On Entrepreneurship - Professor Allan Cohen

Leadership and entrepreneurship may go hand-in-hand, but can they be taught? 

Dr. Cohen, the Edward A. Madden Distinguished Professor of Global Leadership at Babson College, (and currently interim Graduate School dean) shares his view on the subject. Cohen served for seven years as Chief Academic Officer, leading major curriculum and organizational changes, and returned to the faculty to teach leadership, change and negotiations.

In the corporate world what does entrepreneurship mean and why is it important?

Let me start with why it's important and I'll come back to what it means because people bring some interesting connotations to it. Organizations of all kinds need to figure out how to grow; without growth it's hard to sustain the appropriate benefits for the people who work for the organization; it's hard to get the capital to reinvest. It turns out that the territory of entrepreneurship -- spotting new opportunities, spotting things that aren't being done well, spotting unfulfilled needs and then creating products or services or better processes to meet those needs -- is critical to every organization. It isn't always called “entrepreneurship” in big companies; that's part of what is interesting about the meaning. Some companies think of “entrepreneurship” as only for start-ups and so they say, “We don't want our people to be 'doing entrepreneurship' because they will leave us and start their own companies." But every company will tell you it needs innovation for growth; that it needs new and better ways of doing things; that it needs to have people at every level willing to take initiative and offer ideas; be able to follow up on those ideas and mobilize a group of people to accomplish the new project without having all resources lined up in advance and lots of resources to waste. So the skills of entrepreneurship are critical to every company, it's just they sometimes don't call it that.

Do you think that entrepreneurship can be taught, and how does your Executive MBA program help students face the challenge of entrepreneurship?

The question of whether it can be taught is an ongoing one to which the classic academic answer is: it all depends - yes and no; you can and you can't. It isn't possible to magically transform someone who is scared, has no imagination and doesn't have the basic knowledge and skills into a classic entrepreneurial risk-taker. Entrepreneurs never think they are taking risks. Start-up entrepreneurs always think that what they are doing is going to work, even if that idea is a little bit misplaced. But if someone is basically afraid and doesn't have the courage to test a new idea, there is nothing I know of that's going to magically make that person be entrepreneurial.

If you start with someone who is reasonably knowledgeable about certain kinds of work, who has enough confidence to ask questions, who can learn how to look in the areas that we call the white spaces (areas where there is no solution currently); someone who seeks how to tune in better to unmet needs, how to hear things that may not be directly discussed or directly talked about. Then, how to find the right people, how to mobilize people to join in doing something in a new or better way, how to learn to use resources a little at a time (something that start-up entrepreneurs are quite good at), all those things can be taught.

“Teaching entrepreneurship" is about giving people some tools and having them practice, in a variety of settings, using their ideas, using their imagination, using their contacts: the network of people that they know, the network of people they can get to. These are all learnable things.

Can you talk specifically about your program and how you're helping students face the challenge of entrepreneurship?

The program is designed around that theme of entrepreneurial thinking, entrepreneurial leadership and innovation, so we do a variety of things that reinforce these throughout the program. For example, the very first pair of courses that our Fast Track students take is one called 'Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship' and the second is on leadership. And I'll talk about each of those. The 'Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship' course gets them doing creativity exercises and learning lateral thinking. Right from the beginning, in a 5-day face-to-face orientation week, they start out thinking about where there are opportunities for new products. They are learning about how to spot innovation and when it makes sense, and then they are learning the core notions of entrepreneurship, all as part of the first introductory course.

The second course they take is the leadership course, where they have to think about how to articulate a vision that could actually move other people; how to build a team that would collaborate to get things done; how to influence other people; and how to get people whom they don't control to cooperate -- people who work in other areas, who have the expertise but don't have the obligation to help. The whole program starts with that orientation.

Then the final project which runs for a year, the 'Capstone project', is one in which they actually tackle a new project that a company, or their own company, wants and they try to think it through, build the design and develop an implementation plan which is actually put to work. So it's woven through the whole program; it's not just a quick set of ideas. The program is very much designed to have an action/pay off; they are learning concepts and tools, but they are putting them to use rapidly.

Do you think that leadership and entrepreneurship go hand-in-hand?

I do think so. Every definition of leadership talks about changing the status quo; that's how leadership is differentiated from management, which is slightly artificial. We say that management is about making the trains run on time; leadership is about deciding whether you even want to be in the transportation business, or whether trains are the right mode if that's what you're doing. So leadership is about change and, since entrepreneurship is about doing the new, they are very closely connected.

It's hard to be an effective entrepreneur if you aren't able to lead because you won't find people who are willing to follow. Despite the romantic mythology about entrepreneurs, the lone, brave person, standing against the crowd, virtually no entrepreneur does it without a lot of collaboration. In fact, that's one of the key ingredients to being effective as an entrepreneur: networking. Inside a company, or outside, you tap all the resources you've got; people you know, people you've met, people who are friends of the people you know or have met. You use every resource you can bring to bear to solve some particular problem or set of problems. So yes, entrepreneurship and leadership are very closely connected.

On a lighter note, let's talk about clichés:  Do you think that women are better entrepreneurs than men?

No, but I don't think they're worse either. We do a lot of research (we have the world's largest ongoing project on entrepreneurship at Babson, with about 30 countries participating) and I don't think we can tell you that women are better or worse entrepreneurs. When trying to develop new ideas, there are certain kinds of handicaps they have to overcome if the society or organization they are working in isn't supportive of women. But it turns out that the skills are determined by the needs of the situation, not by the characteristics of the person. I think if women are at any advantage, it's probably that in most cultures women are taught to tune into other people more than men are. I don't know if that's nature or nurture. I know there is a lot of nurture that reinforces women being sensitive to other peoples feeling and needs, and that turns out to be very useful when you are trying to get people to join you, or figure out what will get somebody to spend their time and their resources with you and give you the right information and advice. So if there is some natural advantage, that's where it would be.

On the other hand, in cultures where they don't think women are very good at handling money, they have got to overcome that prejudice which takes a certain kind of determination. What we know from the micro-financing experiences which started in Bangladesh, and have now spread around the world, is that in some cultures giving women and women  '  s groups money to invest in things turns out to be more productive than with men. But I don't think that's about anything inherent; I think that's the way the cultures work, and how obligation is felt by people. So I don't think that women entrepreneurs are at a great advantage or disadvantage; the set of issues they have to work around are their set, just as men have their own set to work around. I don't know if that's good news or bad news, but I think that at some level it's encouraging. And we get a lot of women who are interested in starting businesses, starting new ideas, leading product innovation groups and it turns out they can be just as successful as men. And have been.