Agile Entrepreneurship

The more time I spend in community groups like Agile Circles, the more I come to 2 conclusions:

A. we are building ‘the organisations of the future‘ (next article)

B. to get there, we need more entrepreneurship

I have always been an entrepreneur. Since a young age, I wanted to start my own company. Especially during my MBA, I never understood why most people aspired to work in a large enterprise. But times have changed. Today, the startup culture is thriving. Millennials aspire to work in startups. And large enterprises want to become more like startups. I think that makes large enterprises more interesting.

If you start a company, you attract entrepreneurial people. People who want to help start or grow the company and are willing to take some risk.

Entrepreneurial people take initiative, get stuff done, are action-oriented and are willing to break some rules. They want to bring their souls to the company. The larger you get, the more you attract people who seek stability. They want to know how their job will look tomorrow. They want to know what their career path is. They want to know what the company can bring them.

Now if you are a growing or large organisation, how do you keep or create this entrepreneurial, agile mindset (to create agile entrepreneurship)? It’s tough! First of all, you need people who see and understand what I just wrote. They should be willing to break the rules and drive the change. Second, you need to hire more people who understand this. You cannot drive such change top down and tell people ‘Now get up, break the rules, innovate and take ownership’. Well…you can tell them, but most will say ‘yes’, turn around and get back to business as usual. Third, you need to let go of the people who don’t understand this.

Agile entrepreneurship brings the change that we need as human beings. Without it, we’d still be living in cages.