The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty

The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty, by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2000.

What makes this book on habitual entrepreneurial thinking and action invigorating is that it reflects the energy, creativity, and considerable hands-on entrepreneurial experience of the authors-Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. Because the authors are also prominent scholars in the fields of entrepreneurship and strategic management, the impressive quality of the book can be attributed to this unusual combination of operational business experience and academic wisdom. The Entrepreneurial Mindset is a book in which the passion for creating future new businesses meets the discipline of achieving and sustaining profitable growth. Indeed, the book teaches how to capture and activate both the right- and left-- brain faculties (i.e., analytical rigor and creativity) to create successful businesses. The most refreshing and surprising idea in it is that there are entrepreneurial benefits to competing in uncertainty. As McGrath and MacMillan argue, uncertainty-a distraction and discouragement to many entrepreneurs-offers new business opportunities if treated in the right way.

The authors follow a logical order in teaching how to create profitable businesses. They begin with a definition of the characteristics of the entrepreneurial mindset, preparing the groundwork for developing four action-driven modules of lessons. The first module involves establishing the entrepreneurial frame, which entails identifying challenging and quantified goals. McGrath and MacMillan emphasize that setting quantified goals is much more important and practical than trying to achieve consensus on a robust mission and vision. Articulating target performance numbers creates a sense of urgency for entrepreneurial action. Quantified goals should then be communicated to others who can be influential in achievement of the goals. Next, the authors ask the entrepreneur to create an opportunity register to record specific ideas to meet the challenge framed. In this module the authors do an impressive job of engaging readers by asking them to do a set of concrete exercises and to start thinking strategically about their entrepreneurial dreams.

The second module, concerning stocking the opportunity register, offers several useful tools. For instance, the attribute map effectively lays out the consequences of how competitively the current attributes of the product or service match customers' attitude. This map is powerful,...