But entrepreneurs don’t begin MBA programs, and it takes some kind of a “nut” to really be an entrepreneur, according to a leading figure in the MBA entrepreneurship world.
Speaking at ESADE Business School’s VII Annual Conference on social innovation, Pamela Hartigan, director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Saïd Business School, said she tells her students that you don’t learn to be an entrepreneur at business school.
“You don’t learn to be an entrepreneur in an MBA program. Entrepreneurs don’t do MBAs,” she told the audience in Barcelona. “By the most part, they drop out of school [or] they don’t come to school.”
Pamela, who has been leading Oxford Saïd’s social entrepreneurship effort for the past five years, also said that MBAs are essential in helping entrepreneurs implement their vision.
“How do we build those entrepreneur’s teams that are going to take that vision to scale?” she asked, and added: “But without those teams of talented individuals, these visionaries would have fallen short of their goals.”
Pamela cited Derek Sivers, a prominent TED speaker. “His point is that leadership is over glorified. It’s the first follower that transforms a lone nut into a leader,” she said. “There’s a very fine line between that nut and that visionary.”
Although there has been a supposed increase in MBAs taking up social entrepreneurship, Pamela says it’s just as important to drive change from within existing companies so that they are “more accountable for the social and environmental effects of their operations”.
There’s a false dichotomy which suggests those of us who are social entrepreneurs are the good, and those who are commercial entrepreneurs are the opposite, she said. “And it implies that making money is something we should not be proud of, when making money is really great,” said Pamela.
“Entrepreneuring is a team effort… and we can be entrepreneuring wherever we are – even if like me you work in an 800 year old university. It’s something that we can all engage in, while very few of us are entrepreneurs. It takes some kind of a nut to really be an entrepreneur.
“How many times have we gotten up and seen a new venture and said: ‘I could’ve done that’. But the point is we didn’t think of that and we didn’t do it.”
Pamela also said that there is a difference between social enterprise, social innovation and social entrepreneurship. She said that social enterprise lacked disruption, which is a crucial part of entrepreneurship.
“Massive numbers of organizations have sprung up all around the UK and Australia that are calling themselves social enterprises and they’re made up of well-meaning folks addressing all sorts of social ills that depend on government and foundation grants. But they’re not changing the system,” Pamela said.
She says that social enterprise can be seductive, but she wants to see enterprises become more accountable to their funders. “My concern is that rather than actually disrupting root causes of financial, social and environmental ills, social entrepreneurship will become a social enterprise industrial complex,” Pamela added.
She is optimistic about the future, however, and said that she is surrounded by an “army of highly talented students from around the world who are completely committed to re-thinking business and government for the 21st century”.
She added: “Unlike older generations, they don’t want to wait until they’re 50 to give back… young people want to start now, to come up with ways to combine their talents and improve the state of our world.”
Today’s entrepreneurs want to “do away” with the traditional fragmentation that has separated where we make money and where we do good, Pamela added.
“Social entrepreneurship is an approach rather than a specialized field,” she said.
“It’s paving the way towards a much larger transformation of capitalism and the role of government and innovative citizens, where the creation of positive social change will be the key to success, rather than the result of a special new kind of business.”
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