Entrepreneurial Management

- Article
The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most

By: Raffaella Sadun, Joseph B. Fuller, Stephen Hansen and PJ Neal

Landing a job as a CEO today is no longer all about industry expertise and financial savvy. What companies are really seeking are leaders with strong social skills. That’s what the authors discovered after analyzing nearly 7,000 job descriptions for C-suite roles. Their explanation for this trend? Business operations are becoming more complex and tech-centered; workforce diversity is growing; and firms face greater public scrutiny than ever before. Those conditions call for leaders who are adept communicators, relationship builders, and people-oriented problem solvers. To succeed in the future, the authors argue, companies will need to focus on those skills when they evaluate CEO candidates and develop in-house talent.
- Article
The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most

By: Raffaella Sadun, Joseph B. Fuller, Stephen Hansen and PJ Neal

Landing a job as a CEO today is no longer all about industry expertise and financial savvy. What companies are really seeking are leaders with strong social skills. That’s what the authors discovered after analyzing nearly 7,000 job descriptions for C-suite roles. Their explanation for this trend? Business operations are becoming more complex and...
- July 2022
- Article
What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition

By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of retirement for one’s life narrative. We investigate how American professionals construe their working and retirement lives, in a qualitative study drawing on 215 interviews with 120 participants, including 12 interviewed longitudinally throughout their years-long retirement transitions. We identify two orthogonal dimensions for contemplating the work and retirement domains of one’s life—global and quotidian life construal—and four basic modes of cognition that arise from variability across these dimensions. We induce a theoretical model describing how construal of working life prefigures construal of retirement life, which then shapes the retirement life experience. This study contributes to construal level theory, narrative psychology, and the literatures on retirement transitions and the meaning of work.
- July 2022
- Article
What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition

By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of retirement for one’s life narrative. We investigate how American professionals...
- June 2022
- Case
Akervall Technologies: Leading Through Crisis

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Ariel Beck
- June 2022
- Case
Akervall Technologies: Leading Through Crisis

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Ariel Beck

About the Unit

The Entrepreneurial Management Unit strives to raise the level of academic work in the field of entrepreneurship, in methodological rigor, conceptual depth, and managerial applicability. We also strive to improve the odds of entrepreneurial success for our students and for practitioners worldwide.

Because it is such a complex phenomenon, entrepreneurship must be studied through multiple lenses. We use three.

The process of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the processes of entrepreneurial activity in start-ups and established firms by examining the antecedents and consequences of various forms of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and opportunity pursuit for individuals, organizations, and industries. We see experimentation and innovation in products, services, processes, and business models as central to entrepreneurial activity.
The finance of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the financing of entrepreneurial ventures by studying the antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial funding decisions both domestically and internationally.
The context of entrepreneurship - We seek to understand the ways in which entrepreneurs both respond to and shape the context in which they operate, by examining the history of entrepreneurship across time and national borders and by analyzing the legal and cultural contexts for managerial action.

Please also visit the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship.

Recent Publications

The C-Suite Skills That Matter Most

By: Raffaella Sadun, Joseph B. Fuller, Stephen Hansen and PJ Neal

Article |
Harvard Business Review

Landing a job as a CEO today is no longer all about industry expertise and financial savvy. What companies are really seeking are leaders with strong social skills. That’s what the authors discovered after analyzing nearly 7,000 job descriptions for C-suite roles. Their explanation for this trend? Business operations are becoming more complex and tech-centered; workforce diversity is growing; and firms face greater public scrutiny than ever before. Those conditions call for leaders who are adept communicators, relationship builders, and people-oriented problem solvers. To succeed in the future, the authors argue, companies will need to focus on those skills when they evaluate CEO candidates and develop in-house talent.

