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During one of my first entrepreneurial experiences - as part of the management team of an early stage software company - a group of us was sitting around late one night at the end of a challenging day.  One of the guys observed that everyone in the room had left a much larger company to join our relatively small one for similar reasons - to escape the policy and procedures, the layers of management, and with a personal desire to have a bigger, direct impact on a business. And yet we had just spent the better part of a couple of days attempting to draw from those prior experiences in order to implement many of those same processes into our new business!  We all realized that it had become necessary to bring some order to what had become a pretty chaotic situation. 

I frequently encounter misperceptions, or myths as I call them, about entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial environments.  Among them that entrepreneurship is narrowly defined, that it's about only small companies, and that in education it is somehow a lesser business skill than the traditional disciplines of business - finance, accounting, management and strategy.  I call one of these myths the "Big Bang Theory" - that it's all about finding the big idea and that the idea alone will create the success.   That oversimplified perspective ignores the hard work and tenacity that are required for entrepreneurial success.   I've also experienced a corollary to that view during a discussion with a Leeds MBA student.  The student expressed his amazement at the creative entrepreneurial energy that he'd observed since joining our program at the Leeds Business School.  But he was about to disqualify himself from pursuing an entrepreneurial career because he felt that he lacked "the big idea."   These misperceptions can cast a negative view on the perceived value of an entrepreneurship education and how a curriculum that emphasizes entrepreneurship can have broadly applied value.

I recently had a conversation with a group of Leeds MBA students about these topics - about the fundamental importance, value and applicability of entrepreneurial skills.  The process of building an entrepreneurial company --startup or emerging growth-- requires the application of all business skills in what I would describe as the most difficult management environment - one that is undercapitalized, rapidly changing, unpredictable and often seemingly chaotic.  To succeed in such environments, entrepreneurial businesses must have the best talent - the best financial skills, the best marketing skills, and the best strategic selling skills.  These companies can't afford to compromise because they have so little margin of error.  The key is that the members of an entrepreneurial team not only have those specific skills but that they can apply them in such a challenging environment.

At the end of the day, entrepreneurship is still about basic business and management fundamentals - just applied in a demanding, challenging, innovative and highly rewarding environment.  That's a great combination to strive for in any business career.

Earlier this week I attended the first fall Learn from the Best (LFTB) speaker event hosted by the Graduate Entrepreneurs Association (GEA). Thanks to Tim Falls and Jay Wilson for pulling it together - great event, great speaker guests (more in a moment) and great student participation. Standing room only and Tim and Jay finally had to ring the bell to bring the event to a close.

Thanks to Ari Newman, founder and president of FiltrBox, and Eric Marcoullier, co-founder and CEO of Gnip. After brief background and introductory comments from Ari and Eric the floor was opened to students and the questions were non-stop. Ari and Eric were great and very open and transparent about sharing their personal experiences, details of challenges they'd faced, decisions and hurdles they'd had to meet specific to their current and past businesses.

Here were some of my key takeaways. I want to give attribution to Ari and Eric for some great insights - but the attempt to encapsulate them reflects my own words.

Throughout their comments they both stressed the critical importance of listening to customers. When asked about his most valuable resource in building his businesses, Ari stated that it has for years been his network of personal trusted advisers. Eric agreed and offered another perspective - talking about the need for both passion and clarity - that without passion a new business doesn't have a chance, but without clarity (aka reality checks) passion can also get a business into irretrievable trouble.

At the Deming Center we stress that domain expertise is critical; that many great new business ideas don't come from the blinding disruptive insight but rather from new ways of solving old problems. Eric summed that up roughly as "The best way to solve a pain (fill a need) is to have deeply experienced that pain yourself. In other words - become very competent in your domain."

I look forward to the next LFTB session!

This time of year is always exciting at the Deming Center as we invite fresh faces into the Leeds entrepreneurial community. Recently I met the new MBA students - the Class of 2011.

Every time I welcome a new group of MBAs I feel reinvigorated about what the Deming Center does for our students to facilitate opportunities and create access to the entrepreneurial community. We have the good fortune of being in Boulder, which has extraordinary entrepreneurial resources. We do the best we can to leverage our contacts to benefit students, and year after year we find that the benefit goes both ways.

Many of our new MBAs have come to Leeds specifically because of our reputation in entrepreneurship studies. At Deming we offer a broad philosophy and approach to entrepreneurial education - we believe it's a capstone and adds value to every student's business education. We give students skills that enable them to integrate all of what they learn in the traditional business curriculum, and that are applicable in any business setting. I've talked to a lot of colleagues and members of the business community and described the view we take, and I've never had one tell me, "No, we wouldn't want a student with those skills."

For instance, in feasibility and market analysis courses we walk students through a very rigorous creative and analytical process so they know how to identify and validate true product or business opportunities. The Business Plan course shows students how to integrate everything they've learned around marketing, finance and strategy in order to take an idea to fruition. We give students the opportunity to articulate their ideas in front of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors, and to benefit from feedback from people who have actually created companies.

I think of that as a capstone to a business education - an experience that ties together all of elements of business. You can go through business education and never have these experiences unless you take entrepreneurship courses.

While we have some great stories about students who have graduated from Leeds and started their own highly successful ventures, we don't gauge the success of our entrepreneurial program on whether our graduates go out and start companies. We position our students to go out and build industry sector expertise and their professional networks so that when they want to start their own venture, or are invited to join a start-up team, they'll be ready when the great idea comes along -- whether it's the day they walk out of this program or 15 years later.

I feel incredibly enthusiastic about launching into another year of cultivating the future business leaders and entrepreneurs at the Leeds Business School. I also look forward to using this new blog to keep our friends and partners updated on the most current happenings here at the Deming Center! Stay in touch and let me know what you'd like to hear more about.