Enrepreneurship Research Leading Entrepreneurs Determine Entrepreneurial Approaches

Enrepreneurship

Research leading entrepreneurs determine entrepreneurial approaches -- categories: (1) profit oriented, (2) social responsibility oriented 1.Analyze describe founding leader(s), leadership style, major business principles a profit-oriented entrepreneurial approach primary goal provide a product service consumers make a profit.

Two leading entrepreneurs: Socially-oriented and profit-minded

Socially-oriented leadership: Larry Page

Although its motto is 'don't be evil,' Google is a for-profit company. However, it manages to leverage its idealism in a fashion that is well-suited to the image and success of its product. It is an Internet company that is dependent above all upon the dissemination of knowledge. Google co-founder Larry Page places a strong emphasis on innovation at his company. Google's engineers are allowed to spend part of their time on personal projects, as a way of encouraging the company's top talent to generate the ideas of the future. Google trusts in the intelligence of its employees, and encourages them to view their job as fun, rather than as work. With free food, fitness classes, yoga, on-premises healthcare and dry-cleaning, Google headquarters feels more like a camp than a place to go to work. Page's orientation is also manifest in terms of how he allocates organizational resources: "Spending $1 billion on patents offers an important clue to what matters most to Page: innovation" (Elmer 2011). Page is continually tweaking Google's core products to make them better, even though it is unrivaled as a search engine: "By tackling big ideas 'that could really change the world,' you attract incredibly smart people and achieve something worthwhile, even if it's not your original goal,' he said at the Google Faculty Summit in 2009" (Elmer 2011).

Profit-minded leadership

In stark contrast to Google's leadership style, recently-deceased CEO Steve Jobs was noted for his fanatical fixation upon making Apple the best company within its industry. "He was not a consensus-builder but a dictator who listened mainly to his own intuition. He was a maniacal micromanager" and was known for 'chewing out' even top-level employees that did not meet his standards (Allen 2011). Apple's corporate culture was described as Darwinian, encouraging a 'survival of the fittest' mentality amongst designers: "a brutal and unforgiving place, where accountability is strictly enforced, decisions are swift, and communication is articulated clearly from the top" (Allen 2011). In contrast to the perks enjoyed at Google, Apple's health benefits were described as "nothing special," and rather than free food and a gym at the cafeteria, everything costs at Apple (Yarrow 2010). Even peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cost money: employees could purchase them at a discounted rate of .25 (Yarrow 2010). When employees groused, Jobs purportedly told them that it was his job to make Apple stock go up so they could afford to buy the things Google gave away for free (Yarrow 2010).

Approach I identify with Although Apple has produced some brilliant products, I believe that Steve Jobs was able to succeed in spite of, rather than because of his dictatorial managerial approach. Unless someone has the charisma and genius of Steve Jobs, honoring the talent of fellow employees is essential to succeed as a modern entrepreneur. The success of Google shows that focusing on one's social impact, rather than on the profits generated by products alone is superior in many ways -- after all, early on in his tenure, Jobs was actually ousted from his position of leadership, only to return after the company's fortunes began failing.