Using Your Results
There are lots of ways to use your entrepreneurial skills. Some but not all of them involve leaving your job, selling a product, or making money. Here are some other ways you can feed your inner entrepreneur wherever you are.
Entre-Boomers
Baby Boomers have not only flouted the rules of the past few decades, they've torn them up and rewritten them. They're doing the same now to their parents' ideas about retirement. Rather than golf or cruises, a good number of them are looking into entrepreneurial pursuits to fill their golden years. A 2005 Challenger, Gray & Christmas survey found that 13 percent of the 3,000 job seekers polled had started their own business in the second quarter of their lives and 86.6 percent of those were over forty years old. U.S. Department of Labor figures show that one of the fastest groups of self-employed workers is age fifty-five and over. Boomers make up 54 percent of all self-employed workers outside agriculture, a 29 percent increase over the year 2000. Whether the catalyst for midlife entrepreneurship is suddenly getting laid off, a desire to help adult children financially, or simply being too full of energy and ideas to hang up the old briefcase, there's no question that it takes a lot of work and commitment. You may enjoy sewing outfits for your dog, but that doesn't mean you should turn your craft into a full-fledged business. The same qualities and qualifiers that apply to younger entrepreneurs apply to Boomers, too.
Intrapreneurs
Depending on your results on this test, you may come to realize that your talents and temperament are better suited to working within an organization and not on your own. That doesn't mean that you don't have entrepreneurial qualities or that you can't bring some of that spirit into your workplace as an “intrapreneur.” Some ideas that can bring out the entrepreneur in every employee include the following:
Have a fair process for screening and eliminating ideas.
Decentralize the decision-making.
Recognize and reward innovators and the managers who clear the way for innovation.
Encourage free and open discussions of new ideas.
Understand the unpredictable and sometimes disordered nature of innovation.
Post-It notes are a bit of “intrapreneurship” history. A 3M researcher invented the adhesive in 1968, but he was trying to come up with something completely different. Six years later, an innovative colleague came up with the idea of using the sticky stuff for bookmarks that wouldn't fall out of his church hymnal. Can you imagine life without Post-Its? Back in the 1960s, that original researcher probably thought his glue was a “failure.”
Micropreneurs
A micropreneur is someone who takes on the risks and opportunities of a typical entrepreneur but who operates an extremely small business, typically with fewer than five employees. These businesses can be home-based and are frequently in industries that deal with knowledge, creativity, and/or information. A micropreneur might even operate two or more small businesses simultaneously. In 2002, Daniel H. Pink estimated in Free Agent Nation that there were 13 million micropreneurs in the United States. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures for 2000, 70 percent of businesses in the United States have no employees.
Social Entrepreneurs
You don't have to compromise your values in order to be an entrepreneur. You can be ambitious yet not focused solely on profit. Social entrepreneurs don't want to just throw money at society's ills. These “compassionate capitalists” want to find ways to apply their risk-taking, results-oriented business savvy to no less of a challenge than effecting societal change. The idea isn't new — Florence Nightingale and Maria Montessori transformed nursing and education 100 and more years ago — but it's no longer just the purview of single-minded idealists. As the concept gathers momentum, new humanitarian industries, agencies, and educational institutions are springing up around the world. One of them is the Skoll Foundation in Palo Alto, California. Jeff Skoll, a founder of eBay, knows something about entrepreneurship. He became an engineer, but even as a teenager he knew he wanted to make a difference. Now, armed with a Stanford MBA and a fortune worth several billion dollars, he chairs a foundation that grants millions to support innovative approaches to the resolution of social issues around the world. In 2003, the foundation established the Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford University to teach the concepts to young visionaries-in-the-making. As Cheryl Dahle writes in Fast Company (
As you fill in your test results on the chart on pages 178–179, your values, interests, skills, and personality, along with such needs as autonomy and independence, will tell you whether or not entrepreneurship is right for you. If you think you have the traits of an entrepreneur, go for it! If you don't have all of them now, you can develop them if you want it badly enough.
Just remember the immortal words of Yogi Berra: “When you see a fork in the road, take it!”
