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The New Entrepreneurial Leader
Book

The New Entrepreneurial Leader

Developing Leaders Who Shape Social and Economic Opportunity

Danna Greenberg, Kate McKone-Sweet and H. James Wilson
Berrett-Koehler, 2011

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Editorial Rating

6

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Innovative
  • Visionary

Recommendation

The rules of business engagement have changed dramatically in recent years, and the traditional predictive model most business schools teach no longer suffices in the modern world. Babson College professors Danna Greenberg and Kate McKone-Sweet and researcher H. James Wilson present an anthology of academic papers that describe the college’s experience teaching hands-on “entrepreneurial leadership.” It also redefines the goal of business as reaching beyond profit to create social, environmental and economic value. This book of faculty papers from the Wellesley, Massachusetts, college offers an innovative, compelling model of leadership education, though like most anthologies it suffers from repetition and widely varying writing styles. Each chapter includes case studies and course descriptions from Babson, where students start and run businesses as part of their education. Although this collection may be a public relations bonanza for Babson, getAbstract recommends it because it shares enlightening insights about business education for professors, administrators, management students and today’s leaders. If you’ve finished your formal training, you can apply its principles in your present leadership capacity.

Summary

“Entrepreneurial Leadership Is Not Synonymous with Entrepreneurship”

Babson College focuses its curriculum on the “study of entrepreneurship as a discipline.” This approach holds that traditional business management models using predictive analysis and logic no longer suffice in a world where high unemployment, tough economic conditions and widening socioeconomic differences prevail.

“Entrepreneurship” is not the same concept as “entrepreneurial leadership.” Entrepreneurs limit their focus to starting and operating new for-profit business ventures. Entrepreneurial leaders, on the other hand, exist within established businesses, where they expand and launch new product and service opportunities; within social organizations, where they solve small- and large-scale problems; and within social and political movements, government agencies, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), where they create and shape policies.

Society needs business leaders with the skills and courage to make hard decisions in unpredictable, “unknowable” environments. This requires training business students in the three fundamental abilities of entrepreneurial leadership: “cognitive ambidexterity...

About the Authors

Organizational behavior expert Danna Greenberg is associate professor of management at Babson College, where Kate McKone-Sweet chairs technology, operations and information management. H. James Wilson is a senior researcher and writer at Babson Executive Education.

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