What’s the key difference between entrepreneurs and employees?
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L'ARTICOLO ESEMPLIFICA L'APPROCCIO CULTURALE AL MANAGEMENT (CONNESSIONI ORIZZONTALI) DISCUSSO A LEZIONE.
What’s the key difference between entrepreneurs and employees?
Around
13% of Americans are starting or running their own companies.
Almost
everyone else is an employee.
We
may have found out the difference between the two types.
According
to a
2013 Swiss-German study,
the difference lies in disposition: While an employee is a
specialist, an entrepreneur is a jack-of-all-trades.
“Entrepreneurs
differ from employees in that they must be sufficiently well versed
in a whole set of entrepreneurial skills,” write Uschi
Backes-Gellner of the University of Zurich in Switzerland and Petra
Moog of the University of Siegen in Germany.
On
the other hand, they say that employees are “specialists who work
for others and whose talents are combined with those of other
specialists (employees) by the entrepreneurs.”
In
their study, Backes-Gellner and Moog analyzed survey data from 2000
German college students. Their analysis showed that people with a
broader portfolio of experiences were more likely to have a
“disposition toward entrepreneurship.” Qualities that predicted
against entrepreneurship included a desire for job or income
security, as well as, perhaps surprisingly, having an apprenticeship
or internship — since those lead to specialization.
Their
study built on a decade’s worth of research.
The
“jack of all trades” theory first came from Stanford University
economist Edward P. Lazear, whose studies
of Stanford MBAs show
that students who take a broad range of classes and a wider
range of jobs are more likely to become entrepreneurs. A follow-up
German study replicated
those results.
Backes-Gellner
and Moog expanded on that finding by taking in social networks. Their
research suggested that entrepreneurs don’t just have a diverse set
of skills, but they also have a diverse network of relationships —
friends, parents, and business contacts that they can call on when
launching a business. Findings in network science show that having
such a diverse social network is hugely beneficial at a creative
level,
too, since the more perspectives you’re exposed to, the more
refined your ideas become.
So
it’s a double-diversity that leads to entrepreneurship: lots of
experiences, lots of contacts.
“It
is the jacks-of-all-trades across a whole portfolio of individual
resources and not the masters-of-one who are likely to become
entrepreneurs,” Backes-Gellner and Moog write. “The mere social
butterflies or the mere computer nerds are not likely to become
entrepreneurs because they are both too imbalanced and thereby less
likely to be successful as entrepreneurs.”
The
research confirms a lot of folk wisdom about what makes founders
function. None other than Steve Jobs used to say that creative people
have a more diverse “bag of experiences” than everybody
else. In a
1982 speech,
the Apple founder told his audience that “if you’re gonna make
connections which are innovative … you have to not have the same
bag of experiences as everyone else does.”
