Harvard Business Review on Succeeding as an Entrepreneur: A book review by Bob Morris

Harvard Business Review on Succeeding as an Entrepreneur
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (2011)

How to create new businesses and new markets by managing risks effectively

This is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in Harvard Business Review. Having read all of them when they were published individually, I can personally attest to the high quality of their authors’ (or co-authors’) insights as well as the eloquence with which they are expressed. This collection has two substantial value-added benefits that should also be noted: If all of the articles were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be at least $60-75; also, they are now conveniently bound in a single volume for a fraction of that cost.

Those who need best practices and ideas for launching new ventures will find the material in this HBR book invaluable. It is one of the volumes in a series of anthologies of articles that first appeared in Harvard Business Review. Authors of the nine articles focus on one or more components of a process by which to zero in on the most promising prospects, set a clear direction for a start-up, test and revise assumptions along the way, tackle risks that could sabotage efforts, carve out opportunities in emerging markets, launch a start-up within an existent organization, and hand over the reins once the enterprise is established.

In several of the articles, the power and value of asking the right questions is stressed, occasionally demonstrated. I now provide two brief excerpts that are representative of the high quality of all nine articles. In both, asking the right questions is demonstrated:

In “Finding Competitive Advantage in Adversity,” Bhaskar Chakravorti suggests that these five questions be asked when the objective is to “unearth the competitive advantage that adversity can offer”:

1. What under lying needs in your market are being curtailed by adversity? Have new needs emerged because of the adverse circumstances?

2. Look broadly across your business and in completely unrelated areas. What resources – products, people, materials, technologies, or intellectual property – are being displaced or underutilized because of the adversity?

3. Can you see a way to use resources from your answers to question 2 to fulfill a need you identified in question 1?

4. What is the minimum change that customers or your value chain require to adopt your offering? Then, what subsequent changes are likely, and how far could the adoption spread?

5. Can you repeat you success with questions 1 to 4 in additional markets, such as new customers or new products?

In “The Questions Every Entrepreneur Must Answer,” Amar Bhidé notes that of the hundreds of thousands of business ventures launched each year, many never get off the ground. Others fizzle after spectacular rocket starts.

“Why such dismal odds? Entrepreneurs — with their bias for action – often ignore ingredients essential to business success. These include a clear strategy, the right workforce talent, and organizational controls that spur performance without stifling employees’ initiative.

“Moreover, no two ventures take the same path. Thus entrepreneurs can’t look to formulas to navigate the myriad choices arising as their enterprise evolves. A decision that’s right for one venture may prove disastrous for another.

How to chart a successful course for your venture? Bhidé recommends asking yourself these questions:

Where do I want to go?
How will I get there?
Can I do it?

Improvisation takes a venture only so far. Successful entrepreneurs keep asking tough questions about where they want to go – and whether the track they’re on will take them there.

Other articles in this anthology I especially enjoyed include: Noam Wasserman’s “The Founder’s Dilemma,” John Ham’s “Why Entrepreneurs Don’t Scale,” and David A. Garvin and Lynn C. Levesque’s “Meeting the Challenge of Corporate Entrepreneurship.”

SUGGESTED  READINGS

American Entrepreneur: The Fascinating Stories of the People Who Defined Business in the United States
Larry Schweikart and Lynne-Pierson-Doti

In Their Time: The Greatest Business Leaders Of The Twentieth Century
Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
Anthony Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton

Anthony J. Mayo: An interview by Bob Morris

Tony Mayo

Tony Mayo is the Thomas S. Murphy Senior Lecturer of Business Administration in the Organizational Behavior Unit of Harvard Business School (HBS).  He currently teaches FIELD, Field Immersion and Experiential Leadership Development, a new required experiential, field-based course in the first year of the MBA Program.  Previously, he co-created and taught the course, “Great Business Leaders:  The Importance of Contextual Intelligence.”  In addition, Tony teaches extensively in leadership-based executive education programs.  He is the co-author of In Their Time:  The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century, which has been translated into five languages.  He is also the co-author of Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership and Entrepreneurs, Managers and Leaders:  What the Airline Industry Can Teach Us About Leadership.  These books have been derived from the development of the Great American Business Leaders database that Dean Nitin Nohria and Tony created. [Please click here to check it out.] As Director of the Leadership Initiative, Tony oversees several comprehensive research projects on leadership and manages a number of executive education programs on leadership development.  He was a co-creator of the High Potentials Leadership Development, Leadership for Senior Executives, and Leadership Best Practices programs.  He created and oversees the executive coaching component of Harvard Business School’s Program for Leadership Development.

