statements; and proactively taking steps to achieve your own personal happiness.\r\n\r\nThese assignments will help you figure out what you are interested in, identify potential career paths, and build personal unique sustainable competitive advantage in an uncertain world. They will help you network, create multiple good offers, and help you re-frame your career not as just a job, or string of jobs, but as a portfolio of career building experiences including side-hustles, changemaking projects and startups designed to help you develop your skills and your social capital outside whatever your current job happens to be. You will spot opportunities to build your human capital, social capital and financial capital \u2013 the foundations of long-term self-sufficiency, independence, prosperity, well-being and happiness in a world full of uncertainty and change.\r\n\r\nHowever, entrepreneurship is not something you can (or should) turn on only when needed during an assignment. You don\u2019t turn your entrepreneurial brain off while you mindlessly do your job while vaguely hoping for a new and better job sometime in the future. You have to consciously practise entrepreneurial attitudes in order to make them habitual, automatic, and \u201ca part of who you are\u201d not just a way you occasionally act from time to time while doing homework assignments.\r\n\r\nI seek to give you the foundations for an integrated, holistic philosophy of personal empowerment based on entrepreneurial principles, attitudes, methods and tools in order to design and achieve the happiest and most meaningful life possible.\r\n

Planning vs Searching (Ca<\/strong>u<\/strong>sal Logic vs Effectuation)<\/strong><\/h2>\r\n

Watch<\/em><\/strong>: ECLD Module 1 \u2013 Introduction to ECLD (13:34)<\/em><\/p>\r\n \r\n\r\nhttps:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=ZhDPc5ohOlE\r\n

