Chris Gardner's entrepreneurship in The Pursuit of Happyness

Entrepreneur

The movie The Pursuit of Happyness tells the story of a single father who runs into significant difficulty in his life and then pulls himself out of that difficulty with hard work and innovation to become a success. Chris Gardner basically puts all of his eggs in one basket, a bone scanner that is supposed to replace the x-ray. There are a number of problems that result in this project failing, and his marriage fails as well. So very quickly, Gardner is left homeless, broke and with a son to care for. A chance encounter with a stockbrocker gives Gardner an opportunity for an unpaid internship.

The store recounts how Gardner is living at a shelter with his son, and tries to keep this from his co-workers. The internship is a competition for a job, and he needs to win this position, but his domestic circumstance make this a challenge. He responds by finding innovative solutions to give him a competitive edge. The result of this is that Gardner is the most successful intern and is given the position, thereby giving himself a chance to pull his family out of poverty. The movie ends with a note that Gardner eventually owned his own brokerage firm, thereby providing a happy conclusion to the story, that Gardner was able to overcome adversity through hard work and creativity.

The movie relates to the course material in a number of ways. Chapter 1 is about entrepreneurship, and one can take the view that Gardner is his own business, which is pretty much true for stockbrokers. The key tenets of entrepreneurs are that they are risk-takers, focused on opportunity and innovative. These traits describe Gardner well. The chance encounter in the taxi cab give him the opportunity to get the job at Dean Witter, and he takes full advantage of theopportunity. One thing about entrepreneurs is that they are situationally-aware, identifying opportunities and taking advantage of them. Gardner also demonstrates innovation and risk-taking in the movie. . First, he breaks some rules of the business, like contacting the high net worth clients, and this helps him to win -- he is ultimately not punished for violating this rule. Furthermore, Gardner never tells anybody about his circumstances, and approach that was also risky but also succeeded. His innovative solutions to brining in business helped him to win the competition as well, so he took his opportunity and applied innovation to it in order to succeed.

Chapter 2 discusses the pathways to becoming an entrepreneur. We see two of those in this movie, first with the bone density thing and then with the stockbroker opportunity. He starts as a home-based opportunity, taking a major risk by investing his life savings into the bone density device, but it fails, proving that big risks do not always mean big rewards -- sometimes they just mean big failure. But then he gets the opportunity to be a corporate entrepreneur and is able to successfully build his business within the framework of a larger corporation until he starts his own business in the epilogue. For Gardner, the key to success is finding the right opportunity, having confidence, building a good network, and overcoming some of the constraints that could have had him fail.

Chapter 3 reflects the role that creativity plays. This movie highlights some of that. Gardner faces obstacles that the other interns do not face, due to his homelessness. He applies his creativity to problem-solving in order to overcome these constraints and still outperform the other interns. He is well-prepared, finds the right solutions, and implements them effectively. Ultimately, this is probably why he was offered the job. Whether he was the most productive or not, the company saw his productivity and knew that he was the more dynamic candidate in the long run. He possessed one of the most important traits of an entrepreneur and that is what they were looking for more than anything else -- a willingness to look past barriers for better solutions.

Chapter 6 works its way into the movie in the first product, the bone density device. Here we see a lesson is what not to do as an entrepreneur. Gardner becomes overly optimistic about the prospects of this device, and he pushes through with the business without really doing a proper feasibiiltiy analysis. He did not seem to understand the challenges he was going to face before he invested all of his money in the venture. He did not understand the resources he was going to need, and that he lacked enough of them. As a result, that venture was a non-starter. If he had conducted a better product and industry analysis, he might not have ended up homeless to begin with.