Source: Catalyst House

Keri Salls posted to her blog about cool research project published by Saras Sarasvathy, a Professor at the University of Virginia, captures distinctions between entrepreneurs & corporate executives in how they think.

In her article in the new issue of  Inc Magazine, Leigh Buchanan says, “Saras Sarasvathy concluded that master entrepreneurs rely on what she calls effectual reasoning. Brilliant improvisers, the entrepreneurs don’t start out with concrete goals. Instead, they constantly assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies.”

Entrepreneurs are known for possibility thinking. They “Do the doable, then push it”.

Here’s Buchanan’s nugget about goals:

“That is not to say entrepreneurs don’t have goals, only that those goals are broad and—like luggage—may shift during flight. Rather than meticulously segment customers according to potential return, they itch to get to market as quickly and cheaply as possible, a principle Sarasvathy calls affordable loss.”

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A while back in the Harvard Business Review, Rosabeth Moss Kanter posted: ”Unlike full-blown mergers, in which two really do become one because one company disappears, alliances and partnerships resemble modern marriages: separate careers, individual checkbooks, sometimes different names, but the need to work out the operational overlap around household and offspring.”

Moss Kanter lists 15 traits that optimal strategic alliances share with personal marriage –

1. Be open to romance, but court carefully. At the beginning of new relationships, selective perceptions reinforce dreams, not dangers. Potential partners see in the other what they want to see, believing what they want to believe. Hopes, dreams, and visions should be balanced by reality checks.

2. Know yourself. Build your strengths. An organization seeking partners should identify assets that have value to partners and strengthen them. Networks of the weak do not survive. The best alliances join strength to strength.

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