Here is an excerpt from my interview of him. To read the complete interview, please click here.

*     *     *

Morris: Before discussing In Their Time, a few general questions. First, who has had the greatest influence on your professional development?

Mayo: Two individuals had a strong impact on my professional development – a senior manager at Epsilon, one of the firms that I worked at after graduating from Harvard Business School, and Nitin Nohria, my co-author and current Dean of Harvard Business School. Both allowed me to take a number of risks and both challenged me beyond what I thought I was capable of achieving.  I thrive in an environment that is highly challenging but supportive of learning and development.  Both individuals created the context in which I could stretch myself.

Morris: Years ago, was there a turning point (if not an epiphany) that set you on the career course that you continue to follow? Please explain.

Mayo:  The turning point came when I approached a former professor at Boston College to write a letter of recommendation for me for an evening-based master’s in technology management program in the mid-1980s.  When I approached Professor Bowditch to write the letter of recommendation for me, he refused.  He told me to come back with a letter for Harvard or MIT or Dartmouth.  He saw something in me that I did not see in myself.   I was the first in my family to graduate from college and the thought of a top-tier graduate program was never something I even remotely considered.  Though I was disappointed and confused by his reaction, I researched different programs and returned to him with an application to Harvard Business School.  That one action changed the trajectory of my career.  It is something that I try to do myself when I work with young, promising students; I try to help them see their full potential.

Morris: What is the Leadership Initiative and what are its major objectives?

Mayo:  Chaired by Professor Linda Hill, the Harvard Business School Leadership Initiative was organized to be a catalyst for research on leaders and leadership and to design effective leadership development programs that are relevant for the 21st century.  The goal of the Initiative is to support Harvard Business School’s overarching mission to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.  To that end, we search for opportunities to contribute to the study of leadership and the development of content for the MBA Program and various executive education offerings.  Throughout our work, we seek to bridge the gap between the theory and practice of leadership.

Morris: To what extent (if any) has its mission changed since it was founded?

Mayo:  Our mission has been relatively consistent in the decade since the Leadership Initiative was founded.  If anything, the need for leadership at all levels in organizations has expanded and we need to find ways to tap into the leadership potential that exists in each individual.  The increasing globalization of the workforce and the pressures from the global economic crisis have only heightened the need for well-reasoned, thoughtful leadership.

Morris: In your opinion, what is the single greatest challenge that business leaders will face during (let’s say) the next 3-5 years? Any advice?

Mayo:  Leaders have always faced the challenge of inspiring others while making important strategic decisions for their organizations with limited, conflicting, and ambiguous information.  A leader’s success or failure is often dependent on his or her ability to accurately interpret, analyze, and process this information in a constrained time frame.  Today’s leaders are confronted with challenges and opportunities that are more dynamic and complex than ever before.  Leaders need to understand how to harness technological advances, manage and lead a dispersed and diverse workforce, anticipate and react to constant competitive and geopolitical change and uncertainty, compete on a global scale, and operate in a socially responsible and accountable manner.  Leadership is a team sport, and no one individual can do it all.  Effective leaders build their self-awareness and hire individuals who can complement their skills

Morris: In which specific area of M.B.A. programs now offered by the most prestigious business schools is there the greatest need for immediate improvement? Please explain.

Mayo:  When HBS celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2008, it was an opportune time to reassess our model of MBA education.  To that end, Professors Skrikant Datar and David Garvin embarked on a major review and evaluation of MBA programs.  Their book, Rethinking the MBA, highlighted three primary areas that leading MBA programs should address in helping their students prepare for leadership positions in the future.  The three areas include leadership, globalization, and integration.  HBS embraced their recommendations and has launched a new required course called FIELD, Field Immersion and Experiential Leadership Development, which encompasses these three areas with a primary focus on field-based experiential work.  For instance, all Harvard MBAs will be required to participate in a global immersion where they will work with a company in an emerging economy.  To truly develop as a leader, one must learn about the phenomenon (that is where cases and books do a great job), but it is even more important that one experiences being a leader (that is where experiential exercises come into play).  More and more, MBA programs are combining theoretical lessons with practical leadership experiences.

*     *     *

To read the complete interview, please click here.

Tony Mayo invites you to check out the resources at the HBS Leadership Initiative: by clicking here.

