Kaplan Jaroslav Kaplan Research Company Founder of the Business IQ project
Entrepreneurial Thinking I am often asked the same question about the title of my new book, "Business Incognita. How to push the boundaries of entrepreneurial thinking", which has just recently been published in the Moscow publishing house "Alpina".
The question typically boils down to: "Is there anything that can be done about entrepreneurial thinking?"
I would like to present my point of view on this matter. As you probably know already, I researched this question between 2015 and 2021 and have accumulated enough material to make my practical judgments.
As a first judgment, I will argue that the main source of all undesirable states of an entrepreneur is the incoherence between his activities and the environment in which such activities take place. These are not problems with employee motivation, with hiring, with sales and production alone.
It is all a consequence of one cause - the incoherence between the entrepreneur's activities and his environment.
Any activity does not happen by itself, but within a specific space in which such activity "unfolds".
If conditions exist within that space in which such an activity can potentially be executed, then there is a probability that this or that activity will be executed.
If, on the other hand, the conditions existing within that space do not allow such an action to occur, then the result of such an action is obvious - it will never occur, despite all efforts.
You will not be able to ride a sled on water or float on it in the air, as the laws of physics do not allow it.
Similar to this example, different conditions exist in every field of endeavor, whether the entrepreneur knows it or not.
For an activity to be possible, some degree of coherence between that activity and the environment is required.
For example, you can't normally build a foundation for a house in water or air - such an activity is incompatible with those types of environments.
At the same time, this is exactly what happens to many entrepreneurs - they simply don't realize that they are building the foundations of skyscrapers on water and are constantly surprised that things are happening with such difficulty.
As a result, there are more and more problems in the business and at some point all those problems start to look unsolvable.
As my second judgment, I will point out that in reality most problems in business cannot be solved at the same level at which they "manifested" themselves.
Let's say if we see problems in the sales department, often those problems can't be solved at the sales, marketing, hiring or production level. The real problem may lie in the fact that consumers have not considered the entrepreneur's products valuable for a long time. And he still remembers the "good times" of a decade ago as they lined up for him. I describe this situation more dryly - "the entrepreneur's context of interaction with consumers has changed".
The third judgment I wanted to define is the inability of consumers in today's conditions of market "mega-noise" to perceive and recognize the value that the entrepreneur "put" in his products for them. This value of products remains unrecognized, like a black cat in a dark room. The cat is there, but we can't see it.
The most difficult thing here is that the perception of customer value must be managed, it (high perceived value of the entrepreneur's products) will not appear by itself. And that is my fourth judgment.
Until people recognized the value of crude oil, they paid to get rid of this dirty mass when discovering it on their lands. Later, when the economic potential of oil was redefined, it went from unwanted waste to a lucrative commodity. Oil remained what it was, but perceptions of its value have changed dramatically.
Marxists (falsely) believed that labor has its own objective intrinsic value. In other words, they believed that something only gains value because of the labor involved. The economist Murray Rothbard refuted this assumption through the proposition of making and selling mud pies. According to the Marxist view, any product must a priori have objective and intrinsic value because of the labor put into it, but would anyone willingly pay money for mud pies?
The fifth judgment is that often an entrepreneur will have to rise one or more levels above the "layer" on which his problems "manifest" themselves.
And as a consequence of this change, he may need new points of view on what is happening in his activities and his interaction with consumers, including new criteria for evaluating such activities.
This, by the way, is directly related to such a widespread concept as "customer satisfaction". The whole problem here, as a rule, is how exactly to measure it to the benefit of the entrepreneur and consumers. But in this article I will not dwell on it in detail.
My sixth judgment on the issue of entrepreneurial mentality - is that the real reason for failure is not what the entrepreneur DOES, but WHO does it. And this assertion leads us to the importance of the personality of the entrepreneur himself, which becomes either the source of his stunning success or trivial failure.
Here I would consider it appropriate to note that all human activity (as well as all of his life) is largely determined by what a person thinks of himself or who he thinks he is.
In this regard, the following question is very important: "And who does this or that entrepreneur consider himself to be?". Obviously, there will be as many answers as there are interviewees, but another thing is important here.
Here we see different worldviews, different lines of thought and different approaches to entrepreneurship - from the rules of decision-making to the criteria for evaluating the results achieved.
If we continue these reflections, I would point to the sharp increase in the complexity of tasks in entrepreneurship as the seventh judgment. Here I would argue that if an entrepreneur fails to achieve his goals over a long period of time, he is most likely dealing not with one isolated problem, but with a whole set of such problems, which needs to be solved not as a separate equation, but as a whole system of equations. This requires different skills and methods from the entrepreneur.
As an eighth judgment, I will point out that the disease of " early scaling of the business" is still common. The entrepreneur does not yet know the extent to which the value he creates is optimized with the market, and he is already starting his scaling. Here, it is important to recognize the different states of the market so as not to miss the moment.
If I were to summarize all these judgments into one, the most important judgment, I am sure it would be the statement that it is impossible to change a person's "doing" without first changing their thinking.
It makes little sense to give an alcoholic a new liver transplant without changing his lifestyle. By changing his thinking, we will "automatically" change his doing.
This statement seems relevant to me if we take into account the horrifying statistics of "mortality" in entrepreneurship - seven entrepreneurs out of ten fail in the first five years of their activity.
In this article, I have provided some basic guidelines for looking at what entrepreneurial thinking should be. And as you can see for yourself, we can do something about it.
Jaroslav Kaplan Author of the book "Business Incognita. How to push the boundaries of entrepreneurial thinking". Expert in the field of sustainable development of organizations and discovering new sources of growth. Developer of the methodology of contextual market research. Member of the International Association of Strategic and Competitive Intellect Professionals SCIP (USA).
In this light (yet profound) business fable a very magical and sincerely nice goldfish, Goshio, navigates her aquarium and the seas of the Paraquarian world beyond. The heroine's journey is an allegory of the entrepreneurial world (and of life) – based on the author's own research journey to circumnavigate the fascinating World of Entrepreneurship. www.goshio.com