<\/h2>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_253\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"418\"]\"a Original diagram for textbook[\/caption]\r\n\r\nUntil recently, virtually all business courses and job placement books came from a planning-based mindset in a stable environment as shown on the left side of the figure. This works very well for many large established companies and the step-by-step management tools arising from this planning-based approach have been widely taught and validated over many years.\r\n\r\nThe vast majority of career-planning, goal-setting, self-help, personal success, and happiness books are also written from this managerial causal thinking perspective. Most of these planning-based methods will urge things like: \u201cbegin with the end in mind\u201d, \u201crelentlessly pursue your goals\u201d or \u201cnever give up\u201d. Many of these books require you to articulate your goals within the first few pages and then spend the next 90% of the book telling you how to achieve this known goal. But what if you don\u2019t know what you want, or change your mind, or live in a quickly-changing uncertain world where planning just doesn\u2019t work very well?\r\n\r\nThe step-by-step planning approach works very well for people who know what they want or have a fairly clear path (e.g. to be a doctor, lawyer, real estate agent or Olympic athlete). These people can set a clear goal and then pursue it until they finally achieve it. Many successful people have used this approach and their resulting success books extol the virtues of tenacity and persistence toward known goals (causal thinking). That\u2019s the underlying assumption of virtually all goal-setting, business planning, self-help, time management, and personal wellness and happiness books. When it works, it works very well!\r\n\r\nIt didn\u2019t always work well for me. I didn\u2019t really know exactly what I wanted to do \u2013 I didn\u2019t have a perfect vision of a potential future goal toward which I wanted to strive relentlessly. I was good at using all the planning-based tools I\u2019d read about to set and achieve short term and mid-term goals. They helped me become a productive machine, but I lacked an overall direction and the books didn\u2019t help me learn how to piece together a multi-faceted life with balance and long-term happiness. I read over 100 such books, most of which contain good tools and some gems of insight (which I use in this workbook), but also lots of ideas that frustrated me or didn\u2019t work very well in certain situations. Fortunately, the science of entrepreneurship and the field of design thinking transformed this whole line of thinking!\r\n\r\nIt turns out that over 80 percent of people are like me and don\u2019t always know what they are passionate about. I was not alone despite what many of the gurus extolled. Most people discover they are passionate about something only after they\u2019ve tried it, not before. They need to Search and Discover their goals instead of Plan to achieve known goals.<\/strong> Most entrepreneurs and most people find themselves on the right side of the figure where they need to search or discover instead of plan.\r\n\r\nThe entire business planning methodology (left side) is based on imagining a future goal and then figuring out what actions in the present will achieve that goal using causal logic. That\u2019s how most of the tools we teach in the BComm and MBA program have been designed. We teach how to fully analyse and plan to control all aspects of a business in order to reach that envisioned future goal. In contrast, the new entrepreneurial search and discovery tools on the right are about starting where you ARE (not where you want to end up), taking an experimental step in what you think might be the right direction, learning, and then deciding whether to pivot to a new direction or persevere in the same direction using effectual thinking.\r\n\r\nMy friend Dr. Matteo Vignoli (a design thinking expert and professor at the University of Bologna in Italy) calls it Farming vs Hunting. Everything on the left side is based on the farming mindset \u2013 if your goal is to eat tomatoes you plan your tomato planting for the right time of year, give them water and sunlight, and control for any uncertainties like insects and weather. If the weather is too uncertain you build a greenhouse to exert greater control. Life is stable and predictable and you always get what you plan for. On the right side you need a hunting mindset \u2013 the environment is uncertain and you don\u2019t know where the food might be. You may spend the entire day chasing after different prey and you never know what you might find. Obviously, farmers and hunters need different methods and mindsets \u2013 farmers plan and hunters search.\r\n\r\nUsing more academic language, the planning side on the left uses causal managerial logic where things are reasonably predictable, the desired future state is reasonably stable and known, and the causal actions (means) needed to achieve the future state (goal) are reasonably known. Think farming. That\u2019s what we\u2019ve been teaching in business schools for most of the last 30+ years.\r\n\r\nThe revolutionary new entrepreneurial mindset on the right uses effectual doing instead of managerial thinking and the primary tools are design thinking and agile, lean startup methods. Effectuation does not start with the end in mind. It starts with your current situation (the \u201cBird-in-the-Hand\u201d Principle) which includes your human capital (education, knowledge, skills), social capital (networks, relationships), character (attitudes, beliefs, values) and financial capital. Instead of setting a firm end goal, you use divergent thinking to envision alternative goals and select a hypothesis that you would like to test (pick a direction). You take proactive steps toward testing that hypothesis, learn, adapt, and then either persevere toward that temporary hypothesis goal or pivot toward a different direction. Think hunting. You don\u2019t know where the food is so you start to search in one direction, find weak signals, learn from the search, and decide whether to continue in that direction or pivot to change course.\r\n\r\n \r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_252\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"677\"]\"A Original artwork for textbook[\/caption]\r\n\r\nFarming starts with the end in mind and takes a direct, straight-line approach toward a clearly identified goal using planning methods. This is called \u201cCausal Thinking\u201d (left side of the figure). Hunting\/Searching starts with your current situation, brainstorms alternative goals, narrows down the range of choices into a hypothesis goal, takes a proactive action toward that hypothesis goal, and then seeks insights to learn, adapt, and\/or pivot in order to create the future. This is called \u201cEffectual Entrepreneurial Doing\u201d (right side of the figure).\r\n

Effectuation<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nPerhaps the most fundamental and revolutionary idea to arise from the field of entrepreneurship is the concept of Effectuation (\u201cEffectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise\u201d by Sarasvathy, 2009). Previously, business planning was based on the desire to predict the future through the use of analysis and causal logic. As shown on the left side of the figure, managerial thinking (\u201ccausal thinking\u201d) starts with a given goal and then attempts to select the means required to achieve this goal.\r\n\r\nEffectual Entrepreneurial Doing, in contrast, starts with understanding what means are under the entrepreneur\u2019s control then tries to creatively envision a variety of alternative goals. It does not attempt to predict<\/em> the future, instead it takes concrete steps that are under the entrepreneur\u2019s control to create<\/em> the future. Researchers have analyzed the way that successful entrepreneurs use effectual doing, instead of causal thinking, and describe various principles of effectuation and design thinking. These are incorporated throughout this workbook and the 20+ ECLD videos available free on YouTube and include principles such as:\r\n