 

 

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton Harvard Business Press (2007) I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a rich and nuanced social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.” Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.

Paths to Power: A book review by Bob Morris

Paths to Power: How Insiders and Outsiders Shaped American Business Leadership
Anthony J. Mayo, Nitin Nohria, and Laura G. Singleton
Harvard Business Press (2007)

I recently re-read In Their Time, co-authored by Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria, in combination with this book whose subtitle correctly indicates what Mayo, Nohria, and Laura Singleton set out to explain: how “insiders” and “outsiders” of big business (as Michael Useem explains in an insightful Foreword) presided “over our dominant organizations” and, in process, examine “which pathways lead to the apex – or which do not” for those who would also achieve such dominance.

Rather than limiting their attention to a set number of exemplary leaders – in chronological order — and then devoting a separate chapter to each, taking a linear approach to the material, the co-authors chose to examine the evolution of 20th century business leadership in terms of the ten decades, assigning to each following the first chapter an appropriate component (birthplace, nationality, religion, education, class, gender and race, etc.) while frequently cross-referencing throughout the entire century. For example, they juxtapose comparable individuals such as James Stillman’s presidency of National City Bank (1891-1909) and Sanford “Sandy” Weill’s of Citigroup (that National City Bank eventually became) a century later.

Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton’s role in Paths to Power is more that of cultural anthropologists than as biographers or even business historians. They create a social and economic context within a 100-year framework as they examine what separated outsiders from insiders in business leadership in the 20th century. In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a “taste.” Here is a representative selection from the material that Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton provide.

On birthplace: “As a starting point in our examination of twentieth-century leader backgrounds, we thus come away with the decisive conclusion that even in the United States, the great land of opportunity, not every birthplace was created equal…While mobility between regions tended to increase later in the century, people with more prosperous family origins – origins that typically stemmed from birth in a similarly prosperous region of the country -retained an advantage when entering business in a new area. The distinguishing features of each of the country’s major regions, both as sources of and sites for leaders, will constitute an important backdrop for further discussions about leader characteristics.” (Page 54)

On education: “Yale’s popularity among business leaders like the Weyerhaeusers vaulted it to a preeminent position in the early part of the century: it was the most popular school for all of our leaders prior to 1950, educating thirty-two of them (about 15 percent of all that era’s college graduates). With twenty-seven leaders, Harvard came next, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ranked a distant third with fourteen graduates. Yale was a perfect fit for the era of the dominant Protestant establishment, to which the Weyerhaeusers, steadfast Presbyterians, belonged. Yale was seen as a bastion of conservative, faith-oriented values during this period, in contrast to the more intellectual and individualistic attitudes at Harvard. (Page 124)

On class: “With nearly 30 percent of the leaders consistently coming from relatively poor backgrounds and, because of their success, passing on wealthy or at least quite comfortably middle-class upbringings to their own children, genuine upward mobility is undoubtedly represented by almost one in three of these leaders. Still, countermeasures such as the GI Bill and trends toward professional management, rather than improving the chances of those from poorer backgrounds, appear to have only held the line against an inexorable advantage of those with advantages.” (Page 184)

In his Foreword, Useem explains this book’s unique importance. “Studies of the social origins of America’s business elite have been a long-standing research tradition, dating to such classics as W. Lloyd Warner and James Abegglen’s Big Business Leaders in America and Mabel Newcomer’s The Big Business Executive, both published in 1955. We have not had the benefit of a truly comprehensive portrait since those works of more than fifty years ago; now Mayo, Nohria, and Singleton have not only updated the picture but also produced the definitive portrait of our time.”

Those who share my high regard for this brilliant book are urged to check out the aforementioned In Their Time as well as Stuart Crainer’s The Management Century and Stewart H. Holbrook’s The Age of the Moguls: The Story of the Robber Barons and the Great Tycoons. (Obtaining a copy of it is well worth the effort.) In it, Holbrook examines a number of “lords of capital” who, in his words, “made `deals’ purchased immunity, and did other things which in 1860, or 1880, or even 1900, were considered no more than `smart’ by their fellow Americans, but which today would give pause to the most conscientiously dishonest promoter….They were a motley crew, yet taken together they fashioned a savage and gaudy age as distinctively purple as that of imperial Rome, and infinitely more entertaining.”

Holbrook’s account of 19th century robber barons and great tycoons “sets the table” for the “feast” of information and analysis that Anthony Mayo and Nitin Nohria with Laura Singleton so skillfully provide.