Keywords: C-Suite; Skills; Skills Development; Social Skills; Management Skills; Interpersonal Communication; Talent and Talent Management

Citation

Find at Harvard

What Do I Make of the Rest of My Life? Global and Quotidian Life Construal across the Retirement Transition

By: Jeff Steiner and Teresa M. Amabile

July 2022 |
Article |
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Retirement means relinquishing the daily structure that work provides and the career-dependent meanings that it offers life narratives. The retirement transition can therefore involve contemplating both how to spend newly-freed daily time and the implications of retirement for one’s life narrative. We investigate how American professionals construe their working and retirement lives, in a qualitative study drawing on 215 interviews with 120 participants, including 12 interviewed longitudinally throughout their years-long retirement transitions. We identify two orthogonal dimensions for contemplating the work and retirement domains of one’s life—global and quotidian life construal—and four basic modes of cognition that arise from variability across these dimensions. We induce a theoretical model describing how construal of working life prefigures construal of retirement life, which then shapes the retirement life experience. This study contributes to construal level theory, narrative psychology, and the literatures on retirement transitions and the meaning of work.

Keywords: Retirement Transition; Life Narrative; Construal Level Theory; Global Construal; Quotidian Construal; Meanings Of Work And Retirement; Retirement; Transition; Perspective

Citation

Find at Harvard

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Akervall Technologies: Leading Through Crisis

By: Lynda M. Applegate and Ariel Beck

June 2022 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Citation

Educators

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Can Goodr Fight Food Insecurity at Scale?

By: Daniel Isenberg and William R. Kerr

June 2022 |
Case |
Faculty Research

Jasmine Crowe founded Goodr to redirect food waste to people in need. Now a profitable enterprise, she’s searching for Series A funding and encountering pushback. Scaling and contract concerns are also at the forefront of her mind, but so are her values. Feeding hungry people is at the core of her mission, but potential backers tell her the company is better off without doing so. She thinks, too, about how her race may be holding her back from funding opportunities.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Investor Demand; Food; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Values and Beliefs; Social Issues; Race; Opportunities; Contracts

Citation

Educators

Katie Couric Media: Landing the First Client

By: N. Louis Shipley, William R. Kerr and Paige Boehmcke

June 2022 |
Teaching Note |
Faculty Research

Developed for teaching Entrepreneurial Sales, the Katie Couric Media case supports class discussion on client selection, sales strategy, and scaling a startup media firm.

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; Entrepreneurship; Marketing; Mergers And Acquisitions; Start-up

Citation

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Metaverse Land: What Makes Digital Real Estate Valuable

By: Scott Duke Kominers

Article |
a16zcrypto.com

Keywords: Crypto Economy

Citation

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Measuring the Tolerance of the State: Theory and Application to Protest

By: Veli Andirin, Yusuf Neggers, Mehdi Shadmehr and Jesse M. Shapiro

2022 |
Working Paper |
Faculty Research

We develop a measure of a regime's tolerance for an action by its citizens. We ground our measure in an economic model and apply it to the setting of political protest. In the model, a regime anticipating a protest can take a costly action to repress it. We define the regime's tolerance as the ratio of its cost of repression to its cost of protest. Because an intolerant regime will engage in repression whenever protest is sufficiently likely, a regime's tolerance determines the maximum equilibrium probability of protest. Tolerance can therefore be identified from the distribution of protest probabilities. We construct a novel cross-national database of protest occurrence and protest predictors, and apply machine-learning methods to estimate protest probabilities. We use the estimated protest probabilities to form a measure of tolerance at the country, country-year, and country-month levels. We apply the measure to questions of interest.

Citation

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Platinum Capital

By: Jo Tango and Alys Ferragamo

June 2022 |
Case |
Faculty Research

How should a venture capital firm divide compensation and decision rights between its founders and its next-generation partners? Platinum Capital faced this decision in July 2020. Platinum’s younger partners had just requested a piece of the firm’s highly lucrative Management Company from Platinum’s founders. The founders felt they were owed compensation for the risk and “lean” years they had faced when founding the firm. Yet, the high-performing new partners had other career opportunities and wanted to be “real” partners in the business. Should the founders grant the next generation access to the management company? If so, how should the firm’s decision rights work in this new scenario?

Keywords: Decision Rights; Business and Stakeholder Relations; Compensation and Benefits; Governance; Retention; Negotiation